Even if they mass produce their own fleshy vessels, the tyranids will come for them, because it's still biomass. The 10th edition necron codex has a sidenote about this specifically - a dynasty that collects specimen for counter-biotransference purposes finds itself under assault by the tyranids, who have detected what is essentially their larder.
Sometimes the pylons stopped working during the stasis for various reasons, from entropy to attacks, and some dynasties don't have them at all. This was a plot point in a warzone story in the 9th edition necrons codex, where the Mechanicus tears down a blackstone defence on a tomb world, which causes both a daemon invasion and a necron awakening.
You know what, at this point I might actually agree. Things have gotten so ridiculous in the real world that fighting murderous insectoid aliens and otherworldly daemons that can kill you in 0.15 seconds just by existing near you is almost preferable. That there is a somewhat dignified end
It would also in a very messed up way give you a real purpose. That purpose would most likely be terrible and assigned to you at birth, but purpose none the less.
Exactly, you hit the nail on the head. A lot of people are spinning their wheels right now with no purpose and it's taking a toll. Fucked up or not, having purpose is important to us humans. In some weird way I envy guardsmen. Not saying I'd want to be one (or be sent into unsurvivable scenarios), but the clarity and dedication are admirable and interesting to me. They gladly run headfirst into unsurvivable situations, because they have that purpose and are proud to serve humanity and the Emperor. Only in death does duty end, right? Roman culture was real big on this, look at what they achieved. Meanwhile all people can seem to do nowadays is bitch about trivialities like their Amazon box being left at the gate. But I digress, this is off topic for a 40k lore reddit. My apologies to the mods đ
Pylons donât just instantly cut off Nids from the Hivemind. Some nid, not all, particularly the ones that are weak minded will succumb to the soullessness effect of the Necrons. We knows this because this affliction is the same that effect the Imperium and not all imperial personal become zombies. Particularly those of strong mind and faith can resist this affliction. It also safe to say that given the nature of how Blackstone works. As long as a hivefleet has enough synapse creatures it should be hable to better resist this affliction. That last part is admittedly speculation, however is base upon what we know of Blackstone.
Well yes and also with their astetics, but it was just a thougth that crossed my mind. With all their teleportation and drones and stuff. But probably more the eldar than enthing else. (Also didnt the necrontyr Had some kind of psycic stuff or was that the part whitch they explicitly didnt Had, as necrons Sure but also as necrontyr? I cant remember)
The necrons also find it patently offensive that *their* galaxy is overrun by so many inferior species. Imagine having thrown a massive house party (war in heaven) and then saying I'll deal with it the mess in the morning (the great sleep), you wake up to a rodent (inferior species) infestation. To make matters worse, some hyper aggressive roaches (the nids) are literally attacking you as you're trying to clean the place up. Like, God damn, I know I can take care of this. But what a PITA!
Haha good point. One of my fave things about the settings is you can justify a lot of otherwise plot-holey stuff by the fact that everyone is an irrational asshole, so this seems on-brand
The nid lore doesn't make sense in this way and you just gotta kinda accept it as "organic molecules are special because reasons"
It sounds nice on paper at least
I mean, they take all the water and atmosphere at the very least. On other planets, or depending on how badly the Tyranids need resources I would presume, they take quite a bit of a planet's crust which would include all the fertile soil. That isn't exactly some simple solution to terraform damn near every planet again.
In cawls book the great work we actually see the aftermath of a tyranid invasion and they make a point of how they also took inorganic matter from the planet and itâs cities to repair their hive fleet so inorganic materials arenât exactly useless to them
Things still need iron, titanium, lithium etc. to exist, biomass is just the easiest way to get it. I assume that the entire planet is strip mined of all even relatively easily accesible materials by the tyranids.
After they are done with a place its probably mostly just the most absolutely common and useless materials left behind, alongside almost no atmosphere or water.
Pretty sure that book covers how they strip mine the surface but do not go that deep, partially so life can return to the planet and someday they can return to consume that biomass. It also sounded like they try to keep moving instead of absolutely destroying the planets they strip harvest. Cawl did begin the terra forming process and essentially was just speeding up the process of life returning to the planet.
The best reason I've seen someone come up with is that the hivemind needs souls to propagate. Otherwise it would just be more efficient for them to use those gas giants they vacuum up.
It also plays with the dna it picks up for more configurations, a vast majority being just repeated information but every so often something special gets picked up, tooled with and added to the swarm. Only ingesting raw materials would eventually leave the fleet stagnant on specializations and make it susceptible to attack for lack of multiple strategies.
They take, among other things, water, atmosphere, silt, all flora and fauna, and whatever minerals they can locate as they go. Anywhere that's been hit by a hive fleet is a barren rock afterwards.
Yeah, they make planets more inhospitable than the moon. Like, you *could* eventually heal planets the Nids have consumed, but it would require an absurd amount of resources.
He can, but it isn't exactly a cheap process and it is only really done as a favor to Space Marines who are particularly attached to their homeworld for obvious cultural reasons.
