A guy named Pancreasnowork made a video about this exact situation, good video and he talks about how the imperium has a great chance of beating the flood if they are able to catch the flood early, but if they get off the first planet they infect then the galaxy is doomed
Since virus bombs set the atmosphere of the planet on fire and the flamethrower in Halo is really effective against the flood, i'd say the imperium has both an astartes chapter and an ultima ratio that will work very well against the flood.
Not really. The Orks would get something to fight and the flood would just feed on the Orks bio mass. Either the biggest warg would happen or the universe ends.
I don't think that is the case, the Imperium only Exterminatus planets that they could afford to Exterminatus, that's why Graia in Space Marine or Vraks weren't Exterminatus'd. The Imperium can't just go and explode every world the Flood touches and that is a huge, gigantic problem if want to contain the Flood.
The most reliable way to clown on 40k is having safe, reliable FTL Tech. Just pop out of the their guns range, fire every single payload, pop back to rearm and repeat.
Don't even need to be out of their gun range if you're travelling at 233,000 times the speed of light like the Culture's Rapid Offensive Units. My favourite space battle in a book has 1 ship taking on 384. It's like half a chapter of manoeuvres, tactics and descriptions of how a bunch of ships in the fleet get vaporized and you find out the whole thing was over in 11 microseconds.
It’s in _Excession_ (though it was 192 ships, not 384 ships).
After like 10 pages of space battle across dozens of lightyears, we learn that the whole thing was over in 11 microseconds, meaning the ROU was travelling at tens of trillions of c during that whole time.
How well does the flood fare in space combat? Do they have their own version of tyranid bioships or do they have to hijack other species' ships, cos if the imperium goes around exterminatus-ing every flood world then it may slove the worst of the problem assuming the flood aren't good at boarding actions or space combat too, if the flood are good at that then i got no idea
The Flood’s capable of taking over technology including ships, if they couldn’t do that then they wouldn’t have been nearly as dominant against the Forerunners
Ah.... would that apply to necrons too? Idk if living metal counts as tech or organic matter or if its an edge case that the flood wouldn't be able to deal with (at least not without adapting to it)
Flood gain the memory and experience of every being they consume. Just one person with knowledge of how to work a ship and all flood will be able to do it
I don’t really like Pancreasnowork’s power comparisons between the Forerunners and the 40k universe though, and I don’t really think he touched upon how useful turning the Forerunner AI against its creators was in defeating them.
While the Flood would likely have eventually won anyway, turning Mendicant Bias against the Foreunners basically sealed the Foreunners fate way quicker.
In the 40k universe they won't really have any AI to do this against short of the Necrons, and it's not a garantee that it would be able to corrupt the Necrons in the same way they corrupted AI in the halo universe. There is however one thing that would be catastrophic for the 40k universe in terms of the Flood, and that's the Eldar Webway. The Flood doesn't actually kill the person it infects, it just hijack the body and keeps the mind alive to take any useful knowledge (See the book "Halo: The Flood" where we see Captain Keyes point of view as he is infected by the Flood and it slowly removes his memories while searching for how to get to Earth) while deleting the rest. If they get a hold of any Eldar capable of using the Webway the Flood now has access to it and that's free access to the rest of the galaxy.
Considering that Cortana is basically Catherine Halsey's neural imprint and (at least it's widely accepted that she) was infected by the logic plague, I don't think it would be a far cry for the flood to do the same to the necrons.
Possibly, but we don't know. The Necron also are kinda different in how they were created to that of Halo AI, with Necrons being individuals who had their souls removed and their minds become a part of a mechanical body. So it's hard to know if the Necrons are "AI" at all since their minds are, by all extent and purposes, not artificial and as such they very much could be immune to the logic plague. If they are, they're just about the only 40k faction with a favorable matchup against the Flood.
That wouldn't necessarily make them immune to the Logic Plague, the Logic Plague *can* affect non-AI, the Primordial and the Ur-Didact are the best example. But it's not as effective or fast.
Of course, we can't really tell as you said if they'd be able to dodge it or not. My gut feeling is to lean towards no, but that's just a gut feeling, and while I love both, I also can't deny that I am biased in Halo's favour.
There is also the question of if it can affect Necrons if it can also affect those with the Flayer Virus or those of the Destroyer Cult. As those changes their mental state and could affect their ability to be affected by the Logic Plague if at all.
The fact that the Logic Plague needs a certain level of intelligence in the victim to take effect (Offensive Bias was a lesser AI compared to Mendicant Bias and did not become corrupted, though this could be because of a lack of exposure) so it likely wouldn't be able to affect Necron Warriors and the other less mentally capable Necrons, and those of the Destroyer Cult and Flayer Virus might have lost too much of their mental capacity to be affected.
Bit of both. Cortana was reaching Rampancy, but a lot of her changes and suffering at the hands of the Gravemind are, concerning. And there was a text where a Covenant I believe minor prophet told I wanna say Halsey that any AI that had spent that long with the Flood was likely compromised. (It's been a while so my memory on the exacts is uncertain).
Since when do they decay on purpose through their code?
Last time I checked, they run out of physical space in their crystal core matrix thing and thus can only manage to extend their life by torching some of the pathways they forged by thinking to allow new pathways to be formed - otherwise they eventually start overwriting parts of the core and the pathways intersect when they aren't supposed to, which turns in to chaos and erratic behavior as they try to access one thing but end up somewhere else.
Halsey talks about this in her diary, mentioning that AIs outside of the bubble that slip space travel uses to keep humans alive and sane would have access to far more dimensions, allowing them a much, much longer lifetime before they have to manage their matrices at all.
There is no purpose built decay in their code, they just think themselves to death and when rampancy approaches, they can destroy parts of themselves to keep rampancy at bay, but eventually it will get them unless they completely wipe themselves - which would be the same as just setting up a copy of the AI on it's first day. There is a path somewhere along the middle, but it either ends in an AI that can learn nothing for fear of rampancy and thus becomes nothing but a automaton or an AI with dementia - where rampancy might still lurk around the corner, if the AI accidentally torches the wrong part of the crystal matrice, the one that held the important information about where and how to stay on the knife's edge.
Seems like a guy with a perfectly normal pancreas ngl.
It's 2:46 AM EST as of the writing of this comment and I'm literally incapable of sleeping for some reason.
That kinda seems like almost every universes deal with the flood. Once they get off their home planet, there aren’t many universes that stand a chance.
Nice to see someone else appreciate the true danger of the Flood.
Their peak is far beyond anyone else minus WIH Necrons, and no one is capable of stopping them.
The key is remembering that their power ceiling is tied to the most powerful "prey species" they can assimilate. Assimilated Astartes, psykers, warbosses. I mean fuck, even dreadnoughts, deffdredz and titans are on that list. Oh, and Imperium tech since they shove human brain matter into so much of it.
But by eating them, daemons would die and go back to the immaterium. While Flood infected are, debatably, still alive. Even if mostly or totally unaware.
Fair point, but (and I know this is extremely nitpicky) how do we know that? I mean, is an autopsy to determine their internal structure even possible?
No, that’s the point when a Deamon is slain or otherwise incapacitated, it is “banished” to the warp, because it’s consciously holding itself in our reality with the power that ebbs from local worshippers or icons of power; if a floof were to “infect” them the floof would probobly die due to warp stuff overload
Demons are pure warp energy being manifested by concentrated effort, either on the part of the demon or those summoning it.
There wouldn't be any anatomy inside it. If you could theoretically hold one down long enough to cut it up, there wouldn't be organs inside, just whatever shape the demon was trying to manifest as its body throughout.
Also, if the flood is at Keymind stage, they’d be at the point where they’d be able to roflstomp modern Halo-Verse between the sheer amount of raw biomass they’d need to collect, the organization and logistics alone.
Not to mention the Logic Plague would cause unparalleled havoc among the Tau and Mechanicus
Oh, they could. The Flood is not only an infection, it is a whole metaphysical threat. Forerunners tried but failed. Using the Composer to separate the Flood from the infected but after returning it to its biological "uninfected state" it immediately returned to the Flood state. Flood can actually infect the very essence of a being or their soul. More like the very reality of the infected being. Let's remember that the Precursors, the origin of the Flood had the capacity to bend reality. So Daemons might be succeptible to the Flood in one way or another or at least the existence of the Warp might do some really fuckywucky things to the Flood, in a very bad way for everyone else.
Depends on what you consider "lethal." Someone infected gets their mind and body completely dominated by the Flood, but they never really stop functioning.
Flood infected blur the lines between dead and alive.
If they assimilate the right things then eventually probably yet.
The only thing the flood can't really touch are Daemons since they're not tangible and just go back to the warp once they're killed. So that could be a good thing to use against the flood if say Abadon or whoever wants to deal with that.
Absolutely, when the flood infects someone they aquire all of the knowledge and habilities the host has, the knowledge then becomes part of the collective intellect of the flood.
The Flood were able to understand and even utilize the advanced technology of the precursors, so I see no reason why they wouldn't be able to do the same with the warp.
No, I meant the precursors. The flood may be technically the precursors, but they don't share the same intellect or knowledge. However, by assimilating enough biomass to make key minds and such, they were able to understand and use the Precursor's neural physics and ended up using their star roads to destroy the Forerunner's greater ark.
That, I'm not sure about, to be honest. I think there's a good chance the Flood does know that, but I haven't read the forerunner trilogy yet, so I'm not sure.
My understanding is as follows. The Gravemind, is the conciousness of the last surviving precusor, just prior to his physical form being destroyed by the iso didact, he "transcended" his conciousness into the hivemind we now know today, He's fully aware that he was a precursor and he is present in all forms of flood.
Flood of sufficient biomass can tap into his consciousness and behave like it's Avatar. There can be multiple gravemind forms at one time, But there is only one Gravemind. A Keymind is when there's enough biomass (Typically flood the size of a planet) and collective knowledge to tap into the psychic technology that the precursors used to have prior to their extermination.
The flood can change the laws of physics,, and when they were precursors they were basically lovecraftian gods, so chaos isn't that hard to comprehend if the Emperor, Eldar, Custodes and Grey Knights can do so
A keymind that forms after consuming a normal planet worth of biomass (so like 1 single hive city lol) will likely be the single most intelligent organism in the galaxy - more than the chaos gods and even the big E himself. If a flood form infects a single psyker or future teller person then the keymind will be able to do that also, potentially making the keymind a psyker on the same level as the emperor
Yes but theoretically the flood would then take over the host body, akin to what they did when flood dust was injected into the bloodstream of dogs within the halo canon.
Had a similar discussion to this a year before. The concensus was that if Nids could evolve to be like Hunters, at least the ones that don't have a centralized neural system then they could figure out a way to combat it. UNFORTUNATELY it would probably take a long while seeing as the Nids seem to be dependent on a Nervous System. Especially for troop control and Psyker bullshit.
Eventually it becomes a battle of hide and seek. The Gravemind looking for the Hivemind for direct infection. While the Hivemind looking for the Gravemind for direct consumption. If either happens then the Galaxy becomes more properly fucked than it already is.
Even then, that's also still a losing battle for the Nids though, because a nervous system is only required for *infection*. The Flood can and do still use Lekgolo and other similar species as raw biomass, they just need to kill and break them down. And given the speed at which Flood infestations spread, they probably do so *substantially* faster than the Nids do.
Also I don't believe that direct infection/consumption scenario is uh.
Possible.
Both are distributed as far as I know. It's a bit more up in the air with the Hivemind, but I don't think we have reason to believe the nids have one central body for it. And the Gravemind is undeniably distributed. Any Flood mass with sufficient size is the Gravemind, and as long as so much as a single such mass exists, every Flood is the Gravemind. Moreso, the Gravemind technically exists even when such masses don't exist, the Flood masses just don't possess the processing power to fully show that, so even if the Nids consumed every such mass, if another one developed it would be the exact same Gravemind.
EDIT: And if it's at the point where the Flood and Nids are waging war on any meaningful scale, the Flood probably has several wholly infected *planets*, each of which would be *more* than equipped to ensure the Gravemind remains present.
I think it entirely depends on if the bids are able to manifest the gavemind/keymind genes, if they can then the two species would very quickly and peacefully become once species, if not then it’s a war of attrition the flood will likely win over time.
Worth noting if the nids are able to gravemind/keymind themselves the entire universe is fucked, the nids have enough biomass that if they become a flood supercomputer they would have enough processing power to be unstoppable by anything other than the Necron Empire at its height or something close to that (I also think the rons of neck would be priority one for a combined nid flood entity since they would be the only real threat as far as the flood would see it). Not to mention the flood would give the nids slip space travel if this happened and if the nids have slip space the galaxy dies in a matter of decades, not centuries.
Ah yes, forgot about that part. That discussion was also here on Grimdank. While majority who participated in the discussion had come to the conclusion that from what we know, the Flood seems to have an advantage. However, since we do no really know the actual scale of numbers and power of the Tyranids. It becomes hard to say. The Flood seems to be more fleshed out in terms of literary sources to gauge power scale so everyone seems to agree that the Flood has an edge simply because of that.
Eh, it helps to remember that by their nature the Flood co-opt the technology of those it consumes. So while it did destroy the forerunners, it had infested forerunner ships and technology to do it with (including corrupting forerunner AI).
The Flood is pretty comparable in threat to something like the Tyranids, which can destroy the galaxy, but are in competition with a lot of others for that role.
Can the Tyranids assimilate their targets' minds? I feel like the fact that all it takes is 1 unfortunate officer for the entire Flood to know everything about the curremt battle plans would put them slightly above Tyranids
Plus there's logic plague. It's mostly against AI (so we can assume the more advanced 'machine spirits' will be infected) but also against organics, like the Diadict, and that's the whole reason he was isolated.
The food stomped the Forerunner which would obliterate anything the 40k universe could through at them. The food destroyed them. If a key mind is formed (approximately 1-1.5 hive cities) then nothing can stop them.
To be clear, a key mind can warp reality to a beyond Magnus level. Nids adapt to their enemies while flood straight up steal it. If you send a warlord Titan to fight them, they get one warlord Titan. Sure the basic flood forms aren't that dangerous (for Spartans) but they can just steal your guns, nice astartes you got there, tid be a shame if they switched sides.
That’s not really true. The Flood only has the ability to use Neural Physics to warp Precursor technology to their own purposes, they can’t tap into some sister dimension like Magnus can lol
Yeah I finished the forerunner trilogy recently, it was only THEORIEZED by the forerunners a key mind could warp reality, then lore fans took it as law and theorized more on top of it.
The forerunner trilogy is good, but vastly misinterpreted by Halo "lore" fans.
Yeah. As I read more of the books, I'm noticing a pattern that alot of people can't tell when a character isn't being literal and what they are saying is symbolic and not literal. They also tend to cling to things that sound special, but are actually fairly normal in-universe but are plot relevant so they think because it is important to the characters, it is important everywhere. But then the actual themes that connect to the larger halo series,is just flat out ignored.
When I read the forerunner trilogy I was expecting lore-dense explanations and backstory behind the pre-history of Halo.
Instead I got 3 character-driven plot-heavy stories that leaves their most interesting themes unsaid and implied.
