The Helldivers 2 Iceberg Explained 

Video has been reported to the Ministry of Truth for evaluation. For the glory of Super Earth!

As entertaining as these conspiracy theories are, I will adhere to the wisdom of the experts of Super Earth.

Helldivers are frozen because it's easier to not upkeep your troops indefinitely until you need to throw them into battle. just think about it within the context of the war. You have a galaxy spanning war that covers thousands of planets at any given time, with the possibility of tens of thousands more that could be invaded without notice. You need hundreds of millions of troops to cover such a vast warfront, so what better way to have your reserves in standby than by having them literally at the warfront awaiting to be deployed. So how do you upkeep so many troops? They all need beds, food, entertainment and other commodities, right? Just put them on stasis indefinitely until the very moment that you need them. You'd be saving an infinite amount of logistical resources by doing this and still have them ready to be deployed whenever needed. From the Helldiver's perspective, you finish all your training, you graduate and next thing you know you're about to be sent into battle. All that training, knowledge, and protocols are still fresh in your memory; after all, from your perspective, you just finished the final exam 5 minutes ago. You know exactly what to do, and when to do it. You didn't have to drill or train anything extra on your way to the front nor while you were on standby waiting for orders. You finish your training, walk into a fridge, get thawed out 100s of lightyears away, go through a small briefing on your objective, maybe grab a healthy nutrient bar on your way to the pod, and dive into battle. It's a genius strategy!

Can't wait for the 4th faction to appear: Genetically engineered catgirls that overthrew a secret super earth research facility and created an advanced amazonian society.

Personal theory: another reason why Helldivers are frozen right after training is to make them go into combat while they are still highly motivated and vigorous from said training. The drill sargeant tells you that you are "literally invincible", hands you a heavy machine gun, and shows you how to use ship-to-ground artillery strikes. Who wouldn't be highly eager to kick some bugs and bots after that? By freezing the fresh Helldivers, they can maintain this blissfully unaware rookie excitement right up until they are deployed.

“You hear treason?” “I hear treason”

I cannot unhear the way your voice trails and the middle of each of your words is the loudest you pronounce them and the end of each word is there a little bit longer than they should be

I like the spooky music in the background. Makes me feel like I've stumbled into some massive conspiracy and the ministry of truth has me under surveillance 🔎

Fun fact: every players destroyer has slightly different crew members. i have a democracy officer who has a eyepatch

the Helldivers being all different people who enlisted instead of being clones is my favorite bit because of the inherent humor and commentary that comes from a fresh recruit getting unfrozen after god knows how long and instantly being promoted to whatever rank the last Helldiver who died was and immediately taking control of their Destroyer as if nothing had happened

Dude, I appreciate the section titles you keep at the bottom left, make it so easy to go back where I was last at in between working 💀

The clone theory drives me crazy. You don't need to recruit clones....

Fun fact regarding Cyberstan and Joel: so you can see playercounts on each planet, even Super Earth has a player count which is the devs doing stuff in the game. The other day Cyberstan was spotted with a single player on it. Joel is up to something there

"Managed Democracy is the worst kind of government, except for all the other ones." -Super Churchill.

ahahaha, these are really funny man, i can tell you put a lot of time in these stories man. i know the ministry of truth would not lie to us though, good stories! you should become a movie writer one day, cheers!

This is the best way to tell a story. You let the players try and figure it out.

Senator Killjoy has been quoted on the topic of clones. "We do not clone our Helldivers, each recruit is given their turn at wheel at the correct time.", which is confirmed by the cryo process on each destroyer.

When your mag is empty and your knife is broken or dull a shovel will always suffice

Just want to say I love your music selection. And great video of course 👍

I really like that you credit people on their findings :)! good vid too

The automatons will sometimes insult the player in a heavily distorted English You can occasionally make out “human scum” amidst the gibberish

The lady on the ship explains the whole thing pretty much. The ships are powered by element 710, and they get that not from samples, but from the bugs themselves. They use bug goo to fuel the ships. So they're actually killing the bugs for interstellar drive fuel.

The music choices throughout this are wild. Recontextualizing a few in a major way but still sounding perfectly fitting, and matching every beat.

Nice touch with the Cyberpunk theme when it comes to body augmentation and modification.

