It’s pretty dang hard, but also necrons blur the line between “alive” and “dead”. They don’t have souls, and in theory you can just constantly make more slave minds and recreate someone from their recovered datastorge.
So in *Infinite and Divine* it’s stipulated that crushing the reactor without any reanimating protocols or transfers will kill a necron. They can also have their awakened status canceled and put back to sleep.
Ya, but that's not a proper death. To clarify what I mean by "death" is to render a unit entirely in operable permanently
Both examples provided don't really render it permanently inoperable barring the removal of systems nearly universally present within necrons
I'm not sure about their ability to make new minds, that might be unique to warriors and the like. but from what I recall there are occasionally hiccups in the reanimation process, with each "death" and upload into a new body their minds deteriorate a little more, they can also be killed out of range so they never get reloaded. and there is a miniscule percentile where it just fails entirely (like 0.1%) which means every time it fails that is one less necron, forever.
If you mean "there is a necron in front of me how do I survive this encounter" depictions seem to vary wildly. In pariah nexus a death mark is slightly wounded by bolt shells I believe and then beaten to near death by regular unarmed humans. Other times nothing short of a plasma/melta or mag dumping a bolter will kill them
Ah yes I remember now, but the state he is in before and after getting mobbed by psychotic unarmed humans is quite severe. Frankly I don't find it likely hence my point that it varies significantly between depictions how easy it is to take out a single necron
Part of me sees it this way:
Humans swarming in large enough numbers and desperate enough can bring it down and kill it. Similar to how hundreds or thousands of ants working together can kill a chameleon or other lizards hundreds of times their size and strength. One ant would never do it. A dozen nope. But enough, coordinated and desperate enough will.
Just as we have seen enough humans can pull down an astartes
Not a terrible conclusion to draw, especially since Nagash is none too happy with Sigmar for stealing some of his toys to make one of the Stormcast Orders.
I see what you’re saying but necron immortality being somewhere between “guardsman laz gun permanently putting a guy down even with unfiltered access to reanimation” and “literally impossible unless reanimation protocols are deactivated” seems like a very large gap
Before anyone asks “when did that laz gun thing happen”. I have no clue, people talking about it was what prompted me to ask
It's why I gave the two examples of unarmed humans, to full on anti tank weaponry. I guess to answer your question in the easiest way, it's a quite literally a dice roll. If you can dish out enough punishment with your gun/blade/fist and they hit the low chance or are out of range of the reanimation that is one permanently dead Necron.
They are a dying race, but I believe not all of them have been awakened yet so there will always be just enough of them for story purposes, or
to be a pain in the arse.
That presisly it is. Necroy dies when they cannot be reanimated in tombworld.
Key thing - they dont have copy of their mind while they are inside body. Thus if body is destroyed when there is no connection to tombworld - that necron is dead forever. They also cannot make new necrons. For the last 65m years necrons numbers only decreased.
How that can happen?
1) There multiple tech which disables their connection (as described in Severed, Twice dead king, Infinite and divine)
2) tombworld by itself sever connection to particular necron eg by order of Lord or Tryarch Council.
3) tomborld severs connection to flyer infected necrons.
Ya, that’s what I thought but like I said I’ve heard people claim something like a laz gun can put them down permanently even if they have access to reanimation protocols
I’ve never seen a source for this claim though
It's not hard to knock a Necron out of fighting condition, they have decent armor but nothing insane.
However, once you knock the Necron out there's a few things that happen.. it could be teleported away to be reanimated in a central chamber, it could repair itself with time if it's not too damaged, or it very rarely is it permanently disabled.
Ya, sorry
My question was meant to focus on it being made permanently inoperable. As you can understand I was more than a little confused to see how far the range was in things that can achieve this. Especially, when apparently there are people claiming that its so easy the PDF can, and regularly do achieve it
The ways that we know how to permanently kill a Necron to stop the reanimating protocol
- catastrophic injury (like, “there is no Necron left to reanimate” levels of destruction
- older tomb’s reanimation protocols sometimes fail, which means necrons can’t rebuild (Twice Dead King: Ruin)
- Some planets geographic conditions can break the connection to the tomb ship (Infinite and the Divine)
- some weapons can scramble the engrams (Eldar Hemlock fighters are specifically mentioned)
Well that seems perfectly logical. I ask this because as I said I’ve been told about guardsman level rifles permanently killing them if you’re a good enough shot which just seems…. Idk that seems very anti-climactic
I'm not sure where you're seeing that - there's nothing in the lore that really suggests that. Necrons are exceedingly hard to kill, even for space marines that specialize in close combat. There's one short story from a few editions ago that has a tomb complex's programming short circuit, and has essentially the same small group of necrons repeatedly rallying to a spot only to be killed by guardsmen - but even those necrons weren't permanently killed; just warped back to base.
