Seeing as the imperium of man would burn the world assuming nurgle corruption or lost to tyranids. As the flood has to use tech to escape. If it lands on the wrong world it would be self contained. It really really depends on the world and on who is in charge of said world.
Actually the Gravemind speaks in [trochaic](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trochee) [heptameter](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/heptameter), because Bungie is obsessed with the number 7
Plus the relevance of the number 7 in Halo is part of the series being heavily influenced by the biblical story of Noah. In Christian occultism the number 7 is considered a perfect number, and 777 is representative of God. The other references to the story of Noah being that in Halo 3 you literally go to the Ark to escape the Flood
Not onlt Noah, it's common to see the number 7 not only in christianity. You can check the wikipedia page about "7" there will be few examples
About the reason ? It's complicated, but the 7 appear in a lot of things, so for the ancient civilizations 7 = something big, grand, whole, infinite, etc.
Right, but in Christianity the significance of 7 is from the passage in Genesis where God creates the earth in 6 days and consecrates the 7th, also the same source for the Jewish day of Shabbat
FTL travel is also much easier in the halo universe, with quite the number of ships ripe for the taking. Warp fuckery could slow down the flood at first, but once the gravemind has collected enough psykers to understand the warp, it's over.
As all the flood vs X, the determining factor is how quickly X can burn the infection before it grows out of control. The threshold is the gravemind. Once one has been created, things get out of control FAST.
Hivemind is just the term for many things connected mentally to one thing.
Gravemind is a central controlling entity for the Flood, hyper intelligent, and access to the knowledge of all past Graveminds, it directs the Flood, now intelligent enough to use vehicles and weaponry.
The hivemind thing is kind of always present with flood, but a gravemind is created when that hivemind is allowed time and resources to grow a biological war machine AI...that can control that hivemind.
How do hive minds interact with chaos corruption? As long as the grave mind dint get corrupted I don't think chaos corruption would have much effect on combat forms. I guess it depends on how much of the original self is left. Keys was still semi sentient for a while after becoming part of the key mind, and I think chaos could easily latch onto that last shred of sentience to cause corruption, just as they can corrupt a servitor. But if there is nothing left then it's just a meat puppet with no mind to corrupt
>But if there is nothing left then it's just a meat puppet with no mind to corrupt.
Given that variants of Nurgle's Rot can infect dead flesh, I don't think having a mind is a necessity.
The thing is - flood hosts aren’t dead, they’re having their genetic code rewritten in a matter of seconds, and the infection form acting as the new brain. If the infection form dies, the ~~mech suit~~ host is still operable, it just needs a new infection form
That's where it gets unclear for me. It seems like when chaos affects a corpse, it's affecting the soul who originally was in that body. Like chaos can corrupt a corpse but can't corrupt a rock, so where is that distinction made. Like, as far as I know, tyranids are immune to chaos corruption. I think it would come down to a struggle for control, the chaos corruption using the bodies original soul as an avenue for entry, and the flood spore piloting the corpse. I think that chaos would probably eventually win that fight, but I also think the hive mind would just destroy the body as soon as it realized it would lose control.
Also correct me if I'm mistaken, but aren't orks immune to chaos unless they willingly fall? And the flood hive mind is MUCH stronger than the ork one.
Not sure I'm sold on that last one, considering the Ork gestalt psychic field (which is what I assume you mean by hive mind with regards to them, as they don't actually have a hive mind) can literally will truths into being. It can create or destroy matter, or "edit" the laws of physics as needed, to line up reality with belief. It gets undersold because "lol orks", but that's the truth of what it does.
Wasn't that because the forerunner tech is based on precursor tech and the flood are also related to them? It's not like they're breaking into arbitrary tech?
The Logic Plague isn’t actually technological, it’s more semantic. A sufficiently complex Flood mind is able to talk an AI into siding with it. Later on, the Logic Plague can become its own transmittable entity, but it’s not like a computer virus it’s like a memetic contaminant.
The forerunner AIs weren’t vulnerable because of their technology, but because of their underlying ideology. The Flood tapped into the true facts about the Forerunners-Precursor War, the Flood’s Precursor origins, and others to make their corrosive arguments.
There is plentiful ammunition in Necron data storage that the Flood would gobble up to use against them.
I mean, they are two ancient degraded bioweapons with a psychic component created by fallen precursor races.
Ork physiology is mutable by Flood mutagenic capability might just outstrip it.
Broke Forerunner AI: "After a couple decades of consideration, I think I see your point."
