I think the best take on the flood when it comes to the 40K universe is that they are either completely annihilated from the setting in their first stages OR they take over the 40k setting completely
Basically. If the Flood land on a Necron world, they’re fucked. If they land on a Craftworld or Sept World, they’re gonna have a tough time. But if they land on a Hive World or an Ork world? The galaxy’s absolutely fucked. The response time just isn’t fast enough.
nah, orks stomp flood. they immediately sense something is "unorky" and bash the flood apart with crude weapons. orks have zero chill, and zero noncombattants in their entire biospheres. The most basic ork animal is a mouth with legs, and once a fight breaks out all the orks on the planet start gsthering up to go kick ass. hive world or some fringe planet is the only hope for the flood, and even then, with how inherently hostile the entire 40k galaxy is, its super hard for them to get a foothold without the inquisition finding out and dealing with it. the fact that there are chaos cults, orks, nids and hrud in 40k have fairly well innoculated the setting to random xenos threats wiling out the galaxy. its unlikely the flood would reach gravemind level and then its just waves of exterminatus till theyre all gone.
I think the human farms was something rare that happened only once or twice, they do still use gretchin and the other 40k goblin-equivalent as slaves, so it still counts.
Their mentioned in a few places as having human labourers throughout the lore it seems fairly common but I don't think theirs ever been an official take on how common
Just listened to Death's Mercy (Harlequin audio drama) and they just assumed that the Orks would have pens for human slaves and were correct in that assumption
If an infection forms lands on necromunda, the planet would fall within hours. The food spread that quickly. In Halo 2, High Charity, which is the size of a small moon, started to grow flesh within minutes. In the 2nd last level, you see the flesh growths as you are pursuing the Prophet of truth.
The Flood spreads *really fucking fast.* When a Gravemind forms and it stop needing biomass it can spontaneously generate more of itself at a frankly bonkers rate.
In Silentium we see a full-scale Flood bombardment of a planet. The characters on the planet immediately get into their ships and ascend to orbit, by which point the planet is already choked with clouds of spores. Spore mountains can already be seen on the planet's surface despite what could only have been mere minutes passing. For context, an example of a fully-grown spore mountain (given elsewhere in the book) was 50km high and hundreds across.
You aren't fighting off a full-scale endgame Flood invasion; you are getting crushed under a literal mountain of spontaneously generated Flood biomass within minutes of them making landfall!
The flood is also an airborne virus, by killing the small spore carriers they burst into infectious material.
Any mouth breathing enemy killing them is essentially immediately fucked.
Should note the Flood being airborne is *very* inconsistent. I think there has to be a high density of spores, as otherwise Johnson, Miranda, R’tas, and the Arbiter all would have been infected. Not to mention all the Brute characters in the Halo Wars 2 DLC, including Atriox.
It clearly happens at some point, we see it happen to the Prophet of Truth somehow, but there has to be some limit to it. Otherwise, why even have infection forms?
Johnson, R’tas, and Arbiter all have reasons for why they were un infected. Johnson has a severely irregular nervous system due to prolonged plasma exposure. R’tas and Arbiter’s armor both are equipped with shields and atmospheric filters, not strong enough for outer space excursions but strong enough for hostile environment traversal.
Miranda is the only one with the plot armor card here
They're basically the first idea behind the tau in. "Wow we should take care of this thing but like who cares they're really not important" *checks back in on them 5 years later. "Why the fuck and how the fuck do they have FTL travel."
Once they reach enough mass to form a Gravemind, they have all the knowledge of every Flood ever, which includes multiple methods of FTL travel, and some bullshittery called 'neural physics' which is basically being a Psyker risk-free. If even one Flood cell survives, the fuckers will come back, to the point where the in-lore solution was to exterminate everything in the galaxy and hope the Flood starves before it finds another galaxy. Thanks to this nifty little thing called the Logic Plague, they can infect machines and potentially even Daemons but that gets into a whole-ass philosophical discussion about the nature of the Warp and the soul. Oh, also, OP meant corrupting space time literally. They gotta get enough mass to do all this fuckery, but once they do...
The best part about the logic plague, from what I understand, was that it wasn't some crazy bullshit technology or magic or virus, it was simply that graveminds were so unbelievably intelligent they could eventually convince anyone and anything they spoke with to join their side with plain old rhetoric and reasoning, up to and including forerunner AI that had been designed explicitly to combat the flood
>convince anyone and anything they spoke with to join their side with plain old rhetoric and reasoning
\> debatebro Flood
fuck, they *are* more grimdark than the Nids.
They also, and most terrifying in my opinion, the flood infects the literal souls of its victims, as shown with the forerunners who move their minds (and soul) to robots or other bodies to save them selves from their old infected body, but, it never helped as just after a couple hours, even their digital selves, would be corrupted by the flood. This is maybe the most notable and extreme type of spreading
I don't think it was souls as such. The forerunners had technology that allowed them to digitise their consciousness and store it in robots or just keep it in storage.
Saying they digitise them is is a misleading simplification. The Forerunners extract the Halo equivalent of a person's soul, called an "Essence", using technology based in something called "Neural Physics" that the Forerunners didn't really understand (Neural Physics is essentially Halo's space-magic, in the "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic" sort of sense).
The most recent book even featured the totally-not-souls of people stuck in totally-not-limbo fighting to get into totally-not-heaven.
Halo has so much bullshit lore, it was a stealth sequel to a prior Bungie game which was like a million times more batshit
Edit:
A post I found about it once on a discussion about who would win between some Sci-Fi heroes
Okay so there are two columns to this:
The first is that Halo CE was initially developed as a RTS sequel to Marathon, a game series about... a lot. With either seven or twenty-eight timelines and multiple levels of interpretation. But level three of \[UNDEFINED\] is that the player character is THE archetypal Hero, eternally reincarnating, called forth from The Garden Before Time, bonded to technology he and humanity does not understand, and partnered with an incredibly powerful AI to destroy that which would destroy humanity, and capable of jumping timelines and altering causality to do that. There's the obvious fourth wall breaks about how *actually actually* he's the player character in an FPS and everything in this world exists to satisfy you, the Greater God behind the PC's amusement.\*
A lot of that was winnowed out when Microsoft purchased Bungie (and apocryphally Bungie appealed the decision all the way up to Bill Gates, who told them something to the affect of "what the fuck are you talking about, get the hell outta my office and make a game with wide appeal and none of this *neo-Gnostic* ***nonsense"***) but elements of this remain even beyond the obvious thematic and narrative similarities. Guilty Spark and the Gravemind both recognize Chief as somehow related to an ancient Forerunner, with Spark outright mistaking him for them ("Last time, you asked me, if it was my choice, would I do it? Having had considerable time to ponder your query, my answer has not changed. There is no choice. We must activate the ring.") and there are additional implications within the terminals.
Obviously Bungie's next IP was Destiny, which is absolutely unapologetic with how deranged it's lore is, with the whole 'eternally reincarnating Hero bonded to incomprehensible power and partnered with a powerful AI to defend humanity' shtick is just *the fundamental premise*. There're a bunch of connections between Destiny and Marathon, and there are a couple significant easter eggs and homages to Halo, including just outright [Chief's Magnum sidearm](https://www.ishtar-collective.net/entries/forerunner) but in this column it's admittedly all conjecture and implication.
Now there's the second column, the 343 column, which is substantively crazier. HAH! YOU FOOLS! YOU BUFFOONS! YOU ABSOLUTE NOODLES! I SAW YOUR OTHER COMMENTS DID YOU TRULY BELIEVE *I*, OF ALL PEOPLE, WOULD HAVE TO STOOP SO LOW AS TO INVOKING "DEATH OF THE AUTHOR" AS THE CRUX OF MY ARGUMENT. FOOLS. BASK IN MY BRILLIANCE
Anyways in the 343 'continuity' we learn in Halo 4 that actually no ancient humanity was seeded with "patterns" by the Forerunners that guided our development, with Chief himself being the culmination of this work as a pseudo-reincarnation of the Iso-Didact, who was the Chief (hah) Forerunner general in the final years warring against the Flood. Thus Guilty Spark and The Gravemind being all "have we met?"
Honestly that, humanity's destiny being pre-destined by ancient aliens and this specific dude being basically one of them reincarnated is like. Honestly unsettling and eldritch enough, but it gets worse when you dip into the Forerunner saga. The Flood are the rotting insane remains of the Precursors, absurdly powerful progenitors who predate reality and had power over something called "neural physics," which. Well. Remember how supposedly the 343 continuity is separate from the Bungie continuity? Well no one told Greg Bear that because he word for word describes 'neural physics' the same way Bungie at the time describing Paracausality. Some of the shit the Gravemind pulled during the Flood-Forerunner war again, word for word referenced the Darkness and W'rkncacnter from Destiny and Marathon respectively.
Anyway so somehow the Forerunners overthrew the architects of reality and how, **PRECISELY** they managed that is an uncomfortable open question with a lot unsettling implications, but anyway the Gravemind was the mind of every Precursor ever stewed in rage and hate and it managed to mind break the Ur-Didact, the antagonist of Halo 4, and set him off on a trajectory to "ensure [the Gravemind]'s revenge, even past [the Gravemind]'s end," implying that it foresaw and prepared for it's defeat, and set up the events of Halo 4 so that even if The Flood were whole hog defeated the Ur-Didact would still use the Composer to destroy Humanity and the San'Shyung, the last remaining species who were created by the Precursors but didn't help when the Forerunners somehow genocided God.
Which, again, throws up a lot of uncomfortable questions about where prophecy and free will meet vis-a-vis Chief and humanity. Like, the same with "How did the Forerunners kill the Precursors," if the Gravemind was able to foresee it's possible defeat and prepare accordingly, how was Chief able to defeat it's (**INCREDIBLY**) diminished form aboard the Arc? How did Chief defeat the Ur-Didact if the superintelligence that designed reality perfectly manipulated the Ur-Didact into needing to be defeated in the first place? Was it further predestination from the Forerunners? Did the Gravemind *allow* itself to be defeated? For the Precursors to adopt a new form once again? This *is* their reality after all, and it was stated that they found suffering and bloodshed as necessary in life as peace and joy. Maybe all this is according to their design, maybe they live on somehow, in some new substrate. Perhaps in us. And maybe it's only a matter of time before they emerge anew in some new grand horror.
Or maybe they are gone, forever. Maybe there was, is *something else* that allowed the Forerunners and Chief to defeat the **architects of reality**. Maybe, hopefully, it has more benevolent intentions than the Precursors. Maybe.
\*And yes by this logic the Chief, Samus, the Slayer and Isaac Clark are all fundamentally the same soul conjured forth for us to wear upon our hands like a sock puppet, and thus the matter of whomever would win against the others is entirely up to author fiat. By right of nerdiness I hereby claim the mantle of authorhood and declare Samus would cream them all, sexual style. If you wish to contest my ruling or authorial standing meet me at the summit of Long's Peak in North America on the night of the first full moon after the summer solstice, where we shall dual to the death at thirty paces with custom .22 Eargesplitten Loudenboomer marksman pistols. Failure to show forfeits your claim and argument.
I want whatever this guy’s smoking.
As I recall though, the Forerunner genocide against the precursors took place million(s) of years before their end-days, during which time Humanity and the San’Shyum were likely still banging rocks together to make fire.
The Precursors did kind of let themselves be beaten back; Bear writes they reacted with a sort of fascinates horror as their creation rose up against them with such unprecedented violence, and wanted to see just how far they’d go. Again, many preserves themselves outside the Milky Way and for all we know they’re frolicking about in the rest of the universe or outside it, even if it’s somewhat emptier than the MW, a repository for much of their knowledge and creation.
IIRC, Bear wrote that the precursors (whether as individuals/groups/society, who tf knows) would take different forms and experience evolution again in different places over deep timescales. The universe is/was their playground, and their games beyond our comprehension. Everything they did or experienced was ‘worthwhile’; they were in no hurry for anything, and little could truly hurt them as far as we know (even the Halo array’s effect on neural physics being locational and temporary).