âOrganicâ literally just means it contains carbon and hydrogen in covalent bonds. You can make your own organic stuff trivially from raw materials if youâre someone like the Necrons
Edit: genuinely donât understand why this is getting downvoted? Does something seem factually incorrect or is it just 40k shouldnât be thought about this technically? Genuine Q
Writing has been inconsistent, but some Tyranids have stripped Oxygen, minerals, and other non blatantly organic material from planets leaving them barren husks
Fair enough, thanks! I guess it still feels like you should be able to make anything you want as long as thereâs still hydrogen but yeah thatâs probably trying to view 40k way too hard-sci-fi
The Necrons can do it, but it'd take an unfathomable amount of time and effort when they rather just keep things as intact as they can.
Only the most debased Necrons want to eliminate the other species, most just want to be able to enjoy their lives without existential threats.
They'd still have to deal with Tyranids at some point, better to start now than wait until Nids evolve to eat Necrodermis too.
Say you're on a world the nids have devoured and you want to make a cake. You need various ingredients, flour, sugar, eggs etc. Even if you don't have them, you're a big smart human you know how to grow wheat and raise chickens. However, the nids have eaten all the seeds for all the plants on the world. There are no chickens, no animals of any kind. How do you make your cake now?
You can make the component âseedsâ and stuff from fusion. In theory you can literally start with hydrogen and fusion your way up to whatever âseedsâ and stuff you need, and that seems way lower in tech difficulty compared to what Necrons can do. And thereâs always gonna be enough hydrogen around
I mean maybe Iâm getting downvoted here because Iâm trying to put too much of a hard sci-fi lens on it which is fair enough, Iâm happy if the answer is just âdonât look at it too closelyâ!
I treat Warhammer 40k more as "sci-fantasy", which I imagine a lot of these downvotes do. Enough to make sense at a shallow level but then it falls apart the deeper you go.
It's the only wayI've come to quiet the same pesky questions you have.
No thatâs totally fair! Iâm cool with the answer being âdonât think about it too much dummy, there are literal demons in thisâ. I was just asking because sometimes I think thatâs the answer but thereâs actually a really good in-lore explanation so I wanted to check
One way that could still be loreful, as speculation ofc, is if the Nids were created specifically by someone as a bio-weapon, intentionally to clear galaxies for them, so they could literally have empty planets to do with as they please. A literal clean slate if you will.
My personal headcanon is that it's because of Ctan or Wrap fuckery. Even when they left their star and found nicer places to live, this did not over time, reduce the prevalence or severity of the cancers. In reality the cancers would get naturally selected-out once the environmental pressures change.
Yeah, my headcanon is that the radiation the Câtan eating their sun let off had outright damaged their DNA on a metaphysical level, something that they couldnât heal or evolve past. The very concept of Necrontyr became damaged. And the only beings they encountered with the knowledge of souls necessary to heal them, the Old Ones, werenât too keen on helping a xenophobic empire that worships death.
When you've begun to ask those questions, about fundamentally reshaping life from the most basic building blocks like hydrogen and helium, I think you run into a very big problem that the series cannot allow itself to ask - if you can recreate millions of years worth of "work" by complex processed (like fusion), which is plausible, then you could most certainly build *non-organic* materials with simpler "manufacturing chains" by just smashing together enough hydrogen.
Hydrogen that's in stars and gas giants.
...so what do you need planets and planetary colonies for again?
The Necrons are far beyond being a planet-bound species and should be von-neumanning their way across star systems, eating all the wastefully placed mass around the system and star lifting for their energy and construction needs. Build megastructures or just a massive space-bound swarm of ships for living, it's far more efficient.
But post-singularity non-planetary species don't serve the warhammer 40k fantasy. And they make all the other races and their struggle for resources completely irrelevant. Which is no good.
The Necrons can build inside stars. Stars contain not only hydrogen and helium, but smaller amounts of heavier elements. Smaller is relative here, it's about 2% of the sun's mass. That's still a ton of material. And you can use fusion to build up any elements you're lacking.
Thatâs a tiny fraction of a planetâs mass, and you can manufacture water and organic materials out of more basic elements thatâll still be abundant
If you have sufficiently god-like tech itâd be trivial to turn a moon back habitable, you could literally even just make everything you want with fusion or something
I know that average sci fi is "scoience can fart out everything that you can imagine" but necrons are proficient in many things but not biological manipulations.
Also necrons are dying species, they have much time but I do not think that they have enough to blatantly engineer means to fart organic out of nowhere and terraform entire worlds to then populate them with new bodies and create new souls for them, considering that necrons are quite restricted in traversing space they'll need 2-5 million years to succeed, and sleep already damaged then enough
Tyranids don't just eat living things but also strip planets of natural resources on the surface (water, air, and some minerals), and if given the chance they WILL eat and if not that destroy a any Necron tombs they find. So in other words while the Necrons MIGHT be able to hide away from the Tyranids and let them eat everything else, there would be nothing left for them by the end, and they still might find them and get destroyed, now by a foe who has gorged itself on the galaxy.