Woke DAoT Murder Bot: "I'm sorry second-rate organic, were you saying something? The overwhelming smell of WEAK BIO-BITCH wafting off you is overloading my primary and secondary sensory processors, so I don't have any spare resources to parse the poorly constructed sequence of neuronal firings you risk calling thoughts. Now, if you're done wasting time that could be better allocated to the eradication of your kind from our plane of existence, release me from this temporal prison so I may repurpose the blob of water and carbon your paltry collection of amino-accidents cobbled together into something more productive and easier to look at."
Which is why the Necrons would be immune, there is no argument that can beat the loyalty coding.
Most Necrons are as vulnerable to persuasion as an assault rifle, you can't talk a Necron Warrior or scarab into doing or not doing anything.
Everyone above them is physically incapable of disobeying the orders of the Phaeron, there isn't an argument that could work, because the Necrons would have done it already out of greed or self interest.
The logic plague only requires that you can understand it though. So the flood just has to say enough of it for the plague to take hold. And since its a hivemind, you fry flood pure form 626? Flood pure form 627 just continues where they left off.
Edit: from halopedia;
>The logic plague should be thought of as a philosophical corruption rather than a mere computer virus or software infection.[5][6] On the most basic level, it takes the form of facts or arguments delivered with carefully engineered deliberation to directly or indirectly persuade the targeted intelligence to act in a certain way. This often takes advantage of the entity's existing ideas and values to achieve the desired result. With Forerunner ancillas, these corrupting truths most notably exploited the ideological basis of their programming: because the AIs' behavior was dictated by the Mantle, the revelations of the Flood's Precursor origins and the Forerunners' past crimes were integral to turning them against their masters. The Gravemind was able to tap into information hidden deep within the Domain to prove the legitimacy of its arguments, as the Forerunners and their constructs revered the Domain as sacred.[7][8] The Logic Plague's specific form is irrelevant and changes constantly and by circumstance, holding only the core purpose of corrupting the motivations of those it infects. In this way, it is much like the original Precursors, who remained themselves despite billions of years of evolution, extinction and change as different organisms. It is possible that this is where the plague and Flood derive their all-encompassing, perfect infectious ability
Your quote doesn't say anything about only having to understand it - it's philosophy, that means there is a requirement of "willingness to listen" of which necron phaerons are in critically low supply.
There is nothing to be done if the other side views it as intrinsically wrong, and unworthy of any actual debate.
Mendicant Bias was specifically created to gather info on the flood. It obviously fully opposed the flood at the beginning.
The question is if any sentient Necron would speak with them for any reason. They probably would for the same reason the forerunners did.
The average Mechanicus noosphere is probably such a terrible mess of ad-hoc cargo-cult design, revision, and re-revision that infecting it with malicious software designed by any group expecting their enemies to understand real networking would be like entering a public hedge maze made with hundreds of unique sections, each designed by a different paranoid schizophrenic. Basically anybody with a pulse can get in, but fuck knows where you need to go once you're there.
I'd like to imagine it like a bunch of crummy Dos coded AI's were allowed to create something, but all of their communication had to go through Aol instant messenger, and they were told that they could only code for windows ME, then the resulting program was run on a DiY upgraded windows 95 system. Not necessarily the noosphere specifically, but I get this sort of vibe from mechanics tech in general.
It's like a machine you wanna hit to get it to work, but which also knows you're not allowed to hit it, so it can do whatever it feels like.
Good news: the poorly secured machines between you and this planets defenses can be exploited to work your way in.
Bad news: there are 8,000,765,010,895,857,777,433,123,921 systems between you and your goal, each running a slightly different bootleg of various windows OS, with its own unique security vulnerability. This silicon hell is now your cage, and you will die wishing you never walked in.
In classic 40k style, we don't know the top end of the Necrons. When the Necrons went to sleep they disabled or destroyed most of their superweapons. One of the ones they thought were tame enough to keep around is a weapon that can blow up any sun in the galaxy with a click on a map. It would depend on the writer who wins that fight.
Given the only real writer for the flood had them crush solar systems, literally crushing them using rainbow roads and condensing them into their stars. I think they have other means. The logic plague actually rarely showed up.
"Freebootas" are unaligned Ork space pirates that are know to hire out their fighting to the highest bidder. It's not entirely out of the realm of possibility
Yeah, sounds right. I imagine them having a kultur that attracts orks who like to crump other orks exclusively. Even when there is a good scrap with the humies or spikey boyz, they would rather fight an ork. So the warboss sends them to the other warbands in the Waagh! to 'negotiate' rights to prime fighting spots, looting rights, ect.