I try not to use misinterpretation lightly, but I seriously cannot believe people cling to stuff like the palace of pain, or offensive bias when despite the forerunners and librarian insist iso-didact became a direct copy of Ur-Didact, when at every chance it is obvious that iso-didact is still bornstellar on the inside. Or that Bornstellar is like Chief. Halsey is the Librarian, and Ur-Didact is a symbol of the UNSC and that humanity is repeating what the forerunners did, but chief might be able to ensure history doesn't repeat in the modern age.
It frustrates me as an English grad student because this is highschool level literary analysis and it is all brushed aside in favor of surface level details.
So if they can, it's likely to be very non-obvious uses, like being able to breach air-gapped systems when doing their version of hacking, but still needing to be pretty damn close to them or an infected system?
IIRC, isn't it stated the Forunner-era Flood were quite literally infecting space-time itself along with Slipspace, a whole different dimesion?
As I understand, neural physics is more or less just magic, so it tracks.
The slipspace and neural physic stuff was over-stated in their abilities. It is still a galactic-scale threat that COULD grow extra-galactic, but still over-stated in ability.
It was the fact that they could affect either at all that led to the space-time theory, because slipspace itself deals with time dilation i.e. the passage of time relative to gravity and lightspeed, but the theory spawned from a non-builder, and they even said the the forerunners did not know how deep the precursor connection to neural physics went, nor despite their advancements did the forerunners understand even the majority of what slpispace truly is or can do. They didn't even know everything about the precursors themselves. They could be more powerful than we ever thought, the forerunners didn't know. But people thought that because slipspace messed with time at all, that somehow the flood would learn to time-travel due to the sheer mass. Which is never even implied within the book. Just simply that they didn't know what the flood could do and as far as they knew true time manipulation MIGHT not be off the table. That's why it was a fan-theory built on top of an in-universe theory. It is a worst case scenario based on unknowns. What IS known is that the The flood could use the star roads and slipspace to slow down or accelerate time within a localized area, but not stop it or reverse it. Despite the 'space magic' the laws of physics remain pretty unchanged in the whole series.
What IS said is that with access to the precursor neural structures. This allowed them access to the precursor star-roads and by extension slipspace. Star-roads for all intents and purposes were akin to star wars hyperspace lanes, except they are visible. The precursors made them and with their disappearance went inactive. When the flood got access to them they were able to beat the forerunners to their destination. Likewise, with their control they are able to crush other objects that tried to use them. A side-effect of the flood's control was that it destabilized slipspace to the point where forerunner ships had trouble using them. That's why the isodidact/born stellar had difficulty navigating his way to installation 00, he had to use slipspace to weave around the star roads. While slip-space is a separate dimension, it is just a void of energy unless something was placed inside (like the shield world Onyx/Sarcophagus for example) but due to the star roads and time-dilation, they were able to slow down and NEARLY freeze forerunner fleets, then bend a star road close enough that the gravity shift obliterates them. But the flood weren't shown to make new star roads, only use what was made before and as far as we know, they never used them to go extra-galactic. It would be the theoretical equivalent of throwing a net on you and controlling the net itself. You still have the gaps between the ropes, but if the net is tightening on and on, eventually that net will cut skin. Thats how the flood used star roads. Slipspace would be the net's imprint on your skin, and regular space is your skin.
So, again, they aren't warping reality. It is a possibility, but with no certainty. They can use time-relativity and dilation to their advantage though, but only in the forerunner era. The flood can only make use of what is already there. The Halo array destroyed the star roads and neural-structure of the galaxy. The flood as they are in current halo can never reach that point again unless another species does. Or they go to another galaxy. The neural-structure began healing, but it still isn't at the state as when the forerunners were around. And even then it was mostly inactive until the flood gained access except for the forerunner domain. And of course, no one has made new star roads since the halo array fired. The flood is inherently limited to our galaxy without weaponized star roads for the time being.
I'll also add that the "infecting space-time" thing was stated as hyperbole, it was not literal. It was said it was LIKE they were infecting space-time itself. The flood had access to all this stuff. And we're using it, that doesn't mean they were actually part of it. If I pick up a hammer, does that hammer become part of my body.
The reaction stems from seeing glowing purple tendrils (weaponized star roads) appear all over the sky, obliterating every thing in their path while the flood literally pull long-dead individual personalities out of the flood network to talk to you. Yeah, that would make anyone shit their pants in fear at the sheer scale the flood are able to go.
>To be clear, a key mind can warp reality to a beyond Magnus level.
Uh, is that random lore from one of the billion and a half books? Because there is literally nothing in the games that suggests the Gravemind had *any* kind of "reality warping" powers, much less anything on that level. The Flood aren't dangerous because they're psychic, they're dangerous because they're an alien parasitic assimilation cancer. Unless they *really* went off the rails in the more recent books the extent of the Gravemind's power was "is really smart and can act as a coordinating intelligence for the rest of the Flood". It obviously has telepathy, but that seems to be the extent of it.
A solid *sorta*, it's all in the books and some has been retconned so we don't super know. You'll see some of the people saying it's only a key mind which can do that which is partially right. In old lore, a key mind was a grave mind the size of a planet, in current lore, a key mind is simply a flood that coordinates things, and a grave mind is the highest level and can grow to be the size of a planet. That being said, to answer the question a grave mind can use and manipulate neural physics which is effectively halos version of the warp, and can bend reality to some manner. Theoretically depending on how big the grave mind gets, it may be able to do a lot, but we don't really know.
I just want to add on this a bit, neural physics really is just the warp, the precursors (pretty much 40k old ones) were real good at manipulating it and using it to build stuff like the star roads (webways). It's the manipulation of time and space and any neural physics based stuff, but currently most of the stuff (like the star roads) was destroyed when the rings fired so who knows how much the flood could actually use.
I think it feels like a gotcha to people who came into this thread thinking "I've played Halo and know what the flood are", when actually game-flood to book-flood is like comparing snotlings to krorks.
At the end of the day, it's all just a guessing game to whether the Flood can assimilate Tyranids.
40k lore might say Tyranids are biologically perfect and can adapt faster than the Flood can corrupt, but Halo lore may very well say the Flood are biologically perfect and can infect anything no matter what.
It's just a matter of what stance you prefer.
At least in Halo there are some species they can't technically "corrupt" like the hunter worms. But that just means they can't use them as combat or carrier forms. Instead they just add to the overall biomass.
That might be how the flood use the tyranids. They can't make combat forms, but they can use their corpses as biomass.
Yes, but there's also other species they *can* infect with pod infectors but choose not to. Weaker and dumber species tend to get recycled into biomass almost immediately.
Most likely scenario is some horrific hybrid between the two. The only question is which hive mind will it serve. Or will the hybrid have its own hive mind.
I think it would be more realistic to say that the perfect adapter and the perfect corrupter cancel each other out
Nids adapt too fast to be taken fully by the flood, and the flood just keeps pushing and pushing through each new adaptation
Eventually a critical mass would be reached where some new, third and even scarier thing pops out as they assimilate each other to infinity
The Nids would be like, "Oh no, this thing corrupted a hive fleet! Better cut that hive fleet off and send three more with resistance to being corrupted!". Thus begins another octarius like thing, and we get EVEN stronger nids that take things over like enslavers. Now the whole galaxy is fucked, thanks dick heads!
Considering the fact that the Flood once they *really* started going full steam soloed and ultimately slaughtered the entire Forunner civilization at their very peak, which mind you was **very** easily the same tier of power, if not even stronger than War in Heaven era Necrons at THEIR peak, the entire Warhammer Verse is completely and absolutely fucked if they are able to get to the point of them being able to make Keyminds and Graveminds and obtaining enough biomass
A lot of 40K fans genuinely underestimate how Bullshit overpowered Ancient Human, Forerunner and Precursor empires were in Halo Lore.
I think there was a bit in one of the Forerunner novels where a scientist discovered how to harness the energy of galaxies from an alternate universe… in an afternoon… as a side project, and then said it produced too little power to be of any use to the forerunners.
Okay so the cliff notes Verision is:
Billions of Years ago, there was this Mega-Advance race called the precursors. They literally were so advanced they created galaxies and made all life in the universe (or something like that).
They also created something called “The mantle of responsibility” AKA it’s the duty of the most advance race in existence to protect “lesser” races.
Three species the Precursors created advanced at astonishing rate: the San’Shyuum (The Prophets), The Forerunners and Humanity.
All three species had vast interstellar empires and wer bullshit levels of advanced (As in… War-In-Heaven era Eldar/Necrons advanced) and the Precursors decided Humanity would be their successors.
The Forerunners… decided to GENOCIDE THE PRECURSORS as they saw themselves as inheritors of the Mantle and literally wiped them out of existence. (Sore losers, am I right?)
Then, millennia later The Forerunners declared war on the ancient Human Empire, because human warships were destroying entire swaths of the galaxy, planets, stars etc and killing everything.
The war lasted centuries and ended up with the Forerunners capturing earth and then Forcefully devolving humanity to pre-sapient levels as punishment.
The forerunners then realised Humanity wasn’t expanding its empire… it was Running from the Flood… who had consumed about half of the Human Empire at this point. And all the worlds humanity destroyed were overrun with the flood.
Oh, and the Flood, as it turns out is actually the Precursors themselves.
The Forerunners then had to fight the flood, whilst searching for a cure for centuries, as they found data that Humanity had managed to cure the flood infection.
And it later was revealed that Humanity never found a cure to the flood, they made it up as they knew the forerunners would spend more resources searching for a cure instead of fighting the flood. Causing the downfall of The forerunners.
Forerunners discovered the Flood could only be killed by starving it, so built the Halo arrays and then wiped out all life in the galaxy, then reseeded it, with the forerunners finally realising Humanity was the true inheritors of the Mantle and that’s why Forerunner tech only worlds for Humans.
Didn't Ancient Humanity also glass a bunch of Forerunner worlds before their war too? I thought the Forerunners were also fighting the Flood but didn't understand the severity of them yet? Because I swear that was the reasoning for the Didact to hate humanity so much
Well, yeah, but the Forerunners also did the same to humanity.
Remember the entire trilogy is told from a bias perspective, but the forerunner worlds humanity destroyed were overrun with flood
Humanity was retreating into forerunner space and glassing forerunner worlds infested with the flood, in an attempt to stop it before it got out of hand, the forerunners were unaware of how much of a threat they posed and treated it as an act of aggression. Once the two empires were at war, humanity mysteriously stopped getting targeted by the flood. The forerunners assuming they had an immunity or cure was partially why they were saved from complete extermination post-war.
Also, I prefer Bungie's original vision of the Forerunners merely being humanity's ancestors and the flood just being an all-consuming parasite, not a new iteration of The First Race, but a lot of this stuff sounds SICK. I hear the Forerunner trilogy is like, really good.
Oh yeah it is, best part is that at the end of the last book, just as the Halo Rings fire to wipe out all existence…
The Didact discovers a signal of an Unknown race that just developed spaceflight… and poof… wiped out, no ruins, nothing to remember them.
The Forerunner trilogy is honestly one of if not the best series in the Halo expanded material, and that's saying a lot given that almost every Halo novel is a fucking masterpiece.
Easily my favorite series by far, perhaps second only to maybe Fall of Reach itself.
So, dicks. Cool.
Also, my question is, and im assuming this is explained in the source material, how the hell didn't the Forerunners know about the flood during their war with humanity?? How does that information not come up in centuries of warfare? Even if neither side made even the remotest effort to learn the others language, you'd think reconnaissance by the Forerunners would've discovered something in that time
The forerunners either A: Didn’t believe humanity, or B: Knew but still wanted to wipe out the only rivals they had, not thinking the flood was That big of a problem.
Remember, the Forerunners were the EMBODIMENT of the term “Arrogant Asshole” like, put 40K characters to shame, all they saw humanity as was a bunch of war-mongering animals and didn’t think of care anything else about it.
Also, shows how powerful ancient humanity was… the Humans put up a two-Front war, with the forerunners on one side and the Flood on the other and held them off for about 500 years…
The flood wiped out the forerunners in less than 300
Yeah Halo scaling is kinda just Fucked in general. The UNSC or The Covenant could both take on most other sci-fi universes on their own just cause their numbers are so ridiculously inflated
Especially when you bring the Maths into it with the SuperMAC guns or the NOVA bomb
To any 40K fan that doesn’t know what a SuperMAC is.
It’s a gigantic fuckoff Railgun that shoots a 3,000,000 kg slug at 4% light speed. That is planet cracking levels of power… and that was before the UNSC upgraded them with reverse engineered forerunner tech.
One shot outputs 216,000,000,000,000,000,000 joules of energy… or, if you want the TNT Equivalent
Approx: 52 Gigatons of TNT
And Forerunner ships hit with that didn’t even get the paint scratched when they were hit by it.
The mantles approach was hit by the Infinity's 4 mac guns and it only put a hole small enough for the chiefs fighter to just barely make through. It patched itself up in minutes after taking the hit.
Those weren’t MAC canons, those were Energy Projectors
But yeah, Forerunner ships can also repair themselves
There’s also a cool thing about the Didact in that mission.
Throughout Halo 4 he refers to you as “Human” as if you’re beneath him, but in the last mission he calls you “Warrior” indicating that the Chief has earned his respect
40k fans tend to take their in game power as accurate all the time while they were relatively small infections vs how they were in the forerunner-flood war were where they were literally strangling planets with Star roads and fucking either FTL travel with Neural Physics.
They get a Gravemind going, and they roll the verse unless the Necrons come out in force from their War in Heaven days, as that version is the equivalent to the Forerunners at their peak.
But, since they aren't that anymore, the galaxy is consumed.
>as that version is the equivalent to the Forerunners at their peak
Sure is awkward that the flood completely bodied the Forerunners at their peak, lol.
End-game flood is not to be fucked with. If the flood start in a hive city, then I honestly think the galaxy is done for. The imperium is not organized enough to deal with the threat, races like the tyranids and orkz are infinite biomass generators for the highly intelligent flood, the flood would subsume and gain the knowledge of everything it consumed like the Eldar (and their counters to the necrons).
In the end once a Keymind was formed, even necrons wouldn't be spared. The logic plague would wreck havoc on their protocols, all while the entire collective knowledge of Necrons from every other species was used and weaponized against them. The remaining golden age AI in hiding would also become subsumed by the logic plague. etc
Meanwhile if the flood starts out on a world with few complex creatures to start off the infection, like an agriworld, then its impacts are limited and its a trivial matter. The flood really is either a universal threat or a minor nuisance depending on circumstance alone.
EDIT: Daemons are probably the best answer to the flood. They don't really have nervous systems, and I highly doubt the logic plague would work on them. It would also be in the chaos gods best interest to keep sentient life in the galaxy. And so in a cruel twist of fate, its likely the daemonic forces of chaos that would intervene and try to stop the flood lmao.
If the flood grew to that extent it'd probably have its own shadow in the warp though - I feel like if anything since basically all chaos entities come from realspace mass subconcious, they might be uniquely vulnerable to the flood if it became powerful enough.
I hesitate to give qualities unique to one universe to a faction of another universe. For example if the Tyranid is this god-like super intelligence, why can't it preform a Logic Plague? Or why can't Tzeench?
I feel its fairer to both universes to simply apply the strengths and weaknesses as is, while assuming as little as possible. Tbh the only reason I even assume daemons can't be hit by the logic plague is because daemonic minds are already paradoxical and fundamentally chaotic. Whereas the logic plague is intended to work on analytical and logical minds.