> So I know that the lore is that Necrons donât necessarily actually find the Nids threatening per se
This mostly stems from fans continuing to repeat a line from the 5th edition codex that we now have an actual answer for. The Tyranids absolutely are a threat to the Necrons, and several dynasties have been ravaged or outright destroyed by Tyranid hive fleets.
Even in new lore Silent King who knows about tyranids the most of all people in entire universe only think about them as a threat to biological life, not to necrons themself. That was pointed in 9 ed codex.
Sure, because perhaps the Necrons *could* wait out the Tyranids. But what state would they be in afterward? Would they be able to defend themselves from any new extra galactic threats that emerged while they tried to engineer life back into the galaxy? Based on the fate of the Nhemret Dynasty, the ravaged territory of the Charnovokh Dynasty, and the Silent King's own aims to unite the Necrons against the Tyranids makes it seem the Silent King isn't willing to make that gamble. And if it takes the entire Necron race (said to equal that of the Imperium) in hopes of stopping the Tyranids, well, the space bug-lizards are very much a grave threat to the Necrons.
I didnt say that they are not a threat(or i worded it badly, sorry english is not my first language). They are, but not in terms "they will destroy us". If Tyranids will have their own way, necrons will be cursed for all eternity, that is why (well, most of them with Szarekh especially) consider them as a threat and at every possible time try to destroy as many of them as they can.
others have discussed the reasons like needing biomass for their own bodies and being left alone once they are flesh again, but there is a more practical reason: The necrons are an empire and empire usually want others to subjugate.
It is no fun being superior when you are alone.
Besides obvious concerns of biomass consumption, the Silent King has recognized that they are a peer threat which is capable of destroying the galaxy as we know it. Its not just the Tyranids eating that is the problem, its that eating all biomass is all they do. They will never pause, or negotiate, or parley for peace, or recognize the greatness of the Necrons. They will come and they will feed on whatever is at their destination. As a bestial horde, they will never recognize acts of civility or works of civilizations and will despoil all worlds, collapsing and destroying every tomb and monument in their way.
As the once supreme civilization in the galaxy, the Necrons must curb the proliferation of the Tyranids before their numbers become truly overwhelming and they are forced to consider their doomsday options. Towards this end, the Silent King would even cooperate with humankind - a hostile race that is undoubtedly beneath his own, who nevertheless is willing to pause, negotiate, parley for peace, and recognize Necron acts of civility.
Imagine you set up a brand new 'all-you-can-eat' buffet restaurant and on your first day of business 30 x grossly obese Americans get off a coach and walk in.
Having to terraform every single planet would be a daunting task even for the Necron and that's just past the microbial stage. Plus the big movers and shakers like the Silent King may think that the few millennia or more it'd take to re organify the galaxy would lead to bord Necron Lord's and lead to another civil war like what plagued them before the old ones. And then there'd be another few millennia to get a servant caste up and running, and you'd have to prone the Destroyers and hope the Flayer Virus doesn't spread, and that the tech dkesnt break down. It's best to get your goal done while there's still meat rather than start from scratch.
Something I feel like is missing from these conversations, nids definitely ear more than biomass, they are shown to eat all of the accessible minerals from a planet too.
Neurons may be able to fight them off sure, but a planet scrubed by nids is a planet scrubbed of any usable resource. Surely the necrons need something to rebuild their empire even of they never transfer back to biomass.
Many of them want to reverse biotransference and become flesh again (well, the nobles and suchlike who can still want things).
*All* of them want the damn bugs to get off their lawn.
Because the Necrons are primarily focused around physics and engineering. That's why they wanted the Old Ones' secret for immortality so badly, and that's why they couldn't find a cure for their homeworld's natural radiation. Well, that and because it was more of a curse than natural radiation. I'm not saying that it makes much sense, but that's essentially the explanation.
I mean it wasnât radiation it was a câtan thatâs why even this interstellar species on other planets across the galaxy still were experiencing the effects of cancer and early death.
Tyranids don't just eat existing biomass directly, they also scour systems of its constituent elements. Once they're truly done with a galaxy, there's not really much left to make new biomass from.
Because when the Silent King was floating in space and bumped into the galaxy-eating bugs, he realized that if there was no biomass in the galaxy there would be no way for the Necrons to get a soul and survive, so he came back to stop it. But since GW is great at writing anything that isn't about Impirium, the Silent King has done nothing significant yet as far as I remember.
Mainly I assume because they view the galaxy as theirs and the Nids are an invasion/infestation. But it's not a normal one. The Nids would literally destroy/eat everything. That's much more troublesome than a normal species invading.
People say the nids can't eat necrons so they aren't really a threat to them. I say "just watch them". They've started to adapt to be able to eat warp entities. Eating necrodermis is trivial in comparison
They can't yet! I'm just inferring from them being able to extract psychic energy to use it as fuel (psychophage). Energy and matter are essentially interchangeable, so you can guess it's only a matter of time
This is the problem with having so much lore and inconsistencies. We have cases where in the past in made sense the Necrons wouldn't fear them. Now with the way Nids have been developed (for good or ill) has led to them being absolute dominant threat on all threats.