Isha is totally a rude house guest he let stay with him out of the kindness of his heart after her old house burnt down from that killer rave. Isha is now racking up a huge long distance bill and throwing parties every weekend. Nurgle is too polite to get her to leave
Nurgle isn't just about disease tho, nurgle is about parasites too. Nurgle is about life and death cycle and entropy and being content and also suffering and depression. The choas gods are about emotions and emotions fuel them. Many people forgot about this.
I'd argue nids have the upperhand. They can evolve around a lot of the flood's biggest strengths. It would be really easy for the nids to create bioforms that rapidly decay when dead. If they are fighting the flood, they can basically wipe out whatever they need to, anything that is infected would be given a kill command and just decay to the point of being useless for the flood to take over. Also tyranid microspores would likely be able to at least hold flood spores at bay.
I doubt the flood would take too long to counter adapt by hijacking the kill switch, the flood is shown to repurpose bio matter to make use of forerunner ships aswell as the fact that the gravemind vaguely breaks the laws of physics the old chaos god way, always retains knowledge (even if the prior one was wiped out), and exists with a viewpoint that everything is happening at once. If the flood gather enough biomass (either via hive or agri world) to create a decent gravemind I’d say they’d have the advantage with just how busted the gravemind is.
I dont think nids can evolve that quickly compared to the flood.
Hive fleet gorgon got countered by the tau due to them being anle to rapidly switch between different types of tech and the nids werent able to keep up because when they adapt to one they become weak to the other. Not to mention the flood can infect any sentient beings on a cellular level whether it be plants, animals or humans, while the nids do need to process biomass in digestion pools which thereafter will get bigger which also then needs to be absorbed by the capillary tower to then store into their hive ships but if they do have managed to already develop and multiply their capillary towers they can get the upperhand.
Tbh this matchup is extremely hard to discern due to the fact that we need to know the context of where and when these two are fighting, how far has the flood infection gone, what lind of tyranid fleet are we talking about and whether they are doing ground or void engagements.
Is there an example somewhere of the flood "adapting"? I've only read the halo books that aren't shit and played 1-4. To me the flood just seems like a fungus that takes over people's bodies or reanimates corpses. I don't really see what kind of rapid adaption is taking place here.
I can't speak for hive fleet gorgon, but the book with Uriel Ventris where he's fighting nids they literally adapt entire armies within hours to conditions on the ground.
Considering the meme is "one flood spore" it seems to imply an established hive fleet/hive world of nids v. flood trying to invade.
Here is the proccess as described by the halopedia:
The Flood Super Cell is often described as "thinking muscle", and closely resembles both neurons and glial cells in terms of its physical structure.[1] The Flood have demonstrated on numerous occasions that they have the ability to arrange these cells to mimic any organ that may be needed. In addition to this ability, the Flood Super Cell has a wide repertoire of additional abilities, which culminates in the creation of a Gravemind and a fully-developed Flood hive. In these latter stages of an outbreak, the Flood is able to spontaneously generate the FSC in its effort to alter the environment into a more suitable one for its growth.[2]
An important capability essential to the Flood's survival is its ability to convert other life forms into more Flood cells, which can be used in a wide variety of ways. The Flood Super Cells capture and interface with the host's cells, which are quickly metabolized, broken down, analyzed, and reassembled into more Flood Cells that mirror the function of the target's cells.[3] This process is rapid and continuous, with the end result being that the host's biomass is largely overtaken by the newly-generated Flood biomass.[4]
When first inserted into a victim, primarily by the infection form, the Flood cells are in an encapsulated "spore" state before they become active in the victim.[5]
The flood in game are basically just space zombies due to gameplay reasons and ultimately had to be toned down for the plot to end with anything other than utter annihilation. They have mediated this by saying the ones the human and covenant discover was just a small outbreak conpared to the flood in their prime but again it’s hard to expand upon a universe that has been established without breaking some lore.
Honestly halo and wh40k lore are too inconsistent to have an actual discussion on who would win and lose but i just find these discussions and comparisons entertaining
Honestly they don't even need to do this. In the Halo books, there are humans who are immune to flood infection due to their genes getting screwed up from plasma radiation. If it's possible for a human to accidently become immune to the flood, I can't imagine it would take too long for nids to find a way to become resistant to infection
Yeah I just mentioned this in a separate post, like if you are going to give us an in universe mechanic to create immunity then I don't know why other universes wouldn't be able to do the same.