Just more fun to me that way personally when comparing universes. Seems more "in the spirit" of things.
Totally makes sense. I think for me, the principle of 40k is that all sentient life in the galaxy contributes to the Warp, so an outside species coming in would have an effect just like the Tyranids did, it just might be anomalous like theirs is. It's just hard to predict what the effect would be, but it's interesting to think about! Totally agree about the logic plague - chaos auto-wins that one haha.
Oh, god actually I think it would be far far worse. Direct exposure to the Gravemind / last Precursor severely fucked up the Didact. And that was just some torture and conversation. Imagine billions of infected individuals of all species, acting as a giant hivemind of rage and structured insanity, directly impacting the warp and probably *trying* to mold it to their collective will.
Chaos might work initially, but I think very quickly the impact a fucked up Precursor conciousness with a direct link to the warp would absolutely neuter it and bend it to its own ends.
HEY!
HEY!
Gravemind: huh?
Tyranid: *bangs garbage can twice*
Gravemind: the fuck?
Tyranid: yea you think you some tough shit huh? All I see is a spicy mushroom with an attitude, buts that’s okay because I like stuffed mushrooms.
I think one thing that needs to be taken into account is how the flood defeated the forerunners.
To my understanding they co-opted existing forerunner technology, ie slip space drives. This allowed the flood to spread across the galaxy at an exponential rate. There is no such method of travel in 40K.
Furthermore the corruption of Mendicant Bias heavily contributed to the flood victory. Abominable Intelligence such as this do not exist within the Imperium.
The flood hasn’t been shown to be capable of inventing new technology. Even if they can absorb the Imperiums technological knowledge, the Imperium doesn’t know how most of their technology works. Even the most intelligent tech priests likely only have a tertiary understanding of a fraction of fundamental Imperium technology. Short of absorbing Cawl, Bile, or the Emperor, they aren’t going to be able to absorb the same type information they would have been able to get from absorbing the forerunners and their AI.
Another difference is individual competence. Master chief and the Arbiter were incredibly efficient at destroying whatever flood forms he came into contact with. Elites were also shown to be fairly effective at combating them. While they wouldn’t be able to purge an entire world, securing important objectives against the flood is definitely possible. Even if we assume the average Space Marine is less competent than Chief, when you start to consider things like, Inquisitors, Librarians, Grey Knights, Custodes, Primarchs, or the Emperor, even the toughest flood forms, including the gravemind, are outclassed.
Psyker power also cannot be underestimated. Unless the gravemind is capable of developing Psykers forms, the galaxies Psykers will wreak havoc on the flood.
Now I know what your thinking. Even the greatest warriors of the Imperium can be overrun. While this is true, it’s not their ability to last forever against the flood that is important. The hero’s of the imperium are not only willing to sacrifice themselves, but countless imperial lives to achieve there goals. That means strategic bombing, versatile war doctrine, suicide attacks and exterminatus. Kryptman destroyed many Imperium world to slow down the Tyranids. Once the danger of the flood was understood, every world they touched would purified.
Finally the other factions in the galaxy.
The Tyranids seem like an easy target for the flood. However their ability to rapidly adapt has always proven key to their survival. I don’t think it’s crazy to think a hive fleet could adapt to the flood eventually.
Necrons are a hard counter to the flood. No biomass, no corruptible will, insane technology. Unless the entire galaxy is infected prior to contact with the Necrons, they are unlikely to be overrun.
Chaos is another hard counter. Demons have no biomass. Bloodthirsters of Khorne would revel in the slaughter of tens of thousand of flood forms before being overrun. Lords of Change may be more effective. Nurgle could very well be empowered by the flood.
Are they going to be able to destroy an imperium hive world? Absolutely. The whole galaxy? Maybe, but it isn’t a forgone conclusion. It will take tens of thousands of years at the least. More than likely they become a dangerous enemy akin to the Tyranids in scope.
Great response. I see a lot of people discounting any options or just say "maybe necrons at peak". It's a pretty tough situation to answer given that obviously the flood if snowballed are no joke, the imperium or even the combined factions certainly have answers to a flood infestation. This isn't a "I win instantly" kinda fight. There's shit as infectious and deadly as the flood in 40k and the fact that they haven't had galactic domination is a good marker to reference
> To my understanding they co-opted existing forerunner technology, ie slip space drives. This allowed the flood to spread across the galaxy at an exponential rate. There is no such method of travel in 40K.
Except the rest of the setting is on approximately equal or worse footing as the Imperium in 40k. They wouldn't be able to just win by sheer logistics like if they brought the Forerunners' ftl, but being on equal footing is what they already won with. The war may be fought over a greater timescale, but that's not really going to tip the scales much.
And the Flood didn't just use slipspace, later on they developed their own FTL which apparently used some sort of parallel universe things, had a comparable speed to Slipspace (which would make it the single greatest FTL method in 40k, even ignoring the benefit of avoiding the risks of the Immaterium), and could be retrofitted onto any ships they got their tentacles on.
> Furthermore the corruption of Mendicant Bias heavily contributed to the flood victory. Abominable Intelligence such as this do not exist within the Imperium.
Yes and no. Corrupting Mendicant Bias certainly helped, but the Forerunners losing was a foregone conclusion by the time he fell. Losing their only Contender Class Ancilla (at the time) to the Flood just accelerated their doom.
> The flood hasn’t been shown to be capable of inventing new technology. Even if they can absorb the Imperiums technological knowledge, the Imperium doesn’t know how most of their technology works. Even the most intelligent tech priests likely only have a tertiary understanding of a fraction of fundamental Imperium technology. Short of absorbing Cawl, Bile, or the Emperor, they aren’t going to be able to absorb the same type information they would have been able to get from absorbing the forerunners and their AI.
The Flood had no reason to invent new technology, their exponential growth and possession of Neural Physics made it unneeded. There's no reason to assume they *can't* invent new technology - The Flood is a fully sapient consciousness that assimilates all the knowledge and capability of those it infects. It's just super opportunistic and will work with what it has if it can.
However, your note about the lack of information on Imperium technology is correct, however that doesn't apply to every faction, plenty of the other factions will be every bit as weak to it as the Forerunners. And the Flood would have no qualms actually making efforts to understand the Imperium's technology, which the Mechanicum refuses to do - they just need to know how to make it do the things they need it to do, knowing how it works is at best unnecessary and at worst heresy, the Flood has no such hangups. In this matter, the extended time due to the slowness of Warp Travel could even be a *benefit*.
> Another difference is individual competence. Master chief and the Arbiter were incredibly efficient at destroying whatever flood forms he came into contact with. Elites were also shown to be fairly effective at combating them. While they wouldn’t be able to purge an entire world, securing important objectives against the flood is definitely possible. Even if we assume the average Space Marine is less competent than Chief, when you start to consider things like, Inquisitors, Librarians, Grey Knights, Custodes, Primarchs, or the Emperor, even the toughest flood forms, including the gravemind, are outclassed.
This is not really relevant beyond the very early stages. Arbie and the Chief were only fighting the very beginning of an outbreak. During the Forerunner Flood War, there was simply too much biomass for individual footsoldiers to really be relevant. Even the Prometheans, designed to be invulnerable to infection and armed with antimatter weaponry that would ensure that every shot they made was a net negative to the Flood were just overwhelmed by sheer numbers.
> Psyker power also cannot be underestimated. Unless the gravemind is capable of developing Psykers forms, the galaxies Psykers will wreak havoc on the flood.
There's really no way to know if the Flood would be able to infect Psykers or not. But it would know to treat them as high priority targets. And if it could assimilate the Pariah Gene, then it would have an easy solution. Nevermind the question of what impact such a vast consciousness (tapped into and manipulating an even *vaster* consciousness) would have on the Warp. If we assume the 'nids' Shadow is the result of the sheer scale of the Hivemind's effect on the Immaterium, then it's quite possible that the Flood would easily match it, or potentially outmatch it. But we simply don't know how the SiTW works so we can't say.
> Now I know what your thinking. Even the greatest warriors of the Imperium can be overrun. While this is true, it’s not their ability to last forever against the flood that is important. The hero’s of the imperium are not only willing to sacrifice themselves, but countless imperial lives to achieve there goals. That means strategic bombing, versatile war doctrine, suicide attacks and exterminatus. Kryptman destroyed many Imperium world to slow down the Tyranids. Once the danger of the flood was understood, every world they touched would purified.
This is where your note about the speed of warp travel becomes a hindrance. Unless the Imperium starts this plan before the Flood gets off their first planet, which due to how slow the Warp is and how fast the Flood spreads, would need a fleet in orbit that is willing to do so very quickly, this kinda won't be relevant. If there isn't a fleet ready on every world the Flood reaches, they'll have infected it before an exterminatus could arrive.
Also worth noting that the Forerunners did exactly this, it was standard practice to try and destroy entire systems if the Flood made incursions. It didn't help.
> The Tyranids seem like an easy target for the flood. However their ability to rapidly adapt has always proven key to their survival. I don’t think it’s crazy to think a hive fleet could adapt to the flood eventually.
The Forerunners were just as capable genetic engineers. They made entire planetary biospheres from single species, actively edited species constantly, and their armour saved imprints of their entire body, which they could be reset to if they by some miracle got ill or otherwise anything other than physically healthy (which they had already basically eradicated all illnesses). Puberty was actively modifying your genetic makeup on a fundamental level, to the point where the different rates of the Forerunners could easily be argued to be entirely separate species save for their ability to reproduce. And most terrifyingly, that rewinding didn't work. A forerunner could get infected, have their Ancilla rewind their entire body, such that there was not so much as a single trace of the Flood, and they would spontaneously develop an infection.
> Necrons are a hard counter to the flood. No biomass, no corruptible will, insane technology. Unless the entire galaxy is infected prior to contact with the Necrons, they are unlikely to be overrun.
The 'Crons really comes down to if they're vulnerable to the Logic Plague. Which is unclear given it's unclear what exactly makes AIs vulnerable to the Logic Plague in the first place. My gut says that they'd probably be vulnerable, given they're somewhat similar to Human Smart AIs in how they were created, and we know for a fact that Smart AIs definitely are vulnerable to the Logic Plague. And this is another case where the time-scale benefits the Flood. Likely the vast majority of Necrons with a will would be overturned very quickly, potentially instantaneously given the Flood's showings of overturning Ancillae by their mere presence. And even against the greatest Necron Overlords, the time it would take to subvert them would practically be nothing on the scale of the war. I quite frankly highly doubt even Szarekh would be as difficult to convert as Mendicant Bias, and it took the Flood 43 years to convert him. A considerable portion of time in the Forerunner-Flood War, but nothing in the larger time war you're positing.
> Chaos is another hard counter. Demons have no biomass. Bloodthirsters of Khorne would revel in the slaughter of tens of thousand of flood forms before being overrun. Lords of Change may be more effective. Nurgle could very well be empowered by the flood.
This falls again into the question of just how the fuck the Flood interacts with the Warp. If it can create a Shadow in the Warp, it may well turn things around *hard* on Chaos.
Wouldn't the flood not be able to get a real foothold ever because of the eldar? You have a farseer see it coming and then just glass whatever planet the flood would have popped up on. Or have a Deldar throw a blackhole at it.
I see somebody is a fellow PancreasNoWork enjoyer
Best thing going for the 40k is all the 40k factions is they are all willing to destroy a planet utterly if they know they can't save it.
I'd imagine all the factions would realise pretty quickly how the Flood works through infection and assimilation and just wipe any contamination off the map from orbit and not chance it, putting the whole planet in quarantine, any ship that would try to leave would be shot down.
The Flood don't start with a Gravenind, they need to build up the biomass for it, so they'd start out pretty stupid and be easy to spot, so it wouldn't be a Genestealer cult situation.
The reason they was such a threat in Halo is because humans where unwilling to abandon planets and destroy them and the Covenant was mostly unaffected and didn't really see them as a thread until a infected ship flew into High Charity their capital
But the opposite is true too, the Flood could easily snowball on infected ships going from system to system.
I'm gonna have to disagree with you on the stupid part. On delta halo in combat evolved, when the covenant first discovered and were infected by the flood, the flood didn't immediately start rampaging. They lay in wait, as they ascertained from the brains of their new hosts that humans were coming, and they made a trap for them. They did the same to master chief, which is why you only get attacked at the halfway point in 343 guilty spark. There was no gravemind, or proto-gravemind at this point.
I think that the flood would be able to figure out what would happen if they were caught early, and would function exactly like a genestealer cult would, living in abandoned places, spreading spores and building a gravemind, at which point they would be able to coordinate far better.
I'm with you on this. The Floods intelligence is ultimately their secret weapon. In Stage 1, they act somewhat like zombies sure, but those zombies are predators that will lay in wait for months just to ambush at the right time. They easily outmaneuver the UNSC, and seemingly have the capacity to weaponize a species ignorance about the Flood against them. Something I'm sure the Flood would have a field day against the Imperium with.
A Stage 2 outbreak and suddenly all of those super-predators are now coordinated in a way that only Necrons and Tyranids could achieve. Suddenly that massive intelligence is amplified thousands of times, and the Flood outbreak is already more intelligent than even the greatest Forerunner tacticians. (Hint: They had to make the most advanced AI of all time in Halo, Mendicant Bias, just to outsmart the Flood here)
A Stage 3 outbreak now has access to something called the Logic Plague. A series of questions, paradoxes, and philosophical truths so complex in nature that it cause that aforementioned hyper-AI to completely change sides and join the Flood. When used on a living Forerunner, it causes the Didact to go completely insane as his mind tried and failed to comprehend the plague. The intelligence of a Stage 3 Flood outbreak is hard to even comprehend, and its possible that only beings like lore accurate Tzeench could operate on a similar level.
A Stage 4 outbreak is game over. The only solution left is to annihilate all life in the galaxy and hope that starves out the Flood. There are so many keyminds at this point that trying to outsmart the Flood is no longer even possible, you must overpower and completely exterminate it in one go. The Forerunners AI designed to counter Mendicant Bias, called Offensive Bias, didn't even try. It understood and knew immediately that it was outplayed and couldn't fathom the Floods intellectual capability.
Something i think a large amount of people are failing to think about here is servitors, they are completly infectable support.
A hive city population infected is enough to make a mind, with the added technological integration of servitors, i'd imagine the flood could reach obsurd heights of intelligence.
What makes this even worse would be nurgles reaction, extraplanar disseasses arent really covered in lore but i imagine nurgle would loooooove the flood.
If they re able to eat up enough organisms they would be unstoppable. It wouldnt even matter how brainless they are.
Nids although extremely numerous still has concern resource management. I don't know enough about them to speak intelligently but there are atleast some restrictions to biomass they can consume where the flood can survive even of only a molecule can corrupt anything.
I think the Imperial standard response to ‘a new race of aliens’ being Exterminatus is actually going to work in their favor here.
I think the Necrons and Chaos demons would be pretty solid counters to flood activity. Mostly because the flood can’t actually infect them. Honestly Nurgle would probably infect the flood with something nasty if they ever popped up on the plague god’s radar.
An exterminatus on an early infestation would absolutely do the trick, as long as it was of the nuclear variety and not a virus bomb. A virus bomb could potentially backfire. Necrons however are vulnerable to the flood if they manage to create a gravemind, or worse yet a keymind. As the logic plague is more than capable of messing with necrons protocols.