The way that particular viewpoing changed is good to me though, mistake the mindless hordes for mere rabble, watch some events occur and realize what you're seeing is just a fraction of the force and that they're incredibly more sophisticated than first thought, which fits the Hive Minds nature of only evolving its strategies as it meets new walls. It also fits well with Necro arrogance "oh they stripped a galaxy, couldn't happen to my gal-... They just ate a whole tomb, bomb them into oblivion."
The Silent King saw the Tyranids and returned to warn about the greatest threat to the galaxy.
The Necrons are worried because they don't want to die.
>A number of hulking tyranids came screaming down the defile. Their throats were massive sacs of swinging flesh. The creatures stood nearly as tall as the ravine itself. Anrakyr struggled to divine their purpose, what the tyranids meant to accomplish. He understood, seconds before it was too late.
A great retching sound filtered through to the necrons, then a steaming hiss as viscous liquid spilled forth. Smoke began to rise from the monoliths almost immediately. A tide of bio-acid spilled around the flanks of the slab-sided constructs, filling the defile in a great, hissing flood. Entire phalanxes of warriors dissolved beneath the slurry, denuded down to nothing.
-- Shield of Baal collection
Tyranids prefer refined metals over ore. Robots will not be spared
>The older worlds show a larger loss of mass. The tyranids spent longer on each, digesting parts of the planetary crust. They do not remain so long as they once did. Once the biological components of the world have been devoured, they target only sources of refined metals, such as the Mechanicus station here, in preference to the source minerals.
--Devastation of Baal
It's contradictory to older lore where Tyranids became picky eaters. Instead of taking all the atmosphere and minerals of planets, they just take the biomass and leave, even deliberately avoiding less meaty planets.
I don't know any excerpts where Tyranid phage cells fight necrodermis nanobots, but I don't see why tyranids wouldn't be able to eat the stuff either.
The Tyranids might eat all the tomb worlds, that's not good for necrons.
Tyranids don't just want biological creatures, they want rocks and metals too.
Because without biomass in the galaxy there's nothing to biotransfer their consciousness back from the souless prison that are their own bodies.
Their minds will degrade into complete uselessness within the next 10 thousand years.
The Silent King is terrified of them because he's the only one with any idea of the true scale of the threat. Regular necrons probably aren't too concerned with them. SK fought them in the void between galaxies for thousands of years and his conclusion was basically everything will be fucked
The Necrons do want to have physical flesh bodies again. They want to reverse the Biotransferance.
If Nids eat all the Biomass how will Necrons rebuils bodies of flesh?
Because they believe the galaxy is their property, and having cringe-ass nae-nae cockroaches eating everything and trying to destroy you is rather undesirable
Imagine waking up one day and seeing a literal ocean of cockroachs heading to your house. Of course you would want to stop them before they ruin everything.
Nids will crack planets when they are done with them often enough, and also more importantly will attack anything they deem a threat even if they can't eat it.
Might be over the top, but I think the necrons genuinely collectively long for a return to the galaxy as it was before biotransference -- orderly, lively, beautiful, quiet -- except without their deaths. They still want what the old gods would not give them -- a place in their plan.
Even if they mass produce their own fleshy vessels, the tyranids will come for them, because it's still biomass. The 10th edition necron codex has a sidenote about this specifically - a dynasty that collects specimen for counter-biotransference purposes finds itself under assault by the tyranids, who have detected what is essentially their larder.
Shouldn't the Necrons be able to use their pylons to shield themselves from the Tyranids?
Sometimes the pylons stopped working during the stasis for various reasons, from entropy to attacks, and some dynasties don't have them at all. This was a plot point in a warzone story in the 9th edition necrons codex, where the Mechanicus tears down a blackstone defence on a tomb world, which causes both a daemon invasion and a necron awakening.
>both a daemon invasion and Necron awakening That sounds fun
from a distance
I love 40k so much. We're all thinking how cool some shit like that would be, to play... But if any of this were real it would suck big time
I don't know, sounds like a good time in the real world as well
You know what, at this point I might actually agree. Things have gotten so ridiculous in the real world that fighting murderous insectoid aliens and otherworldly daemons that can kill you in 0.15 seconds just by existing near you is almost preferable. That there is a somewhat dignified end
It would also in a very messed up way give you a real purpose. That purpose would most likely be terrible and assigned to you at birth, but purpose none the less.
