Helldivers 2's ongoing Major Order has deployed soldiers to the supercolony of Meridia to quite literally destroy the planet using Dark Fluid, the substance that "spaghettified" people last week. Abnormally aggressive Terminid swarms were expected, seeing as this is a supercolony and the bugs are sadly facing extermination, but divers are contending with an even more severe type of bug here.
Meridia missions follow a somewhat unique structure, with our squads calling in Dark Fluid backpacks that double up as excellent jet packs, before running to a drill site, calling in said drill, and defending it from bugs who are fighting for survival. That last part can be particularly cruel, however.
The Reddit post below shows a Meridia mission played on Trivial Difficulty - the easiest one - but I'd forgive you if you were to mistake it for a Helldive Difficulty operation on account of the Shrieker storm that's absolutely bullying the poor rookie. Again, Terminids are naturally hostile to managed democracy but the clip below is anything but trivial.
MY BROTHER IN CHRIST THIS IS A TRIVIAL DIFFICULTY MISSION from r/Helldivers
Other posts in the game's subreddit claim that enemy swarms and even towering Bile Titans spawn directly under the drill, which is susceptible to being destroyed, thus making the Meridia missions almost impossible. The problem seemingly stems from a bug that lets enemies spawn within arm's reach of the objective, without a limit to how many Terminid breaches can occur at once.
After several other examples and complaints flooded the game's subreddit, community manager Katherine 'Baskinator' 'Baskin jumped onto the shooter's Discord channel to confirm that, yes, the buggy planet is indeed bugged: "Thank you to everyone that made us aware of the spawning bug in the current Major Order."
Baskinator assures that a "hotfix is currently being worked on for that issue and will be deployed as soon as possible," so we can go back to spaghettifying Meridia soon.