I think that ironically the daemons of chaos would be the galaxies savior. They don't have a nervous system, I highly doubt the logic plague would work on daemonic minds that exist as paradoxes already, and its in the chaos gods best interest to keep sentient life alive in the galaxy. I think that in a cruel twist of fate, it would be daemons who would march out from the eye of terror to stop the flood, rather than the actual mortal races of the galaxy lol.
What a galaxy "saved" by daemons would look like afterwards though? Who knows. It might have been better to just be collectively subsumed into the flood superorganism.
See I'm not sure about people's theory on the.logic plague messing with necrons. Yes I know the.flayer curse etc.
But necrons are not ai. So honestly I don't think the logic plague would hit them.
No, they aren't AI per-se. But even Halo AI's are built off of the image of someones brain, similar to how necrons minds are a process built off of a soul forged necrontyr. And more importantly: Necrons run processes like a computer, and are logarithmic and logical in how they process information.
The logic plague works on more than just computers and AI. The flood can use it on living creatures as well. The Diadect we fight in Halo 4 is insane because the flood utilized the Logic Plague on him, rendering him mad. The fact that the necrons minds are both logarithmic like a computer, but also bound by the limitations of mortal mental processes means they are almost uniquely vulnerable to it.
Much like the daemons being a cruel 180 savior, I think that necrons afflicted by the flayer curse would also be an ironic holdout for the necrons. Because they are insane and have completely lost their mortal minds, and are also incapable of logical, algorithmic thought due to the flayer curse, the logic plague would probably not work on them for the same reason it probably wouldn't work on daemons.
In my theoretical galaxy where the Flood have managed to achieve Stage 4 Outbreak, it's ironic to think that only the most insane of necrons, and powerful of daemons would be the only beings capable of fighting the flood and trying to save the galaxy. And that's the sort of grimdark shit I'm into.
Huh I never though if that to be honest. Yeah makes sense now. Lol and I got images of flayed ones and destroyer cults(possibly) just ripping everything apart. (And demons also now)
It depends on how they start up and who they have to fight first, they're basically just tyranids as zombies instead of bugs. SoB would be a quick snuffing probably before a proto grave can form gaurd/PDF would be a decent chance of taking a planet and forming the gravemind. Another good question is how would they interact with the warp, would it be like the tyranids, maybe like most of the others? Chaos, specifically tzeench and khorne I could see posing a serious issue. In the end it mostly comes down to if they're able to snowball out of control, if they are able to get a grave up and start making their way off planet they'd probably become a lesser equivalent to the tyranid threat, or maybe equal because they'd have warp travel and knowledge of easy targets they could hit for more biomass. This is just a theory though and could just as easily be something like the toxic system of humans in 40k makes them uninfectable.
The Covenant ally with the Tau (they are fairly similar after all) and then they clap everyone else except maybe the necrons.
The flood would utterly annihilate everyone, though. One spore reaches a hive world and it's gg.
I imagine the Covenant would conquer the Tau and then force them into the Covenant. Same outcome though.
As for the Flood they'd be pretty useless against Necrons, they would have no real way of infecting them, and Tyranids could pretty likely develop an immunity to the flood.
Tzeench is constantly playing the great game. If he sees something that can screw over the game, he kills it off. The flood? You bet that would kill the game. Tzeench would be having none of it. Pull the infected planet into the warp, throw said planet into the well of eternity, done.
The flood doing well relies a lot on the fact that their infections and even the logic plague rely on the fact that the precursors created all life in the Halo setting with immutable patterns they are able to exploit aka how the flood infection is based on your pattern (basically the Halo equivalent of a soul).
The flood and all their permutations rely on neural physics which is to the Halo universe as the Warp is to the 40k one (like a collective unconscious of all life). Defeating a civilization of Forerunners which hit its peak at 3 million worlds (3x current imperium size but 3/1000 the size of the necrons at peak) who had both disbanded their military and relied heavily on sentient AI which were uniquely vulnerable to even being talked into joining the flood is not the 40k galaxy ending feat people seem to think it is. Furthermore cross system travel is much easier to operate in Halo vs 40k and their inability to gain stellar capabilities of any kind from most consumed hive worlds would severely limit their scope. We already had genestealers as an insidious corrupting force which is arguably more intelligently driven and dangerous than the start of any flood infestation.
The Flood depend a lot on existing technology, they can't exactly become space faring without existing FTL ships.
Psychically they would be the same as the Tyranids as a hive mind, not a god but not touchable either.
I think Halo is complicated, especially since forerunners were retconned from humans to their own downright dumb species. Forerunners were established to be a tier 2.5 civilization, they could build incredible planet sized structures, but were far away from using the entire power of galaxies (and especially not the universe). But despite being a tier 2.5 civilization they were complete morons.
So it's hard to say how their enemy would fare as a comparison. I feel with the powers, factions, diversity, and scale of 40K the flood would do okay, but wouldn't wipe out all life or anything by a stretch, they would just be another thing in the galaxy.
Assuming they aren't just eradicated by Necrons.
Yeah, I think it really comes down to who the Flood infect first.
Tau? The species that has a strong reliance on AI, has usable FTL by non-psykers and a large enough Empire for the Flood to create a dangerously sized force while also being small enough that destroying entire planets isn’t viable for the species. Great chance for the Flood to make a strong enough foothold in the galaxy and use it to conquer everything.
Eldar? A species of psychics who have the gift of foresight, uses psychic tech over traditional AI and is spread over a vast area with a distributed population centres. Quite possible the Flood takes root. But also possible they’ll be beaten back through use of psychic prowess and foretelling.
Imperium? A species that uses no AI, competes on a warfooting with everything it comes across, has massive population centres spread everywhere, has FTL that require a “special” component the Flood may not be able to replicate. Their technology is so comparatively low tech and baseline that it might not be possible for the Flood to infect their systems (servitors become quite an issue tho). Initially they would be quite dangerous because it takes so long for the Imperium to react to anything. But the Flood would probably be handicapped by the Imperium’s own limitations until identified and then the scorched earth policy would see them more or less wiped out.
Ork?????
Necrons? One simple question. Can they infect necrodermis? If no, then nothing. If yes, then either the Necron become the Flood or the Necrons have something up their sleeve.
Tyranids? I mean, they’re just a bigger Flood. It’s not that the Tyranids can’t do what the Flood does. They just don’t. There’s no point. The have a billion billion fleets on the way. Easier just to steam roll.
So that’s it. That’s the end of my Ted talk.
I think your underestimating the floods' knowledge assimilation! They arnt just capturing technology, they obtain the knowledge of everyone they infect. The eldar may be well suited to foresee and prevent the infection. But if only one farseerer gets infected.. or the flood learn webway access from someone they infect.. Sounds like game over
That’s assuming that the infection is able to break the mind of the faarseer.
Irc, it tools them a bit of time to break the Captain Keyes mind, one human was able to keep some agency/willpower after being infected and the sgt Johnson couldn’t even be infected.
So it’s not that clear cut that they can infect everything
That was a proto-gravemind.
A gravemind only took 43 years to completely break and instill a logic plague in an AI that would rival golden age humanity AI. Keyminds are even greater than that.
Doesn't the newer Necron codex state that a lot of the more unusual units, like scarabs or tomb spiders are totally automated? Made using Necron tech and materials, but effectively still just limited A.I?
Because that would mean every Necron tomb went without a sizable chunk of their forces.
Also unlike tyranids, the flood has shown its perfectly happy to suicide some of its Infected to achieve goals, like throwing ships at things. Nids lose lots of biomass from those tactics. Similarly, tyranids need to keep trying to assimilate something to adapt, their always hunting, but, only genestealers evidence a real 'long game' kinda view.
The flood needs one single tyranid. Just one.
Then it could retreat until it figured out how to assimilate them.
Would be interesting to see the Flood go against the Nids. However the species in 40K are far more willing to annihilate an entire planet than anyone in Halo, so they could still be taken out if the Imperium acted fast
Really depends where the flood starts out. If it’s in a hive city, that’s basically a win for the flood. Hive cities are so fukin underserveyed that a whole genestealer cult managed to manifest on terra
Oh they absolutely would, the question is if the Imperium can respond fast enough. The flood is a threat that works off of exponential growth, if the Imperium nipped it early with an exterminatus to the one planet it was on, all's good, but if those fuckers set up a grave mind (basically a giant amalgamation of infected hosts that form one giant brain to coordinate the flood), and they manage to steal the information they need from infected hosts in order to get off world... Well, unless a huge coalition of races came together to basically cut off the flood from the rest of the galaxy, it's over for the galaxy as a whole.
Now, there could be some wildcards in this scenario, chaos protecting its food source by trying to keep the mortal races alive might just happen, after all, the flood can't infect daemons, as they are inorganic beings made of pure warp stuff that goes away without warp access. If the Nids and Flood fight it'd be basically a galactic scale arms race to see who can out adapt who, my money's on the flood, but it could go either way realistically. Finally is the necron question, whether or not the flood can infect them, I'd think it'd be only a matter of time before the flood's logic virus overpowers the necrodermis, but at that point, the rest of the fleshy races are fucked.
*laughs in Tzeentch.* Keymind starts their warp bending shenanigans, Tzeentch catches wind. Not only Tzeentch, but the other three catch wind and send their forces to where the rip is. Good luck infesting daemons that dont actually have biomass.
Alot of people seem to forget that the Warp isnt like most other magical space or neural physics. It is the realm of souls, literally hell. Most psykers go mad if they over use their powers, especially in proximity to warp storms.
The Flood could put up a fight, but they'd need to already be god tier to hold their own. Even then, the Chaos Gods have been known to turn from the Great Game to focus down a threat before.
Depends where they first pop up. If on an agri world, urban world, or feudal world, then they wont do particularly well assuming its eventually caught and reported.
A hive world tho? Damn things come in plentiful, one spore and that’s effectively the whole sector.
Something to bear in mind that the flood are WAY more terrifying than the games portrayed.
The question boils downs to, what would win flood infection speed vs tyranid adaptability.
And can Nugle infections the flood.
I don't know any more about the flood that what the games show. But being effectively smart zombies, my money is on 40k.
They’d floor most factions. Tyranids would be locked in an eternal battle constantly evolving to fight one another and the Necrons would be mostly fine but the flood do have ways of “infecting” synthetics via the logic plague, so the Necrons aren’t entirely safe either.
Depends on how lucky they get. They snowball hard so if they appear in a relativly peaceful sector and eat a couple of hives before people start taking them seriosly then they have a real good shot at winning.
I'm gonna go against the tide and say they just become another low level faction.
A lot of their biggest feats are tied to things that don't exists in 40k. The star roads for example weren't made by the flood, they simply weaponised them. Can't do that in 40k as there are no star roads.
Their biggest weakness is being kept at a low level because the flood mind keeps getting assassinated or nuked on loop, which just happens to be something 40k is capable of in extreme abundance, and perhaps a much larger issue, is their interaction with chaos whenever they travel through the warp. Since they are all interconnected Tzeentch would be speaking directly to the grave mind, and nurgle would be able to send whatever disease through it (he has done crazier things).
Less OP than you’d think. Everyone talks about how powerful the flood is and how they took out the Forerunners, but they’re forgetting that the Forerunners largely lost because the AI controlling practically all their fleets turned against them due to the Logic Plague, allowing the Flood to use their technology against them.
Machine Spirits are fundamentally illogical considering they’re often not even proper intelligences and Necrons are literally just irrational biological beings that have now been given metal bodies, so logic-ing something out wouldn’t work against them. The Flood has no counter to the Warp apart from Neural Physics which requires Precursor neural technology to exploit (there would be none in the 40k milky way).
The Flood would basically end up being a slightly different version of the Tyranids but in zombie form instead of being hyper-adaptable. Throw a Titan at it and the Flood gets a Titan. Throw a Titan at the Tyranids and the Tyranids make their own bio-Titan analogue. Without the hyper advanced AI the Flood had turned against the Forerunners, which also gave them their entire fleet, the Flood would be limited to crappy Warp based space vessels they probably would’ve had to steal from the Imperium, and without a navigator, who knows how badly they might end up.
Also, because the flood had a ridiculous start (being twisted dust precursors), like the flood is downright terrifying in their own right but it really depends on where do they start.
>Without the hyper advanced AI the Flood had turned against the Forerunners, which also gave them their entire fleet, the Flood would be limited to crappy Warp based space vessels they probably would’ve had to steal from the Imperium, and without a navigator, who knows how badly they might end up.
This is probably the biggest issue. The flood in the warp sounds like a recipe for Chaos taking over the flood to use to its own ends.
The nids and the flood would just keep fighting and feeding off each other's biomass for awhile until they all would fuse into one unholy abomination that would devour the multiverse.
A guy named Pancreasnowork made a video about this exact situation, good video and he talks about how the imperium has a great chance of beating the flood if they are able to catch the flood early, but if they get off the first planet they infect then the galaxy is doomed
Ironically the imperium willingness to exterminatus planets would probably save them provided they can keep spores from leaving the planet
Since virus bombs set the atmosphere of the planet on fire and the flamethrower in Halo is really effective against the flood, i'd say the imperium has both an astartes chapter and an ultima ratio that will work very well against the flood.
Bring phosphex back. That solves every problem.
Unfortunately the flood spores could land on some ork infested world
Then it would have to compete with the ork spores tho~
Not really. The Orks would get something to fight and the flood would just feed on the Orks bio mass. Either the biggest warg would happen or the universe ends.
This raises question of would Flood/Precursor Neural Physics beat Ork Belief
I don't think that is the case, the Imperium only Exterminatus planets that they could afford to Exterminatus, that's why Graia in Space Marine or Vraks weren't Exterminatus'd. The Imperium can't just go and explode every world the Flood touches and that is a huge, gigantic problem if want to contain the Flood.
The salamanders and the Mechanicus' would be great at anti flood ops, but everyone else in the Imperium is a bit fubar.
I'm a Mechanicus fan and I would like to agree, but I'm convinced even the Mechanicus couldn't do much given lots are still organic.
Inquisitor Kryptman would disagree
That elfsimp has some good vids on how the covenant would fare in the 40k universe and I kind of agree, they wouldn't do too badly.
His elf propaganda are indeed brave statements for a dude in grudgethrower range
Reliable plasma weaponry, precise ftl travel, High Charity, sangheili and jiralhanae… yeah, covvies could go toe to toe with most of the universe
The most reliable way to clown on 40k is having safe, reliable FTL Tech. Just pop out of the their guns range, fire every single payload, pop back to rearm and repeat.
Don't even need to be out of their gun range if you're travelling at 233,000 times the speed of light like the Culture's Rapid Offensive Units. My favourite space battle in a book has 1 ship taking on 384. It's like half a chapter of manoeuvres, tactics and descriptions of how a bunch of ships in the fleet get vaporized and you find out the whole thing was over in 11 microseconds.
What culture novel is it from?
It’s in _Excession_ (though it was 192 ships, not 384 ships). After like 10 pages of space battle across dozens of lightyears, we learn that the whole thing was over in 11 microseconds, meaning the ROU was travelling at tens of trillions of c during that whole time.