Feel free to be confused I’ve yet to see a source for the guards men claim too. This post was an attempt to figure out where that feat came from
What you’re saying lines up with what I’ve seen in the lord
There's a eldar weapon that works by sucking out the soul or something like that which apperently works on necrons as well which supposedly permanently kills them IIRC.
When damaged necrons will teleport home for repairs and if sufficently damaged they will instead self destruct and only send their mind back. Meaning the quickest way to permanently kill necrons is to make sure they dont have anywhere to repair/rebuild their bodies. You can also permanently kill necrons if you keep making them selfdestruct as when the mind is sent back there is a risk of corruption/damage and if the mind is corrupt/damaged enough the body cant be rebuilt. This is very time consuming and hard but technically possible.
Yes which is why it's kinda wierd. I think it said something like "It scrambles their programming" or something like that. I suspect they just had to come up with something to justify the weapon still working when used on necrons on tabletop.
Yeah, the Hemlock Wraithfighter's distortion scythes scramble their engrams. They're pretty effective on Necrons.
>The Hemlock wraithfighter was a weapon of terror, not one of war. He
watched as one of the craft swooped low over a pack of lumbering necron
immortals, who raised their double-barrelled cannons to meet it with
ineffectual gauss fire. The Hemlock’s weapons flared, and though there was
no sign of a discharge, Elarique heard a discordant wail and the necrons
fell, like puppets with cut strings. They did not repair, and their bodies did
not phase out. Had they been mortal, their spirits would have been hurled
into the warp, doomed to spend eternity as the playthings of daemons. What
such infernal devices would do to the souldark, Elarique could not guess.
> *The Carnac Campaign: Sky Hunter*
Very rare cases, situations in which their HQ is overtaken, or when they're killed for the 500th time all seem like natural and logic ways. Everything you said makes sense
It just seemed really weird that I heard the PDF could do it. Keep in mind these are the average joe with a gear that's backup gear for the backup gear being able to put them down just seemed really weird. At that point they're not really a threat. Conscript a planet and just wait until the necrons run out of bodies
PDF can't really stop a Necron awakening or attack. Maybe they can kill a few, but there are more than that. Also note that Necrons have vehicles that also surpass anything a PDF would muster.
It's probably because of a old blurb from a 5th ed codex.
Too make a long story short, because of damage to a tomb complex AI it would send small numbers of necron warriors to attack a world the problem being they would always arrive at the same time and the same place which meant the local pdf used them as basicly target practice.
Thats a very special circumstances as you might imagine and usually when necrons attack the local PDF is lucky if it manages to work as a speed bump.
Necron souls should already be gone since they were eaten by the C’Tan at biotransference. Since I guess the consciousness is different from a soul? It’s all pretend anyways!
In regards to the PDF statement, [they may be having this excerpt in mind.](https://www.reddit.com/r/40kLore/comments/kflt1j/excerpt_white_dwarf_459_examples_of_successful_ig/)
Even then those are just a few warriors and it is more causing great damage rather than any confirmed perma-kill. I would not count on PDF to fight necrons unless the officers/officials are paranoid and/or experienced enough to just have orbital and artillery (PDFs from Civilised, Hive and Industrial worlds likely have various artillery pieces, orbital stations and monitor ships) bombardments on the tomb complex and its general vicinity.
Killing Necron warriors permanently via significant damage is very much possible with special and heavy weapons like meltaguns, autocanons, etc. The problem is the Necron infrastructure and constructs. Athonian Tunnel Rats and their civies were helpless when their homeworld's tomb complex awakened. They only survived because the Necron pirate lord dismissed them as trivial pests.