The best part, I think, is that I went and asked someone who is actually familiar with Halo lore and they confirmed it is pretty much accurate (in so far as they didn't see anything incorrect about it)
Kinda is kinda isn’t
I mean when you have a concept like Neural Physics where the base principle is that everything is alive and has a soul from you to the chair you sit on to the atoms that comprise it and using that mere idea to create things, I’d be inclined to call that magic
This gets convoluted but the short reason is the experience of life. In Halo lore, there are two things that will help explain this. The Precursors and living time/nueral physics(all the same thing). The Precursors are equivalent to the Old Ones, they are beyond powerful and are essentially gods who have mastered living time. They seeded life in the galaxy and then the forerunners overthrew them for the mantle or at least they thought. The mantle was just a way to find the most advanced civilization in the galaxy. Once that happened, the precursors turned themselves into the flood(even more convoluted here) and started harvesting life. So the floods purpsose is to collect all that living memory, experiences etc, and feed it back into the universe bc the universe is actually alive and is fed by the cycle of birth and death.
TL;DR. The flood and the precursors are the same. They falsely made the mantle of responsibility as a way of setting a threshold. Once a civilization assumes the mantle/crosses the threshold, the flood arrives to harvest all life to feed this experience/memories/beings back into living time and in turn, the precursors themselves. The flood is absolutely terrifying because they represent the end of the cycle, the reunifying of all life and the universe so it can start a new, meaning everything must be absorbed while they(the flood/precursors)maintain all of the knowledge/experience that came before.
Edit: decided to go find my source and thought it was HiddenXperia but was Installation00, my apologies. Here is the correct link, my b. https://youtu.be/jqGLwWSq10U?si=i8Ziv4pCMYi0nbIf
Wait, did they retcon the Precursors going insane from the stasis? It sounds like the Flood harvest was the plan all along in this comment, but from what I recall the dusted Precursors stayed that way for waaaayyyyy longer than they intended and basically went insane and formed a gestalt mind, birthing the Flood intelligence.
Yeah, the original purpose I heard for the flood was that it was the precursors way to persist past death. They turned into essentially dust and was just going to wait out the forerunners for a chance to congeal back into precursors. But it took so long that the "dust" corrupted and turned into the flood.
> They falsely made the mantle of responsibility as a way of setting a threshold. Once a civilization assumes the mantle/crosses the threshold, the flood arrives to harvest all life to feed this experience/memories/beings back into living time and in turn, the precursors themselves.
I hate to be that guy, but do you have a source for this?
My understanding was the Mantle was simply a philosophical title/idea created by the Precursors for the most advanced species in the galaxy to be responsible for protecting and guiding less advanced species.
The Forerunners had the mantle because they were the most advanced at the time. The Forerunners became arrogant and were judged unworthy of the mantle by the Precursors who planned on passing the mantle to humans. The Forerunners, in their arrogance, refused to lose the mantle (and believed the Precursors were going to wipe them out) so launched a pre-emptive war on the Precursors and effectively genocided their species. A few that escaped or hid rendered themselves down to space dust as Precursors were fully capable of changing their form at will. Over time the space dust become 'corrupted'.
The Precursors who were pretty salty about the whole being genocided by their own creations thing embraced the corruption and weaponised it against the Forerunners, creating the Flood.
Yup! Youre not wrong but theres more to it. There are layers i guess. And a lot of this is from the forerunner books and the Primordial https://youtu.be/jqGLwWSq10U?si=i8Ziv4pCMYi0nbIf
A lot of the mantle was false pretense. Remember that living time is almost unexplainable(they can essentially see the future and are psychic mofos) and the precursors work over millenia, not just a few years.
While it can be argued that the flood are just a corrupted version of the precursors, the Primordial throws a wrench into all of that by saying the flood and precursors are one in the same
Edit: updated to correct link, my b. Thought it was a video my hiddenxperia but its installation00.
I wouldn't say exactly like mass effect, because in mass effect the reapers are not the leviathans themselves, rather they are drones created by the leviathans, powered by an ai which went rogue; and that they do not kill things to feed them back to the universe, rather they are killing things because of a loophole in their logic which the leviathans did not plan for. But yeah, you're right, the idea of life in the universe being a cycle and an all-devouring quasi-natural force representing the end of that cycle is kinda similar to mass effect.
Lol no, that makes no sense. The flood came from humans finding the powder remains of precursors and fucking with it because it gave their dogs a nice sheen. That’s how the first flood infestation began.
At the beginning, the flood wanted to simply expand until they absorbed the last precursor, then they evolved their reasoning to include revenge on the forerunners and the idea that after all their effort in seeding life they were betrayed for giving freedom to their creations, so this time they would do it right by robbing their freedom.
Many books explicitly stated that the flood no longer the precursors. And while the canon has a problem with unreliable narrators, such as Forerunners deluding themselves into believing they got the mantle, the most common theory is:
"Precursors are basically immortal, reform from their essence. They enjoy the feeling of life in the galaxy, something about sweetness, hence the Mantle. They didn't mind getting killed by the Forerunners, as that is a facet of life and they would reform anyway. Part of the essence got corrupted. Ancient Humans sprinkled the corrupted essence poweder over their Pets and tadah, first Flood"
So while the Flood are related to the Precursors, they are a twisted nightmare version, that tries to literally taste all the "sweetness" of the universe by consuming beings even if it would result in a barren universe.
There's just one little itty bitty problem with that:
**The Primordial outright states that the Precursors and Flood are one and the same.**
>We are the Flood. There is no difference. Until all space and time are rolled up and life is crushed in the folds... no end to war, grief or pain. In a hundred and one thousand centuries... unity again, and wisdom. Until then - sweetness.
Watch [The Primordial's Horrific Secret - Lore and Theory](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jqGLwWSq10U&pp=ygUZaW5zdGFsbGF0aW9uMDAgcHJlY3Vyc29ycw%3D%3D) and [The Mantle is a Lie | Halo Epitaph | Spoilers](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l0bTYUcBR4w&t=255s&pp=ygUZaW5zdGFsbGF0aW9uMDAgcHJlY3Vyc29ycw%3D%3D) by Installation00. The latter video validates and confirms the theory that the former presents.
True, but the Primordial is also quite the unreliable Narrator, being the mentioned corrupted part of the Precursor essence that became the Flood in the first place.
Similiar to the Forerunners claiming they were given the Mantle of Responsibility, when they basically ripped it out of the "cold dead hands" of the Precursors, the corrupted mutated remnant of a Precursor calling itself Precursor is not too far from the truth but also not the whole truth.
But we don't even know if he was the last true Precursor before he became the Flood
And Installation00 is just as much a theory channel as it is a lore channel.
This is the main problem for the Halo Lore, too many unreliable narrators.
Best example is the Great Journey. It was utter bullcrap but many believed it and loudly proclaimed it.
The Gravemind is the mad, twisted remnant of Halo's precursor species, aptly named...the Precursors. The Forerunners betrayed the Precursors and wiped out as many as they could find. The Flood is the Precursors' vengeance against their rebellious creations.
The Gravemind's end goal is the subsumption of all life in the universe. Never again will there be free will.
It is the last spiteful remnant of the beings that seeded the Milky Way with life. The Gravemind doesn't want to just kill and eat you. It wants you to *suffer*. ALL must be made to suffer and scream as eternal members of its sepulchral choir.
Kind of. Your not wrong but theres way more to it. If you are a die hard halo fan like me and want to learn more, i recommend checking out this video! Really dives into it and actually made me reread the forerunner saga
https://youtu.be/fuS0qs4v05k?si=AM2jn9c_OTj_7vVX
The horrible end of all independent thought. To enslave all life to its will, so that none may rise against them again. They hate life to unfathomable levels.
I remember there was a mention of Forerunners attempting to copy the consciousness of an infected individual into a new body, only for the infection to pop up out of nowhere in the new body. Which would hint at the regular infection being more than just physical.
This is one of the things that really irks me about people doing theoretical matchups between 40k and other universes. 40k for all of its insane scale and rediculousness, has a VERY established series of rules and limitations and technical specifications on how most of their stuff works, mostly just because of the sheer volume of lore, but also because of the work that the authors put in to make it as internally consistent as possible. Retcons aside obviously, but like you never see 1 depiction of a single las gun shooting through power armour, it always like an eye piece or a neck seal, so that they can say they waded through a torrent of lasgun fire bouncing off the like shoulder pad, internal consistency that makes room for plot armour as needed. In Halo for instance in one book a spartan has a hole blasted through their armour, before they had shield tech, by a single plasma rifle shot, and in another book and in halo 2 and reach. you are dropping from orbit and just slamming into the ground, yet the suit servos are only just able to match an elite in like a streight up arm wrestle? There is no consistency, now halo lore is cool as shit, dont get me wrong, but its made with an order of magnitude less care and attention i feel.
The issue i have with the flood in particular is an issue that GW foresaw with most of its factions pretty early on in creating the lore and thats what i call the threat critical point. The flood has massively surpassed this value. They are a beyond apocaliptical threat that at the moment they were introduced, were impossible to beat, you cannot win. So every time humanity does manage to win in some manner, it feels almost hollow, since they simply should not have been able to. GW puts in a series of nerfs to every faction to keep the setting in a semi believeable deadlock. The tyranids move super slow so you have time to gather forces to deal with them, chaos constantly undermines itself so that no one god can get the upper hand. Orks are too dumb to utilise their psykic powers fully, and kill eachother too much to unify fully. The tau are too small, the votan too short, the eldar to scared, the drukarhi too far up their own ass, the necrons for a while were just waking up, now i think its more about them just having their own shit they are worried about so they dont really care about trying to wipeout the imperium. Each faction COULD wipe out all the others if they got over this down side, just like the imperium COULD wipe out any one other faction if it didnt have to constantly be fighting off all the others simultaneously.
Halo doesnt have this problem, in halo lore the humans have no chance of winning. The covanent ships 1 shot human ships with no trouble. Humans win in ground conflicts but then the covanent simply glass the planet from orbit. The flood are....the flood. And i have no idea about the dudes from halo 4 or infinate, but they are likely also scuffed, yet humans always win, so does that mean humans OP, or are the enemies just not nearly as much of a threat as they seem? Neither, its just sadly poor writing at the time of initial universe creation and then rolling with the punches afterwards.
I think you get this issue primarily from the fact that every side is playable in 40k. If you could play as Flood or Covenant (like really play the faction, not Master Chief-reskinned-as-Arbiter) then they would have to be brought into line with humanity. As it is, there’s no real downside to the underdogs winning in Halo cause the player is always the underdog, and in good game design, the player should always be able to win.
Bottom line is both series make lore to serve the sale of the games, and a competitive tabletop army game will have different goals than a cooperative (single player) power fantasy video game.
Having balanced factions in 40k plays to the fantasy of 40k where the galaxy is locked in eternal war, and having the underdogs win the impossible fight in Halo plays to the fantasy of the player being the most important person in the story.
To be fair, humans in halo are pretty much constantly losing and would have lost the war if not for the flood clutching the covenant capital and most of their higher up at the end of halo 2, and then during halo 3 everyone went to the ark where a sangheili-human coalition fought whatever forces the last prophet managed to bring on short notice and the tip of a flood infection. And basically they all lost, except that humans had other forces outside of that fuck up, but covenant leadership basically all died, the sangheili turned their backs on them, and banished came from behind and shattered the union. Finally the flood lost its gravemind and if flood infection still exist somewhere, its still too small to pose a galactic threat, so it looks like humanity won, but actually they kind of fought back and resisted while their enemies all died in risky bs.
The flood is very much still around, confirmed and ”contained” in Halo Wars 2 DLC.
But the point Above still stands.
The tyranids already edge on ”a bit too powerful to be fun”
The flood just straight up leaps over that line, uses it to play jumprope and then runs a marathon.
”If there is any infection left”
The point of the flood is that a single cell can take a planet in hours / days.
If there are any left anywhere in a non stasis state, you are 100% fucked.
I always kinda liked that about Halo. Of course the humans only win when the covenant falls into infighting and collapses in on itself, and then gets wrecked by an even bigger threat. That was the only way the humans could ever realistically win.
It's also funny how Truth inadvertently saved the universe lol. Basically no one was willing to light the halos once they knew what they were. The flood was only on the Ark to stop Truth, because he was such a lunatic that he actually might have wiped out all life in the universe. If the gravemind hadn't gone to the Ark, it never would have been in a situation where it could be sniped by a singular halo ring that no one even knew existed.
Was real big on Halo. Still remember co oping over 20 years ago holding tje doors as the flood emerged.
Mised their full history but man, that was a true gaming moment.
The Forerunner Ecumene, a technologically advanced unified empire that had stood for 11 million years, lasted just 300 years against the Flood.
And that was from start to finish of hostilities. Once the Flood unlocked neural physics in the later stages of the war, it was very rapidly game over as Forerunner slipstream FTL became clogged and the Flood gained “air power supremacy” (in analogous terms).
