A small group of modders just built their own version of the Helldivers 2 Galactic War from scratch, and the community is paying close attention. The Custom Galactic War, known as CGW, launched publicly this week after being developed quietly for months, and it’s already generating serious buzz across Steam discussions, YouTube, and Reddit.
The CGW is a fanmade alternative to the official Galactic War run by Arrowhead Game Studios, designed to deliver a faster-paced, more player-driven experience.
According to the developers, the mod includes multi-faction battles, custom subfactions, custom biomes and points of interest, balanced spawn rates, custom missions, custom operations, custom mechs, and small but meaningful balance tweaks to weapons.
It’s still in its early stages, the team is small and bugs are expected, but it’s being actively developed and the feature list is already impressive.
How a leak server became a full Galactic War
The origins of the CGW trace back to a Discord server called “Holotable”, which belonged to a dataminer known as Dripku, someone who built a reputation digging into Helldivers 2’s files and posting leaked content online.
Over time, Dripku and a group of collaborators began experimenting with customizing missions and biomes, and eventually decided to push further, building their own galactic war entirely. Certain aspects of the project required direct API access to the game, and that hands-on experience gave the team the technical confidence to take it all the way.
Work began on February 22, 2025, and the team kept developing quietly until news broke that EAC (Easy Anti-Cheat) was set to replace GameGuard in Helldivers 2. Concerned about potential complications, the team made the call to release CGW early so players could experience it before any changes took effect.
Holotable was renamed to Custom Galactic War, the server went public, and after someone posted about it on r/helldiversunfiltered, the project exploded in visibility. Within days, YouTube videos started appearing, Steam discussions filled up with questions, and players began flocking to the Discord to try it out.
The team has been clear about their intentions from the start. The CGW is not designed to compete with or discredit Arrowhead Game Studios. In their own words, it is a passion project, an alternative experience with more emphasis on narrative and player agency, not a replacement for the official war.
The developers explicitly asked the community not to use CGW as a vehicle to spread negativity toward Arrowhead, a boundary they’ve enforced consistently.
What the CGW actually brings to the table
The official Galactic War is a slow-burn, developer-controlled experience. Arrowhead manages the narrative, decides which planets are active, and controls how the story progresses. The CGW flips that model. The war table is custom-built, the story evolves in real time and is run directly by the modders, and the overall pace is significantly faster. The mod also pushes spawn rates higher, tilting gameplay closer to a full horde shooter experience.
One of the standout features is the modular mech system. The CGW introduces custom modular mech arms, including a shoulder-mounted option, giving players a degree of mech customization that doesn’t exist in the base game.
Combined with multi-faction battles, where players can face multiple enemy types simultaneously, the experience feels notably different from what Arrowhead currently offers. There are also special armed SEAF soldiers that appear outside of cities, another element not present in the official game.
Beyond the big-ticket features, the CGW includes custom subfactions, custom missions, custom operations, and ongoing balance adjustments to weapons. The team describes it as very much a work in progress, with bugs to be expected given the pace of its release, but development is active and moving fast.
The timing couldn’t be more interesting
The CGW arrived at a particularly charged moment for the Helldivers 2 community. The game’s Steam reviews recently dropped to “Mostly Negative,” driven by player frustration over content pacing, hidden balance changes, and a sense that Arrowhead has been out of touch with what the community wants.
The situation came to a head when CCO Johan Pilestedt hosted a Reddit AMA that, rather than easing tensions, became a flashpoint for an even larger wave of criticism, with players calling out shallow progression, underused weapons, and a Galactic War that had lost its sense of consequence.
Arrowhead has since responded with promises of Galactic War overhauls, deeper multi-week campaigns, better communication, and meaningful progression improvements arriving this summer.
In the middle of all that, the CGW went live, a fan-built war dropping at the exact moment players were most vocal about wanting the official one to be better. Whether or not that timing was intentional, the result is that the CGW has landed in a community that is actively hungry for something new, and it’s being received with a level of enthusiasm that reflects that.
The project is a testament to what a passionate, skilled modding community can pull off when they put their minds to it. It isn’t trying to replace Helldivers 2 or embarrass Arrowhead, it’s a love letter to the game, built by people who care enough to spend months constructing an entire alternative war from scratch.
It’s rough around the edges, it’s early, and it has a lot of room to grow. But for players looking for something different while they wait for Arrowhead’s promised updates, the CGW is absolutely worth checking out.
If you want in, keep in mind that access to the Custom Galactic War Discord isn’t immediate, due to a massive influx of players, the team is currently running an application process to join.
Already tried the Custom Galactic War? Tell us what you think in the comments, we want to know if the community-built war lives up to the hype!