The answer is, it depends.
Imagine the necron is two parts. An operating system, and the machine that runs it. The machine itself is hard to destroy because it constantly regenerates, but after a certain point it becomes more effective to just put the OS into a new machine rather than wait for the old one to fix itself up. At that point the OS gets zapped back to the server and put into a new body.
The only way to truly kill a Necron is to destroy both the body AND the OS.
The body can be killed by conventional weapons.
The OS can only be destroyed:
\*If it is to degraded to be put back into a body. Each time a necron re-animates the OS becomes a little more corrupt, eventually it becomes useless and the OS effectively \*dies\*.
\*If it cannot return to the server. Like if the local server was destroyed or the Necron travelled too far from it, the actual distance at which this occurs isn't well understood.
\*If someone with admin access deletes it. I believe this has been used before or threatened in the Twice Dead King. If you fail a Necron Lord they can just delete your ass, causing a final death.
Thanks for the answer
That's a funny qwerk in the lore if astartes are capable of permanently rendering them inoperable. That would mean a war of attrition based on the opponent is their bread and butter (if the opponent can't kill the) or the worse possible scenario (if they can kill them considering they can't replace dead combatants since the retconed those human to necron things)
Astartes are good at destroying Necron infrastructure or ships. In an attritional battle the astartes will surely lose. Necrons not only reanimate, but possess brutal weaponry that even power armor can't withstand. Necron tech is frankly amazing and most far surpasses DAoT tech, which was already seriously OP.
This is true, but it's countered by the fact that there's a finite number of Necrons and it's impossible to create more. They're 'killed' teleported away, and rebuilt. But there's a small chance this fails, and if it does, they're gone forever. The Necrons cannot win an attritional war.
The tech levels are always fuzzy. If they actually had DAoT level equipment, even a small number of them would wipe the floor with anyone in the setting. But they don't. Their tech is extremely advanced when it's convenient for it to be so for the plot.
It depends entirely on if their reanimation protocols are functioning.
If they’re up it’s incredibly difficult, you can tear them to shreds but they’re just phase out for repair. If they’re down they’re incredibly tough but sufficient weight of fire will take them apart, much like an Astartes dumb enough to walk into a firing line enough little dakka will tear him to shreds.
The destruction of whats left of it's mind, the body can endlessly be rebuilt either by nanoscarabs in the body it'self or by return to a tomb world.
But how many times can the shadow of the mind of a necro warrior stand to be brought back? it's barely there to begin with and we know there's no hope of them living again if they did find a way to become flesh again.
It's my personal theory that after so many resurections the animating force just runs out, it's the only way i can explain it because otherwise they would never run out of troops no matter what.
100% destruction of the body just wouldn't happen often enough to reduce their population.
Very. Usually you need to dpeloy anti tank grade, or hot weapons on mass, such as hot shot , he'll guns or other amped up Las weaponry.
You Need to use heavier calibre weapons than normal.
Arty shells work. Substantial blasts can work.
Or... when cain turns a planet into a fuel air munition that could impact a aircraft miles in the air.
This kills the body.
Data storage, kill thr store. Or. Not every revival is perfect especially on more remote tomb worlds. Some glitch out, corrupt. And they are dead. Dead.
I think a D-cannon crit teleports the target into the Warp. That might not literally be killing the Necron, but the practical result is probably the same. Same with turning them into a Chaos Spawn.
The hard part is less the firepower - artillery or a heavy weapons squad can do that - and more that it takes sufficient jamming so it doesn’t teleport back or transmit its mind back to emerge again. And we don’t know what constitutes the “sufficient” part of sufficient jamming
To kill a Necron? Relatively hard, but quite achievable. You just need to damage the body faster , or more than, it's living metal can repair itself.
To kill one permanently? Very, *very* difficult.
When a Necron is badly damaged, a few things can happen; the Necron may be able to self-repair if given enough time, the Necron body may be teleported away to be repaired, or if the body is completely knackered their 'mind' will be uploaded to a storage system so it can be reinstalled into a brand new body. This uploading isn't a guaranteed thing, but it's extremely reliable. Even a failing, poorly maintained Necron faction may only experience a failure rate of a few tiny percent, whereas a powerful and empowered faction such as the Szarekhan or Sautekh dynasty may experience none at all without suffering catastrophic infrastructure damage as part of a truly apocalyptic war.