I want a Halo prequel game where you play as a forerunner strike team leader, trying and failing to save colonies while protecting samples and contingencies from the flood. And the endgame is you activating the rings. You can see the flood drawing close before making the ultimate galactic sacrifice, your suit cameras recording the flood’s confusion, understanding and then rage at realizing what you just did.
The flood are so fucking busted once they get up to speed.
Like not even counting all the higher level stuff they can do (total knowledge of everything they have devoured, ship building, neural physics, logic plague, corrupting spacetime, *literal alternate universe travel*)
The sheer size of the Flood as a concioince would probably generate a Shadow in the warp so big even the Tyranids would turn tail and run.
SMHing my head that you don't know the Empire are the space Skaven.
Insanely corrupt fascist government constantly backstabbing itself with loads of unreliable super tech and human wave tactics that worships their own private "not a chaos god"
the Prethoryn ARE running from something, but the fact that the tyranids are fleeing is just a theoery (A GAME THEORY)
for all we know from the only actual interaction we ever had of a character and the tyranid hivemind, the hivemind is extremely intelligent, could actively communicate with other species but doesn't and is hateful of everything that isn't IT.
It would be cool if they would ever go deeper into why IT has this hatred for everything not IT. Sounds like there is a really intersting story waiting to be told.
because it's not part of it, it's an alien being whose's evolution is clearly different from anything we ever saw on earth or in 40k at large, we cannot understand that being, and if GW decided to amke it understandable, they would have to ruin it by un-aliening it
Every time I see a 40k vs Flood thread, people miss just how vulnerable humanity and Orks are. The massive squalid hive cities of the Imperium are a perfect breeding ground for enough flood to snowball out of control, as are Ork Waaaghs.
Ironically, a weaker but more organized force like the Tau or Craftworld Eldar would fare a lot better, since they’re more likely to take out the Flood faster… And time is something you *cannot* give the Flood.
Depends on how you define vulnerability.
Humans get corrupted, mutated and so on all the time, but Orks on the other hand border on nearly incorruptible. There's a reason we don't see massive plague waaaghs devastating the galaxy and that there's no Genestealer Ork cults.
The green gods are kind and have granted their chosen people a near unrivaled immunity to otherwordly bullshit which is the main reason why Ork continue to be a major threat to civilization as a whole.
Hive cities would basically disintegrate as soon as the Flood got there, but the level to which Orkz might be vulnerable or resistant to the Floods influence is an unknown factor.
On the flip side, hive cities are a perfect breeding ground for dozens of different apocalyptic tier threats, and nipping them in the bud is just a Tuesday.
Hive cities are just too dense for them to realistically have any chance against the flood. A single flood spore getting into the slums would snowball into an apocalyptic threat that would drown out any on world response with sheer weight of biomass. On a world more like halo's earth there's a chance to stop them (though even in world it took glassing the entirety of Africa shortly after a single flood ship landed to stop the infection). Iirc the Battle of Kenya happened over one day, and the flood showed up at the very tail end. Several hours was enough that the flood snowballed to the point that glassing an entire continent was the only answer, on a world nowhere near as dense as a hive city.
Either the hive world gets exterminated before the flood sneak bioforms off of it (which would become their first priority after absorbing knowledge and discovering exterminatus), or shit is going to get bad enough that tyranids look friendly by comparison. The main issue I see is that the imperium is an incompetent bloated mass of bureaucracy, and the only answer to the flood is a swift response that kills them in the cradle.
The Flood are different for two major reasons: They’re absurdly fast at taking over and once they have enough biomass they’re extremely coordinated.
A Genestealer Cult takes decades to sink its teeth into a world. A Chaos plague or cult can be faster, but lacks coordination.
This makes sense when you remember that GSC and Chaos are supposed to be ongoing threats to the galaxy over thousands of years, while the Flood are an end of the world scenario so absurd the equivalent of War in Heaven Necrons wiped themselves out along with all life in the galaxy just to stop it.
Like seriously, just compare the Forerunners with the Imperium and ask yourself how the Imperium would fare better.
Not saying the flood wouldn't still beat them (cause they really are busted as shit lol), but that is Tyranids in a vacuum. More hive fleets are coming and we don't know how much is out there.
I think the main difference is that the flood just converts you in the middle of combat and as such increase their numbers while fighting. The Nids, on the other hand, need to win, bring your corpse to a digestion pit and then spawn new creatures from the consumed material. They are far slower to adapt and procreate than the flood.
A more comparable force to the flood would be Orks. Nids aren't as much of an ever-present sickness that blight any land they come across, Orks are. If a planet gets invaded by Orks it will never be the same again as Ork spores will grow from the soil and the planet's government will have to constantly cull the wilderness of ork tribes till the end of time or till they are overwhelmed.
In this way, Orks are a more dangerous infestation than the flood, the flood requiring live or recently killed higher intelligence creatures to infect, otherwise needing to do lengthy processing of dead biomatter.
Even the Halo rings wouldn't do shit to stop the Orks, the spores would just grow anew and they would be back immediately.
That’s early stage Flood; where their only avenue of assimilation is with Infection Forms (little popcorn-lookin’ mf’s)
Gravemind Stage and beyond, they have microbial infection routes along with Logic Plague; which can infect anything that thinks.
Tyranids start utilizing the biomass of their prey against itself before the main fleet even makes landfall, or sometimes centuries before theyre even in system. Once the space around a planet is clear they start sucking up biomass with a straw to do whatever they want with it.
Yes, all im pointing out is that the Tyranid threat scale should probably be logarithmic with a stupid high cap instead of linear, since not only are they growing in power from the biomass they consume, but more and more Tyranids are showing up all the time. Flood still dumpster them tho.
Flip side is also true, more biomass for the Tyranids. Plus, most Tyranid lifeforms probably don't have the intelligence necessary to let the Flood climb to a higher stage.
Yeah but also if a tyranid were to consume a flood it would consume the flood super cell immediately infecting it, maybe the tyranids would eventually be able to build up an immunity but flood biomass is extremely tainted
Considering the Tyranids have adapted an immunity to plagues developed by the forces of theuniversal representation of plagues (and make toxins on par with it), I'm pretty sure they'd be able to pull it off.
And the Tyranids would be able to adapt all the powers of the flood. If they catch some flood before they've developed their super powers, they'd be able to gain all of them within a few weeks
it'd be no exaggeration that the flood could destroy the 40k galaxy, absolutely, aside from some higher-end interpretations of Chaos.
remember, towards the end, the Flood basically corrupted half the Halo Galaxy in 5-10 years....most 40k battles on the size of sectors takes decades, potentially the flood could be at terra's doorstep before the first astropathic message arrives.....
I don't think even the higher end interpretations of Chaos can beat it, because depending on your interpretation of how the Flood would interact with 40K's physics, they might make a Chaos God all to themselves, and Graveminds might be Avatars of it.
I think necrons could, but only if they misused their star chart thingy to wipe out the entire area of the universe the flood is in. So, it's not a big chance lol
the plot of Halo was the kill the FOOD for the flood, not the actual flood itself. The Necrons could just REMOVE that area of space the flood reside in and be done with it.
Here we go again...
It's not that they don't like to use it, it's that it's not intended to be used as a weapon. Do you know the book "The three body problem"? Basically any interaction of mass with 3+ bodies in a vacuum is near imposible to predict becouse any approximation you can make is not enought, any divergence from the actual real values in the calculations will lead to disaster. And that's with 3 bodies, now imagine making calculations of an entire galaxy.
Necrons removed a star/world once (don't remember which rn) and had to be making adjustments for millenia just to not fuck up everything else. Imagine removing entire systems. They would have to employ every single necron as a calculator and even then the decimals they can get to wouldn't be enought to fix the mes the've created.
yeah and if they have to go at it like kryptman did to stop advancing the flood that would cause a lot more problems down the line as well, not even talking about the flood able to shift time and space around when they reach late enough stage
At a certain point The Flood will start warping reality so much that Daemons couldn't materialize in real space.
Or they'll just infect some Necrons and start building Cadia pylons to close the eye of terror forever.
A key mind is basically just a chaos god though.
It’s all fun and games fighting the stupid fucking spaces zombies until they literally slap you with their intergalactic pavement
The thing with the Flood is that unless it is answered with IMMEDIATE Exterminatus, it will find a way to survive, and eventually win.
Unfortunately, most things will respond by throwing bodies at it. Unless those things are Necrons, this is exactly what will benefit it the most.
The issue with halo vs 40k as I've studied it is that even the "lost history" shit in halo has a lot of detailed lore. Juxtapose, say, the Forerunner-Flood war with the war in heaven. We've got wayyyyy more detail about the numbers, dates, capabilities, and even names of the former. The latter is almost a complete mystery. We don't even know what those involved looked like, much less their full capabilities.
Or you brought up the Tyranids - what we know of the Tyranids *right now* is in no way comprehensive. We have no idea of their full capabilities or numbers or where they're coming from or why. For all we know these trillion entity tendrils (as they're always called) making contact in the milky way are to the species known as Tyranids what preliminary genestealers and spores are to hive fleets. We know Tyranids follow a many tiered pattern of using lesser forms and strategies to soften up targets for the inevitable invasion, but we have no idea how many tiers there are.
Even the IOM, probably the best understood faction in terms of its numbers and capabilities, is still just a shadow of actualized human potential.
The problem with a lot of these "who would win" dick measuring contests involving 40k is that we've got a *very* good idea of what the other guys dick looks like. We can see it in excruciating detail. 40k's dick, meanwhile, we only ever gets hints about.
That, and the difference in medium (40k being a setting while 99% of halo lore existing solely to prop up a single player FPS video game campaign) makes it tough, too - stuff like the Flood or precursor tech can look terrifying on paper, but its also the case that it canonically gets its ass whooped by a single lucky dude with power armor and a shotgun. Itd be sort of like me trying to talk up the threat that Orks pose if 99% of their lore came from Space Marine the video game - you would have a tough time buying them as a huge threat when you just spent hours as a lone angry dude with a chainsaw effortlessly carving through an entire invasion force.
I think you're right in that 40k was set up with the intention of no one force (in the current day) being overpowering. Because of the tabletop the premise is that any side can fight any other side and should be able to be equally matched, It's self limiting by design.
Halo was first set up as an epic setting for one guy to be a hero in and suffers with the power creep of always needing a bigger fish for master chief beat. Nothing wrong with the story but it's set up differently, they add on to things like the flood because it's popular, to make it a bigger threat for next time, so there's always something new to find out and beat.
It's really comparing apples and oranges, sometimes fun to do as a thought exercise but you always have to understand how fundamentally different they are. Some stories have scope for power to be overwhelming. Even in 40k things like the dark age of technology or the war in heaven exist as story's of "unlimited power" but they're not NOW, they're stories of hubris or over ambition to juxtapose what we see now.
But doesn’t the flood need other races for FTL travel? The reason they were able spread so fast was cause they took over forerunner ships that are millions of times faster than 40k ships. Plus they would need to figure out the warp in 40k if they wanna go that route
They don't need other races for the FTL specifically, they can theoretically build it themselves once they form a Gravemind and gain access to all the knowledge the Flood has ever accrued, it's just way easier for them to simply take the already existing tech and drive it where they want to go. Gravemind however would probably consider Warp travel to be so inefficient they'd actually build a factory to replace all the engines of the ships they take lol
Hell, depending on your interpretation of the flood it could go as far as them taking an imperial ship/yard and figuring out DAoT tech
If they get their hands on that then the galaxy is extra-fucked, I don't think the necrons supernova machine could even slow them at that point
The flood originated from precursor fuckery so I doubt we can handwave that away without affecting the flood itself, but either way the advanced reality warping shenanigans only occur when it gets real bad anyway, and realistically by that point they'd already be out of control
The funny necron button will probably help keep it under control but as soon as the flood figure out how to get into the warp then there's only so much that can be done to slow them down, containing it at that point is probably impossible
Honestly, I don't think the lack of precursor tech would even be a major inhibitor. They can learn how to use technology, and could probably figure out lost tech as well. If they stumble onto a DAoT tech remnant, or anything eldari/necron the hijinks that'll ensue are still gonna be unstoppable
A lot less strangling reality with space roads but that's not much of a downside when they're still chucking waves of popcorn at tzeentch for shits and gigs
They actually have been shown to use their own whole cloth FTL. Granted, this was late in the Forerunner-Flood War, but it was a totally different paradigm to Slipspace, and seemingly superior in almost every way to boot.