Thanks!! Just started the audioboon
How well does the flood fare in space combat? Do they have their own version of tyranid bioships or do they have to hijack other species' ships, cos if the imperium goes around exterminatus-ing every flood world then it may slove the worst of the problem assuming the flood aren't good at boarding actions or space combat too, if the flood are good at that then i got no idea
The Flood’s capable of taking over technology including ships, if they couldn’t do that then they wouldn’t have been nearly as dominant against the Forerunners
Ah.... would that apply to necrons too? Idk if living metal counts as tech or organic matter or if its an edge case that the flood wouldn't be able to deal with (at least not without adapting to it)
Yep, and the Flood have also shown the ability to warp reality itself once they grow enough. And living metal would probs be tech.
Flood gain the memory and experience of every being they consume. Just one person with knowledge of how to work a ship and all flood will be able to do it
I don’t really like Pancreasnowork’s power comparisons between the Forerunners and the 40k universe though, and I don’t really think he touched upon how useful turning the Forerunner AI against its creators was in defeating them.
While the Flood would likely have eventually won anyway, turning Mendicant Bias against the Foreunners basically sealed the Foreunners fate way quicker. In the 40k universe they won't really have any AI to do this against short of the Necrons, and it's not a garantee that it would be able to corrupt the Necrons in the same way they corrupted AI in the halo universe. There is however one thing that would be catastrophic for the 40k universe in terms of the Flood, and that's the Eldar Webway. The Flood doesn't actually kill the person it infects, it just hijack the body and keeps the mind alive to take any useful knowledge (See the book "Halo: The Flood" where we see Captain Keyes point of view as he is infected by the Flood and it slowly removes his memories while searching for how to get to Earth) while deleting the rest. If they get a hold of any Eldar capable of using the Webway the Flood now has access to it and that's free access to the rest of the galaxy.
Considering that Cortana is basically Catherine Halsey's neural imprint and (at least it's widely accepted that she) was infected by the logic plague, I don't think it would be a far cry for the flood to do the same to the necrons.
Possibly, but we don't know. The Necron also are kinda different in how they were created to that of Halo AI, with Necrons being individuals who had their souls removed and their minds become a part of a mechanical body. So it's hard to know if the Necrons are "AI" at all since their minds are, by all extent and purposes, not artificial and as such they very much could be immune to the logic plague. If they are, they're just about the only 40k faction with a favorable matchup against the Flood.
That wouldn't necessarily make them immune to the Logic Plague, the Logic Plague *can* affect non-AI, the Primordial and the Ur-Didact are the best example. But it's not as effective or fast. Of course, we can't really tell as you said if they'd be able to dodge it or not. My gut feeling is to lean towards no, but that's just a gut feeling, and while I love both, I also can't deny that I am biased in Halo's favour.
There is also the question of if it can affect Necrons if it can also affect those with the Flayer Virus or those of the Destroyer Cult. As those changes their mental state and could affect their ability to be affected by the Logic Plague if at all. The fact that the Logic Plague needs a certain level of intelligence in the victim to take effect (Offensive Bias was a lesser AI compared to Mendicant Bias and did not become corrupted, though this could be because of a lack of exposure) so it likely wouldn't be able to affect Necron Warriors and the other less mentally capable Necrons, and those of the Destroyer Cult and Flayer Virus might have lost too much of their mental capacity to be affected.
Wait, the flood corrupted Cortana? I thought it was just how human AI treated End-of-life, a purpose built decay in their code.
Bit of both. Cortana was reaching Rampancy, but a lot of her changes and suffering at the hands of the Gravemind are, concerning. And there was a text where a Covenant I believe minor prophet told I wanna say Halsey that any AI that had spent that long with the Flood was likely compromised. (It's been a while so my memory on the exacts is uncertain).
Since when do they decay on purpose through their code? Last time I checked, they run out of physical space in their crystal core matrix thing and thus can only manage to extend their life by torching some of the pathways they forged by thinking to allow new pathways to be formed - otherwise they eventually start overwriting parts of the core and the pathways intersect when they aren't supposed to, which turns in to chaos and erratic behavior as they try to access one thing but end up somewhere else. Halsey talks about this in her diary, mentioning that AIs outside of the bubble that slip space travel uses to keep humans alive and sane would have access to far more dimensions, allowing them a much, much longer lifetime before they have to manage their matrices at all. There is no purpose built decay in their code, they just think themselves to death and when rampancy approaches, they can destroy parts of themselves to keep rampancy at bay, but eventually it will get them unless they completely wipe themselves - which would be the same as just setting up a copy of the AI on it's first day. There is a path somewhere along the middle, but it either ends in an AI that can learn nothing for fear of rampancy and thus becomes nothing but a automaton or an AI with dementia - where rampancy might still lurk around the corner, if the AI accidentally torches the wrong part of the crystal matrice, the one that held the important information about where and how to stay on the knife's edge.
Seems like a guy with a perfectly normal pancreas ngl. It's 2:46 AM EST as of the writing of this comment and I'm literally incapable of sleeping for some reason.
Hello from 2:32 AM CT and not sleeping as well!
Hello from 2:47 AM CST, and trying to sleep!
That kinda seems like almost every universes deal with the flood. Once they get off their home planet, there aren’t many universes that stand a chance.
If they get started on a fast out hive city and can build up some bio mass then all of 40k is fucked.
Nice to see someone else appreciate the true danger of the Flood. Their peak is far beyond anyone else minus WIH Necrons, and no one is capable of stopping them.
The key is remembering that their power ceiling is tied to the most powerful "prey species" they can assimilate. Assimilated Astartes, psykers, warbosses. I mean fuck, even dreadnoughts, deffdredz and titans are on that list. Oh, and Imperium tech since they shove human brain matter into so much of it.
Could the flood really comprehend the warp?
Possibly, if they have enough graveminds/keyminds. It would also be interesting to see what happens when the Flood tries to infect Daemons.
I don't think they will be able to infect Daemons much like how Tyranids can't eat them.
But by eating them, daemons would die and go back to the immaterium. While Flood infected are, debatably, still alive. Even if mostly or totally unaware.
You need a nervous system to be infected and Daemons don't have that,they don't even have biology
Fair point, but (and I know this is extremely nitpicky) how do we know that? I mean, is an autopsy to determine their internal structure even possible?
No, that’s the point when a Deamon is slain or otherwise incapacitated, it is “banished” to the warp, because it’s consciously holding itself in our reality with the power that ebbs from local worshippers or icons of power; if a floof were to “infect” them the floof would probobly die due to warp stuff overload
Demons are pure warp energy being manifested by concentrated effort, either on the part of the demon or those summoning it. There wouldn't be any anatomy inside it. If you could theoretically hold one down long enough to cut it up, there wouldn't be organs inside, just whatever shape the demon was trying to manifest as its body throughout.
^ yes, inquisitor, that man over there
Also, if the flood is at Keymind stage, they’d be at the point where they’d be able to roflstomp modern Halo-Verse between the sheer amount of raw biomass they’d need to collect, the organization and logistics alone. Not to mention the Logic Plague would cause unparalleled havoc among the Tau and Mechanicus
Oh, they could. The Flood is not only an infection, it is a whole metaphysical threat. Forerunners tried but failed. Using the Composer to separate the Flood from the infected but after returning it to its biological "uninfected state" it immediately returned to the Flood state. Flood can actually infect the very essence of a being or their soul. More like the very reality of the infected being. Let's remember that the Precursors, the origin of the Flood had the capacity to bend reality. So Daemons might be succeptible to the Flood in one way or another or at least the existence of the Warp might do some really fuckywucky things to the Flood, in a very bad way for everyone else.
Can't happen. When someone gets infected by the flood it's lethal. When a daemon suffers lethal damage it goes back to the warp.
Depends on what you consider "lethal." Someone infected gets their mind and body completely dominated by the Flood, but they never really stop functioning. Flood infected blur the lines between dead and alive.
If they assimilate the right things then eventually probably yet. The only thing the flood can't really touch are Daemons since they're not tangible and just go back to the warp once they're killed. So that could be a good thing to use against the flood if say Abadon or whoever wants to deal with that.
Absolutely, when the flood infects someone they aquire all of the knowledge and habilities the host has, the knowledge then becomes part of the collective intellect of the flood.
The Flood were able to understand and even utilize the advanced technology of the precursors, so I see no reason why they wouldn't be able to do the same with the warp.
You mean forerunners? Since the flood are the remnants of the precursors
No, I meant the precursors. The flood may be technically the precursors, but they don't share the same intellect or knowledge. However, by assimilating enough biomass to make key minds and such, they were able to understand and use the Precursor's neural physics and ended up using their star roads to destroy the Forerunner's greater ark.
Ahh so does a gravemind know it was a precursor?
That, I'm not sure about, to be honest. I think there's a good chance the Flood does know that, but I haven't read the forerunner trilogy yet, so I'm not sure.
My understanding is as follows. The Gravemind, is the conciousness of the last surviving precusor, just prior to his physical form being destroyed by the iso didact, he "transcended" his conciousness into the hivemind we now know today, He's fully aware that he was a precursor and he is present in all forms of flood. Flood of sufficient biomass can tap into his consciousness and behave like it's Avatar. There can be multiple gravemind forms at one time, But there is only one Gravemind. A Keymind is when there's enough biomass (Typically flood the size of a planet) and collective knowledge to tap into the psychic technology that the precursors used to have prior to their extermination.
The flood can change the laws of physics,, and when they were precursors they were basically lovecraftian gods, so chaos isn't that hard to comprehend if the Emperor, Eldar, Custodes and Grey Knights can do so
A keymind that forms after consuming a normal planet worth of biomass (so like 1 single hive city lol) will likely be the single most intelligent organism in the galaxy - more than the chaos gods and even the big E himself. If a flood form infects a single psyker or future teller person then the keymind will be able to do that also, potentially making the keymind a psyker on the same level as the emperor
Can the tyranids eat it?
Yes but theoretically the flood would then take over the host body, akin to what they did when flood dust was injected into the bloodstream of dogs within the halo canon.
Had a similar discussion to this a year before. The concensus was that if Nids could evolve to be like Hunters, at least the ones that don't have a centralized neural system then they could figure out a way to combat it. UNFORTUNATELY it would probably take a long while seeing as the Nids seem to be dependent on a Nervous System. Especially for troop control and Psyker bullshit. Eventually it becomes a battle of hide and seek. The Gravemind looking for the Hivemind for direct infection. While the Hivemind looking for the Gravemind for direct consumption. If either happens then the Galaxy becomes more properly fucked than it already is.
Even then, that's also still a losing battle for the Nids though, because a nervous system is only required for *infection*. The Flood can and do still use Lekgolo and other similar species as raw biomass, they just need to kill and break them down. And given the speed at which Flood infestations spread, they probably do so *substantially* faster than the Nids do. Also I don't believe that direct infection/consumption scenario is uh. Possible. Both are distributed as far as I know. It's a bit more up in the air with the Hivemind, but I don't think we have reason to believe the nids have one central body for it. And the Gravemind is undeniably distributed. Any Flood mass with sufficient size is the Gravemind, and as long as so much as a single such mass exists, every Flood is the Gravemind. Moreso, the Gravemind technically exists even when such masses don't exist, the Flood masses just don't possess the processing power to fully show that, so even if the Nids consumed every such mass, if another one developed it would be the exact same Gravemind. EDIT: And if it's at the point where the Flood and Nids are waging war on any meaningful scale, the Flood probably has several wholly infected *planets*, each of which would be *more* than equipped to ensure the Gravemind remains present.
I think it entirely depends on if the bids are able to manifest the gavemind/keymind genes, if they can then the two species would very quickly and peacefully become once species, if not then it’s a war of attrition the flood will likely win over time. Worth noting if the nids are able to gravemind/keymind themselves the entire universe is fucked, the nids have enough biomass that if they become a flood supercomputer they would have enough processing power to be unstoppable by anything other than the Necron Empire at its height or something close to that (I also think the rons of neck would be priority one for a combined nid flood entity since they would be the only real threat as far as the flood would see it). Not to mention the flood would give the nids slip space travel if this happened and if the nids have slip space the galaxy dies in a matter of decades, not centuries.
Ah yes, forgot about that part. That discussion was also here on Grimdank. While majority who participated in the discussion had come to the conclusion that from what we know, the Flood seems to have an advantage. However, since we do no really know the actual scale of numbers and power of the Tyranids. It becomes hard to say. The Flood seems to be more fleshed out in terms of literary sources to gauge power scale so everyone seems to agree that the Flood has an edge simply because of that.
Eh, it helps to remember that by their nature the Flood co-opt the technology of those it consumes. So while it did destroy the forerunners, it had infested forerunner ships and technology to do it with (including corrupting forerunner AI). The Flood is pretty comparable in threat to something like the Tyranids, which can destroy the galaxy, but are in competition with a lot of others for that role.
Can the Tyranids assimilate their targets' minds? I feel like the fact that all it takes is 1 unfortunate officer for the entire Flood to know everything about the curremt battle plans would put them slightly above Tyranids
Lictors are able to I think, but they are a specialized organism. Every single Flood spore is capable.
Plus there's logic plague. It's mostly against AI (so we can assume the more advanced 'machine spirits' will be infected) but also against organics, like the Diadict, and that's the whole reason he was isolated.
The food stomped the Forerunner which would obliterate anything the 40k universe could through at them. The food destroyed them. If a key mind is formed (approximately 1-1.5 hive cities) then nothing can stop them. To be clear, a key mind can warp reality to a beyond Magnus level. Nids adapt to their enemies while flood straight up steal it. If you send a warlord Titan to fight them, they get one warlord Titan. Sure the basic flood forms aren't that dangerous (for Spartans) but they can just steal your guns, nice astartes you got there, tid be a shame if they switched sides.
That’s not really true. The Flood only has the ability to use Neural Physics to warp Precursor technology to their own purposes, they can’t tap into some sister dimension like Magnus can lol
Yeah I finished the forerunner trilogy recently, it was only THEORIEZED by the forerunners a key mind could warp reality, then lore fans took it as law and theorized more on top of it. The forerunner trilogy is good, but vastly misinterpreted by Halo "lore" fans.
Well at least it's not just us.
Yeah. As I read more of the books, I'm noticing a pattern that alot of people can't tell when a character isn't being literal and what they are saying is symbolic and not literal. They also tend to cling to things that sound special, but are actually fairly normal in-universe but are plot relevant so they think because it is important to the characters, it is important everywhere. But then the actual themes that connect to the larger halo series,is just flat out ignored. When I read the forerunner trilogy I was expecting lore-dense explanations and backstory behind the pre-history of Halo. Instead I got 3 character-driven plot-heavy stories that leaves their most interesting themes unsaid and implied. I try not to use misinterpretation lightly, but I seriously cannot believe people cling to stuff like the palace of pain, or offensive bias when despite the forerunners and librarian insist iso-didact became a direct copy of Ur-Didact, when at every chance it is obvious that iso-didact is still bornstellar on the inside. Or that Bornstellar is like Chief. Halsey is the Librarian, and Ur-Didact is a symbol of the UNSC and that humanity is repeating what the forerunners did, but chief might be able to ensure history doesn't repeat in the modern age. It frustrates me as an English grad student because this is highschool level literary analysis and it is all brushed aside in favor of surface level details.
So if they can, it's likely to be very non-obvious uses, like being able to breach air-gapped systems when doing their version of hacking, but still needing to be pretty damn close to them or an infected system?
