All experiments here showed that compressive stresses impact both the propagation direction and the orientation of metal dendrites in solid electrolytes. The deflection increases with the load's magnitude: a 70 MPa load produced a small deviation in the dendrite propagation direction. Larger applied loads (𝜎𝜎 𝑎𝑎𝑎𝑎𝑎𝑎𝑎𝑎𝑎𝑎𝑎𝑎𝑎𝑎 = 200 MPa) produced dendrite growth nearly parallel to the loading axis. Stated plainly, compressive loads can deflect metal dendrites to the extent that electrical short-circuiting of the solid electrolyte is completely averted. During preparation of this manuscript, we became aware of a recent pre-print from McConohy, Xu et al. , in which a correlation is observed between the strain applied to a solid electrolyte and the initial dendrite growth morphology (at a few micrometer length scale). Those results are qualitatively consistent with the present findings; as we show, regardless of the initial orientation of a growing dendrite, the direction of propagation can be changed by an imposed stress field.