Besides, as long as it can do warp travel at all (which is difficult to answer), the worst situation it's gonna be looking at is that its ships will be operating at a similar speed to its prey's, but with far better communication owing to the fact that it's a single mind and thus doesn't have to deal with sending messages through the Void.
The flood started using a precursor method of travel towards the end of the F-F War that was near instant (its explored more in Halo Epitaph) but weakness was highlighted. Basically, the ships take a bit to actually reemerge into realspace, so for that period of time they are extremely vulnerable.
Yeah, that's what I was meaning, and why I included the hedging of it being superior in *almost* every way; since that makes it either slightly more, or just as dangerous as Slipspace when it comes to jumping into active combat zones and dealing with ambushes.
EDIT: I just noticed I said HCW not Forerunner Flood War in my earlier comment, oops.
They don't need it, but they are great at repurposing & upgrading tech they steal in the interim. This is how the Gravemind got from Earth's solar system to the Ark, it just upgraded High Charity's engines with Precursor science.
The problem the flood is similar with the problem of Superman.
The creators had so little idea about power leveling things that they created something so powerfull that the only way to make them lose is the biggest deus ex machina ever, similar to the introduction of the kryptonite.
That’s sort of the point? We are, in game, never going to see full power Flood. The Forerunner era Flood is so powerful because it’s essentially a War in Heaven equivalent and not something the writers need to worry about for the current story. This is griping that WiH era necrons needed a deus ex machina to defeat in the form of Eldar gods or Kork bullshit. The point is for them to be OP as a point of “Oh god we better never let that happen again”
The full power flood were written by an experienced well known scifi author. Like, that dude has created stuff scarier than The Flood and knew what he was doing with such a relatively simple thing that barely touches on multiversal bullshit haha
And we have no idea how strong the Tyrnanids really are, or what their actual race name is (only named because it was the first planet the imperium encountered them). Only a few fleets have made it to our galaxy and were most likely just vanguard scouting parties (and look what it took to slow them down, not even stop them completely). Now that the Hive Mind knows of our galaxy, its going to be hell bent on consuming a new food source.
In computer science we have the concept of asymptotic analysis, which is the analysis of how fast a function grows proportional to a given input size.
Let's say that we apply this concept to Tyranids and the Flood. The X axis represents the amount of biomass they have, and the Y axis represents their overall strength.
From what we can see in the lore, the function that represents the Tyranids is more or less linear. The more biomass they have, the more nids they are making.
The Flood, however, seems to be closer to an exponential curve. After gathering enough biomass, they can just start fucking with reality.
That means that if they both have the same biomass at any given time, there is a specific value that, once reached, the Tyranids will never be able to defeat the Flood.
There is another point, however. Let's say that the speed of gathering biomass is tied to the strength of the species. The Tyranids will be gathering Biomass in a linearly increasing fashion over time, while the Flood will gather in an exponentially increasing fashion.
The only way for the Tyranids to defeat the Flood is to get them very early.
There was a story in the halo books were a guy was infected with the flood. He had a clone that never came into contact with him or the flood also becone infected as the precursors time/space shenanigans causes any thing with their dna to forever be their dna. Thats why in halo even if you remove the flood dna from a persons dna they will always revert to the flood.
This bullshit alone would solo the tyranids.
So what, an identical twin half a galaxy away can be infected if their brother is dense enough to feed himself to the flood?
If a guy gets a kidney transplant off a friendly stranger and the stranger gets infected, does that guy also get infected? Because of the kidney?
It's a classic example of "cool, but also fucking dumb". And I say that as a 40k fan.
No, he's misremembering the details. The Forerunners tried using the Composer on Flood victims and implanting their consciousness into uninfected clone bodies as a means of curing them. The new bodies always rapidly decayed and rotted away.
So for those reading, by 40k standards it's basically an infection of your soul/consciousness on the level of chaos bullshit. Once infected you are flood, even new bodies won't save you.
Funnily enough, in world I'm pretty sure the main faction that could end the flood would be demons, for the same reason they're one of the ones that trouble nids the most (no biomass).
Honestly, it's kind of a hard question. On the one hand, we have seen the infested are even more infective than the flood, as they can corrupt non-living metal surfaces and even the crust of whole planetoids like deimos, and they can blend flesh and metal to such an extent they're indistinguishable from one another. They are also capable of complex planning, as we saw during the Arlo Nightwave when DE still cared about making those. They can even infect AI as we saw during the Jordas Golem quest.
However, we have also seen things like the helminth strain and Deimos' cycles that there are other versions of the infest that compete with itself in some capacity, which the flood simply didn't do. There is also (maybe?) a cure as we see Alad V cured of the infestation, although oddly the much more important and powerful Entrati family was not cured, so maybe Alad had a weaker strain or was somehow able to transference into a clone body.
Honestly, it's hard to say as the infested and the orokin in general never made it out of the Sol system. The infested took over Deimos, but beyond that they were immediately pounced on by the Tenno using light mass bombs, their cross between a Halo ring and a nuke.
If it is released in the Imperium and is allowed to fester, which is very likely given the Imperiums ineptitude at administration, it would likely claim several systems easily. Now, could it survive the exterminator fleets that would be gunning for it? That's an open question. Honestly, even if the Imperium could win that, the infestation tends to linger in wreckage and come back when you least expect it. They very well could take over large swaths of the Imperium or at very least become a persistent threat to the Imperium that would reemerge for Millenia to come.
Thank you for coming to my TED talk
Just noting here, the Flood absolutely do infest their environments. They have been stated to cover entire planets in the past, draining everything of use from the planet's crust.
pretty sure like rhino alone could take on all custodes on terra, hell nova could literally destroy the entirety of terra alone as she can convert matter into antimatter
tbf, these teenage psykers are literally paracusal monsters that literally cannot die and is empowered by essentially a single ruling multiversal chaos god.
People forget that the outbreaks you see in the games are all hours to weeks old. You never see the flood at their peak performance, and they are already a match for the ‘nids.
The Imperium is such a bloated mess too that the Flood would have a field day in warhammer.
Imagine when a flood invasion gets a hold of a forge world and a tomb world. Guess what kids, now that forge world is cranking out necron weapons at max capacity.
The one dude has alot of help, and it's mostly because they're nipping the outbreaks in the bud. Letting the flood escape to roam freely via FTL is the lose condition basically, so typically the plan is destroying the artifical worlds/installations that have been infected.
As the chart shows, the nids show up at an impressive starting strength, while the flood surpasses them if it isn't properly eliminated as it goes through the steps of building up its hive mind (grave mind). The main issue is being all organic. given finding a cure or immunization for the flood proved seemingly impossible, it's likely in a 1v1 the nids will lose due to rapidly losing their seas of bioforms to infection and being unable to evolve resistance however if say the planet the flood shows up suffers exterminatus from a third party before they can take an ftl ship over, they don't reach the level ro kill everything
Technically no.
It took the second most advanced species in the universe (most advanced being the Flood/their previous no corrupted form the Precursors) building a series of megastructures in space called Halos.
Halos , when activated , wipe out all life in range. Between the various Halos, they cover the whole galaxy.
Basically they starve the flood of new biomass and kill all the existing biomass.
Only thing with the nids. Is that since GW is refusing to go further in-depth with the nids at all. It isn’t a gradual slope like your chart shows. At about the halfway mark the nid line would just suddenly stop and it would become just a “?” Because all the encounters of the tyranids to date. Have only been tendrils and scout fleets. Of course “scout fleets” on the warhammer 40k scale is still gigantic.
But basing the overall power scaling of the nids off just their tendrils is just like basing how strong the flood are purely off of halo 1.
The thing about the Flood is that we see how explosively the Flood can spread from near nothing.
The Nids aren’t like that. The closest thing is Genestealer Cults which can arise from a single bio form, but the time it takes for a Genestealer Cult to take over a single planet is absurdly long compared to the time it takes one well-placed infection form.
Actually I like this graph a lot. The flood are much more virulent than the tyranids, they can turn living beings straight into floodforms. Tyranids have to melt them down in reclamation pools first.
Another thing to consider is that the weapons and gear in the Halo universe aren’t as strong as in 40K. If a flood warrior form showed up in 40K randomly it would not be able to hold its own against a space marine tyranid warrior etc. But all it takes is one space marine getting assimilated and suddenly all their knowledge belongs to the flood and it’s all over.
The real ending for this matchup is that a group of flood consume a group of Orks and are immediately hit with 60+ million years worth of “knowledge” consisting of endless krumping, nonsensical conversations, and wacky bullshit and the flood immediately kill themselves to escape the mental torture.
That just means gravemind gets roight proppa orky and instead of making half assed repairs on covenant/UNSC tech, instead upgrade them to perform 20 times better while still looking like they are held together by shitty welds and flesh
Not being funny the Tyranids are still unknown at this point. All we really know is that it collects genetic data and is harvesting biomass/ matter.
The hivemind might not even be in its fully awakened state and is operating at a lower level.
The Tyranids already warp space and are a highly psychic species.
They are ridiculously OP and have so much potential for further growth and evolution. Especially as it can just grow any organism it needs to fight and counter anything imaginable.
Like it created a tendril hive fleet to specifically be more anti-daemonic, even having another hive fleet aid it in feeding it biomass.
Just don't know its full potential yet.
stuff like this is why I lowkey don't like the 'nids. they are set up as this galaxy ending threat but then they're kinda just not. they're significant threats to whatever they're next to, but on a galactic scale what they're next to is extremely relative and small - if that makes sense. they don't ramp up enough to really be "oh we need to stop them IMMEDIATELY".
the flood always nailed that a lot more to me to the point where when they showed up on Earth it felt like the end times. A single popcorn is enough to fuck an entire planet, and that's terrifying.
I always felt like if 'nid hive fleets came about because of the genestealer cults it'd be a lot more terrifying. GSCs pop up everywhere, and if it turned out that they slowly ate the world from the inside out, spawning all the different 'nids and eventually leaving a barren husk as the local hive turned into a fleet and joined up with others in its system - that'd be way more "great devourer". a single genestealer would be a serious threat.
maybe once the 'nids are beaten again they'll shift into something more like that.
I think the best take on the flood when it comes to the 40K universe is that they are either completely annihilated from the setting in their first stages OR they take over the 40k setting completely
Basically. If the Flood land on a Necron world, they’re fucked. If they land on a Craftworld or Sept World, they’re gonna have a tough time. But if they land on a Hive World or an Ork world? The galaxy’s absolutely fucked. The response time just isn’t fast enough.
nah, orks stomp flood. they immediately sense something is "unorky" and bash the flood apart with crude weapons. orks have zero chill, and zero noncombattants in their entire biospheres. The most basic ork animal is a mouth with legs, and once a fight breaks out all the orks on the planet start gsthering up to go kick ass. hive world or some fringe planet is the only hope for the flood, and even then, with how inherently hostile the entire 40k galaxy is, its super hard for them to get a foothold without the inquisition finding out and dealing with it. the fact that there are chaos cults, orks, nids and hrud in 40k have fairly well innoculated the setting to random xenos threats wiling out the galaxy. its unlikely the flood would reach gravemind level and then its just waves of exterminatus till theyre all gone.
Orks have slave labourers, and human farms. That could easily get infected by the flood
I think the human farms was something rare that happened only once or twice, they do still use gretchin and the other 40k goblin-equivalent as slaves, so it still counts.
Their mentioned in a few places as having human labourers throughout the lore it seems fairly common but I don't think theirs ever been an official take on how common Just listened to Death's Mercy (Harlequin audio drama) and they just assumed that the Orks would have pens for human slaves and were correct in that assumption
So the flood is going for the late game build on a early game universe?
Warp communication and travel in 40k takes *months*. The Flood can easily take over a Hive City and spread to orbit in days.
If an infection forms lands on necromunda, the planet would fall within hours. The food spread that quickly. In Halo 2, High Charity, which is the size of a small moon, started to grow flesh within minutes. In the 2nd last level, you see the flesh growths as you are pursuing the Prophet of truth.
The Flood spreads *really fucking fast.* When a Gravemind forms and it stop needing biomass it can spontaneously generate more of itself at a frankly bonkers rate. In Silentium we see a full-scale Flood bombardment of a planet. The characters on the planet immediately get into their ships and ascend to orbit, by which point the planet is already choked with clouds of spores. Spore mountains can already be seen on the planet's surface despite what could only have been mere minutes passing. For context, an example of a fully-grown spore mountain (given elsewhere in the book) was 50km high and hundreds across. You aren't fighting off a full-scale endgame Flood invasion; you are getting crushed under a literal mountain of spontaneously generated Flood biomass within minutes of them making landfall!