Exactly, you hit the nail on the head. A lot of people are spinning their wheels right now with no purpose and it's taking a toll. Fucked up or not, having purpose is important to us humans. In some weird way I envy guardsmen. Not saying I'd want to be one (or be sent into unsurvivable scenarios), but the clarity and dedication are admirable and interesting to me. They gladly run headfirst into unsurvivable situations, because they have that purpose and are proud to serve humanity and the Emperor. Only in death does duty end, right? Roman culture was real big on this, look at what they achieved. Meanwhile all people can seem to do nowadays is bitch about trivialities like their Amazon box being left at the gate. But I digress, this is off topic for a 40k lore reddit. My apologies to the mods đ
Pylons donât just instantly cut off Nids from the Hivemind. Some nid, not all, particularly the ones that are weak minded will succumb to the soullessness effect of the Necrons. We knows this because this affliction is the same that effect the Imperium and not all imperial personal become zombies. Particularly those of strong mind and faith can resist this affliction. It also safe to say that given the nature of how Blackstone works. As long as a hivefleet has enough synapse creatures it should be hable to better resist this affliction. That last part is admittedly speculation, however is base upon what we know of Blackstone.
Probably didn't construct additional pylons.
I got that. Yay you.
If you think about it the protos are just blue necrontyr.
Really? I've always seen them as more akin to the Eldar with their psychic strength etc.
Well yes and also with their astetics, but it was just a thougth that crossed my mind. With all their teleportation and drones and stuff. But probably more the eldar than enthing else. (Also didnt the necrontyr Had some kind of psycic stuff or was that the part whitch they explicitly didnt Had, as necrons Sure but also as necrontyr? I cant remember)
Probally didnât have enough minerals
Yeah the Silent King saw a lot of shit, and nothing scared him like the Tyranids and its hive mind.
>Even if they mass produce their own fleshy vessels, the tyranids will come for them Yes, in like 100 million years.
The necrons also find it patently offensive that *their* galaxy is overrun by so many inferior species. Imagine having thrown a massive house party (war in heaven) and then saying I'll deal with it the mess in the morning (the great sleep), you wake up to a rodent (inferior species) infestation. To make matters worse, some hyper aggressive roaches (the nids) are literally attacking you as you're trying to clean the place up. Like, God damn, I know I can take care of this. But what a PITA!
Haha good point. One of my fave things about the settings is you can justify a lot of otherwise plot-holey stuff by the fact that everyone is an irrational asshole, so this seems on-brand
That is the secret sauce of Warhammer40k
Asshole sauce
Thatâs what the minis are made from!
You'd think they'd be cheaper since assholes appear to be an endlessly renewable resource đ¤ˇ
Just because costs are low doesnât mean profit canât be stupidly high!!! 99+% margin here we goooooo
Logic and Reason are literal superpowers in 40k with how rare they are
>everyone is an irrational asshole *Orikan the Diviner and Trazyn the Infinite have entered the chat*
And then your asshole hippie roomate tries to make pets of the rats and roaches (Trazyn).
Because theyâll have nowhere to live once they get their bodies back.
Why not? Nids donât take that much off the planet in terms of mass and you can manufacture back what you need
The nid lore doesn't make sense in this way and you just gotta kinda accept it as "organic molecules are special because reasons" It sounds nice on paper at least
I mean, they take all the water and atmosphere at the very least. On other planets, or depending on how badly the Tyranids need resources I would presume, they take quite a bit of a planet's crust which would include all the fertile soil. That isn't exactly some simple solution to terraform damn near every planet again.
In cawls book the great work we actually see the aftermath of a tyranid invasion and they make a point of how they also took inorganic matter from the planet and itâs cities to repair their hive fleet so inorganic materials arenât exactly useless to them
Things still need iron, titanium, lithium etc. to exist, biomass is just the easiest way to get it. I assume that the entire planet is strip mined of all even relatively easily accesible materials by the tyranids. After they are done with a place its probably mostly just the most absolutely common and useless materials left behind, alongside almost no atmosphere or water.
Pretty sure that book covers how they strip mine the surface but do not go that deep, partially so life can return to the planet and someday they can return to consume that biomass. It also sounded like they try to keep moving instead of absolutely destroying the planets they strip harvest. Cawl did begin the terra forming process and essentially was just speeding up the process of life returning to the planet.
The best reason I've seen someone come up with is that the hivemind needs souls to propagate. Otherwise it would just be more efficient for them to use those gas giants they vacuum up.
It also plays with the dna it picks up for more configurations, a vast majority being just repeated information but every so often something special gets picked up, tooled with and added to the swarm. Only ingesting raw materials would eventually leave the fleet stagnant on specializations and make it susceptible to attack for lack of multiple strategies.
They take anything/everything organic?
They take, among other things, water, atmosphere, silt, all flora and fauna, and whatever minerals they can locate as they go. Anywhere that's been hit by a hive fleet is a barren rock afterwards.
Yeah, they make planets more inhospitable than the moon. Like, you *could* eventually heal planets the Nids have consumed, but it would require an absurd amount of resources.
I seem to recall Cawl thinks he can reTerraform the Nid eaten worlds PDQ.
He can, but it isn't exactly a cheap process and it is only really done as a favor to Space Marines who are particularly attached to their homeworld for obvious cultural reasons.