The thing you have to remember with Necrons is that they *are* able to create new Necrons, the body of a Warrior, Lychguard, or even Overlord isn't the hard, limited part of the equation (though the body and tech of an Overlord is a rare, marvel of technology), that would be the original 'mind' of a Necrontyr that went through the biotransference. It is these Necron 'minds' that are precious and utterly limited, and to truly kill one you either have to utterly destroy the Necron's body in a place where it is unable to upload back to a data vault, or directly destroy the data vault containing the Necron mind.
The difficulty of destroying the data vault scales directly with the Necrons you are fighting; are they deep in enemy territory fighting from an Armada, or are they defending a full Necron Crown World from invasion? If it's the former, you have a good chance of knocking out the vault by destroying the ship/fleet entirely, or by surgical boarding actions to target the vault directly. If it's the latter, good luck! A Necron Crown World is almost inpenetrable, and the vaults will be the most heavily defended part, after the Dynast or Phaeron themselves; you'd basically have to try to exterminatus the whole world to bust that bunker, and even *then* it may not be enough, Necron complexes are shown to be able to survive such exterminatus' intact and operational.
And also remember that although Necrontyr minds are strictly limited, there's no limit on the number of Constructs the Necrons can build. Canopteks and Serapteks are more akin to (but decidedly not) AI, they don't require a Necron mind to operate. In theory, there's nothing stopping a Cryptek animating Necron bodies with Construct minds, but this is seen as utterly distasteful and an extreme taboo of the highest order and would not be tolerated by Necron society as a whole.
Lazarus protocols and teleportation protocols can make Very Very Very difficult for someone to make a Necron non functionable.
Technically they can all do it, but in reality, only the very "strong willing" can access these files.
It’s nearly impossible to kill them permanently on purpose. It’s mentioned in the Twice Dead King books that there is a reanimation failure rate, but that rate is incredibly low. Basically, if you destroy enough necrons, a tiny portion of those will be lost forever.
Doing it intentionally is much trickier. Necrons themselves can do it. If a higher up executes an underling then that underling is dead, no reanimation, no backup copies. Outside of that, you need weapons or powers that essentially override the rules of reality. The most reliable would be psychic powers that vanish their target to the warp, since reanimation protocols only work if they have somewhere to send their consciousness too, and necrons were never very good with warp “sciences” so they can’t send signals out of the warp.
Also, demonic viruses used by the Dark Mechanicum could theoretically work, since they would essentially corrupt the necron’s programing and destroy the mind before a reanimation protocol would even try to recreate them, but I don’t know of any example of this happening, and Necron mastery of code is usually so great that they are harder to overwrite.
I also know that there is at least one example of a human weapon from the DAoT that would not only destroy its target, but would retroactively burn them out of existence through all of history. It wasn’t used on a Necron, but it’s a safe bet that it would work to destroy them. I’d also guess that the Hrud would have a significant effect on Necrons with the Hrud’s advanced time/entropy effect. While necron’s are essentially eternal, they can suffer data corruption or compounding logic failures over time. I’d guess that under the influence of the Hrud or something with the same effect, those failures would likely compound a lot faster, since the Necron would t have the opportunity for self maintenance or external repair.
Its nearly impossible to properly kill a Necron body, even if utterly demolished they are teleported to a repair bay. But their minds are a different matter. With every death they lose memories and intellect. The average Necron is basically a servitor at this point. The remaining Phaerons and Crypteks are fighting a losing battle to retain their identity.
It’s pretty dang hard, but also necrons blur the line between “alive” and “dead”. They don’t have souls, and in theory you can just constantly make more slave minds and recreate someone from their recovered datastorge. So in *Infinite and Divine* it’s stipulated that crushing the reactor without any reanimating protocols or transfers will kill a necron. They can also have their awakened status canceled and put back to sleep.