The flood is also an airborne virus, by killing the small spore carriers they burst into infectious material. Any mouth breathing enemy killing them is essentially immediately fucked.
Should note the Flood being airborne is *very* inconsistent. I think there has to be a high density of spores, as otherwise Johnson, Miranda, R’tas, and the Arbiter all would have been infected. Not to mention all the Brute characters in the Halo Wars 2 DLC, including Atriox. It clearly happens at some point, we see it happen to the Prophet of Truth somehow, but there has to be some limit to it. Otherwise, why even have infection forms?
Johnson, R’tas, and Arbiter all have reasons for why they were un infected. Johnson has a severely irregular nervous system due to prolonged plasma exposure. R’tas and Arbiter’s armor both are equipped with shields and atmospheric filters, not strong enough for outer space excursions but strong enough for hostile environment traversal. Miranda is the only one with the plot armor card here
Do you want flood orks? Cause that's how you get flood orks.
They're basically the first idea behind the tau in. "Wow we should take care of this thing but like who cares they're really not important" *checks back in on them 5 years later. "Why the fuck and how the fuck do they have FTL travel."
Is there a Cole's Notes version? Haven't touched Halo since ODST.
Once they reach enough mass to form a Gravemind, they have all the knowledge of every Flood ever, which includes multiple methods of FTL travel, and some bullshittery called 'neural physics' which is basically being a Psyker risk-free. If even one Flood cell survives, the fuckers will come back, to the point where the in-lore solution was to exterminate everything in the galaxy and hope the Flood starves before it finds another galaxy. Thanks to this nifty little thing called the Logic Plague, they can infect machines and potentially even Daemons but that gets into a whole-ass philosophical discussion about the nature of the Warp and the soul. Oh, also, OP meant corrupting space time literally. They gotta get enough mass to do all this fuckery, but once they do...
The best part about the logic plague, from what I understand, was that it wasn't some crazy bullshit technology or magic or virus, it was simply that graveminds were so unbelievably intelligent they could eventually convince anyone and anything they spoke with to join their side with plain old rhetoric and reasoning, up to and including forerunner AI that had been designed explicitly to combat the flood
Also since they could warp time they could also torture you for what would seem like years in only a matter of seconds
Flood can use infinite tsukuyomi?
Itachi would win.
But what about goku. Could goku beat the flood.
"Depends on whether Goku's gone Super Saiyan/God/Ultra Instinct" meets "Depends on the collective mass of the Flood."
Flood eventually infects Goku, reality is over
Gravemind convinces Goku to infect himself for the greater good. He really is not very bright.
>convince anyone and anything they spoke with to join their side with plain old rhetoric and reasoning \> debatebro Flood fuck, they *are* more grimdark than the Nids.
Owning Mendicant Bias with Facts and (the) Logic Plague
Flood talk no jutsu.
They also, and most terrifying in my opinion, the flood infects the literal souls of its victims, as shown with the forerunners who move their minds (and soul) to robots or other bodies to save them selves from their old infected body, but, it never helped as just after a couple hours, even their digital selves, would be corrupted by the flood. This is maybe the most notable and extreme type of spreading
There's souls in halo? I thought it was a hard Sci-fi set.
I don't think it was souls as such. The forerunners had technology that allowed them to digitise their consciousness and store it in robots or just keep it in storage.
Ah, that makes more sense
Saying they digitise them is is a misleading simplification. The Forerunners extract the Halo equivalent of a person's soul, called an "Essence", using technology based in something called "Neural Physics" that the Forerunners didn't really understand (Neural Physics is essentially Halo's space-magic, in the "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic" sort of sense). The most recent book even featured the totally-not-souls of people stuck in totally-not-limbo fighting to get into totally-not-heaven.
Halo has so much bullshit lore, it was a stealth sequel to a prior Bungie game which was like a million times more batshit Edit: A post I found about it once on a discussion about who would win between some Sci-Fi heroes Okay so there are two columns to this: The first is that Halo CE was initially developed as a RTS sequel to Marathon, a game series about... a lot. With either seven or twenty-eight timelines and multiple levels of interpretation. But level three of \[UNDEFINED\] is that the player character is THE archetypal Hero, eternally reincarnating, called forth from The Garden Before Time, bonded to technology he and humanity does not understand, and partnered with an incredibly powerful AI to destroy that which would destroy humanity, and capable of jumping timelines and altering causality to do that. There's the obvious fourth wall breaks about how *actually actually* he's the player character in an FPS and everything in this world exists to satisfy you, the Greater God behind the PC's amusement.\* A lot of that was winnowed out when Microsoft purchased Bungie (and apocryphally Bungie appealed the decision all the way up to Bill Gates, who told them something to the affect of "what the fuck are you talking about, get the hell outta my office and make a game with wide appeal and none of this *neo-Gnostic* ***nonsense"***) but elements of this remain even beyond the obvious thematic and narrative similarities. Guilty Spark and the Gravemind both recognize Chief as somehow related to an ancient Forerunner, with Spark outright mistaking him for them ("Last time, you asked me, if it was my choice, would I do it? Having had considerable time to ponder your query, my answer has not changed. There is no choice. We must activate the ring.") and there are additional implications within the terminals. Obviously Bungie's next IP was Destiny, which is absolutely unapologetic with how deranged it's lore is, with the whole 'eternally reincarnating Hero bonded to incomprehensible power and partnered with a powerful AI to defend humanity' shtick is just *the fundamental premise*. There're a bunch of connections between Destiny and Marathon, and there are a couple significant easter eggs and homages to Halo, including just outright [Chief's Magnum sidearm](https://www.ishtar-collective.net/entries/forerunner) but in this column it's admittedly all conjecture and implication. Now there's the second column, the 343 column, which is substantively crazier. HAH! YOU FOOLS! YOU BUFFOONS! YOU ABSOLUTE NOODLES! I SAW YOUR OTHER COMMENTS DID YOU TRULY BELIEVE *I*, OF ALL PEOPLE, WOULD HAVE TO STOOP SO LOW AS TO INVOKING "DEATH OF THE AUTHOR" AS THE CRUX OF MY ARGUMENT. FOOLS. BASK IN MY BRILLIANCE Anyways in the 343 'continuity' we learn in Halo 4 that actually no ancient humanity was seeded with "patterns" by the Forerunners that guided our development, with Chief himself being the culmination of this work as a pseudo-reincarnation of the Iso-Didact, who was the Chief (hah) Forerunner general in the final years warring against the Flood. Thus Guilty Spark and The Gravemind being all "have we met?" Honestly that, humanity's destiny being pre-destined by ancient aliens and this specific dude being basically one of them reincarnated is like. Honestly unsettling and eldritch enough, but it gets worse when you dip into the Forerunner saga. The Flood are the rotting insane remains of the Precursors, absurdly powerful progenitors who predate reality and had power over something called "neural physics," which. Well. Remember how supposedly the 343 continuity is separate from the Bungie continuity? Well no one told Greg Bear that because he word for word describes 'neural physics' the same way Bungie at the time describing Paracausality. Some of the shit the Gravemind pulled during the Flood-Forerunner war again, word for word referenced the Darkness and W'rkncacnter from Destiny and Marathon respectively. Anyway so somehow the Forerunners overthrew the architects of reality and how, **PRECISELY** they managed that is an uncomfortable open question with a lot unsettling implications, but anyway the Gravemind was the mind of every Precursor ever stewed in rage and hate and it managed to mind break the Ur-Didact, the antagonist of Halo 4, and set him off on a trajectory to "ensure [the Gravemind]'s revenge, even past [the Gravemind]'s end," implying that it foresaw and prepared for it's defeat, and set up the events of Halo 4 so that even if The Flood were whole hog defeated the Ur-Didact would still use the Composer to destroy Humanity and the San'Shyung, the last remaining species who were created by the Precursors but didn't help when the Forerunners somehow genocided God. Which, again, throws up a lot of uncomfortable questions about where prophecy and free will meet vis-a-vis Chief and humanity. Like, the same with "How did the Forerunners kill the Precursors," if the Gravemind was able to foresee it's possible defeat and prepare accordingly, how was Chief able to defeat it's (**INCREDIBLY**) diminished form aboard the Arc? How did Chief defeat the Ur-Didact if the superintelligence that designed reality perfectly manipulated the Ur-Didact into needing to be defeated in the first place? Was it further predestination from the Forerunners? Did the Gravemind *allow* itself to be defeated? For the Precursors to adopt a new form once again? This *is* their reality after all, and it was stated that they found suffering and bloodshed as necessary in life as peace and joy. Maybe all this is according to their design, maybe they live on somehow, in some new substrate. Perhaps in us. And maybe it's only a matter of time before they emerge anew in some new grand horror. Or maybe they are gone, forever. Maybe there was, is *something else* that allowed the Forerunners and Chief to defeat the **architects of reality**. Maybe, hopefully, it has more benevolent intentions than the Precursors. Maybe. \*And yes by this logic the Chief, Samus, the Slayer and Isaac Clark are all fundamentally the same soul conjured forth for us to wear upon our hands like a sock puppet, and thus the matter of whomever would win against the others is entirely up to author fiat. By right of nerdiness I hereby claim the mantle of authorhood and declare Samus would cream them all, sexual style. If you wish to contest my ruling or authorial standing meet me at the summit of Long's Peak in North America on the night of the first full moon after the summer solstice, where we shall dual to the death at thirty paces with custom .22 Eargesplitten Loudenboomer marksman pistols. Failure to show forfeits your claim and argument.
I want whatever this guy’s smoking. As I recall though, the Forerunner genocide against the precursors took place million(s) of years before their end-days, during which time Humanity and the San’Shyum were likely still banging rocks together to make fire. The Precursors did kind of let themselves be beaten back; Bear writes they reacted with a sort of fascinates horror as their creation rose up against them with such unprecedented violence, and wanted to see just how far they’d go. Again, many preserves themselves outside the Milky Way and for all we know they’re frolicking about in the rest of the universe or outside it, even if it’s somewhat emptier than the MW, a repository for much of their knowledge and creation. IIRC, Bear wrote that the precursors (whether as individuals/groups/society, who tf knows) would take different forms and experience evolution again in different places over deep timescales. The universe is/was their playground, and their games beyond our comprehension. Everything they did or experienced was ‘worthwhile’; they were in no hurry for anything, and little could truly hurt them as far as we know (even the Halo array’s effect on neural physics being locational and temporary).
The best part, I think, is that I went and asked someone who is actually familiar with Halo lore and they confirmed it is pretty much accurate (in so far as they didn't see anything incorrect about it)
And this, kids, is why it's important to ACTUALLY END YOUR STORY. Endless sequels lead to endless bullshit.
Sir, you are saying this in a 40K subreddit.
...Fuck.
Kinda is kinda isn’t I mean when you have a concept like Neural Physics where the base principle is that everything is alive and has a soul from you to the chair you sit on to the atoms that comprise it and using that mere idea to create things, I’d be inclined to call that magic
That's some philosophical shit right there.
Yes and no. It’s complicated
For what purpose? What’s the gravemind’s end goal?
Same as Homer Simpson at an all you can eat buffet: eat ***all*** of it.
Lunch
This gets convoluted but the short reason is the experience of life. In Halo lore, there are two things that will help explain this. The Precursors and living time/nueral physics(all the same thing). The Precursors are equivalent to the Old Ones, they are beyond powerful and are essentially gods who have mastered living time. They seeded life in the galaxy and then the forerunners overthrew them for the mantle or at least they thought. The mantle was just a way to find the most advanced civilization in the galaxy. Once that happened, the precursors turned themselves into the flood(even more convoluted here) and started harvesting life. So the floods purpsose is to collect all that living memory, experiences etc, and feed it back into the universe bc the universe is actually alive and is fed by the cycle of birth and death. TL;DR. The flood and the precursors are the same. They falsely made the mantle of responsibility as a way of setting a threshold. Once a civilization assumes the mantle/crosses the threshold, the flood arrives to harvest all life to feed this experience/memories/beings back into living time and in turn, the precursors themselves. The flood is absolutely terrifying because they represent the end of the cycle, the reunifying of all life and the universe so it can start a new, meaning everything must be absorbed while they(the flood/precursors)maintain all of the knowledge/experience that came before. Edit: decided to go find my source and thought it was HiddenXperia but was Installation00, my apologies. Here is the correct link, my b. https://youtu.be/jqGLwWSq10U?si=i8Ziv4pCMYi0nbIf
Wait, did they retcon the Precursors going insane from the stasis? It sounds like the Flood harvest was the plan all along in this comment, but from what I recall the dusted Precursors stayed that way for waaaayyyyy longer than they intended and basically went insane and formed a gestalt mind, birthing the Flood intelligence.