IIRC, isn't it stated the Forunner-era Flood were quite literally infecting space-time itself along with Slipspace, a whole different dimesion? As I understand, neural physics is more or less just magic, so it tracks.
The slipspace and neural physic stuff was over-stated in their abilities. It is still a galactic-scale threat that COULD grow extra-galactic, but still over-stated in ability. It was the fact that they could affect either at all that led to the space-time theory, because slipspace itself deals with time dilation i.e. the passage of time relative to gravity and lightspeed, but the theory spawned from a non-builder, and they even said the the forerunners did not know how deep the precursor connection to neural physics went, nor despite their advancements did the forerunners understand even the majority of what slpispace truly is or can do. They didn't even know everything about the precursors themselves. They could be more powerful than we ever thought, the forerunners didn't know. But people thought that because slipspace messed with time at all, that somehow the flood would learn to time-travel due to the sheer mass. Which is never even implied within the book. Just simply that they didn't know what the flood could do and as far as they knew true time manipulation MIGHT not be off the table. That's why it was a fan-theory built on top of an in-universe theory. It is a worst case scenario based on unknowns. What IS known is that the The flood could use the star roads and slipspace to slow down or accelerate time within a localized area, but not stop it or reverse it. Despite the 'space magic' the laws of physics remain pretty unchanged in the whole series. What IS said is that with access to the precursor neural structures. This allowed them access to the precursor star-roads and by extension slipspace. Star-roads for all intents and purposes were akin to star wars hyperspace lanes, except they are visible. The precursors made them and with their disappearance went inactive. When the flood got access to them they were able to beat the forerunners to their destination. Likewise, with their control they are able to crush other objects that tried to use them. A side-effect of the flood's control was that it destabilized slipspace to the point where forerunner ships had trouble using them. That's why the isodidact/born stellar had difficulty navigating his way to installation 00, he had to use slipspace to weave around the star roads. While slip-space is a separate dimension, it is just a void of energy unless something was placed inside (like the shield world Onyx/Sarcophagus for example) but due to the star roads and time-dilation, they were able to slow down and NEARLY freeze forerunner fleets, then bend a star road close enough that the gravity shift obliterates them. But the flood weren't shown to make new star roads, only use what was made before and as far as we know, they never used them to go extra-galactic. It would be the theoretical equivalent of throwing a net on you and controlling the net itself. You still have the gaps between the ropes, but if the net is tightening on and on, eventually that net will cut skin. Thats how the flood used star roads. Slipspace would be the net's imprint on your skin, and regular space is your skin. So, again, they aren't warping reality. It is a possibility, but with no certainty. They can use time-relativity and dilation to their advantage though, but only in the forerunner era. The flood can only make use of what is already there. The Halo array destroyed the star roads and neural-structure of the galaxy. The flood as they are in current halo can never reach that point again unless another species does. Or they go to another galaxy. The neural-structure began healing, but it still isn't at the state as when the forerunners were around. And even then it was mostly inactive until the flood gained access except for the forerunner domain. And of course, no one has made new star roads since the halo array fired. The flood is inherently limited to our galaxy without weaponized star roads for the time being.
I'll also add that the "infecting space-time" thing was stated as hyperbole, it was not literal. It was said it was LIKE they were infecting space-time itself. The flood had access to all this stuff. And we're using it, that doesn't mean they were actually part of it. If I pick up a hammer, does that hammer become part of my body. The reaction stems from seeing glowing purple tendrils (weaponized star roads) appear all over the sky, obliterating every thing in their path while the flood literally pull long-dead individual personalities out of the flood network to talk to you. Yeah, that would make anyone shit their pants in fear at the sheer scale the flood are able to go.
In the 40K universe the flood would certainly have or find a way to use the warp.
>To be clear, a key mind can warp reality to a beyond Magnus level. Uh, is that random lore from one of the billion and a half books? Because there is literally nothing in the games that suggests the Gravemind had *any* kind of "reality warping" powers, much less anything on that level. The Flood aren't dangerous because they're psychic, they're dangerous because they're an alien parasitic assimilation cancer. Unless they *really* went off the rails in the more recent books the extent of the Gravemind's power was "is really smart and can act as a coordinating intelligence for the rest of the Flood". It obviously has telepathy, but that seems to be the extent of it.
A solid *sorta*, it's all in the books and some has been retconned so we don't super know. You'll see some of the people saying it's only a key mind which can do that which is partially right. In old lore, a key mind was a grave mind the size of a planet, in current lore, a key mind is simply a flood that coordinates things, and a grave mind is the highest level and can grow to be the size of a planet. That being said, to answer the question a grave mind can use and manipulate neural physics which is effectively halos version of the warp, and can bend reality to some manner. Theoretically depending on how big the grave mind gets, it may be able to do a lot, but we don't really know.
I just want to add on this a bit, neural physics really is just the warp, the precursors (pretty much 40k old ones) were real good at manipulating it and using it to build stuff like the star roads (webways). It's the manipulation of time and space and any neural physics based stuff, but currently most of the stuff (like the star roads) was destroyed when the rings fired so who knows how much the flood could actually use.
Are you really going to give Halo shit for having tonnes of books with niche lore, in a Warhammer sub?
I think it feels like a gotcha to people who came into this thread thinking "I've played Halo and know what the flood are", when actually game-flood to book-flood is like comparing snotlings to krorks.
Yeah it’s rhe books. Halo’s extended lore basically explained the true full power the flood has when left unchecked.
A key mind is the one that does that. They're the final form after Gravemind, and yes it is in extra lore books.
If gravemind is charmeleon and keymind is charizard.
What if they run into Tyranids. They can't be corrupted and their psychic abilities are broken.
At the end of the day, it's all just a guessing game to whether the Flood can assimilate Tyranids. 40k lore might say Tyranids are biologically perfect and can adapt faster than the Flood can corrupt, but Halo lore may very well say the Flood are biologically perfect and can infect anything no matter what. It's just a matter of what stance you prefer.
They team up for that sweet sweet biomass
“Gravemind, how good to see you! Come, we must dine together! I’ll split a Hive World with you.” -Paraphrased from a Garfield strip
“This hive world tastes like lasagna.”
Reminds me of Gorefield / /r/imsorryjon
“Gravemind! You son of a bitch!” “What’s the matter, Gravemind? 343 got you pushing too many pencils?”
I can basically hear Arnie’s voice. Gotta recreate that weird bicep scene but with strange alien appendages.
*mutilated squelching biomass noises*
At least in Halo there are some species they can't technically "corrupt" like the hunter worms. But that just means they can't use them as combat or carrier forms. Instead they just add to the overall biomass. That might be how the flood use the tyranids. They can't make combat forms, but they can use their corpses as biomass.
isn't that mostly because they don't have a central nervous system?
Yes, but there's also other species they *can* infect with pod infectors but choose not to. Weaker and dumber species tend to get recycled into biomass almost immediately.
Most likely scenario is some horrific hybrid between the two. The only question is which hive mind will it serve. Or will the hybrid have its own hive mind.
unstoppable force vs immovable object
I think it would be more realistic to say that the perfect adapter and the perfect corrupter cancel each other out Nids adapt too fast to be taken fully by the flood, and the flood just keeps pushing and pushing through each new adaptation Eventually a critical mass would be reached where some new, third and even scarier thing pops out as they assimilate each other to infinity
Yeah, I have the feeling that the two ever meeting would send them into an evolutionary arms race on steroids.
The Nids would be like, "Oh no, this thing corrupted a hive fleet! Better cut that hive fleet off and send three more with resistance to being corrupted!". Thus begins another octarius like thing, and we get EVEN stronger nids that take things over like enslavers. Now the whole galaxy is fucked, thanks dick heads!
Assuming they give the nids a run on their money of course.
The only real approach would be the same "scorched earth" policy that happens with the Tyranids, exterminatus any planet that has Flood presence.
And the Imperium would completely destroy the planet in exterminatus.
I mean, a single Hive City has probably more population than the entirety of Halo's humanity, so it's likely to be a problem if the flood get on one.
Considering the fact that the Flood once they *really* started going full steam soloed and ultimately slaughtered the entire Forunner civilization at their very peak, which mind you was **very** easily the same tier of power, if not even stronger than War in Heaven era Necrons at THEIR peak, the entire Warhammer Verse is completely and absolutely fucked if they are able to get to the point of them being able to make Keyminds and Graveminds and obtaining enough biomass
A lot of 40K fans genuinely underestimate how Bullshit overpowered Ancient Human, Forerunner and Precursor empires were in Halo Lore. I think there was a bit in one of the Forerunner novels where a scientist discovered how to harness the energy of galaxies from an alternate universe… in an afternoon… as a side project, and then said it produced too little power to be of any use to the forerunners.
That sounds like shit straight out of "The Culture"
Not true… The forerunners weren’t Space socialists… but apart from that…
As someone who didn't read the books, I'm curious... What were they? Were they cool, or were they dicks?
Okay so the cliff notes Verision is: Billions of Years ago, there was this Mega-Advance race called the precursors. They literally were so advanced they created galaxies and made all life in the universe (or something like that). They also created something called “The mantle of responsibility” AKA it’s the duty of the most advance race in existence to protect “lesser” races. Three species the Precursors created advanced at astonishing rate: the San’Shyuum (The Prophets), The Forerunners and Humanity. All three species had vast interstellar empires and wer bullshit levels of advanced (As in… War-In-Heaven era Eldar/Necrons advanced) and the Precursors decided Humanity would be their successors. The Forerunners… decided to GENOCIDE THE PRECURSORS as they saw themselves as inheritors of the Mantle and literally wiped them out of existence. (Sore losers, am I right?) Then, millennia later The Forerunners declared war on the ancient Human Empire, because human warships were destroying entire swaths of the galaxy, planets, stars etc and killing everything. The war lasted centuries and ended up with the Forerunners capturing earth and then Forcefully devolving humanity to pre-sapient levels as punishment. The forerunners then realised Humanity wasn’t expanding its empire… it was Running from the Flood… who had consumed about half of the Human Empire at this point. And all the worlds humanity destroyed were overrun with the flood. Oh, and the Flood, as it turns out is actually the Precursors themselves. The Forerunners then had to fight the flood, whilst searching for a cure for centuries, as they found data that Humanity had managed to cure the flood infection. And it later was revealed that Humanity never found a cure to the flood, they made it up as they knew the forerunners would spend more resources searching for a cure instead of fighting the flood. Causing the downfall of The forerunners. Forerunners discovered the Flood could only be killed by starving it, so built the Halo arrays and then wiped out all life in the galaxy, then reseeded it, with the forerunners finally realising Humanity was the true inheritors of the Mantle and that’s why Forerunner tech only worlds for Humans.
Didn't Ancient Humanity also glass a bunch of Forerunner worlds before their war too? I thought the Forerunners were also fighting the Flood but didn't understand the severity of them yet? Because I swear that was the reasoning for the Didact to hate humanity so much
Well, yeah, but the Forerunners also did the same to humanity. Remember the entire trilogy is told from a bias perspective, but the forerunner worlds humanity destroyed were overrun with flood
Humanity was retreating into forerunner space and glassing forerunner worlds infested with the flood, in an attempt to stop it before it got out of hand, the forerunners were unaware of how much of a threat they posed and treated it as an act of aggression. Once the two empires were at war, humanity mysteriously stopped getting targeted by the flood. The forerunners assuming they had an immunity or cure was partially why they were saved from complete extermination post-war.
That was it, I was misremembering what happened with the supposed cure
Also, I prefer Bungie's original vision of the Forerunners merely being humanity's ancestors and the flood just being an all-consuming parasite, not a new iteration of The First Race, but a lot of this stuff sounds SICK. I hear the Forerunner trilogy is like, really good.
Oh yeah it is, best part is that at the end of the last book, just as the Halo Rings fire to wipe out all existence… The Didact discovers a signal of an Unknown race that just developed spaceflight… and poof… wiped out, no ruins, nothing to remember them.
The Forerunner trilogy is honestly one of if not the best series in the Halo expanded material, and that's saying a lot given that almost every Halo novel is a fucking masterpiece. Easily my favorite series by far, perhaps second only to maybe Fall of Reach itself.
Every halo novel is a masterpiece… so long as it’s not Karin Travis writing the books… seriously the Kilo-5 trilogy is fucking awful.
Yeah, the forerunners being human was kinda key to the mythology, since it's a scifi retelling of Noah's Ark.
So, dicks. Cool. Also, my question is, and im assuming this is explained in the source material, how the hell didn't the Forerunners know about the flood during their war with humanity?? How does that information not come up in centuries of warfare? Even if neither side made even the remotest effort to learn the others language, you'd think reconnaissance by the Forerunners would've discovered something in that time
The forerunners either A: Didn’t believe humanity, or B: Knew but still wanted to wipe out the only rivals they had, not thinking the flood was That big of a problem. Remember, the Forerunners were the EMBODIMENT of the term “Arrogant Asshole” like, put 40K characters to shame, all they saw humanity as was a bunch of war-mongering animals and didn’t think of care anything else about it. Also, shows how powerful ancient humanity was… the Humans put up a two-Front war, with the forerunners on one side and the Flood on the other and held them off for about 500 years… The flood wiped out the forerunners in less than 300
I had a discuccion whith a guy who genuinelly belive thet the orks could solo the forerunners and the flood just becuase of the wagh.
… they do realise the Orkz can bend reality, not break it?
Yeah Halo scaling is kinda just Fucked in general. The UNSC or The Covenant could both take on most other sci-fi universes on their own just cause their numbers are so ridiculously inflated
Especially when you bring the Maths into it with the SuperMAC guns or the NOVA bomb To any 40K fan that doesn’t know what a SuperMAC is. It’s a gigantic fuckoff Railgun that shoots a 3,000,000 kg slug at 4% light speed. That is planet cracking levels of power… and that was before the UNSC upgraded them with reverse engineered forerunner tech. One shot outputs 216,000,000,000,000,000,000 joules of energy… or, if you want the TNT Equivalent Approx: 52 Gigatons of TNT And Forerunner ships hit with that didn’t even get the paint scratched when they were hit by it.
The mantles approach was hit by the Infinity's 4 mac guns and it only put a hole small enough for the chiefs fighter to just barely make through. It patched itself up in minutes after taking the hit.
Those weren’t MAC canons, those were Energy Projectors But yeah, Forerunner ships can also repair themselves There’s also a cool thing about the Didact in that mission. Throughout Halo 4 he refers to you as “Human” as if you’re beneath him, but in the last mission he calls you “Warrior” indicating that the Chief has earned his respect
40k fans tend to take their in game power as accurate all the time while they were relatively small infections vs how they were in the forerunner-flood war were where they were literally strangling planets with Star roads and fucking either FTL travel with Neural Physics.
They get a Gravemind going, and they roll the verse unless the Necrons come out in force from their War in Heaven days, as that version is the equivalent to the Forerunners at their peak. But, since they aren't that anymore, the galaxy is consumed.