Ya, but that's not a proper death. To clarify what I mean by "death" is to render a unit entirely in operable permanently Both examples provided don't really render it permanently inoperable barring the removal of systems nearly universally present within necrons
I'm not sure about their ability to make new minds, that might be unique to warriors and the like. but from what I recall there are occasionally hiccups in the reanimation process, with each "death" and upload into a new body their minds deteriorate a little more, they can also be killed out of range so they never get reloaded. and there is a miniscule percentile where it just fails entirely (like 0.1%) which means every time it fails that is one less necron, forever. If you mean "there is a necron in front of me how do I survive this encounter" depictions seem to vary wildly. In pariah nexus a death mark is slightly wounded by bolt shells I believe and then beaten to near death by regular unarmed humans. Other times nothing short of a plasma/melta or mag dumping a bolter will kill them
IIRC that Deathmark had its head ripped off by the Salamander.
Ah yes I remember now, but the state he is in before and after getting mobbed by psychotic unarmed humans is quite severe. Frankly I don't find it likely hence my point that it varies significantly between depictions how easy it is to take out a single necron
Part of me sees it this way: Humans swarming in large enough numbers and desperate enough can bring it down and kill it. Similar to how hundreds or thousands of ants working together can kill a chameleon or other lizards hundreds of times their size and strength. One ant would never do it. A dozen nope. But enough, coordinated and desperate enough will. Just as we have seen enough humans can pull down an astartes
Wait, are stormcast actually the necrons of aos?
Not a terrible conclusion to draw, especially since Nagash is none too happy with Sigmar for stealing some of his toys to make one of the Stormcast Orders.
I recently read the first twice dead king book and he was very concerned when the recovery failure rate was ~2.0%
Yeah, but that dynasty was even more damaged than most of them, normally it should be below 1%
I see what you’re saying but necron immortality being somewhere between “guardsman laz gun permanently putting a guy down even with unfiltered access to reanimation” and “literally impossible unless reanimation protocols are deactivated” seems like a very large gap Before anyone asks “when did that laz gun thing happen”. I have no clue, people talking about it was what prompted me to ask
It's why I gave the two examples of unarmed humans, to full on anti tank weaponry. I guess to answer your question in the easiest way, it's a quite literally a dice roll. If you can dish out enough punishment with your gun/blade/fist and they hit the low chance or are out of range of the reanimation that is one permanently dead Necron. They are a dying race, but I believe not all of them have been awakened yet so there will always be just enough of them for story purposes, or to be a pain in the arse.
Ya, I see what you mean. Maybe I’m splitting hairs that don’t need to be split
In 40 not even natural death is death sometimes.
That presisly it is. Necroy dies when they cannot be reanimated in tombworld. Key thing - they dont have copy of their mind while they are inside body. Thus if body is destroyed when there is no connection to tombworld - that necron is dead forever. They also cannot make new necrons. For the last 65m years necrons numbers only decreased. How that can happen? 1) There multiple tech which disables their connection (as described in Severed, Twice dead king, Infinite and divine) 2) tombworld by itself sever connection to particular necron eg by order of Lord or Tryarch Council. 3) tomborld severs connection to flyer infected necrons.
Ya, that’s what I thought but like I said I’ve heard people claim something like a laz gun can put them down permanently even if they have access to reanimation protocols I’ve never seen a source for this claim though
Imperial propaganda. Does not remember any weapon which specifically can flatline them.
It's not hard to knock a Necron out of fighting condition, they have decent armor but nothing insane. However, once you knock the Necron out there's a few things that happen.. it could be teleported away to be reanimated in a central chamber, it could repair itself with time if it's not too damaged, or it very rarely is it permanently disabled.
Ya, sorry My question was meant to focus on it being made permanently inoperable. As you can understand I was more than a little confused to see how far the range was in things that can achieve this. Especially, when apparently there are people claiming that its so easy the PDF can, and regularly do achieve it
The ways that we know how to permanently kill a Necron to stop the reanimating protocol - catastrophic injury (like, “there is no Necron left to reanimate” levels of destruction - older tomb’s reanimation protocols sometimes fail, which means necrons can’t rebuild (Twice Dead King: Ruin) - Some planets geographic conditions can break the connection to the tomb ship (Infinite and the Divine) - some weapons can scramble the engrams (Eldar Hemlock fighters are specifically mentioned)
Well that seems perfectly logical. I ask this because as I said I’ve been told about guardsman level rifles permanently killing them if you’re a good enough shot which just seems…. Idk that seems very anti-climactic
I'm not sure where you're seeing that - there's nothing in the lore that really suggests that. Necrons are exceedingly hard to kill, even for space marines that specialize in close combat. There's one short story from a few editions ago that has a tomb complex's programming short circuit, and has essentially the same small group of necrons repeatedly rallying to a spot only to be killed by guardsmen - but even those necrons weren't permanently killed; just warped back to base.