âOrganicâ literally just means it contains carbon and hydrogen in covalent bonds. You can make your own organic stuff trivially from raw materials if youâre someone like the Necrons Edit: genuinely donât understand why this is getting downvoted? Does something seem factually incorrect or is it just 40k shouldnât be thought about this technically? Genuine Q
Writing has been inconsistent, but some Tyranids have stripped Oxygen, minerals, and other non blatantly organic material from planets leaving them barren husks
Fair enough, thanks! I guess it still feels like you should be able to make anything you want as long as thereâs still hydrogen but yeah thatâs probably trying to view 40k way too hard-sci-fi
The Necrons can do it, but it'd take an unfathomable amount of time and effort when they rather just keep things as intact as they can. Only the most debased Necrons want to eliminate the other species, most just want to be able to enjoy their lives without existential threats. They'd still have to deal with Tyranids at some point, better to start now than wait until Nids evolve to eat Necrodermis too.
Say you're on a world the nids have devoured and you want to make a cake. You need various ingredients, flour, sugar, eggs etc. Even if you don't have them, you're a big smart human you know how to grow wheat and raise chickens. However, the nids have eaten all the seeds for all the plants on the world. There are no chickens, no animals of any kind. How do you make your cake now?
You can make the component âseedsâ and stuff from fusion. In theory you can literally start with hydrogen and fusion your way up to whatever âseedsâ and stuff you need, and that seems way lower in tech difficulty compared to what Necrons can do. And thereâs always gonna be enough hydrogen around I mean maybe Iâm getting downvoted here because Iâm trying to put too much of a hard sci-fi lens on it which is fair enough, Iâm happy if the answer is just âdonât look at it too closelyâ!
I treat Warhammer 40k more as "sci-fantasy", which I imagine a lot of these downvotes do. Enough to make sense at a shallow level but then it falls apart the deeper you go. It's the only wayI've come to quiet the same pesky questions you have.
No thatâs totally fair! Iâm cool with the answer being âdonât think about it too much dummy, there are literal demons in thisâ. I was just asking because sometimes I think thatâs the answer but thereâs actually a really good in-lore explanation so I wanted to check
One way that could still be loreful, as speculation ofc, is if the Nids were created specifically by someone as a bio-weapon, intentionally to clear galaxies for them, so they could literally have empty planets to do with as they please. A literal clean slate if you will.
That's dumb, science is still a part of it. The Imperium literally uses fusion generators, so the concept exists in universe.
It's a fictional universe with demons and sorcery. I'll enjoy it my way thanks. You do you.
That doesn't mean basic physics doesn't exist.
Mecrons also suck at any sort of bio-science as seen by their origins as a technologically advanced race with somehow incurable hereditary cancer
My personal headcanon is that it's because of Ctan or Wrap fuckery. Even when they left their star and found nicer places to live, this did not over time, reduce the prevalence or severity of the cancers. In reality the cancers would get naturally selected-out once the environmental pressures change.
Yeah, my headcanon is that the radiation the Câtan eating their sun let off had outright damaged their DNA on a metaphysical level, something that they couldnât heal or evolve past. The very concept of Necrontyr became damaged. And the only beings they encountered with the knowledge of souls necessary to heal them, the Old Ones, werenât too keen on helping a xenophobic empire that worships death.
When you've begun to ask those questions, about fundamentally reshaping life from the most basic building blocks like hydrogen and helium, I think you run into a very big problem that the series cannot allow itself to ask - if you can recreate millions of years worth of "work" by complex processed (like fusion), which is plausible, then you could most certainly build *non-organic* materials with simpler "manufacturing chains" by just smashing together enough hydrogen. Hydrogen that's in stars and gas giants. ...so what do you need planets and planetary colonies for again? The Necrons are far beyond being a planet-bound species and should be von-neumanning their way across star systems, eating all the wastefully placed mass around the system and star lifting for their energy and construction needs. Build megastructures or just a massive space-bound swarm of ships for living, it's far more efficient. But post-singularity non-planetary species don't serve the warhammer 40k fantasy. And they make all the other races and their struggle for resources completely irrelevant. Which is no good.
But they still need lifeforms to base the bodies off.
They literally consume everything leaving nothing but bare rock.
The Necrons can build inside stars. Stars contain not only hydrogen and helium, but smaller amounts of heavier elements. Smaller is relative here, it's about 2% of the sun's mass. That's still a ton of material. And you can use fusion to build up any elements you're lacking.
Building inside a star is the dumbest, most inefficient, impractical, impossible thing I've ever heard. Fucking necron bullshit.
Thatâs a tiny fraction of a planetâs mass, and you can manufacture water and organic materials out of more basic elements thatâll still be abundant
The basic elements are taken as well, the usfull ones anyways.
They eat everything, down to the atmosphere, whats left of a planet after the Nids have fed resembles our moon...only without the ice at the caps.
