[2023] whats going on at launch that takes almost 10 minutes?

Originally posted by Arcadian Del Sol: The game runs smooth as ice once it loads, but that initial progress bar takes nearly 10 minutes. What's going on?

Does it take this long without mods? My setup takes ~40 seconds to load and I don't have a great computer.

I suggest nuking your old save files and oos folder, since these grow rather large sometimes. You can also manually delete your /steamapps/stellaris folder and then re-download, since something doesn't seem right here.

If none of this stuff fixes it, go to support.paradoxplaza.com and open a ticket, customer support should be able to help you with this.