Two weeks ago, the Helldivers 2 community was caught off guard by a patch that secretly added gunships and giant AT-AT walkers to the automaton's planet. Players spent a hectic 24 hours scrambling to respond to the new threat and ultimately liberate Maleveron Creek. While Super Earth triumphed and the gunships became the mainstay of the automaton mission, the walkers mysteriously disappeared.

This morning, Arrowhead did it again. The Factory Strider is a four-legged "dreadnought" with a cannon on top, a rotating front laser, and a mobile factory that continuously spawns devastators. At nearly the same height as the Vile Titan, the Strider is the largest and most resilient enemy we have seen.

There is reason to believe that the Striders aren't going anywhere this time either, as Arrowhead officially acknowledged their appearance on social channels today with a strawman news broadcast, revealing that the Striders the community first encountered were merely prototypes.

After attempting several missions in the post-Strider world, it was discovered that there were two ways to encounter them. On difficulty 6 (possibly 4 and 5), Strider has a dedicated mission type. Like the lower difficulty Vile Titan missions, they must destroy two of them on opposite sides of the map.

While certainly imposing, we didn't have much trouble with a single factory Strider. Several of them brought their quasar cannons and recoilless rifles. We knew exactly where the Strider would spawn, so it was easy to set up at least 80 meters away and knock the Strider down with our biggest guns. Strider takes far more punishment than the tanks and hulks, but if he gets enough head shots he will go down. The only weakness I noticed was the head, but there is likely at least one other.

What really scares me is the random drop of striders on the higher difficulty levels: as Reddit user Dolt1372 shared, three striders could drop at once, and Dolt's clip runs out before we see how their squad responded to the surprise attack. It did not go well, though. In addition to worrying about coordinating with their teammates which one to shoot first, they also have to worry about the three walkers constantly creating new enemies and distracting them.

I honestly don't know how to stop three Striders from descending other than a Hail Mary with multiple 380mm missiles; I rarely use 380mm because I often feel it's overkill, but with Striders I don't have to worry about that.

I was not able to get more than one strider to drop at a time in three missions of seven difficulty levels. Maybe we got lucky, or maybe Arrowhead reserved this particular hellhole for levels 8 and 9. On the bright side, today's patch was not only a Trojan horse for a fearsome new enemy, but it also fixed some nasty bugs, such as inconsistent damage values between the host and participating players.