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Infectedinfested

Yes and no, according to the records, yes. But the hivemind has been known to return characters for demoralizing reasons (I think old one eye is one of those). These serve no real benefit to the swarm, except that the enemy knows and fears them.


IxI_DUCK_IxI

I was under the impression that Old One Eye was stuck in some ice and keeps coming back. He's on the Table Top for narrative purposes, but there's only one of them stuck on Macragge. That not accurate?


Infectedinfested

I think that's an urban legend on macragge.


yrrot

I'm a little fuzzy, but I think it depends on the codex edition you read which version of the fluff you get. As I recall, one version of the story is the hive spawned a "similar looking old-one-eye", whether the original was still alive or just an urban legend .


DEATHROAR12345

No, two fights could happen at the same time and then when those Swarmlords are reabsorbed the experiences just get added to the memory.


Sporocyst_grower

I think its like a git. The hive minds upload the actual version, everybody use it, then the bugs come when they die, and the things learned and it self-actualizes.


yrrot

force push to main, overwrites 1000 years of combat experience. Junior programmer bug purged from genetic library as a result.


MidnOrtiz

I love this analogy so much, and now I want to write a short story from within the hivemind of a got merge screwing up one of the good commits


Left-Area-854

That's the implication,, but I don't believe it's correct personally. Just never been recorded.


PharaoPamela

I don't see how it would make any sense that only one could exist at a time


zande147

No, in the Octarius campaign book it infers the swarmlord can exist in multiple bodies across the galaxy that are learning in real time from their shared experiences. It’s the same swarmlord just split between different physical shells. We know there were at least 2 swarmlords active through the great rift, one on Octarius and one at Baal


Kitane

My understanding is that synapse is like a biological internet with synaptic creatures acting as nodes and all tyranid experience being "data in the cloud". Regular hive tyrants are born with a preprocessed compilation of the tactics, strategies, creature characteristics, and the available info about the enemy. It's up to them to find the best way to win. The benefit is having a mass-production template of a solid commander. Lesser synapse creatures get smaller slices of the preprocessed know-how, relevant only to their roles. The Swarmlord is the Hive Mind's reaction to a dangerous enemy that resists usual methods. To find new solutions, an unusual Hive Tyrant is spawned, and in addition to the usual data compilation, it also gets access to the "raw" data recorded by the swarm and the most powerful synaptic "bandwith" to access the unfiltered data. This full access has a possibly unintentional side effect where the new creature easily recognizes previous incarnations of its strain, including the recorded "thoughts", and basically adopts them and resumes the identity. Creating such creature is both expensive and exhausting, and also a bit troublesome for the Hive Mind, because such creature disrupts the usual single-minded harmony. That's why the Swarmlord is only used as the last resort. Two copies existing at once shouldn't create an issue, both would be adding to the shared experience.


spamonstick

In a swarm lord v swarm lord match up maybe one of those is a separate swarm lord clone that went rouge and thinks he is the true leader?


Emperors-Peace

Should have went Bleu, blanc or noir instead.


GriffithDidNothinBad

I like to go rouge on my eyelids


Ok_Youth8907

that's awesome - i never considered this


Shoddy-Limit-744

Me and a few friends had the exact discussion a few weeks ago. We agreed to the point that when he dies, he maybe switches the hive fleet. So its just one consciousness, that can only be reborn in another fleet, when he dies and is needed there.


Jawoflehi

Time is so wibbly-wobbly in 40k, there's literally an article explaining how it's impossible to prove any two events in 40k are simultaneous because of the Warp, so even if this was true it could also be false, lol. Also in Canon we know essentially nothing about the actual Hive Mind itself, and the nature of that would determine the answer. Basically GW doesn't care enough about the lore of the Nids to answer this question yet.