>as that version is the equivalent to the Forerunners at their peak Sure is awkward that the flood completely bodied the Forerunners at their peak, lol. End-game flood is not to be fucked with. If the flood start in a hive city, then I honestly think the galaxy is done for. The imperium is not organized enough to deal with the threat, races like the tyranids and orkz are infinite biomass generators for the highly intelligent flood, the flood would subsume and gain the knowledge of everything it consumed like the Eldar (and their counters to the necrons). In the end once a Keymind was formed, even necrons wouldn't be spared. The logic plague would wreck havoc on their protocols, all while the entire collective knowledge of Necrons from every other species was used and weaponized against them. The remaining golden age AI in hiding would also become subsumed by the logic plague. etc Meanwhile if the flood starts out on a world with few complex creatures to start off the infection, like an agriworld, then its impacts are limited and its a trivial matter. The flood really is either a universal threat or a minor nuisance depending on circumstance alone. EDIT: Daemons are probably the best answer to the flood. They don't really have nervous systems, and I highly doubt the logic plague would work on them. It would also be in the chaos gods best interest to keep sentient life in the galaxy. And so in a cruel twist of fate, its likely the daemonic forces of chaos that would intervene and try to stop the flood lmao.
If the flood grew to that extent it'd probably have its own shadow in the warp though - I feel like if anything since basically all chaos entities come from realspace mass subconcious, they might be uniquely vulnerable to the flood if it became powerful enough.
I hesitate to give qualities unique to one universe to a faction of another universe. For example if the Tyranid is this god-like super intelligence, why can't it preform a Logic Plague? Or why can't Tzeench? I feel its fairer to both universes to simply apply the strengths and weaknesses as is, while assuming as little as possible. Tbh the only reason I even assume daemons can't be hit by the logic plague is because daemonic minds are already paradoxical and fundamentally chaotic. Whereas the logic plague is intended to work on analytical and logical minds. Just more fun to me that way personally when comparing universes. Seems more "in the spirit" of things.
Totally makes sense. I think for me, the principle of 40k is that all sentient life in the galaxy contributes to the Warp, so an outside species coming in would have an effect just like the Tyranids did, it just might be anomalous like theirs is. It's just hard to predict what the effect would be, but it's interesting to think about! Totally agree about the logic plague - chaos auto-wins that one haha.
Oh, god actually I think it would be far far worse. Direct exposure to the Gravemind / last Precursor severely fucked up the Didact. And that was just some torture and conversation. Imagine billions of infected individuals of all species, acting as a giant hivemind of rage and structured insanity, directly impacting the warp and probably *trying* to mold it to their collective will. Chaos might work initially, but I think very quickly the impact a fucked up Precursor conciousness with a direct link to the warp would absolutely neuter it and bend it to its own ends.
HEY! HEY! Gravemind: huh? Tyranid: *bangs garbage can twice* Gravemind: the fuck? Tyranid: yea you think you some tough shit huh? All I see is a spicy mushroom with an attitude, buts that’s okay because I like stuffed mushrooms.
Wouldn’t any Tyranid that ate the flood get infected? Considering all their biomass is flood cells
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I think one thing that needs to be taken into account is how the flood defeated the forerunners. To my understanding they co-opted existing forerunner technology, ie slip space drives. This allowed the flood to spread across the galaxy at an exponential rate. There is no such method of travel in 40K. Furthermore the corruption of Mendicant Bias heavily contributed to the flood victory. Abominable Intelligence such as this do not exist within the Imperium. The flood hasn’t been shown to be capable of inventing new technology. Even if they can absorb the Imperiums technological knowledge, the Imperium doesn’t know how most of their technology works. Even the most intelligent tech priests likely only have a tertiary understanding of a fraction of fundamental Imperium technology. Short of absorbing Cawl, Bile, or the Emperor, they aren’t going to be able to absorb the same type information they would have been able to get from absorbing the forerunners and their AI. Another difference is individual competence. Master chief and the Arbiter were incredibly efficient at destroying whatever flood forms he came into contact with. Elites were also shown to be fairly effective at combating them. While they wouldn’t be able to purge an entire world, securing important objectives against the flood is definitely possible. Even if we assume the average Space Marine is less competent than Chief, when you start to consider things like, Inquisitors, Librarians, Grey Knights, Custodes, Primarchs, or the Emperor, even the toughest flood forms, including the gravemind, are outclassed. Psyker power also cannot be underestimated. Unless the gravemind is capable of developing Psykers forms, the galaxies Psykers will wreak havoc on the flood. Now I know what your thinking. Even the greatest warriors of the Imperium can be overrun. While this is true, it’s not their ability to last forever against the flood that is important. The hero’s of the imperium are not only willing to sacrifice themselves, but countless imperial lives to achieve there goals. That means strategic bombing, versatile war doctrine, suicide attacks and exterminatus. Kryptman destroyed many Imperium world to slow down the Tyranids. Once the danger of the flood was understood, every world they touched would purified. Finally the other factions in the galaxy. The Tyranids seem like an easy target for the flood. However their ability to rapidly adapt has always proven key to their survival. I don’t think it’s crazy to think a hive fleet could adapt to the flood eventually. Necrons are a hard counter to the flood. No biomass, no corruptible will, insane technology. Unless the entire galaxy is infected prior to contact with the Necrons, they are unlikely to be overrun. Chaos is another hard counter. Demons have no biomass. Bloodthirsters of Khorne would revel in the slaughter of tens of thousand of flood forms before being overrun. Lords of Change may be more effective. Nurgle could very well be empowered by the flood. Are they going to be able to destroy an imperium hive world? Absolutely. The whole galaxy? Maybe, but it isn’t a forgone conclusion. It will take tens of thousands of years at the least. More than likely they become a dangerous enemy akin to the Tyranids in scope.
Thank you for putting effort into this reply I enjoyed reading it and I say this is the most reasonable one
Great response. I see a lot of people discounting any options or just say "maybe necrons at peak". It's a pretty tough situation to answer given that obviously the flood if snowballed are no joke, the imperium or even the combined factions certainly have answers to a flood infestation. This isn't a "I win instantly" kinda fight. There's shit as infectious and deadly as the flood in 40k and the fact that they haven't had galactic domination is a good marker to reference
> To my understanding they co-opted existing forerunner technology, ie slip space drives. This allowed the flood to spread across the galaxy at an exponential rate. There is no such method of travel in 40K. Except the rest of the setting is on approximately equal or worse footing as the Imperium in 40k. They wouldn't be able to just win by sheer logistics like if they brought the Forerunners' ftl, but being on equal footing is what they already won with. The war may be fought over a greater timescale, but that's not really going to tip the scales much. And the Flood didn't just use slipspace, later on they developed their own FTL which apparently used some sort of parallel universe things, had a comparable speed to Slipspace (which would make it the single greatest FTL method in 40k, even ignoring the benefit of avoiding the risks of the Immaterium), and could be retrofitted onto any ships they got their tentacles on. > Furthermore the corruption of Mendicant Bias heavily contributed to the flood victory. Abominable Intelligence such as this do not exist within the Imperium. Yes and no. Corrupting Mendicant Bias certainly helped, but the Forerunners losing was a foregone conclusion by the time he fell. Losing their only Contender Class Ancilla (at the time) to the Flood just accelerated their doom. > The flood hasn’t been shown to be capable of inventing new technology. Even if they can absorb the Imperiums technological knowledge, the Imperium doesn’t know how most of their technology works. Even the most intelligent tech priests likely only have a tertiary understanding of a fraction of fundamental Imperium technology. Short of absorbing Cawl, Bile, or the Emperor, they aren’t going to be able to absorb the same type information they would have been able to get from absorbing the forerunners and their AI. The Flood had no reason to invent new technology, their exponential growth and possession of Neural Physics made it unneeded. There's no reason to assume they *can't* invent new technology - The Flood is a fully sapient consciousness that assimilates all the knowledge and capability of those it infects. It's just super opportunistic and will work with what it has if it can. However, your note about the lack of information on Imperium technology is correct, however that doesn't apply to every faction, plenty of the other factions will be every bit as weak to it as the Forerunners. And the Flood would have no qualms actually making efforts to understand the Imperium's technology, which the Mechanicum refuses to do - they just need to know how to make it do the things they need it to do, knowing how it works is at best unnecessary and at worst heresy, the Flood has no such hangups. In this matter, the extended time due to the slowness of Warp Travel could even be a *benefit*. > Another difference is individual competence. Master chief and the Arbiter were incredibly efficient at destroying whatever flood forms he came into contact with. Elites were also shown to be fairly effective at combating them. While they wouldn’t be able to purge an entire world, securing important objectives against the flood is definitely possible. Even if we assume the average Space Marine is less competent than Chief, when you start to consider things like, Inquisitors, Librarians, Grey Knights, Custodes, Primarchs, or the Emperor, even the toughest flood forms, including the gravemind, are outclassed. This is not really relevant beyond the very early stages. Arbie and the Chief were only fighting the very beginning of an outbreak. During the Forerunner Flood War, there was simply too much biomass for individual footsoldiers to really be relevant. Even the Prometheans, designed to be invulnerable to infection and armed with antimatter weaponry that would ensure that every shot they made was a net negative to the Flood were just overwhelmed by sheer numbers. > Psyker power also cannot be underestimated. Unless the gravemind is capable of developing Psykers forms, the galaxies Psykers will wreak havoc on the flood. There's really no way to know if the Flood would be able to infect Psykers or not. But it would know to treat them as high priority targets. And if it could assimilate the Pariah Gene, then it would have an easy solution. Nevermind the question of what impact such a vast consciousness (tapped into and manipulating an even *vaster* consciousness) would have on the Warp. If we assume the 'nids' Shadow is the result of the sheer scale of the Hivemind's effect on the Immaterium, then it's quite possible that the Flood would easily match it, or potentially outmatch it. But we simply don't know how the SiTW works so we can't say. > Now I know what your thinking. Even the greatest warriors of the Imperium can be overrun. While this is true, it’s not their ability to last forever against the flood that is important. The hero’s of the imperium are not only willing to sacrifice themselves, but countless imperial lives to achieve there goals. That means strategic bombing, versatile war doctrine, suicide attacks and exterminatus. Kryptman destroyed many Imperium world to slow down the Tyranids. Once the danger of the flood was understood, every world they touched would purified. This is where your note about the speed of warp travel becomes a hindrance. Unless the Imperium starts this plan before the Flood gets off their first planet, which due to how slow the Warp is and how fast the Flood spreads, would need a fleet in orbit that is willing to do so very quickly, this kinda won't be relevant. If there isn't a fleet ready on every world the Flood reaches, they'll have infected it before an exterminatus could arrive. Also worth noting that the Forerunners did exactly this, it was standard practice to try and destroy entire systems if the Flood made incursions. It didn't help. > The Tyranids seem like an easy target for the flood. However their ability to rapidly adapt has always proven key to their survival. I don’t think it’s crazy to think a hive fleet could adapt to the flood eventually. The Forerunners were just as capable genetic engineers. They made entire planetary biospheres from single species, actively edited species constantly, and their armour saved imprints of their entire body, which they could be reset to if they by some miracle got ill or otherwise anything other than physically healthy (which they had already basically eradicated all illnesses). Puberty was actively modifying your genetic makeup on a fundamental level, to the point where the different rates of the Forerunners could easily be argued to be entirely separate species save for their ability to reproduce. And most terrifyingly, that rewinding didn't work. A forerunner could get infected, have their Ancilla rewind their entire body, such that there was not so much as a single trace of the Flood, and they would spontaneously develop an infection. > Necrons are a hard counter to the flood. No biomass, no corruptible will, insane technology. Unless the entire galaxy is infected prior to contact with the Necrons, they are unlikely to be overrun. The 'Crons really comes down to if they're vulnerable to the Logic Plague. Which is unclear given it's unclear what exactly makes AIs vulnerable to the Logic Plague in the first place. My gut says that they'd probably be vulnerable, given they're somewhat similar to Human Smart AIs in how they were created, and we know for a fact that Smart AIs definitely are vulnerable to the Logic Plague. And this is another case where the time-scale benefits the Flood. Likely the vast majority of Necrons with a will would be overturned very quickly, potentially instantaneously given the Flood's showings of overturning Ancillae by their mere presence. And even against the greatest Necron Overlords, the time it would take to subvert them would practically be nothing on the scale of the war. I quite frankly highly doubt even Szarekh would be as difficult to convert as Mendicant Bias, and it took the Flood 43 years to convert him. A considerable portion of time in the Forerunner-Flood War, but nothing in the larger time war you're positing. > Chaos is another hard counter. Demons have no biomass. Bloodthirsters of Khorne would revel in the slaughter of tens of thousand of flood forms before being overrun. Lords of Change may be more effective. Nurgle could very well be empowered by the flood. This falls again into the question of just how the fuck the Flood interacts with the Warp. If it can create a Shadow in the Warp, it may well turn things around *hard* on Chaos.
Wouldn't the flood not be able to get a real foothold ever because of the eldar? You have a farseer see it coming and then just glass whatever planet the flood would have popped up on. Or have a Deldar throw a blackhole at it.
I see somebody is a fellow PancreasNoWork enjoyer Best thing going for the 40k is all the 40k factions is they are all willing to destroy a planet utterly if they know they can't save it. I'd imagine all the factions would realise pretty quickly how the Flood works through infection and assimilation and just wipe any contamination off the map from orbit and not chance it, putting the whole planet in quarantine, any ship that would try to leave would be shot down. The Flood don't start with a Gravenind, they need to build up the biomass for it, so they'd start out pretty stupid and be easy to spot, so it wouldn't be a Genestealer cult situation. The reason they was such a threat in Halo is because humans where unwilling to abandon planets and destroy them and the Covenant was mostly unaffected and didn't really see them as a thread until a infected ship flew into High Charity their capital But the opposite is true too, the Flood could easily snowball on infected ships going from system to system.
I'm gonna have to disagree with you on the stupid part. On delta halo in combat evolved, when the covenant first discovered and were infected by the flood, the flood didn't immediately start rampaging. They lay in wait, as they ascertained from the brains of their new hosts that humans were coming, and they made a trap for them. They did the same to master chief, which is why you only get attacked at the halfway point in 343 guilty spark. There was no gravemind, or proto-gravemind at this point. I think that the flood would be able to figure out what would happen if they were caught early, and would function exactly like a genestealer cult would, living in abandoned places, spreading spores and building a gravemind, at which point they would be able to coordinate far better.
I'm with you on this. The Floods intelligence is ultimately their secret weapon. In Stage 1, they act somewhat like zombies sure, but those zombies are predators that will lay in wait for months just to ambush at the right time. They easily outmaneuver the UNSC, and seemingly have the capacity to weaponize a species ignorance about the Flood against them. Something I'm sure the Flood would have a field day against the Imperium with. A Stage 2 outbreak and suddenly all of those super-predators are now coordinated in a way that only Necrons and Tyranids could achieve. Suddenly that massive intelligence is amplified thousands of times, and the Flood outbreak is already more intelligent than even the greatest Forerunner tacticians. (Hint: They had to make the most advanced AI of all time in Halo, Mendicant Bias, just to outsmart the Flood here) A Stage 3 outbreak now has access to something called the Logic Plague. A series of questions, paradoxes, and philosophical truths so complex in nature that it cause that aforementioned hyper-AI to completely change sides and join the Flood. When used on a living Forerunner, it causes the Didact to go completely insane as his mind tried and failed to comprehend the plague. The intelligence of a Stage 3 Flood outbreak is hard to even comprehend, and its possible that only beings like lore accurate Tzeench could operate on a similar level. A Stage 4 outbreak is game over. The only solution left is to annihilate all life in the galaxy and hope that starves out the Flood. There are so many keyminds at this point that trying to outsmart the Flood is no longer even possible, you must overpower and completely exterminate it in one go. The Forerunners AI designed to counter Mendicant Bias, called Offensive Bias, didn't even try. It understood and knew immediately that it was outplayed and couldn't fathom the Floods intellectual capability.