Funny thing is, in my friend group here in Germany we noticed the whole 710=Oil thing really quickly because there was a German TV skid in nineties with a guy walking into a workshop, pretending to know a lot about cars and wanting to buy a new 710er cap, which was just a the oil filler cap turned upside down

13:03 the hole/chip in the back of the helmet is probably a tracker because when you go out of the mission area, you get a very generous 10 seconds to go back to the mission area before you get orbital strikes called on you- with no beacons. How do i know this? Well, a traitorous squadmate of mine tried to bail!

Honestly the fact that an iceberg like this exists is what makes a game so great, the fact that everything on the iceberg is a possibility in hell divers leaves every player guessing at what they might find behind the scenes and or what the next step for the game is

in support of Helldivers having memories uploaded into them: if the training we witness is the extend of what they go through or even if it's the final test, there is no way that would result in an effective soldier. So maybe the collective memories/experience/training of other soldiers is uploaded into them, with or without erasing their past personality. And as we as a player get better, so do our soldiers, and you could even say us watching guides is The battle experience of other Helldivers being uploaded into us.

Helldivers are definitely not clones. The ship module updates say that your family has to pay for you to have more ammo in the field for stratagem weapons.

I believe the helldivers in cryo are linked into a neurological network that allows them to experience whatever the current ship commander is doing. This is why they are all the same rank, this is why you only get 20 per mission, 5 per member of the strike team, (that is the number hooked up and ready to assume command) this is why it takes so long to get one more reinforcement after depleting your stock of 20 (they have to manually upload the combat data to another soldier)

A Democracy Officer is rapidly approaching your location. Thanks for the video, wonderfully put together!

Your intonation totally reminds me of the guy from the Food Wishes channel, lol. Great video, thank you!

Speaking out of character, it's ironic because all the "threats" that face Super-Earth are just blowback from their own actions. They oppressed the Cyborg separatists, who took up arms, and after losing, creating the Automatons, who are an even greater self-replicating threat with no sense of humanity left. They selectively bred the Terminids to be stronger and more aggressive (also probably mutated them if leaks are to be believed). Super-Earth also drove out the Illuminate, who originally came in peace, and will probably come back angrier with better weapons.

I love how this game is just a mashup of literally every sci-fi

we’re going to the re-education camp with this one 🔥

The music choice for this video is spot on. Vigil for the ME reference and Water Temple theme for introducing the Illuminate, who are aquatic aliens

A bit of a correction: The "transport bugs" was only in the CGI animated series Roughnecks. In the book, the Psudoarachnids (All the film adaptations drop the "Psudo" prefix from the name) build starships using advanced industry, and honeycomb their planets with subterranean highways, factories, and advanced infrastructure. Their warrior caste are always armed with a set of high energy beam lasers capable of melting through tank armor with just a few seconds of exposure while being covered in cybernetically implanted alloy armor that protects from most small-arms calibers, and they have a space-navy of FTL capable warships that is on par with the Federation's own technology. At no point in the book does anyone even try to imply the bugs are dumb, actually emphasizing the point that the animalistic, bestial behavior of individual bugs is a quality of their hive-mind intelligence, allowing them to "spend warriors like we spend bullets" and should not ever be allowed to fool you into underestimating their capacity for strategic thinking and tactical brilliance, engaging in flaking maneuvers, deploying decoys, and launching feint attacks using waves of disguised Worker castes posing as warriors to distract and pull away defending troops. To quote the book, "Animals don't build starships." and the Federation expends massive resources and intelligence efforts just trying to develop an understanding of their psychology sufficient to open communication with them to negotiate a peaceful end to the war. The bugs never answer any of these efforts, however, with only very limited success by gathering intel through a 3rd party of methane breathing semi-humanoid aliens who manage to maintain limited communications with the bugs, which is where the bulk of the Federation's intel on the psudoarachnid psychology and culture comes from, including the intel on the "brain bug" caste that function as command and control centers for the hive mind.

I have a slight worry about how the galactic map is made... In Helldiver 1, the factions got perfect space for each one, but in the second game, there is actually space for a 4th one...