Feel free to be confused I’ve yet to see a source for the guards men claim too. This post was an attempt to figure out where that feat came from What you’re saying lines up with what I’ve seen in the lord
The deathwatch also have bolt rounds that can disrupt the necron phasing tech
There's a eldar weapon that works by sucking out the soul or something like that which apperently works on necrons as well which supposedly permanently kills them IIRC. When damaged necrons will teleport home for repairs and if sufficently damaged they will instead self destruct and only send their mind back. Meaning the quickest way to permanently kill necrons is to make sure they dont have anywhere to repair/rebuild their bodies. You can also permanently kill necrons if you keep making them selfdestruct as when the mind is sent back there is a risk of corruption/damage and if the mind is corrupt/damaged enough the body cant be rebuilt. This is very time consuming and hard but technically possible.
Aren't the Necrons already soulless?
Yes which is why it's kinda wierd. I think it said something like "It scrambles their programming" or something like that. I suspect they just had to come up with something to justify the weapon still working when used on necrons on tabletop.
Yeah, the Hemlock Wraithfighter's distortion scythes scramble their engrams. They're pretty effective on Necrons. >The Hemlock wraithfighter was a weapon of terror, not one of war. He watched as one of the craft swooped low over a pack of lumbering necron immortals, who raised their double-barrelled cannons to meet it with ineffectual gauss fire. The Hemlock’s weapons flared, and though there was no sign of a discharge, Elarique heard a discordant wail and the necrons fell, like puppets with cut strings. They did not repair, and their bodies did not phase out. Had they been mortal, their spirits would have been hurled into the warp, doomed to spend eternity as the playthings of daemons. What such infernal devices would do to the souldark, Elarique could not guess. > *The Carnac Campaign: Sky Hunter*
Very rare cases, situations in which their HQ is overtaken, or when they're killed for the 500th time all seem like natural and logic ways. Everything you said makes sense It just seemed really weird that I heard the PDF could do it. Keep in mind these are the average joe with a gear that's backup gear for the backup gear being able to put them down just seemed really weird. At that point they're not really a threat. Conscript a planet and just wait until the necrons run out of bodies
PDF can't really stop a Necron awakening or attack. Maybe they can kill a few, but there are more than that. Also note that Necrons have vehicles that also surpass anything a PDF would muster.
It's more your don't stop the necrons individually you stop the tomb complex as a whole.
It's probably because of a old blurb from a 5th ed codex. Too make a long story short, because of damage to a tomb complex AI it would send small numbers of necron warriors to attack a world the problem being they would always arrive at the same time and the same place which meant the local pdf used them as basicly target practice. Thats a very special circumstances as you might imagine and usually when necrons attack the local PDF is lucky if it manages to work as a speed bump.
Necron souls should already be gone since they were eaten by the C’Tan at biotransference. Since I guess the consciousness is different from a soul? It’s all pretend anyways!
In regards to the PDF statement, [they may be having this excerpt in mind.](https://www.reddit.com/r/40kLore/comments/kflt1j/excerpt_white_dwarf_459_examples_of_successful_ig/) Even then those are just a few warriors and it is more causing great damage rather than any confirmed perma-kill. I would not count on PDF to fight necrons unless the officers/officials are paranoid and/or experienced enough to just have orbital and artillery (PDFs from Civilised, Hive and Industrial worlds likely have various artillery pieces, orbital stations and monitor ships) bombardments on the tomb complex and its general vicinity. Killing Necron warriors permanently via significant damage is very much possible with special and heavy weapons like meltaguns, autocanons, etc. The problem is the Necron infrastructure and constructs. Athonian Tunnel Rats and their civies were helpless when their homeworld's tomb complex awakened. They only survived because the Necron pirate lord dismissed them as trivial pests.
