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(Image credit: BigBadHater on TikTok)
Think fast! A 12-foot-tall Charger is on a collision course with your brittle helldiver body. Your guns won’t scratch its armored carapace, but a quick airstrike could stop it in its tracks. Worry not, follow these convenient Super Earth-supplied instructions for calling down life-saving support at a moment’s notice: just hold CTRL, then press right, down down, up up, left, down down do—aaand you’re squished. Better luck next time.
One of the best mechanics in Helldivers 2 is also its biggest learning curve: stratagem codes. Punching in these recipes of destruction in the middle of an active warzone can get you killed, but their unchanging sequences mean they can be mastered. Turns out, they can also be automated.
Imagine: The power to drop a 500 kg payload of liberty with the press of a button. It’s enough to make an automaton shake its bolts loose.
While most Stream Deck-equipped helldivers are using the hardware to streamline their play, I’m partial to YouTuber BigBadHater’s approach, whotaped a Stream Deck to their wristand mapped arrow keys to the buttons to mimic their helldiver’s calldown action in real life. Is it faster than the normal way? Clearly not. Is it cool as hell? I mean just look:
A serious argument against stratagem macros is that frantic code punching is part of the fun of Helldivers 2. The game is designed around not just resource management, but time management—you’re rewarded for kiting enemies away from teammates and executing tactical retreats that buy you time to call down your biggest bomb.
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But as with everything else in Helldivers 2, stratagem sanctity isn’t something to be taken so seriously. Arrowhead has yet to object to macros, and crafting a mini command center with all my favorite stratagems at my fingertips does sound pretty fun. Just nobody tell Arrowhead’sgalactic dungeon master Joel, lest we incur his wrath and find our stratagem codes have been scrambled.
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