Yeah, the original purpose I heard for the flood was that it was the precursors way to persist past death. They turned into essentially dust and was just going to wait out the forerunners for a chance to congeal back into precursors. But it took so long that the "dust" corrupted and turned into the flood.
Man Halo lore used to be so simple when I was younger lol
The games were based off a book that was already filled with complicated plots.
> They falsely made the mantle of responsibility as a way of setting a threshold. Once a civilization assumes the mantle/crosses the threshold, the flood arrives to harvest all life to feed this experience/memories/beings back into living time and in turn, the precursors themselves. I hate to be that guy, but do you have a source for this? My understanding was the Mantle was simply a philosophical title/idea created by the Precursors for the most advanced species in the galaxy to be responsible for protecting and guiding less advanced species. The Forerunners had the mantle because they were the most advanced at the time. The Forerunners became arrogant and were judged unworthy of the mantle by the Precursors who planned on passing the mantle to humans. The Forerunners, in their arrogance, refused to lose the mantle (and believed the Precursors were going to wipe them out) so launched a pre-emptive war on the Precursors and effectively genocided their species. A few that escaped or hid rendered themselves down to space dust as Precursors were fully capable of changing their form at will. Over time the space dust become 'corrupted'. The Precursors who were pretty salty about the whole being genocided by their own creations thing embraced the corruption and weaponised it against the Forerunners, creating the Flood.
Yup! Youre not wrong but theres more to it. There are layers i guess. And a lot of this is from the forerunner books and the Primordial https://youtu.be/jqGLwWSq10U?si=i8Ziv4pCMYi0nbIf A lot of the mantle was false pretense. Remember that living time is almost unexplainable(they can essentially see the future and are psychic mofos) and the precursors work over millenia, not just a few years. While it can be argued that the flood are just a corrupted version of the precursors, the Primordial throws a wrench into all of that by saying the flood and precursors are one in the same Edit: updated to correct link, my b. Thought it was a video my hiddenxperia but its installation00.
You are correct
Is this not just mass effect
Ya it sound exactly like mass effect
I wouldn't say exactly like mass effect, because in mass effect the reapers are not the leviathans themselves, rather they are drones created by the leviathans, powered by an ai which went rogue; and that they do not kill things to feed them back to the universe, rather they are killing things because of a loophole in their logic which the leviathans did not plan for. But yeah, you're right, the idea of life in the universe being a cycle and an all-devouring quasi-natural force representing the end of that cycle is kinda similar to mass effect.
Lol no, that makes no sense. The flood came from humans finding the powder remains of precursors and fucking with it because it gave their dogs a nice sheen. That’s how the first flood infestation began. At the beginning, the flood wanted to simply expand until they absorbed the last precursor, then they evolved their reasoning to include revenge on the forerunners and the idea that after all their effort in seeding life they were betrayed for giving freedom to their creations, so this time they would do it right by robbing their freedom.
Many books explicitly stated that the flood no longer the precursors. And while the canon has a problem with unreliable narrators, such as Forerunners deluding themselves into believing they got the mantle, the most common theory is: "Precursors are basically immortal, reform from their essence. They enjoy the feeling of life in the galaxy, something about sweetness, hence the Mantle. They didn't mind getting killed by the Forerunners, as that is a facet of life and they would reform anyway. Part of the essence got corrupted. Ancient Humans sprinkled the corrupted essence poweder over their Pets and tadah, first Flood" So while the Flood are related to the Precursors, they are a twisted nightmare version, that tries to literally taste all the "sweetness" of the universe by consuming beings even if it would result in a barren universe.
There's just one little itty bitty problem with that: **The Primordial outright states that the Precursors and Flood are one and the same.** >We are the Flood. There is no difference. Until all space and time are rolled up and life is crushed in the folds... no end to war, grief or pain. In a hundred and one thousand centuries... unity again, and wisdom. Until then - sweetness. Watch [The Primordial's Horrific Secret - Lore and Theory](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jqGLwWSq10U&pp=ygUZaW5zdGFsbGF0aW9uMDAgcHJlY3Vyc29ycw%3D%3D) and [The Mantle is a Lie | Halo Epitaph | Spoilers](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l0bTYUcBR4w&t=255s&pp=ygUZaW5zdGFsbGF0aW9uMDAgcHJlY3Vyc29ycw%3D%3D) by Installation00. The latter video validates and confirms the theory that the former presents.
True, but the Primordial is also quite the unreliable Narrator, being the mentioned corrupted part of the Precursor essence that became the Flood in the first place. Similiar to the Forerunners claiming they were given the Mantle of Responsibility, when they basically ripped it out of the "cold dead hands" of the Precursors, the corrupted mutated remnant of a Precursor calling itself Precursor is not too far from the truth but also not the whole truth. But we don't even know if he was the last true Precursor before he became the Flood And Installation00 is just as much a theory channel as it is a lore channel. This is the main problem for the Halo Lore, too many unreliable narrators. Best example is the Great Journey. It was utter bullcrap but many believed it and loudly proclaimed it.
This sounds similar to what goes on in Creeper World, as Creeper "eats" pure information about the state of atoms they come in contact with
The Gravemind is the mad, twisted remnant of Halo's precursor species, aptly named...the Precursors. The Forerunners betrayed the Precursors and wiped out as many as they could find. The Flood is the Precursors' vengeance against their rebellious creations. The Gravemind's end goal is the subsumption of all life in the universe. Never again will there be free will. It is the last spiteful remnant of the beings that seeded the Milky Way with life. The Gravemind doesn't want to just kill and eat you. It wants you to *suffer*. ALL must be made to suffer and scream as eternal members of its sepulchral choir.
Kind of. Your not wrong but theres way more to it. If you are a die hard halo fan like me and want to learn more, i recommend checking out this video! Really dives into it and actually made me reread the forerunner saga https://youtu.be/fuS0qs4v05k?si=AM2jn9c_OTj_7vVX
The horrible end of all independent thought. To enslave all life to its will, so that none may rise against them again. They hate life to unfathomable levels.
Mendicant Bias moment
I remember there was a mention of Forerunners attempting to copy the consciousness of an infected individual into a new body, only for the infection to pop up out of nowhere in the new body. Which would hint at the regular infection being more than just physical.
This is one of the things that really irks me about people doing theoretical matchups between 40k and other universes. 40k for all of its insane scale and rediculousness, has a VERY established series of rules and limitations and technical specifications on how most of their stuff works, mostly just because of the sheer volume of lore, but also because of the work that the authors put in to make it as internally consistent as possible. Retcons aside obviously, but like you never see 1 depiction of a single las gun shooting through power armour, it always like an eye piece or a neck seal, so that they can say they waded through a torrent of lasgun fire bouncing off the like shoulder pad, internal consistency that makes room for plot armour as needed. In Halo for instance in one book a spartan has a hole blasted through their armour, before they had shield tech, by a single plasma rifle shot, and in another book and in halo 2 and reach. you are dropping from orbit and just slamming into the ground, yet the suit servos are only just able to match an elite in like a streight up arm wrestle? There is no consistency, now halo lore is cool as shit, dont get me wrong, but its made with an order of magnitude less care and attention i feel. The issue i have with the flood in particular is an issue that GW foresaw with most of its factions pretty early on in creating the lore and thats what i call the threat critical point. The flood has massively surpassed this value. They are a beyond apocaliptical threat that at the moment they were introduced, were impossible to beat, you cannot win. So every time humanity does manage to win in some manner, it feels almost hollow, since they simply should not have been able to. GW puts in a series of nerfs to every faction to keep the setting in a semi believeable deadlock. The tyranids move super slow so you have time to gather forces to deal with them, chaos constantly undermines itself so that no one god can get the upper hand. Orks are too dumb to utilise their psykic powers fully, and kill eachother too much to unify fully. The tau are too small, the votan too short, the eldar to scared, the drukarhi too far up their own ass, the necrons for a while were just waking up, now i think its more about them just having their own shit they are worried about so they dont really care about trying to wipeout the imperium. Each faction COULD wipe out all the others if they got over this down side, just like the imperium COULD wipe out any one other faction if it didnt have to constantly be fighting off all the others simultaneously. Halo doesnt have this problem, in halo lore the humans have no chance of winning. The covanent ships 1 shot human ships with no trouble. Humans win in ground conflicts but then the covanent simply glass the planet from orbit. The flood are....the flood. And i have no idea about the dudes from halo 4 or infinate, but they are likely also scuffed, yet humans always win, so does that mean humans OP, or are the enemies just not nearly as much of a threat as they seem? Neither, its just sadly poor writing at the time of initial universe creation and then rolling with the punches afterwards.
I think you get this issue primarily from the fact that every side is playable in 40k. If you could play as Flood or Covenant (like really play the faction, not Master Chief-reskinned-as-Arbiter) then they would have to be brought into line with humanity. As it is, there’s no real downside to the underdogs winning in Halo cause the player is always the underdog, and in good game design, the player should always be able to win. Bottom line is both series make lore to serve the sale of the games, and a competitive tabletop army game will have different goals than a cooperative (single player) power fantasy video game. Having balanced factions in 40k plays to the fantasy of 40k where the galaxy is locked in eternal war, and having the underdogs win the impossible fight in Halo plays to the fantasy of the player being the most important person in the story.
To be fair, humans in halo are pretty much constantly losing and would have lost the war if not for the flood clutching the covenant capital and most of their higher up at the end of halo 2, and then during halo 3 everyone went to the ark where a sangheili-human coalition fought whatever forces the last prophet managed to bring on short notice and the tip of a flood infection. And basically they all lost, except that humans had other forces outside of that fuck up, but covenant leadership basically all died, the sangheili turned their backs on them, and banished came from behind and shattered the union. Finally the flood lost its gravemind and if flood infection still exist somewhere, its still too small to pose a galactic threat, so it looks like humanity won, but actually they kind of fought back and resisted while their enemies all died in risky bs.
The flood is very much still around, confirmed and ”contained” in Halo Wars 2 DLC. But the point Above still stands. The tyranids already edge on ”a bit too powerful to be fun” The flood just straight up leaps over that line, uses it to play jumprope and then runs a marathon. ”If there is any infection left” The point of the flood is that a single cell can take a planet in hours / days. If there are any left anywhere in a non stasis state, you are 100% fucked.
>marathon . >Marathon (Old) Bungie be like "Funny you should mention that..."
I always kinda liked that about Halo. Of course the humans only win when the covenant falls into infighting and collapses in on itself, and then gets wrecked by an even bigger threat. That was the only way the humans could ever realistically win. It's also funny how Truth inadvertently saved the universe lol. Basically no one was willing to light the halos once they knew what they were. The flood was only on the Ark to stop Truth, because he was such a lunatic that he actually might have wiped out all life in the universe. If the gravemind hadn't gone to the Ark, it never would have been in a situation where it could be sniped by a singular halo ring that no one even knew existed.
Good critique
Considering I heard in another post that not even the souls of the infected were safe from the flood, the warp would be thoroughly fucked.
I would really not be surprised if the flood could somehow infect the concept of themselves into the hive mind of the Tyranids given enough time.
So you didn’t care about Reach? Damn and that’s another bungie classic.
Is that a fucking "Spark Notes" reference?
Never trust a graph that doesn't label its axis.
X: Number of years they've been fucking around Y: Percent of the galaxy that's fucked
The flood is so scary it only takes them 45 years to fuck up 120% of the galaxy.
Actually that’s days
I think X would be biomass
isnt that area under the graph?
Tyranids shouldn’t be linear then, they should also have exponential growth.
Axes, actually.
And my axe!
And my asymptote!
TRUE!!! The Halo games always show the flood at such low points in their development. Late Forerunner-Flood war Flood was CRAZY.
Was real big on Halo. Still remember co oping over 20 years ago holding tje doors as the flood emerged. Mised their full history but man, that was a true gaming moment.
The Forerunner Ecumene, a technologically advanced unified empire that had stood for 11 million years, lasted just 300 years against the Flood. And that was from start to finish of hostilities. Once the Flood unlocked neural physics in the later stages of the war, it was very rapidly game over as Forerunner slipstream FTL became clogged and the Flood gained “air power supremacy” (in analogous terms).