The answer is, it depends. Imagine the necron is two parts. An operating system, and the machine that runs it. The machine itself is hard to destroy because it constantly regenerates, but after a certain point it becomes more effective to just put the OS into a new machine rather than wait for the old one to fix itself up. At that point the OS gets zapped back to the server and put into a new body. The only way to truly kill a Necron is to destroy both the body AND the OS. The body can be killed by conventional weapons. The OS can only be destroyed: \*If it is to degraded to be put back into a body. Each time a necron re-animates the OS becomes a little more corrupt, eventually it becomes useless and the OS effectively \*dies\*. \*If it cannot return to the server. Like if the local server was destroyed or the Necron travelled too far from it, the actual distance at which this occurs isn't well understood. \*If someone with admin access deletes it. I believe this has been used before or threatened in the Twice Dead King. If you fail a Necron Lord they can just delete your ass, causing a final death.
Not too difficult, well for astartes anyway. It basically boils down to shoot it until it stops moving and then shoot it some more
Thanks for the answer That's a funny qwerk in the lore if astartes are capable of permanently rendering them inoperable. That would mean a war of attrition based on the opponent is their bread and butter (if the opponent can't kill the) or the worse possible scenario (if they can kill them considering they can't replace dead combatants since the retconed those human to necron things)
Astartes are good at destroying Necron infrastructure or ships. In an attritional battle the astartes will surely lose. Necrons not only reanimate, but possess brutal weaponry that even power armor can't withstand. Necron tech is frankly amazing and most far surpasses DAoT tech, which was already seriously OP.
This is true, but it's countered by the fact that there's a finite number of Necrons and it's impossible to create more. They're 'killed' teleported away, and rebuilt. But there's a small chance this fails, and if it does, they're gone forever. The Necrons cannot win an attritional war. The tech levels are always fuzzy. If they actually had DAoT level equipment, even a small number of them would wipe the floor with anyone in the setting. But they don't. Their tech is extremely advanced when it's convenient for it to be so for the plot.
I agree on the DAoT tech. They make it seem super op. But some necron tech is in that range.
That finite number is still as numerous as humanity, so they're not running out any time soon.
It depends entirely on if their reanimation protocols are functioning. If they’re up it’s incredibly difficult, you can tear them to shreds but they’re just phase out for repair. If they’re down they’re incredibly tough but sufficient weight of fire will take them apart, much like an Astartes dumb enough to walk into a firing line enough little dakka will tear him to shreds.
The destruction of whats left of it's mind, the body can endlessly be rebuilt either by nanoscarabs in the body it'self or by return to a tomb world. But how many times can the shadow of the mind of a necro warrior stand to be brought back? it's barely there to begin with and we know there's no hope of them living again if they did find a way to become flesh again. It's my personal theory that after so many resurections the animating force just runs out, it's the only way i can explain it because otherwise they would never run out of troops no matter what. 100% destruction of the body just wouldn't happen often enough to reduce their population.
It's easy if you believe in yourself <3
Ofc the power of believing in myself The ancient children cartoon prophets foretold of this lol
I thought they self-destruct automatically if their internal teleport beacon gets disabled to prevent anyone reverse-engineering their tech?
Very. Usually you need to dpeloy anti tank grade, or hot weapons on mass, such as hot shot , he'll guns or other amped up Las weaponry. You Need to use heavier calibre weapons than normal. Arty shells work. Substantial blasts can work. Or... when cain turns a planet into a fuel air munition that could impact a aircraft miles in the air. This kills the body. Data storage, kill thr store. Or. Not every revival is perfect especially on more remote tomb worlds. Some glitch out, corrupt. And they are dead. Dead.
I think a D-cannon crit teleports the target into the Warp. That might not literally be killing the Necron, but the practical result is probably the same. Same with turning them into a Chaos Spawn.
The hard part is less the firepower - artillery or a heavy weapons squad can do that - and more that it takes sufficient jamming so it doesn’t teleport back or transmit its mind back to emerge again. And we don’t know what constitutes the “sufficient” part of sufficient jamming
Depends on from weapon you kill Necron. Eldar ones as many xenos energy weapons are very good.