This is what I imagine the "destroy illegal broadcast" missions get you to destroy

My god you can't even escape the Helldiver roleplayers in youtube comment sections either

As a Warhammer fan, Super Earth is light and rather chill. The bots burning people in cages, decapitating people and impaling the corpses while screaming "give me your skull". How can anyone even say the Automatons are the good guys?

My guess is that the bugs were used to wipe out a rebellion, with helldivers and termicide then used to quell the bug infestation. With the termicide inevitably failing, this is when super earth loses control of the situation.

Well done video. Very informative and entertaining! 🎉

I love how the drop animation makes a perfect video intro to anything

My theory: The automatons are the "children" of the cyborgs, who before being conquered created them with one mission: "Annihilate Humanity". They use human brains and possibly organs to create robots under their programming. They are programmed to spread and destroy all humans, but sometimes can "glitch" and have human tendencies, which explains strange behavior. The Terminids of course are just bugs who were domesticated and harvested, then after heavy forced evolution, turned on the humans and began to spread through spores. One of the NPCs on the ship said something along the lines of "We'll defeat the Terminids and send them back to the farms where they belong... With better protection this time" (not word for word, I can't really remember on the spot.

[Redacted] Review under investigation for Treason.

All these views and no subs 😮 Great quality deserves more 😢recognition. Thank you 🙏

I remember my first time playing the game and coming across a forklift, seeing the “E to interact” button and thinking “oh my god you can drive the forklifts” only to be disappointed by just a text box

Joel and the writing team watching all these conspiracy theories with popcorn in hand 😂

The speech pattern on this narration makes me feel like I'm spinning around in circles.......

Helldivers has the award of being the only game which I have paid for in-game currency for. Hats off to the devs.

I love the Halo music in the background 😂

My personal explanation as to why the unfrozen helldivers are the same rank and grow with our skill in the game is that the frozen helldivers are more or less body swaps. They are frozen, augmented with neurochips that transpose the memories of prior helldivers into a new vessel that can command and be as effective as the prior. Also probably cheaper than cloning and allows for growth if one of them learns or does something unique and effective.

>shoots a guy "AHHHH" "what strange secret message is this...?"

“Be careful who you share this with” I’ll be showing my democracy officer immeadiately

I just realized the Npc in helldivers is the same voice actor as Tyreen from Borderlands 3. Phenomenal video btw got this game a few days ago I'm hooked.

25:26 this is lava. it’s stated that helldivers need to watch out for lava in one of the tooltips you see when loading into a level.

Question on the Freezing of the Helldivers. I get needing to freeze them for interstellar travel - no need for food, water, bathrooms, etc. But why are you frozen when you travel between two ships right next to one another? If you join up with a group and leave that group to return to your own ship, you get the same unfreezing cutscene. Why would you need cryogenic freezing just to be moved back to your own ship?

710 is an old mechanic's joke. "Where do I put the oil in?" "Look for a cap that has 710 on it."

"The organs are for the Cyborgs, Automaton goals are to recapture Cyberstan, you must push North" -gunshot- "quickly cut this transmission. "

I like to think that the Automatons were made by a smaller group of Cyborgs who escaped into exile, and began to mass-produce Automatons so they could get revenge. I think the human brain thing is impossible, since Automatons seem to be produced very quickly, they even have those Fabricators.

Sounds like you slipped in some automaton propaganda to me! O5 said I can't use SCPs to help super earth but I will do what I can and report my findings to the ministry. may they be merciful to you for your traitorous conspiracies! (in all seriousness, this is a great video, keep up the good work)

This is my favorite Illegal Broadcast on the Citadel

With all due respect, freezing is the most common trope of FTL travel. Don't put too much into it, you are freezed to make a jump and you are unfreezed after the jump. Just like in Alien, HALO, etc.

Reporting this Video to the Ministry of Truth

My teammate: Tries to swim through a small lake to the extraction zone Me in voice: buddy you can't swim turn around My teammate: Tries to turn around but 'dies', i.e. gets stuck in the water We hold a little ceremony and give him eternal liberty so he does not fall into Terminid hands and we reinforce his replacement!! Welcome back buddy

We’ve all been attack by Berserkers. If you listen, you can hear them cry out like they’re in pain, seemingly forced to attack fellow Super Earth Helldivers…

This guys cadence is the weirdest I've ever heared

Submitting this link to my Democracy Officer. Expect a visit soon.

was not expecting silverhand's rooftop theme to show up here at 16:40 great use of that theme!