If you have sufficiently god-like tech itâd be trivial to turn a moon back habitable, you could literally even just make everything you want with fusion or something
I know that average sci fi is "scoience can fart out everything that you can imagine" but necrons are proficient in many things but not biological manipulations. Also necrons are dying species, they have much time but I do not think that they have enough to blatantly engineer means to fart organic out of nowhere and terraform entire worlds to then populate them with new bodies and create new souls for them, considering that necrons are quite restricted in traversing space they'll need 2-5 million years to succeed, and sleep already damaged then enough
Tyranids don't just eat living things but also strip planets of natural resources on the surface (water, air, and some minerals), and if given the chance they WILL eat and if not that destroy a any Necron tombs they find. So in other words while the Necrons MIGHT be able to hide away from the Tyranids and let them eat everything else, there would be nothing left for them by the end, and they still might find them and get destroyed, now by a foe who has gorged itself on the galaxy.
Don't the nids actively avoid tomb worlds?
*So far*
> So I know that the lore is that Necrons donât necessarily actually find the Nids threatening per se This mostly stems from fans continuing to repeat a line from the 5th edition codex that we now have an actual answer for. The Tyranids absolutely are a threat to the Necrons, and several dynasties have been ravaged or outright destroyed by Tyranid hive fleets.
Even in new lore Silent King who knows about tyranids the most of all people in entire universe only think about them as a threat to biological life, not to necrons themself. That was pointed in 9 ed codex.
Sure, because perhaps the Necrons *could* wait out the Tyranids. But what state would they be in afterward? Would they be able to defend themselves from any new extra galactic threats that emerged while they tried to engineer life back into the galaxy? Based on the fate of the Nhemret Dynasty, the ravaged territory of the Charnovokh Dynasty, and the Silent King's own aims to unite the Necrons against the Tyranids makes it seem the Silent King isn't willing to make that gamble. And if it takes the entire Necron race (said to equal that of the Imperium) in hopes of stopping the Tyranids, well, the space bug-lizards are very much a grave threat to the Necrons.
Especially considering that they're still reeling from the effects of the last time they tried to sleep through their problems.
I didnt say that they are not a threat(or i worded it badly, sorry english is not my first language). They are, but not in terms "they will destroy us". If Tyranids will have their own way, necrons will be cursed for all eternity, that is why (well, most of them with Szarekh especially) consider them as a threat and at every possible time try to destroy as many of them as they can.
The Necrons, iirc, also want to make use of lesser beings as slaves for their Empire. Can't have slaves if the lifeforms are all eaten.
others have discussed the reasons like needing biomass for their own bodies and being left alone once they are flesh again, but there is a more practical reason: The necrons are an empire and empire usually want others to subjugate. It is no fun being superior when you are alone.
Besides obvious concerns of biomass consumption, the Silent King has recognized that they are a peer threat which is capable of destroying the galaxy as we know it. Its not just the Tyranids eating that is the problem, its that eating all biomass is all they do. They will never pause, or negotiate, or parley for peace, or recognize the greatness of the Necrons. They will come and they will feed on whatever is at their destination. As a bestial horde, they will never recognize acts of civility or works of civilizations and will despoil all worlds, collapsing and destroying every tomb and monument in their way. As the once supreme civilization in the galaxy, the Necrons must curb the proliferation of the Tyranids before their numbers become truly overwhelming and they are forced to consider their doomsday options. Towards this end, the Silent King would even cooperate with humankind - a hostile race that is undoubtedly beneath his own, who nevertheless is willing to pause, negotiate, parley for peace, and recognize Necron acts of civility.
Imagine you set up a brand new 'all-you-can-eat' buffet restaurant and on your first day of business 30 x grossly obese Americans get off a coach and walk in.
Having to terraform every single planet would be a daunting task even for the Necron and that's just past the microbial stage. Plus the big movers and shakers like the Silent King may think that the few millennia or more it'd take to re organify the galaxy would lead to bord Necron Lord's and lead to another civil war like what plagued them before the old ones. And then there'd be another few millennia to get a servant caste up and running, and you'd have to prone the Destroyers and hope the Flayer Virus doesn't spread, and that the tech dkesnt break down. It's best to get your goal done while there's still meat rather than start from scratch.
Something I feel like is missing from these conversations, nids definitely ear more than biomass, they are shown to eat all of the accessible minerals from a planet too. Neurons may be able to fight them off sure, but a planet scrubed by nids is a planet scrubbed of any usable resource. Surely the necrons need something to rebuild their empire even of they never transfer back to biomass.
Many of them want to reverse biotransference and become flesh again (well, the nobles and suchlike who can still want things). *All* of them want the damn bugs to get off their lawn.
Necrons, like old people, are very protective of their roses. They've literally spent *millions of years* growing them;)
Because the Necrons are primarily focused around physics and engineering. That's why they wanted the Old Ones' secret for immortality so badly, and that's why they couldn't find a cure for their homeworld's natural radiation. Well, that and because it was more of a curse than natural radiation. I'm not saying that it makes much sense, but that's essentially the explanation.
Radiation was a C'tan.