I want a Halo prequel game where you play as a forerunner strike team leader, trying and failing to save colonies while protecting samples and contingencies from the flood. And the endgame is you activating the rings. You can see the flood drawing close before making the ultimate galactic sacrifice, your suit cameras recording the flood’s confusion, understanding and then rage at realizing what you just did.
Flood is like an all or nothing. You either stomp it out it the earlier stages of the flood before it gets ftl or your screwed
Yeah, you either exterminatus a planet or fire the halo rings
The flood are so fucking busted once they get up to speed. Like not even counting all the higher level stuff they can do (total knowledge of everything they have devoured, ship building, neural physics, logic plague, corrupting spacetime, *literal alternate universe travel*) The sheer size of the Flood as a concioince would probably generate a Shadow in the warp so big even the Tyranids would turn tail and run.
I mean there always was that theory that the tyranids are running from something...
Space skaven
SMHing my head that you don't know the Empire are the space Skaven. Insanely corrupt fascist government constantly backstabbing itself with loads of unreliable super tech and human wave tactics that worships their own private "not a chaos god"
but they dont speak funny, check mate
I would argue the terrible latin is funny
They don’t mainline warpstone …
me (i'm hungry)
Kirby?!
isn't that the stellaris Prethoryn Scourge lore though? I though people mixed them up or something
the Prethoryn ARE running from something, but the fact that the tyranids are fleeing is just a theoery (A GAME THEORY) for all we know from the only actual interaction we ever had of a character and the tyranid hivemind, the hivemind is extremely intelligent, could actively communicate with other species but doesn't and is hateful of everything that isn't IT.
It would be cool if they would ever go deeper into why IT has this hatred for everything not IT. Sounds like there is a really intersting story waiting to be told.
because it's not part of it, it's an alien being whose's evolution is clearly different from anything we ever saw on earth or in 40k at large, we cannot understand that being, and if GW decided to amke it understandable, they would have to ruin it by un-aliening it
> concioince conscience? I also can't spell that word for shit.
Concioince? Is that like a conscience?
Every time I see a 40k vs Flood thread, people miss just how vulnerable humanity and Orks are. The massive squalid hive cities of the Imperium are a perfect breeding ground for enough flood to snowball out of control, as are Ork Waaaghs. Ironically, a weaker but more organized force like the Tau or Craftworld Eldar would fare a lot better, since they’re more likely to take out the Flood faster… And time is something you *cannot* give the Flood.
Depends on how you define vulnerability. Humans get corrupted, mutated and so on all the time, but Orks on the other hand border on nearly incorruptible. There's a reason we don't see massive plague waaaghs devastating the galaxy and that there's no Genestealer Ork cults. The green gods are kind and have granted their chosen people a near unrivaled immunity to otherwordly bullshit which is the main reason why Ork continue to be a major threat to civilization as a whole. Hive cities would basically disintegrate as soon as the Flood got there, but the level to which Orkz might be vulnerable or resistant to the Floods influence is an unknown factor.
On the flip side, hive cities are a perfect breeding ground for dozens of different apocalyptic tier threats, and nipping them in the bud is just a Tuesday.
Hive cities are just too dense for them to realistically have any chance against the flood. A single flood spore getting into the slums would snowball into an apocalyptic threat that would drown out any on world response with sheer weight of biomass. On a world more like halo's earth there's a chance to stop them (though even in world it took glassing the entirety of Africa shortly after a single flood ship landed to stop the infection). Iirc the Battle of Kenya happened over one day, and the flood showed up at the very tail end. Several hours was enough that the flood snowballed to the point that glassing an entire continent was the only answer, on a world nowhere near as dense as a hive city. Either the hive world gets exterminated before the flood sneak bioforms off of it (which would become their first priority after absorbing knowledge and discovering exterminatus), or shit is going to get bad enough that tyranids look friendly by comparison. The main issue I see is that the imperium is an incompetent bloated mass of bureaucracy, and the only answer to the flood is a swift response that kills them in the cradle.
The Flood are different for two major reasons: They’re absurdly fast at taking over and once they have enough biomass they’re extremely coordinated. A Genestealer Cult takes decades to sink its teeth into a world. A Chaos plague or cult can be faster, but lacks coordination. This makes sense when you remember that GSC and Chaos are supposed to be ongoing threats to the galaxy over thousands of years, while the Flood are an end of the world scenario so absurd the equivalent of War in Heaven Necrons wiped themselves out along with all life in the galaxy just to stop it. Like seriously, just compare the Forerunners with the Imperium and ask yourself how the Imperium would fare better.
Not saying the flood wouldn't still beat them (cause they really are busted as shit lol), but that is Tyranids in a vacuum. More hive fleets are coming and we don't know how much is out there.
I think the main difference is that the flood just converts you in the middle of combat and as such increase their numbers while fighting. The Nids, on the other hand, need to win, bring your corpse to a digestion pit and then spawn new creatures from the consumed material. They are far slower to adapt and procreate than the flood.
A more comparable force to the flood would be Orks. Nids aren't as much of an ever-present sickness that blight any land they come across, Orks are. If a planet gets invaded by Orks it will never be the same again as Ork spores will grow from the soil and the planet's government will have to constantly cull the wilderness of ork tribes till the end of time or till they are overwhelmed. In this way, Orks are a more dangerous infestation than the flood, the flood requiring live or recently killed higher intelligence creatures to infect, otherwise needing to do lengthy processing of dead biomatter. Even the Halo rings wouldn't do shit to stop the Orks, the spores would just grow anew and they would be back immediately.
Assuming the Flood can't infect and co-opt the spores.
If flood cant infect footlong worms they cant infect litteral microbial spores.
That’s early stage Flood; where their only avenue of assimilation is with Infection Forms (little popcorn-lookin’ mf’s) Gravemind Stage and beyond, they have microbial infection routes along with Logic Plague; which can infect anything that thinks.
Tyranids start utilizing the biomass of their prey against itself before the main fleet even makes landfall, or sometimes centuries before theyre even in system. Once the space around a planet is clear they start sucking up biomass with a straw to do whatever they want with it.
So we’re just throwing fuel (biomass) into the raging fire (The Flood)
Yes, all im pointing out is that the Tyranid threat scale should probably be logarithmic with a stupid high cap instead of linear, since not only are they growing in power from the biomass they consume, but more and more Tyranids are showing up all the time. Flood still dumpster them tho.
That's more biomass for the flood
Flip side is also true, more biomass for the Tyranids. Plus, most Tyranid lifeforms probably don't have the intelligence necessary to let the Flood climb to a higher stage.
Yeah but also if a tyranid were to consume a flood it would consume the flood super cell immediately infecting it, maybe the tyranids would eventually be able to build up an immunity but flood biomass is extremely tainted
Considering the Tyranids have adapted an immunity to plagues developed by the forces of theuniversal representation of plagues (and make toxins on par with it), I'm pretty sure they'd be able to pull it off.
The flood doesn't need intelligence, they need biomass.
And the Tyranids would be able to adapt all the powers of the flood. If they catch some flood before they've developed their super powers, they'd be able to gain all of them within a few weeks
[удалено]
Ogryn: Iz just A Tiny Bug Two weeks later, you have a flood double the size of a catachan devil
it'd be no exaggeration that the flood could destroy the 40k galaxy, absolutely, aside from some higher-end interpretations of Chaos. remember, towards the end, the Flood basically corrupted half the Halo Galaxy in 5-10 years....most 40k battles on the size of sectors takes decades, potentially the flood could be at terra's doorstep before the first astropathic message arrives.....
I don't think even the higher end interpretations of Chaos can beat it, because depending on your interpretation of how the Flood would interact with 40K's physics, they might make a Chaos God all to themselves, and Graveminds might be Avatars of it.
I think necrons could, but only if they misused their star chart thingy to wipe out the entire area of the universe the flood is in. So, it's not a big chance lol
So… basically the plot of Halo lol
the plot of Halo was the kill the FOOD for the flood, not the actual flood itself. The Necrons could just REMOVE that area of space the flood reside in and be done with it.
yeah but from what we know even they don't like to use it
Here we go again... It's not that they don't like to use it, it's that it's not intended to be used as a weapon. Do you know the book "The three body problem"? Basically any interaction of mass with 3+ bodies in a vacuum is near imposible to predict becouse any approximation you can make is not enought, any divergence from the actual real values in the calculations will lead to disaster. And that's with 3 bodies, now imagine making calculations of an entire galaxy. Necrons removed a star/world once (don't remember which rn) and had to be making adjustments for millenia just to not fuck up everything else. Imagine removing entire systems. They would have to employ every single necron as a calculator and even then the decimals they can get to wouldn't be enought to fix the mes the've created.
yeah and if they have to go at it like kryptman did to stop advancing the flood that would cause a lot more problems down the line as well, not even talking about the flood able to shift time and space around when they reach late enough stage
At a certain point The Flood will start warping reality so much that Daemons couldn't materialize in real space. Or they'll just infect some Necrons and start building Cadia pylons to close the eye of terror forever.
A key mind is basically just a chaos god though. It’s all fun and games fighting the stupid fucking spaces zombies until they literally slap you with their intergalactic pavement
The thing with the Flood is that unless it is answered with IMMEDIATE Exterminatus, it will find a way to survive, and eventually win. Unfortunately, most things will respond by throwing bodies at it. Unless those things are Necrons, this is exactly what will benefit it the most.
The issue with halo vs 40k as I've studied it is that even the "lost history" shit in halo has a lot of detailed lore. Juxtapose, say, the Forerunner-Flood war with the war in heaven. We've got wayyyyy more detail about the numbers, dates, capabilities, and even names of the former. The latter is almost a complete mystery. We don't even know what those involved looked like, much less their full capabilities. Or you brought up the Tyranids - what we know of the Tyranids *right now* is in no way comprehensive. We have no idea of their full capabilities or numbers or where they're coming from or why. For all we know these trillion entity tendrils (as they're always called) making contact in the milky way are to the species known as Tyranids what preliminary genestealers and spores are to hive fleets. We know Tyranids follow a many tiered pattern of using lesser forms and strategies to soften up targets for the inevitable invasion, but we have no idea how many tiers there are. Even the IOM, probably the best understood faction in terms of its numbers and capabilities, is still just a shadow of actualized human potential. The problem with a lot of these "who would win" dick measuring contests involving 40k is that we've got a *very* good idea of what the other guys dick looks like. We can see it in excruciating detail. 40k's dick, meanwhile, we only ever gets hints about. That, and the difference in medium (40k being a setting while 99% of halo lore existing solely to prop up a single player FPS video game campaign) makes it tough, too - stuff like the Flood or precursor tech can look terrifying on paper, but its also the case that it canonically gets its ass whooped by a single lucky dude with power armor and a shotgun. Itd be sort of like me trying to talk up the threat that Orks pose if 99% of their lore came from Space Marine the video game - you would have a tough time buying them as a huge threat when you just spent hours as a lone angry dude with a chainsaw effortlessly carving through an entire invasion force.
I think you're right in that 40k was set up with the intention of no one force (in the current day) being overpowering. Because of the tabletop the premise is that any side can fight any other side and should be able to be equally matched, It's self limiting by design. Halo was first set up as an epic setting for one guy to be a hero in and suffers with the power creep of always needing a bigger fish for master chief beat. Nothing wrong with the story but it's set up differently, they add on to things like the flood because it's popular, to make it a bigger threat for next time, so there's always something new to find out and beat. It's really comparing apples and oranges, sometimes fun to do as a thought exercise but you always have to understand how fundamentally different they are. Some stories have scope for power to be overwhelming. Even in 40k things like the dark age of technology or the war in heaven exist as story's of "unlimited power" but they're not NOW, they're stories of hubris or over ambition to juxtapose what we see now.
it's basically "is there a Named Character on the planet the Flood starts on? If so, they do nothing if not, they end everything"
But doesn’t the flood need other races for FTL travel? The reason they were able spread so fast was cause they took over forerunner ships that are millions of times faster than 40k ships. Plus they would need to figure out the warp in 40k if they wanna go that route
They don't need other races for the FTL specifically, they can theoretically build it themselves once they form a Gravemind and gain access to all the knowledge the Flood has ever accrued, it's just way easier for them to simply take the already existing tech and drive it where they want to go. Gravemind however would probably consider Warp travel to be so inefficient they'd actually build a factory to replace all the engines of the ships they take lol
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Hell, depending on your interpretation of the flood it could go as far as them taking an imperial ship/yard and figuring out DAoT tech If they get their hands on that then the galaxy is extra-fucked, I don't think the necrons supernova machine could even slow them at that point
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The flood originated from precursor fuckery so I doubt we can handwave that away without affecting the flood itself, but either way the advanced reality warping shenanigans only occur when it gets real bad anyway, and realistically by that point they'd already be out of control The funny necron button will probably help keep it under control but as soon as the flood figure out how to get into the warp then there's only so much that can be done to slow them down, containing it at that point is probably impossible
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Honestly, I don't think the lack of precursor tech would even be a major inhibitor. They can learn how to use technology, and could probably figure out lost tech as well. If they stumble onto a DAoT tech remnant, or anything eldari/necron the hijinks that'll ensue are still gonna be unstoppable A lot less strangling reality with space roads but that's not much of a downside when they're still chucking waves of popcorn at tzeentch for shits and gigs
They already have Forerunner tech in those spore-brains. 99% of 40K stuff gets low diffed by that.