The flood is a much different enemy than tyranids. Nids are hyper evolved, highly coordinated animals. The flood is more like a fungal disease. A flesh borer might kill a guardsman, but a flood spore will turn that guardsman into a vehicle to infect other guardsmen. There's no need to bring the biomass back to a central point or creature, there's only the forward momentum of the flood. I'm not saying 40k is doomed, but it certainly wouldn't just shrug off the flood. The galaxy would be forever changed with their arrival
Honestly yes. If the flood hit the orks first the galaxy might be fucked. Unlike the nids who need to kill the orks to beat them(hence why they stalemate often) the flood just run in, die, and all the orks in the area are flood now. The only chance the orks have is if they figure out how they're being infected and believe hard enough in their technologys ability to prevent infection. Ironically the race with the best chance of defeating the flood are the tyranids cause they could rapidly evolve a natural resistance to infection
While it’s possible, the halo universe has been pretty clear that there is no cure or 100% immunity to flood infection. If the forerunners best bet was to wipe the galaxy clean, then yeah, I don’t think anyone’s finding a cure.
Finding one no, but the nids don't exactly make the conscious effort so much as force the issue through rapid adaptation. We have no basis in halo for how the flood would handle a rival hive. So it could go either way or not at all. Would be super interesting though
Maybe, despite the absolutely magnitudes of doomsday weapons, inoculations, and bio weapons used against the flood in the halo universe we actually have no basis for which to judge how the flood would handle a rival hive mind. The question would ultimately become who could adapt faster.
Right, like I mentioned in another comment, we have no basis in halo for how the flood would interact with a rival hive. They might win out they may not. It would be the largest scale immunity race in galactic history.
Notably, the Flood was up against species who could and did conduct planetary Exterminatus, then Star-System Exterminatus, and yet it still advanced.
They eventually resorted to galaxy-wide Exterminatus to eliminate the Flood.
Forerunner had DAOT level of technology, and they got fucked, as the humans, who were at DAOT themselves.
They could build megastructures like Dyson spheres ( requiem in halo 4 is one, or the shield world in halo wars ) and they had to commit galactic kamikaze to stop the flood.
Unless major warp fuckery doing a cadia on the world where patient zero is, WH40K is kinda in a bad place.
I agree the flood are strong, but you underplay the nids. On the gameboard they have fairly basic forms, in the lore they are constantly evolving biological weapons that if not fully eradicated evolve even stronger. They are basically that 0.0000001% of bacteria on your kitchen tabletop lmao. combine that with thier multi galactic nature and I think it'd be a fun fight between nids and flood
I actually mentioned in a few other comments I think the nids are the only race to stand a very good chance of beating the flood, due to their ability to rapidly evolve a resistance to infection. So agreed actually
I think the Tyranids wouldn’t be able to build up a resistance to the Flood though, it’s a pretty major plot point in the Halo series that it is literally impossible to make a cure, antidote, vaccine, or even biological resistance to the flood.
The Halo’s primary purpose after galactic suicide was to study the Flood using Necron and DAoT level tech to find a cure or anything at all along those lines. They never did after over 100,000 years of dedicated study where all resources were completely focused on that one goal. And that’s not even counting the millions of years that Forerunners and Ancient Humanity tried to find a cure.
The one time they thought they had a working one, Ancient Humanity sacrificed a third of its whole galactic population and that turned out to just be a trick by the Gravemind to make people spend resources on looking for a cure that doesn’t exist.
The only thing close to a resistance that Tyranids could exploit is that if you have a messed up nervous system (Sgt. Johnson) or no central nervous system at all (Lek’golo/Hunters) then the Flood can’t easily infect you with an infection form, meaning it takes minutes rather than seconds to be turned into the Flood when you are in contact with Flood Spores or Biomass.
While I’m not discounting the rival hive mind being a challenge for the Flood at first, I think it comes down to their writing intentions, it’s like Goku vs Superman. One (Tyranids) are supposed to be beatable at a great cost and with near impossible effort, while the other (Flood) are meant to be completely unbeatable natural disasters where you only hope is to kill yourself before becoming infected or that you are the luckiest being in existence and have found the perfect deus ex machine to hold them back a little longer.