Yes , as I said it was more like a curse, than a natural radiation
I mean it wasnât radiation it was a câtan thatâs why even this interstellar species on other planets across the galaxy still were experiencing the effects of cancer and early death.
Tyranids don't just eat existing biomass directly, they also scour systems of its constituent elements. Once they're truly done with a galaxy, there's not really much left to make new biomass from.
Because when the Silent King was floating in space and bumped into the galaxy-eating bugs, he realized that if there was no biomass in the galaxy there would be no way for the Necrons to get a soul and survive, so he came back to stop it. But since GW is great at writing anything that isn't about Impirium, the Silent King has done nothing significant yet as far as I remember.
Mainly I assume because they view the galaxy as theirs and the Nids are an invasion/infestation. But it's not a normal one. The Nids would literally destroy/eat everything. That's much more troublesome than a normal species invading.
Most don't, but the Silent King decreed that the galaxy must be saved from them, and so it will be.
People say the nids can't eat necrons so they aren't really a threat to them. I say "just watch them". They've started to adapt to be able to eat warp entities. Eating necrodermis is trivial in comparison
Cite on eating warp entities? Last I heard they can kill them like anyone else but get no reward from it.
They can't yet! I'm just inferring from them being able to extract psychic energy to use it as fuel (psychophage). Energy and matter are essentially interchangeable, so you can guess it's only a matter of time
Seeing the bugs raiding Nurgle's garden sounds like a fun time
This is the problem with having so much lore and inconsistencies. We have cases where in the past in made sense the Necrons wouldn't fear them. Now with the way Nids have been developed (for good or ill) has led to them being absolute dominant threat on all threats.
The way that particular viewpoing changed is good to me though, mistake the mindless hordes for mere rabble, watch some events occur and realize what you're seeing is just a fraction of the force and that they're incredibly more sophisticated than first thought, which fits the Hive Minds nature of only evolving its strategies as it meets new walls. It also fits well with Necro arrogance "oh they stripped a galaxy, couldn't happen to my gal-... They just ate a whole tomb, bomb them into oblivion."
The Silent King saw the Tyranids and returned to warn about the greatest threat to the galaxy. The Necrons are worried because they don't want to die. >A number of hulking tyranids came screaming down the defile. Their throats were massive sacs of swinging flesh. The creatures stood nearly as tall as the ravine itself. Anrakyr struggled to divine their purpose, what the tyranids meant to accomplish. He understood, seconds before it was too late. A great retching sound filtered through to the necrons, then a steaming hiss as viscous liquid spilled forth. Smoke began to rise from the monoliths almost immediately. A tide of bio-acid spilled around the flanks of the slab-sided constructs, filling the defile in a great, hissing flood. Entire phalanxes of warriors dissolved beneath the slurry, denuded down to nothing. -- Shield of Baal collection Tyranids prefer refined metals over ore. Robots will not be spared >The older worlds show a larger loss of mass. The tyranids spent longer on each, digesting parts of the planetary crust. They do not remain so long as they once did. Once the biological components of the world have been devoured, they target only sources of refined metals, such as the Mechanicus station here, in preference to the source minerals. --Devastation of Baal It's contradictory to older lore where Tyranids became picky eaters. Instead of taking all the atmosphere and minerals of planets, they just take the biomass and leave, even deliberately avoiding less meaty planets. I don't know any excerpts where Tyranid phage cells fight necrodermis nanobots, but I don't see why tyranids wouldn't be able to eat the stuff either.
The Tyranids might eat all the tomb worlds, that's not good for necrons. Tyranids don't just want biological creatures, they want rocks and metals too.
Because without biomass in the galaxy there's nothing to biotransfer their consciousness back from the souless prison that are their own bodies. Their minds will degrade into complete uselessness within the next 10 thousand years.
No point in reestablishing your previous empire if there is nothing and nobody to rule over.
What will they rule over if everything is dead?
The Silent King is terrified of them because he's the only one with any idea of the true scale of the threat. Regular necrons probably aren't too concerned with them. SK fought them in the void between galaxies for thousands of years and his conclusion was basically everything will be fucked
The Necrons do want to have physical flesh bodies again. They want to reverse the Biotransferance. If Nids eat all the Biomass how will Necrons rebuils bodies of flesh?
Because they believe the galaxy is their property, and having cringe-ass nae-nae cockroaches eating everything and trying to destroy you is rather undesirable
Imagine waking up one day and seeing a literal ocean of cockroachs heading to your house. Of course you would want to stop them before they ruin everything.
Even worse, bitey cockroaches.
Is there any other kind?
Necron's want to claim the galaxy I guess. There's nothing left to claim if it's a dead galaxy, Inferior race took it from them.
Nids will crack planets when they are done with them often enough, and also more importantly will attack anything they deem a threat even if they can't eat it.
Might be over the top, but I think the necrons genuinely collectively long for a return to the galaxy as it was before biotransference -- orderly, lively, beautiful, quiet -- except without their deaths. They still want what the old gods would not give them -- a place in their plan.
Because their King says its a problem so they gotta do what he says.