Me, hearing the words "Malevolent Creek." (Sitting under a cold shower holding my legs bawling like a baby) "Please No, No, NOOOOOOOOOOOO!"

Let’s get that oil…FOR LIBERTY

Automatons may be digitalized people, as they can be heard saying also "they gave us new life", so maybe they are in a way akin to Necrons, fully mechanical with the mind of a person within.

One of the theories regarding Helldivers being clones I saw that I REALLY like is that all Helldivers are a unique individual. The training is just a basic aptitude test before they're packaged up and sent to a super destroyer. The super destroyer IS the Helldiver, uploaded into one of the frozen individuals to puppet them. That's why you have the same rank, same resources, and get better - you learn from your own mistakes because you are the ship, not the person.

Good video, excellent music!

Aliens: *have some sort of super-duper weapons that can destroy alot of things at once* Super Earth: YEAH IM PRETTY SURE ITS GOOD IDEA TO ATACK THEM.

8:18 based on some dialogue, it's through spores. They send millions out into empty space, and just a few landing on a planet is enough to start an entire infestation. They dig down, and breed

Another Starship Troopers easter egg is that students fill out Form 710 in high school. Here we have Element 710

13:12 the guy in the back is just flipping the bug off lol 😂

As a democracy evaluator I recommend watching the first 36 seconds of the video and than immediately shutting it off

Goddamn this was suggested to me quickly, front page, it said uploaded 16sec ago lmao

2:49 bro the mass effect 1 loading screen music.... the FEELS

I love that Prince of Persia song you have used in your video man

“Do I think Super Earth belongs in Malevolent Creek? Umm idk I belong in Malevolent Creek, I’ll tell you that”

I'am suprised about not mentioning terminid corpses on tien kwan. There were a lot of them during fight for mechs. It was very peculiar

@natiscool - A note for all this as well for comparison, as the Termanids seem purely inspired by the Verhoeven films. In the Starship Troopers novel, they had space craft.

Ship on ship via boarding action would be amazing. I'm also interested to see if we will see any heavily populated planets needing dives.

Your choice of background music for this is fantastic!

Did play the video in 1.25 speed as natiscool drags the lines so much it wants me sleep XD

cant wait till this becomes an iceberg in likke 5 years with all the lore and mystery behind the scenes of everything

Left out the biggest reference to the shovel in starship troopers 3 (i think). The greatest weapon in the mobile infantryman's arsenal... the shovel. Plus, that great scene in the beginning when the dude gets impaled against the trench wall with the shovel from the explosion.

"Its up to the helldivers, an elite squad of soldiers" The helldivers: *consistently shoots their other squad mates for whispering anything other than democracy*

Reported to my local democracy officer for dissident behavior

I was playing stellaris when listening to this, and I had to pause multiple times due to the fact that you keep using stellaris music in this video at certain points lol.

Fighting Bots are honestly funnier than fighting the bugs mainly because I love using snipers and snipers are kinda bad against bugs.

There is a tip that the automatons will shoot less accurately if being shot because they are programmed that way or... Maybe their human brain is just afraid to die?

I wonder if the illuminate AI just jumped ship and took over human society.

Fascinating video! Though I will be reporting you to my nearest Democracy Officer

I had no idea I was accidentally pushing for the shovel meme. I just loved the idea of using one after Tanya Degurechaff praises them as the quintessence of civilization before using them during a night raid on some trenches.

Here's a thought, contractually, every person on freeze in the ship inherits the equipment and rank. But how do they know how to use the equipment, if they're all fresh recruits sleeping and had no prior clearance to use as practice? My theory is that, while we got the FTL engine from the Illuminate, and got the 710 from the Terminids, we probably stole tech from the cyborgs. Most likely, brain to tech interface technology, and it might be a shared memory or gestalt system for us and every sleeper to take over. Think of it, we're aware of our deaths but a new and waiting Helldiver is woken and tactically aware of the present situation just as they drop in. That was us/we leaving the dying connection of the old body and focusing on the new one dropping in