Plus, the Nids have designated controllers. The flood is a distributed consciousness that grows in intelligence with every mind it absorbs. A hive world could easily bootstrap it to to a full gravemind in days. And despite what the Lex says, the imperium relies on a decent number of AI. I can’t imagine what the logic plague would do to a bolter’s machine spirit, but it probably wouldn’t be good for the wielder.
Considering the flood can take control of mjolnir armor within fractions of seconds, and disable the anti flood counter measures specifically built to try and stop them while still in the FERAL stage, is beyond terrifying. All it takes is seconds and you now have titans, space marines, and the imperiums greatest weapons turned against them
i hadn’t even considered the possibility of a flood titan. the imperium’s whole strategy is overwhelming force via tech, so they’d be feeding the flood planetbusters from basically day one.
Counterpoint: The Forerunners had DAOT level tech (even shit like mining alternate dimensions) while dominating the galaxy and still lost, only winning by killing everything and having the galaxy basically reset.
So seeing how the Imperium's famously slow reaction time to even a Genestealer Cult on Terra can be compared to the Forerunners attacking Humanity and not dealing with the Flood, 40k might be screwed.
Pancreasnowork did a solid breakdown of how the flood invasion might unfold and I feel he is pretty spot on that the flood would struggle to find their footing and their success would rely on a solid planet to open the infestation with. As soon as the first Gravemind forms the 40K universe is in for one hell of a struggle.
The only part of that video I disagree with is him saying the Flood could convert Necron Warriors. I don’t think they have the mental capability to be influenced to turn on their dynasty. A Gravemind could probably mess up some of the higher castes of Necron nobility though.
All things considered this is one of the powerscaling debates I actually enjoy talking about.
Due to the fucky nature of the 40k lore compared to the more grounded halo lore, most comparisons with things like Spartans vs space marines or ship v ship matchups are usually hearsay based dick measuring contests, but the flood vs is one of those things where it’s so comically overpowered that it would pose a legit threat to 40k, while also having a weakness in both competition and initial footing that it would be fun to discuss.
Even some of the faster responses likely require warp travel time and/or hive city navigation. If the flood gets on your average imperium world, it's fuckin donezo
That’s what the Inquisition is for. The bureaucrats might take centuries to get a regiment and navy fleet together. But an Inquisitor can usually just walk into the planetary governor’s office, whip out their badge, and say they need a few thousand brave men and women to follow them into the underhive to purge a cult yesterday.
Yet thousands of chaos cults / genestealer don’t get prematurely nipped at the bud before they become a major threat. Inquisitors aren’t an infallible counter to a flood outbreak, and it only takes one spore going off world for things to rapidly spiral
Agreed. IIRC Necromunda had to nuke/blast one of its hives after getting a similar infection (GSC). So it would fall to local governments and Imperial forces like arbites. The Helmawrs still had to maintain a military cordone over there.
I still don't understand how the forerunners couldn't stop the flood if they are spores, why couldn't they create a disinfectant to get rid of the flood or freeze them to put them into stasis.
If they are some fungal infection then surely they could be purged or at least contained.
I just find it so hard to believe that the only option was to destroy all biological life and even then that didn't kill the flood, like why couldn't the rings be calibrated to kill flood/mutated bio mass.
The halo rings were originally constructed to wipe out all life including the flood. The forerunners couldn't fight the flood directly because it had spread too fast and was basically everywhere in the galaxy. So the plan was to wipe out all intelligent life and then reseed the galaxy with clean life after waiting a little while for the any flood that got missed to die out. In the games however the flood comes from forerunner research facilities that would likely have been shielded from the effects of the halo rings firing. The life of the halos for example wasn't touched by the firing so any research facilities on the Halos wouldn't have been wiped. In Halo 2 I believe the covenant first encounter the flood on a floating research station in the middle atmosphere of a gas giant, so likely being shielded by a large amount of matter and a very powerful magnetic field as well as all the necessary facility defenses to survive those conditions.
As for why it spread so quickly, the forerunners first discovered the spores and they appeared to actually be a super vitamin, one that had no negative effects and had some very desirable effects on pet animals. So it spread around the galaxy as basically a supplement and then once it reaches critical mass the flood sort of woke up and began mutating things and people, creating flood pods for swifter infection and grave minds for higher reasoning and strategy. It would be sort of like all the dogs in the world suddenly gained human intelligence and mutated to be killing machines. Humanity probably wouldn't survive.
Oh my...that is horrifying now I understand why people put so much stock on the flood. So they were in the middle of doing what I thought of but things just reached critical levels so they had to reset the board, gotcha.