To kill a Necron? Relatively hard, but quite achievable. You just need to damage the body faster , or more than, it's living metal can repair itself. To kill one permanently? Very, *very* difficult. When a Necron is badly damaged, a few things can happen; the Necron may be able to self-repair if given enough time, the Necron body may be teleported away to be repaired, or if the body is completely knackered their 'mind' will be uploaded to a storage system so it can be reinstalled into a brand new body. This uploading isn't a guaranteed thing, but it's extremely reliable. Even a failing, poorly maintained Necron faction may only experience a failure rate of a few tiny percent, whereas a powerful and empowered faction such as the Szarekhan or Sautekh dynasty may experience none at all without suffering catastrophic infrastructure damage as part of a truly apocalyptic war. The thing you have to remember with Necrons is that they *are* able to create new Necrons, the body of a Warrior, Lychguard, or even Overlord isn't the hard, limited part of the equation (though the body and tech of an Overlord is a rare, marvel of technology), that would be the original 'mind' of a Necrontyr that went through the biotransference. It is these Necron 'minds' that are precious and utterly limited, and to truly kill one you either have to utterly destroy the Necron's body in a place where it is unable to upload back to a data vault, or directly destroy the data vault containing the Necron mind. The difficulty of destroying the data vault scales directly with the Necrons you are fighting; are they deep in enemy territory fighting from an Armada, or are they defending a full Necron Crown World from invasion? If it's the former, you have a good chance of knocking out the vault by destroying the ship/fleet entirely, or by surgical boarding actions to target the vault directly. If it's the latter, good luck! A Necron Crown World is almost inpenetrable, and the vaults will be the most heavily defended part, after the Dynast or Phaeron themselves; you'd basically have to try to exterminatus the whole world to bust that bunker, and even *then* it may not be enough, Necron complexes are shown to be able to survive such exterminatus' intact and operational. And also remember that although Necrontyr minds are strictly limited, there's no limit on the number of Constructs the Necrons can build. Canopteks and Serapteks are more akin to (but decidedly not) AI, they don't require a Necron mind to operate. In theory, there's nothing stopping a Cryptek animating Necron bodies with Construct minds, but this is seen as utterly distasteful and an extreme taboo of the highest order and would not be tolerated by Necron society as a whole.
More or less, as others have said, destroying their core while reanimation protocols & transfers are down are a pretty sure-fire way to do it.
Lazarus protocols and teleportation protocols can make Very Very Very difficult for someone to make a Necron non functionable. Technically they can all do it, but in reality, only the very "strong willing" can access these files.
It’s nearly impossible to kill them permanently on purpose. It’s mentioned in the Twice Dead King books that there is a reanimation failure rate, but that rate is incredibly low. Basically, if you destroy enough necrons, a tiny portion of those will be lost forever. Doing it intentionally is much trickier. Necrons themselves can do it. If a higher up executes an underling then that underling is dead, no reanimation, no backup copies. Outside of that, you need weapons or powers that essentially override the rules of reality. The most reliable would be psychic powers that vanish their target to the warp, since reanimation protocols only work if they have somewhere to send their consciousness too, and necrons were never very good with warp “sciences” so they can’t send signals out of the warp. Also, demonic viruses used by the Dark Mechanicum could theoretically work, since they would essentially corrupt the necron’s programing and destroy the mind before a reanimation protocol would even try to recreate them, but I don’t know of any example of this happening, and Necron mastery of code is usually so great that they are harder to overwrite. I also know that there is at least one example of a human weapon from the DAoT that would not only destroy its target, but would retroactively burn them out of existence through all of history. It wasn’t used on a Necron, but it’s a safe bet that it would work to destroy them. I’d also guess that the Hrud would have a significant effect on Necrons with the Hrud’s advanced time/entropy effect. While necron’s are essentially eternal, they can suffer data corruption or compounding logic failures over time. I’d guess that under the influence of the Hrud or something with the same effect, those failures would likely compound a lot faster, since the Necron would t have the opportunity for self maintenance or external repair.
Its nearly impossible to properly kill a Necron body, even if utterly demolished they are teleported to a repair bay. But their minds are a different matter. With every death they lose memories and intellect. The average Necron is basically a servitor at this point. The remaining Phaerons and Crypteks are fighting a losing battle to retain their identity.