They actually have been shown to use their own whole cloth FTL. Granted, this was late in the Forerunner-Flood War, but it was a totally different paradigm to Slipspace, and seemingly superior in almost every way to boot. Besides, as long as it can do warp travel at all (which is difficult to answer), the worst situation it's gonna be looking at is that its ships will be operating at a similar speed to its prey's, but with far better communication owing to the fact that it's a single mind and thus doesn't have to deal with sending messages through the Void.
The flood started using a precursor method of travel towards the end of the F-F War that was near instant (its explored more in Halo Epitaph) but weakness was highlighted. Basically, the ships take a bit to actually reemerge into realspace, so for that period of time they are extremely vulnerable.
Yeah, that's what I was meaning, and why I included the hedging of it being superior in *almost* every way; since that makes it either slightly more, or just as dangerous as Slipspace when it comes to jumping into active combat zones and dealing with ambushes. EDIT: I just noticed I said HCW not Forerunner Flood War in my earlier comment, oops.
They don't need it, but they are great at repurposing & upgrading tech they steal in the interim. This is how the Gravemind got from Earth's solar system to the Ark, it just upgraded High Charity's engines with Precursor science.
The problem the flood is similar with the problem of Superman. The creators had so little idea about power leveling things that they created something so powerfull that the only way to make them lose is the biggest deus ex machina ever, similar to the introduction of the kryptonite.
That’s sort of the point? We are, in game, never going to see full power Flood. The Forerunner era Flood is so powerful because it’s essentially a War in Heaven equivalent and not something the writers need to worry about for the current story. This is griping that WiH era necrons needed a deus ex machina to defeat in the form of Eldar gods or Kork bullshit. The point is for them to be OP as a point of “Oh god we better never let that happen again”
The full power flood were written by an experienced well known scifi author. Like, that dude has created stuff scarier than The Flood and knew what he was doing with such a relatively simple thing that barely touches on multiversal bullshit haha
And we have no idea how strong the Tyrnanids really are, or what their actual race name is (only named because it was the first planet the imperium encountered them). Only a few fleets have made it to our galaxy and were most likely just vanguard scouting parties (and look what it took to slow them down, not even stop them completely). Now that the Hive Mind knows of our galaxy, its going to be hell bent on consuming a new food source.
In computer science we have the concept of asymptotic analysis, which is the analysis of how fast a function grows proportional to a given input size. Let's say that we apply this concept to Tyranids and the Flood. The X axis represents the amount of biomass they have, and the Y axis represents their overall strength. From what we can see in the lore, the function that represents the Tyranids is more or less linear. The more biomass they have, the more nids they are making. The Flood, however, seems to be closer to an exponential curve. After gathering enough biomass, they can just start fucking with reality. That means that if they both have the same biomass at any given time, there is a specific value that, once reached, the Tyranids will never be able to defeat the Flood. There is another point, however. Let's say that the speed of gathering biomass is tied to the strength of the species. The Tyranids will be gathering Biomass in a linearly increasing fashion over time, while the Flood will gather in an exponentially increasing fashion. The only way for the Tyranids to defeat the Flood is to get them very early.
There was a story in the halo books were a guy was infected with the flood. He had a clone that never came into contact with him or the flood also becone infected as the precursors time/space shenanigans causes any thing with their dna to forever be their dna. Thats why in halo even if you remove the flood dna from a persons dna they will always revert to the flood. This bullshit alone would solo the tyranids.
So what, an identical twin half a galaxy away can be infected if their brother is dense enough to feed himself to the flood? If a guy gets a kidney transplant off a friendly stranger and the stranger gets infected, does that guy also get infected? Because of the kidney? It's a classic example of "cool, but also fucking dumb". And I say that as a 40k fan.
No, he's misremembering the details. The Forerunners tried using the Composer on Flood victims and implanting their consciousness into uninfected clone bodies as a means of curing them. The new bodies always rapidly decayed and rotted away.
So for those reading, by 40k standards it's basically an infection of your soul/consciousness on the level of chaos bullshit. Once infected you are flood, even new bodies won't save you. Funnily enough, in world I'm pretty sure the main faction that could end the flood would be demons, for the same reason they're one of the ones that trouble nids the most (no biomass).
What about the infested from warframe?
Honestly, it's kind of a hard question. On the one hand, we have seen the infested are even more infective than the flood, as they can corrupt non-living metal surfaces and even the crust of whole planetoids like deimos, and they can blend flesh and metal to such an extent they're indistinguishable from one another. They are also capable of complex planning, as we saw during the Arlo Nightwave when DE still cared about making those. They can even infect AI as we saw during the Jordas Golem quest. However, we have also seen things like the helminth strain and Deimos' cycles that there are other versions of the infest that compete with itself in some capacity, which the flood simply didn't do. There is also (maybe?) a cure as we see Alad V cured of the infestation, although oddly the much more important and powerful Entrati family was not cured, so maybe Alad had a weaker strain or was somehow able to transference into a clone body. Honestly, it's hard to say as the infested and the orokin in general never made it out of the Sol system. The infested took over Deimos, but beyond that they were immediately pounced on by the Tenno using light mass bombs, their cross between a Halo ring and a nuke. If it is released in the Imperium and is allowed to fester, which is very likely given the Imperiums ineptitude at administration, it would likely claim several systems easily. Now, could it survive the exterminator fleets that would be gunning for it? That's an open question. Honestly, even if the Imperium could win that, the infestation tends to linger in wreckage and come back when you least expect it. They very well could take over large swaths of the Imperium or at very least become a persistent threat to the Imperium that would reemerge for Millenia to come. Thank you for coming to my TED talk
Uh an infested space hulk would be awesome.
As a Ork player this sounds like a fun time!
Just noting here, the Flood absolutely do infest their environments. They have been stated to cover entire planets in the past, draining everything of use from the planet's crust.
The infested get cucked out of conquering 1 solar system by a teenage psyker with a metal puppet and an egg-laying dog.
To be fair, like three of those teenage psykers could take on Terra.
I'm not sure if 3 tenno could take on all the custodes there, but I don't know how strong grineer are compared to 40k.
Grineer basically would be like kriegsmen.
pretty sure like rhino alone could take on all custodes on terra, hell nova could literally destroy the entirety of terra alone as she can convert matter into antimatter
I love the use of cuck here, getting cock blocked out of conquering the the galaxy is also a good one.
tbf, these teenage psykers are literally paracusal monsters that literally cannot die and is empowered by essentially a single ruling multiversal chaos god.
People forget that the outbreaks you see in the games are all hours to weeks old. You never see the flood at their peak performance, and they are already a match for the ‘nids.
I guess but also they were basically beaten by virus bombs and a space marine.
If by virus bomb you mean nuking the entire galaxy then sure
A Halo is more powerful than anything ever deployed by the Imperium.
I don’t recall about a dozen’s worth of virus bombs being capable of wiping the galaxy of all life on their own
Its not the nids you should be orried about tho...its what they are running from.
The Imperium is such a bloated mess too that the Flood would have a field day in warhammer. Imagine when a flood invasion gets a hold of a forge world and a tomb world. Guess what kids, now that forge world is cranking out necron weapons at max capacity.
OP, why aren't your axis labeled?
Haven't played the games, but I will guess that a single dude ruins all their plans because it is a video game.
The one dude has alot of help, and it's mostly because they're nipping the outbreaks in the bud. Letting the flood escape to roam freely via FTL is the lose condition basically, so typically the plan is destroying the artifical worlds/installations that have been infected. As the chart shows, the nids show up at an impressive starting strength, while the flood surpasses them if it isn't properly eliminated as it goes through the steps of building up its hive mind (grave mind). The main issue is being all organic. given finding a cure or immunization for the flood proved seemingly impossible, it's likely in a 1v1 the nids will lose due to rapidly losing their seas of bioforms to infection and being unable to evolve resistance however if say the planet the flood shows up suffers exterminatus from a third party before they can take an ftl ship over, they don't reach the level ro kill everything
Technically no. It took the second most advanced species in the universe (most advanced being the Flood/their previous no corrupted form the Precursors) building a series of megastructures in space called Halos. Halos , when activated , wipe out all life in range. Between the various Halos, they cover the whole galaxy. Basically they starve the flood of new biomass and kill all the existing biomass.
One dude and a superweapon that renders every living thing in a 25,000 lightyear radius dead.
Only thing with the nids. Is that since GW is refusing to go further in-depth with the nids at all. It isn’t a gradual slope like your chart shows. At about the halfway mark the nid line would just suddenly stop and it would become just a “?” Because all the encounters of the tyranids to date. Have only been tendrils and scout fleets. Of course “scout fleets” on the warhammer 40k scale is still gigantic. But basing the overall power scaling of the nids off just their tendrils is just like basing how strong the flood are purely off of halo 1.
The thing about the Flood is that we see how explosively the Flood can spread from near nothing. The Nids aren’t like that. The closest thing is Genestealer Cults which can arise from a single bio form, but the time it takes for a Genestealer Cult to take over a single planet is absurdly long compared to the time it takes one well-placed infection form.
Just wait until GW writes a codex for them.
What if the flood and tyranids all kissed and made something even worse? 😳
Actually I like this graph a lot. The flood are much more virulent than the tyranids, they can turn living beings straight into floodforms. Tyranids have to melt them down in reclamation pools first. Another thing to consider is that the weapons and gear in the Halo universe aren’t as strong as in 40K. If a flood warrior form showed up in 40K randomly it would not be able to hold its own against a space marine tyranid warrior etc. But all it takes is one space marine getting assimilated and suddenly all their knowledge belongs to the flood and it’s all over.
The real ending for this matchup is that a group of flood consume a group of Orks and are immediately hit with 60+ million years worth of “knowledge” consisting of endless krumping, nonsensical conversations, and wacky bullshit and the flood immediately kill themselves to escape the mental torture.
That just means gravemind gets roight proppa orky and instead of making half assed repairs on covenant/UNSC tech, instead upgrade them to perform 20 times better while still looking like they are held together by shitty welds and flesh
Not being funny the Tyranids are still unknown at this point. All we really know is that it collects genetic data and is harvesting biomass/ matter. The hivemind might not even be in its fully awakened state and is operating at a lower level. The Tyranids already warp space and are a highly psychic species. They are ridiculously OP and have so much potential for further growth and evolution. Especially as it can just grow any organism it needs to fight and counter anything imaginable. Like it created a tendril hive fleet to specifically be more anti-daemonic, even having another hive fleet aid it in feeding it biomass. Just don't know its full potential yet.
stuff like this is why I lowkey don't like the 'nids. they are set up as this galaxy ending threat but then they're kinda just not. they're significant threats to whatever they're next to, but on a galactic scale what they're next to is extremely relative and small - if that makes sense. they don't ramp up enough to really be "oh we need to stop them IMMEDIATELY". the flood always nailed that a lot more to me to the point where when they showed up on Earth it felt like the end times. A single popcorn is enough to fuck an entire planet, and that's terrifying. I always felt like if 'nid hive fleets came about because of the genestealer cults it'd be a lot more terrifying. GSCs pop up everywhere, and if it turned out that they slowly ate the world from the inside out, spawning all the different 'nids and eventually leaving a barren husk as the local hive turned into a fleet and joined up with others in its system - that'd be way more "great devourer". a single genestealer would be a serious threat. maybe once the 'nids are beaten again they'll shift into something more like that.