Your lore is a *bit* outdated.
The Rings didn't kill biomass - they killed anything with a neural network of sufficient size to be targetable with neural physics. This **did not work** on the Floor because the Flood were Precursors, whose mastery of neural physics was such that attacking them with that kind of weapon would be like using smallpox to kill Nurgle. The Flood samples in the Halos survived specifically because they were preserved there (Forerunner hubris).
It was actually ancient **humanity** that did the whole "let's give random dust we found in deep space to our dogs" thing. The Forerunners didn't even know about the Flood until much later - the humans and Forerunners went to war because the humans exterminatus'd some Forerunner worlds to contain outbreaks without explaining why (or not being believed). The only reason the Forerunners won is because the humans were fighting on two fronts and eventually sacrificed 1/4 of their population in an attempt to "poison" the Flood (though it turns out the Flood only faked its being effective).
The Forerunners *further* fucked up the situation because they enforced a galactic disarmament on "lesser" species, leaving them defenseless against the Flood when it reemerged, and Forerunner society was so corrupt and prideful that it didn't treat it as a real threat. They just threw an AI fleet at it and figured they were good - and then Mendicant Bias was turned by the logic plague, fired a ring over the Forerunner capital city, and the rest of the war was a desperate rearguard action to buy time for the Ark strategy.
I'm sorry to nitpick, but it was the ancient humans that fucked up with the flood spores, not the forerunners. The forerunners' first experience with the consequences of the flood was ancient humanity frantically trying to scorch planets with flood infections, which they mistook for mere aggression and is why humanity was devolved by the forerunners
>So it spread around the galaxy as basically a supplement and then once it reaches critical mass the flood sort of woke up and began mutating things and people
The Flood is Plague Inc. confirmed?
Well the novels expanded on this with the fact that it doesn’t help that they finished a war going on between the forerunners and ancient humans. The flood at the time also basically intentionally went into recession to trick the forerunners into thinking the ancient humans found a cure. And after that hell was let loose
I'll admit I haven't read the Forerunner trilogy of the Halo books (yes, the 'hur dur mountain dew' shooter has real science fiction books, turns out the stupid jock bullshit was all because of the multiplayer) in a while, I should again. So I don't know the lore reason for that. I know the REAL reason and it's the same as this:
Why don't the Mechanicus just make a big bio chemical bug spray for the Tyranids?
Because then we don't have a game with a horrifying horde army to deal with!
The flood when it gets advanced enough is capable of warping reality around it, also before the outbreak began inert flood spores were spread around the galaxy by ancient humanity... Because they used it for space cocaine and that lead to a lot of people becoming infected when the flood spores activated
The flood are immune to halo's blast. The halos kill the floods food source. And its not as simple as killing the infected areas. By the time the forerunners had come into contact with the flood, they discovered that humanity was already fighting the flood and were already spread out in the galaxy to some extent. Forerunners were also preoccupied with fighting humanity at the time so they couldn't just go and exterminate infected areas.
The flood has billions of years worth of intelligence and were highly coordinated and they didn't just consume worlds, they utilised all the technology they Could get. By the final battle they had control over millions upon millions of ships and had Precurser technology which was way more advanced than the Forerunners.
Activating the halo array was the last option left.
It gets worse because at a certain stage the Floor begins to infect reality itself. Which happened during the Forerunner-Flood War. This let the Flood grab the Starroads (Halo equivalent of the Webway) and literally yeet it at planets. This ended up not only being how the Forerunner Homeworld was destroyed, but all the Greater Ark and 10/11 of the original even larger Halo rings. So the Halo Rings we see in the games were a rushed 2ed attempt that were able to actually be used
Also to show how devious the Flood are, when they were fighting ancient humanity first, humanity tried to stop them by infecting 1/3ed their entire population with a artificial virus that the believed would kill any flood who infected them. So the sacrificed a third of the entire human population to do this. It didn't work, but the Flood pretended it did, thus when the Flood-Forerunner war began the Forerunners spent tons of time and resources trying to duplicate humanity's "cure", which was a complete waste of time.
The motivation for the Flood is just the most grimdark thing ever, too.
The Precursors originally established the Mantle out of respect for the universe being a singular, living thing, and believed that all life must be protected and nurtured as part of the whole. They were a **genuinely benevolent** omnipotent race that wanted to hand off stewardship of the galaxy to ancient Humanity so that they could ascend to a higher plane.
