Helldivers’ Costly Choice: What We Lost Picking Vessel 00 Over Nucleus

Helldivers 2 just made the community pick between fast and smart. We chose fast. It worked... and it might come back to bite us.

The fork in the road: Menkent vs. Aesir Pass

High Command set up a binary choice: liberate Menkent or Aesir Pass to grab encryption keys for Database One. The catch was brutal and very on-brand for the Automatons: whichever site went second would be purged by the bots the instant the first one fell. No do-overs, no backups, no 'we'll circle back later.'

The community took Menkent because it was a two-planet push instead of Aesir Pass's three-planet slog. Practical? Absolutely. Strategic? Looking shakier by the hour.

What Menkent actually gave us

Clearing Menkent unlocked intel about something called Vessel 00. High Command's own debrief puts it like this:

'Vessel 00 departed Cyberstan in 2180, four years before the Automatons' initial assault. The bots treat it as their seed or origin, with programmed reverence.'

Interesting lore drop. It ties the Automatons back to Cyberstan and paints Vessel 00 as mythic in their codebase. But for winning the actual war, that info is basically a framed photo on a desk. No vulnerabilities. No coordinates. No lever to pull.

What we lost by skipping Aesir Pass

The second Menkent wrapped, the Automatons scrubbed the 'Nucleus' data tied to Aesir Pass. Gone. High Command says they cannot recover it. If you hear the word 'nucleus' and think 'command center' or 'central processor' or 'primary manufacturing hub'... yeah, same. In other words: the stuff that could have told us how the bots coordinate across sectors, where their reinforcements get built, and who - or what - is actually calling the shots.

Super Earth desperately needs clarity on Automaton operations. Vessel 00 doesn't deliver that. The Nucleus intel might have.

The bigger picture we just blurred

Database One is the biggest intel prize since the Second Galactic War kicked off. Those keys on Menkent and Aesir Pass were our only shot to unlock specific sections before the enemy's purge protocols triggered. When it came time to choose, the community picked convenience. Two planets felt easier than three. But war rarely rewards shortcuts, and this was almost certainly one of those times.

Spoiler alert: leaks ahead

If you want to avoid potential story spoilers, skip this section. The rest of you: things are about to sound very 'inside baseball.'

In early September, prominent dataminer IronS1ghts started pulling Automaton breadcrumbs out of the game files. On September 4, 2025, they said two big things are in active development: Factory Worlds and an Automaton superweapon. The short version:

• Factory Worlds: Industrial planets built around massive factory cities with unique objectives. Think endless production lines feeding the bots across the map. This neatly explains why Automaton reinforcements feel bottomless. Nucleus intel could have pointed to locations, throughput, or weak points.
• The Superweapon: A planet-size device built after those Factory Worlds come online, centered on a single annihilation cannon and visible on the galactic map. A straight-up planet killer. The kind of thing you want intel on before it fires.

Connecting the dots that we no longer have

If 'Nucleus' really referred to Automaton command or manufacturing infrastructure, losing that data means we are going to run headfirst into Factory Worlds and that superweapon with no map, no timetable, and no sabotage plan. Maybe those keys at Aesir Pass would have given us production schedules, targetable facilities, or a way to stall construction. Instead, we get to learn everything the hard way.

So... did we trade strategy for lore?

The million Super Credit question is whether we swapped potentially war-changing intel for a backstory nugget about a ship that left Cyberstan four years before the Automaton war even kicked off. Arrowhead isn't confirming anything, and Cyberstan itself is still deep behind enemy lines with any liberation push on ice. Origins are nice. Operations win wars. Right now, it feels like we picked the former when we needed the latter.

Did we blow it, or was Menkent the only realistic path? Drop your thoughts below, Helldivers.