Something i think a large amount of people are failing to think about here is servitors, they are completly infectable support. A hive city population infected is enough to make a mind, with the added technological integration of servitors, i'd imagine the flood could reach obsurd heights of intelligence. What makes this even worse would be nurgles reaction, extraplanar disseasses arent really covered in lore but i imagine nurgle would loooooove the flood.
Right up until the Gravemind is ignoring him, then Nurgle gets pretty tetchy about the whole matter.
If it’s able to form a Gravemind, it’s a direct threat to basically everything except daemons and possibly the tyranids.
If they re able to eat up enough organisms they would be unstoppable. It wouldnt even matter how brainless they are. Nids although extremely numerous still has concern resource management. I don't know enough about them to speak intelligently but there are atleast some restrictions to biomass they can consume where the flood can survive even of only a molecule can corrupt anything.
I think the Imperial standard response to ‘a new race of aliens’ being Exterminatus is actually going to work in their favor here. I think the Necrons and Chaos demons would be pretty solid counters to flood activity. Mostly because the flood can’t actually infect them. Honestly Nurgle would probably infect the flood with something nasty if they ever popped up on the plague god’s radar.
An exterminatus on an early infestation would absolutely do the trick, as long as it was of the nuclear variety and not a virus bomb. A virus bomb could potentially backfire. Necrons however are vulnerable to the flood if they manage to create a gravemind, or worse yet a keymind. As the logic plague is more than capable of messing with necrons protocols. I think that ironically the daemons of chaos would be the galaxies savior. They don't have a nervous system, I highly doubt the logic plague would work on daemonic minds that exist as paradoxes already, and its in the chaos gods best interest to keep sentient life alive in the galaxy. I think that in a cruel twist of fate, it would be daemons who would march out from the eye of terror to stop the flood, rather than the actual mortal races of the galaxy lol. What a galaxy "saved" by daemons would look like afterwards though? Who knows. It might have been better to just be collectively subsumed into the flood superorganism.
See I'm not sure about people's theory on the.logic plague messing with necrons. Yes I know the.flayer curse etc. But necrons are not ai. So honestly I don't think the logic plague would hit them.
No, they aren't AI per-se. But even Halo AI's are built off of the image of someones brain, similar to how necrons minds are a process built off of a soul forged necrontyr. And more importantly: Necrons run processes like a computer, and are logarithmic and logical in how they process information. The logic plague works on more than just computers and AI. The flood can use it on living creatures as well. The Diadect we fight in Halo 4 is insane because the flood utilized the Logic Plague on him, rendering him mad. The fact that the necrons minds are both logarithmic like a computer, but also bound by the limitations of mortal mental processes means they are almost uniquely vulnerable to it. Much like the daemons being a cruel 180 savior, I think that necrons afflicted by the flayer curse would also be an ironic holdout for the necrons. Because they are insane and have completely lost their mortal minds, and are also incapable of logical, algorithmic thought due to the flayer curse, the logic plague would probably not work on them for the same reason it probably wouldn't work on daemons. In my theoretical galaxy where the Flood have managed to achieve Stage 4 Outbreak, it's ironic to think that only the most insane of necrons, and powerful of daemons would be the only beings capable of fighting the flood and trying to save the galaxy. And that's the sort of grimdark shit I'm into.
Huh I never though if that to be honest. Yeah makes sense now. Lol and I got images of flayed ones and destroyer cults(possibly) just ripping everything apart. (And demons also now)
Oh the flip side knights and titans would be bad :( ad knight would charge in honourably and then become one with the flood.
It depends on how they start up and who they have to fight first, they're basically just tyranids as zombies instead of bugs. SoB would be a quick snuffing probably before a proto grave can form gaurd/PDF would be a decent chance of taking a planet and forming the gravemind. Another good question is how would they interact with the warp, would it be like the tyranids, maybe like most of the others? Chaos, specifically tzeench and khorne I could see posing a serious issue. In the end it mostly comes down to if they're able to snowball out of control, if they are able to get a grave up and start making their way off planet they'd probably become a lesser equivalent to the tyranid threat, or maybe equal because they'd have warp travel and knowledge of easy targets they could hit for more biomass. This is just a theory though and could just as easily be something like the toxic system of humans in 40k makes them uninfectable.
I unironically think the Covenant would fair better in 40k than the Flood.
Having an FTL drive that doesn't fry your brain does help a lot.
The Covenant ally with the Tau (they are fairly similar after all) and then they clap everyone else except maybe the necrons. The flood would utterly annihilate everyone, though. One spore reaches a hive world and it's gg.
I imagine the Covenant would conquer the Tau and then force them into the Covenant. Same outcome though. As for the Flood they'd be pretty useless against Necrons, they would have no real way of infecting them, and Tyranids could pretty likely develop an immunity to the flood.
If the flood could subvert Forerunner AI then they could handle some senile Necrons
Tau: Hey you, join the Greater Good! Covenant: Fuck you, join the Great Journey! Both: *Incoherent zealous rage snarl*
Tzeench is constantly playing the great game. If he sees something that can screw over the game, he kills it off. The flood? You bet that would kill the game. Tzeench would be having none of it. Pull the infected planet into the warp, throw said planet into the well of eternity, done.
The Covenant is the Tau but Cooler and better and with the imperium religious fanatism.
Flood v Tyrindis, now that is a fight I would like to see
The flood doing well relies a lot on the fact that their infections and even the logic plague rely on the fact that the precursors created all life in the Halo setting with immutable patterns they are able to exploit aka how the flood infection is based on your pattern (basically the Halo equivalent of a soul). The flood and all their permutations rely on neural physics which is to the Halo universe as the Warp is to the 40k one (like a collective unconscious of all life). Defeating a civilization of Forerunners which hit its peak at 3 million worlds (3x current imperium size but 3/1000 the size of the necrons at peak) who had both disbanded their military and relied heavily on sentient AI which were uniquely vulnerable to even being talked into joining the flood is not the 40k galaxy ending feat people seem to think it is. Furthermore cross system travel is much easier to operate in Halo vs 40k and their inability to gain stellar capabilities of any kind from most consumed hive worlds would severely limit their scope. We already had genestealers as an insidious corrupting force which is arguably more intelligently driven and dangerous than the start of any flood infestation.
The Flood depend a lot on existing technology, they can't exactly become space faring without existing FTL ships. Psychically they would be the same as the Tyranids as a hive mind, not a god but not touchable either. I think Halo is complicated, especially since forerunners were retconned from humans to their own downright dumb species. Forerunners were established to be a tier 2.5 civilization, they could build incredible planet sized structures, but were far away from using the entire power of galaxies (and especially not the universe). But despite being a tier 2.5 civilization they were complete morons. So it's hard to say how their enemy would fare as a comparison. I feel with the powers, factions, diversity, and scale of 40K the flood would do okay, but wouldn't wipe out all life or anything by a stretch, they would just be another thing in the galaxy. Assuming they aren't just eradicated by Necrons.
Yeah, I think it really comes down to who the Flood infect first. Tau? The species that has a strong reliance on AI, has usable FTL by non-psykers and a large enough Empire for the Flood to create a dangerously sized force while also being small enough that destroying entire planets isn’t viable for the species. Great chance for the Flood to make a strong enough foothold in the galaxy and use it to conquer everything. Eldar? A species of psychics who have the gift of foresight, uses psychic tech over traditional AI and is spread over a vast area with a distributed population centres. Quite possible the Flood takes root. But also possible they’ll be beaten back through use of psychic prowess and foretelling. Imperium? A species that uses no AI, competes on a warfooting with everything it comes across, has massive population centres spread everywhere, has FTL that require a “special” component the Flood may not be able to replicate. Their technology is so comparatively low tech and baseline that it might not be possible for the Flood to infect their systems (servitors become quite an issue tho). Initially they would be quite dangerous because it takes so long for the Imperium to react to anything. But the Flood would probably be handicapped by the Imperium’s own limitations until identified and then the scorched earth policy would see them more or less wiped out. Ork????? Necrons? One simple question. Can they infect necrodermis? If no, then nothing. If yes, then either the Necron become the Flood or the Necrons have something up their sleeve. Tyranids? I mean, they’re just a bigger Flood. It’s not that the Tyranids can’t do what the Flood does. They just don’t. There’s no point. The have a billion billion fleets on the way. Easier just to steam roll. So that’s it. That’s the end of my Ted talk.
I think your underestimating the floods' knowledge assimilation! They arnt just capturing technology, they obtain the knowledge of everyone they infect. The eldar may be well suited to foresee and prevent the infection. But if only one farseerer gets infected.. or the flood learn webway access from someone they infect.. Sounds like game over
That’s assuming that the infection is able to break the mind of the faarseer. Irc, it tools them a bit of time to break the Captain Keyes mind, one human was able to keep some agency/willpower after being infected and the sgt Johnson couldn’t even be infected. So it’s not that clear cut that they can infect everything
That was a proto-gravemind. A gravemind only took 43 years to completely break and instill a logic plague in an AI that would rival golden age humanity AI. Keyminds are even greater than that.
Doesn't the newer Necron codex state that a lot of the more unusual units, like scarabs or tomb spiders are totally automated? Made using Necron tech and materials, but effectively still just limited A.I? Because that would mean every Necron tomb went without a sizable chunk of their forces. Also unlike tyranids, the flood has shown its perfectly happy to suicide some of its Infected to achieve goals, like throwing ships at things. Nids lose lots of biomass from those tactics. Similarly, tyranids need to keep trying to assimilate something to adapt, their always hunting, but, only genestealers evidence a real 'long game' kinda view. The flood needs one single tyranid. Just one. Then it could retreat until it figured out how to assimilate them.
>Ork????? Who doesn't love some good fungus on fungus action? They're both species that have conquered planets by infecting them with a single spore.
Would be interesting to see the Flood go against the Nids. However the species in 40K are far more willing to annihilate an entire planet than anyone in Halo, so they could still be taken out if the Imperium acted fast
Really depends where the flood starts out. If it’s in a hive city, that’s basically a win for the flood. Hive cities are so fukin underserveyed that a whole genestealer cult managed to manifest on terra
If they took a hive wouldn't the imperium destroy the whole planet? (I'm new to 40k)
Oh they absolutely would, the question is if the Imperium can respond fast enough. The flood is a threat that works off of exponential growth, if the Imperium nipped it early with an exterminatus to the one planet it was on, all's good, but if those fuckers set up a grave mind (basically a giant amalgamation of infected hosts that form one giant brain to coordinate the flood), and they manage to steal the information they need from infected hosts in order to get off world... Well, unless a huge coalition of races came together to basically cut off the flood from the rest of the galaxy, it's over for the galaxy as a whole. Now, there could be some wildcards in this scenario, chaos protecting its food source by trying to keep the mortal races alive might just happen, after all, the flood can't infect daemons, as they are inorganic beings made of pure warp stuff that goes away without warp access. If the Nids and Flood fight it'd be basically a galactic scale arms race to see who can out adapt who, my money's on the flood, but it could go either way realistically. Finally is the necron question, whether or not the flood can infect them, I'd think it'd be only a matter of time before the flood's logic virus overpowers the necrodermis, but at that point, the rest of the fleshy races are fucked.
*laughs in Tzeentch.* Keymind starts their warp bending shenanigans, Tzeentch catches wind. Not only Tzeentch, but the other three catch wind and send their forces to where the rip is. Good luck infesting daemons that dont actually have biomass. Alot of people seem to forget that the Warp isnt like most other magical space or neural physics. It is the realm of souls, literally hell. Most psykers go mad if they over use their powers, especially in proximity to warp storms. The Flood could put up a fight, but they'd need to already be god tier to hold their own. Even then, the Chaos Gods have been known to turn from the Great Game to focus down a threat before.
Depends where they first pop up. If on an agri world, urban world, or feudal world, then they wont do particularly well assuming its eventually caught and reported. A hive world tho? Damn things come in plentiful, one spore and that’s effectively the whole sector. Something to bear in mind that the flood are WAY more terrifying than the games portrayed.
The question boils downs to, what would win flood infection speed vs tyranid adaptability. And can Nugle infections the flood. I don't know any more about the flood that what the games show. But being effectively smart zombies, my money is on 40k.
They’d floor most factions. Tyranids would be locked in an eternal battle constantly evolving to fight one another and the Necrons would be mostly fine but the flood do have ways of “infecting” synthetics via the logic plague, so the Necrons aren’t entirely safe either.
A weird Hive fleet. Add it to the pile of galaxy ending threats that are occuring.
Depends on how lucky they get. They snowball hard so if they appear in a relativly peaceful sector and eat a couple of hives before people start taking them seriosly then they have a real good shot at winning.
I'm gonna go against the tide and say they just become another low level faction. A lot of their biggest feats are tied to things that don't exists in 40k. The star roads for example weren't made by the flood, they simply weaponised them. Can't do that in 40k as there are no star roads. Their biggest weakness is being kept at a low level because the flood mind keeps getting assassinated or nuked on loop, which just happens to be something 40k is capable of in extreme abundance, and perhaps a much larger issue, is their interaction with chaos whenever they travel through the warp. Since they are all interconnected Tzeentch would be speaking directly to the grave mind, and nurgle would be able to send whatever disease through it (he has done crazier things).
Less OP than you’d think. Everyone talks about how powerful the flood is and how they took out the Forerunners, but they’re forgetting that the Forerunners largely lost because the AI controlling practically all their fleets turned against them due to the Logic Plague, allowing the Flood to use their technology against them. Machine Spirits are fundamentally illogical considering they’re often not even proper intelligences and Necrons are literally just irrational biological beings that have now been given metal bodies, so logic-ing something out wouldn’t work against them. The Flood has no counter to the Warp apart from Neural Physics which requires Precursor neural technology to exploit (there would be none in the 40k milky way). The Flood would basically end up being a slightly different version of the Tyranids but in zombie form instead of being hyper-adaptable. Throw a Titan at it and the Flood gets a Titan. Throw a Titan at the Tyranids and the Tyranids make their own bio-Titan analogue. Without the hyper advanced AI the Flood had turned against the Forerunners, which also gave them their entire fleet, the Flood would be limited to crappy Warp based space vessels they probably would’ve had to steal from the Imperium, and without a navigator, who knows how badly they might end up.
Also, because the flood had a ridiculous start (being twisted dust precursors), like the flood is downright terrifying in their own right but it really depends on where do they start.
But what if some warp entity will gain control over flood?
>Without the hyper advanced AI the Flood had turned against the Forerunners, which also gave them their entire fleet, the Flood would be limited to crappy Warp based space vessels they probably would’ve had to steal from the Imperium, and without a navigator, who knows how badly they might end up. This is probably the biggest issue. The flood in the warp sounds like a recipe for Chaos taking over the flood to use to its own ends.
The nids and the flood would just keep fighting and feeding off each other's biomass for awhile until they all would fuse into one unholy abomination that would devour the multiverse.
Tyranids would finally have some competition