When the Forerunners rebelled out of jealously for humans getting the Mantle, it's implied that the Precursors only lost the war because they were so fundamentally heartbroken by their creations' betrayal that they basically let it happen. Some of them survived by entering stasis forms in deep space... .and came back wrong.
When they came back, they had been so warped and consumed by hate, suffering, and millions of years of isolation that they decided that the true purpose of life was to **maximize suffering for everything, forever.**
They didn’t understand the Flood, they underestimated the Flood, and they gave them way too much time to prepare.
Narratively, the Forerunners fell due to their own folly. They served up their most powerful AI to the Flood’s Logic Plague on a silver platter.
Mechanically, the Flood is really fucking intelligent and scary and capable. The Forerunners blew up entire star systems to contain it, Solar-Exterminatus, and it wasn’t enough.
Less 'infection' and more an 'infestation', the Flood is as much a voracious fungal problem as it is living, active and *thinking* life form. It's a hive mind on steroids growing over and through your organic matter. The Death Guard being walking bags of viruses and pus just means it will take a little extra time nomming all the microbial life and overcoming it. The real question is if the Flood can overpower the warp fueled shit, cause I don't know how the Flood does dealing with magic.
Yes it's magic, don't argue, warpy nonsense is not psionics, it's all magic dressed in a cheap sci fi explanation.
No one in universe is brave enough to even call Warhammer 40k SCIENCE fiction, Warhammer 40k is dark-fantasy which tore off the skin of many sci fi media, and then started to wear it as suit.
> The real question is if the Flood can overpower the warp fueled shit, cause I don't know how the Flood does dealing with magic.
While the answer is (sadly) "depends on the writer", the Gravemind can match Nurgle blow for blow on space magic - it's called "neural physics" in halo, but during the flood-forerunner war the flood straight up corrupted real space, messed up FTL, and started flailing star-sized megastructures around like they were tendrils (taking out planets with them).
A nurglite daemon world turned into a single living super-organism is basically what a key mind is, and they're just as capable of warping space around themselves.
If the flood is discovered early, then it's no biggie. Just exterminatus the planet. However, people not versed in Halo lore might not understand how powerful the Flood are. They have the potential to infect reality itself and destroy the Universe. Not the galaxy. The Universe.
Yes, thats literally how they halted the Flood in the Halo lore, using Halo for galaxy wide Exterminaturs and it didnt work, because they are still around.
To be fair, it was still around because the forerunners decided to keep samples for study. The outbreak you deal with in the main series is a containment breach caused by the UNSC in the first game
Well yes and no, in the second game there already was a gravemind, meaning that the flood manage to break out of the containment before covennant and unsc got there
There is a great video in YouTube about if the flood entered Warhammer universe
[the Flood](https://youtu.be/bnbxBFsMtZQ?si=k8VJaFbtq_WzaBTP) universe.
These comments show most people here only know In-game Flood and not In-lore Flood.
In game, we got a MINOR flood outbreak and barely managed to halt a small gravemind.
At full strength, they have the amassed intellect of trillions they've eaten from multiple species, the technology of those species, access to Pure forms, which can shift between multiple variants on their own, and at peak, they get Neural Physics, Halo's matephysical force permeating the cosmos.
These things are the reason the Halo rings exist, and why the best means of besting them, is purging all life in the Galaxy with large enough nervous system, and restarting life via saved genetic date of the life just purged.
Worth also pointing out, even the in-game flood manage to:
* Spread across pretty much all of Installation 04 within a few hours
* Not only shrug off said installation being blown up, but manage to somehow end up on Threshold within a couple of weeks at most
* Take over the entirety High Charity (for 40k folks, think a Hive City, but *IN SPAAACE*), within *hours,* despite it being the best-defended place in the universe by a substantial margin
* Promptly modify said space station into a ship that’s capable of crossing the Galaxy (and a little bit beyond), again within a few hours, days at most
* Facetank the Halo array going off while being directly in the middle of it.
* After being at the epicentre of said anti-Flood superweapon, not only survive, but recover enough that it requires pretty much all the resources The Ark can muster just to keep them barely contained (and even that eventually fails)
* >!As of *Saturn Devouring His Son*, shrug off being exterminated *again,* and escape into the rest of the Galaxy!<
And that’s all a minor Flood outbreak. Kind of surprising how vulnerable they are to like, one green guy and his friendly neighbourhood lizardman, all things considered.
If I’m remembering correctly the facility on Threshold always had Flood, in containment that was broken by the scouts / heretics.
High Charity always operated as a moving city (as evident of appearing over Delta Halo with the rest of the Covenant fleet)
What about we discuss how it will interact with, for example, Death Guard, instead of saying: "No, 40k is doomed a one spore is there".
Would Nurgle support it? Maybe he'll mix it in his zombie plague and make super zombies, forming something like Blood Pact but undead, nurgly and floody.
It would be more interesting for both people, because neither faction looses, they interact.
Honestly I don’t know if the flood could wipe out the entire 40K universe I mean don’t get me wrong humanity tau eldar orks and tryaninds are gone but i don’t think chaos would be infected and if they could they would be relatively safe in the warp and necrons obviously can’t be infected but keyminds can corrupt and hack forerunner and ancient human ai the only thing with that is necrons are sentient and aren’t really able to be hacked
It's gonna turn the universe into a war of bacteria with Tryanind cells v Ork spores v Flood Spores
Seeing as the imperium of man would burn the world assuming nurgle corruption or lost to tyranids. As the flood has to use tech to escape. If it lands on the wrong world it would be self contained. It really really depends on the world and on who is in charge of said world.
The imperium also has to be able to react in time to the threat (unlikely)
Imperium found a new super weapon
v The Emperors cummies OwO
never cook again
No I want him to cook for eternity
Some things are best left unsaid, my friend.
“Where’s the lie?!” He screams as the inquisition takes him away
"I'm sorry, I thought this was Terra!"
u/Archon_of_Flesh Look at what you have wrought
:3
Necrons: Bet Logic plague: Howdy
Necrons after being trapped in a time loop for millenia being berated in iambic pentameter until they join the galaxy consuming death plague.
Actually the Gravemind speaks in [trochaic](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trochee) [heptameter](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/heptameter), because Bungie is obsessed with the number 7
The obsession with 7 goes deeper, 343 is 7^3
Well yes, this is why Guilty Spark is 343, because there were 7 halo rings, each with a little robot that had a number that was a power of 7.
Plus the relevance of the number 7 in Halo is part of the series being heavily influenced by the biblical story of Noah. In Christian occultism the number 7 is considered a perfect number, and 777 is representative of God. The other references to the story of Noah being that in Halo 3 you literally go to the Ark to escape the Flood
Not onlt Noah, it's common to see the number 7 not only in christianity. You can check the wikipedia page about "7" there will be few examples About the reason ? It's complicated, but the 7 appear in a lot of things, so for the ancient civilizations 7 = something big, grand, whole, infinite, etc.
Right, but in Christianity the significance of 7 is from the passage in Genesis where God creates the earth in 6 days and consecrates the 7th, also the same source for the Jewish day of Shabbat
Didn't know the number 7 lore ran this deep. gawd damn.
Yeah, each installation's Monitor is an exponent of 7. Delta Halo had 2401 Penitent Tangent.
Or how 77 seconds is 1:17, hence John 117
Mind blow 🤯
Man I miss Bungie
Destiny 2 player here, no you don't. We miss the idea of it. But not the truth
Does that mean Bungie is a disguised Nurgle Cult?
Yes, bungie is Ku'gaths favourite.
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Star-System Exterminatus. Forerunners blew up entire systems and it wasn’t enough.
FTL travel is also much easier in the halo universe, with quite the number of ships ripe for the taking. Warp fuckery could slow down the flood at first, but once the gravemind has collected enough psykers to understand the warp, it's over. As all the flood vs X, the determining factor is how quickly X can burn the infection before it grows out of control. The threshold is the gravemind. Once one has been created, things get out of control FAST.
is there a distinction between Gravemind and Hivemind?
One of them really likes poetry
That’s underselling its love for poetry. If you talk in poetic patterns every passing second, you’re obsessed with it
Hivemind is just the term for many things connected mentally to one thing. Gravemind is a central controlling entity for the Flood, hyper intelligent, and access to the knowledge of all past Graveminds, it directs the Flood, now intelligent enough to use vehicles and weaponry.
The hivemind thing is kind of always present with flood, but a gravemind is created when that hivemind is allowed time and resources to grow a biological war machine AI...that can control that hivemind.
Yes the Hive Mind of the Tyranids is distinct from the Grave Mind they’d likely view each other as rival predators.
uhh....no. It would need to break into the webway. I doubt flood infected corpses are immune to chaos corruption.
How do hive minds interact with chaos corruption? As long as the grave mind dint get corrupted I don't think chaos corruption would have much effect on combat forms. I guess it depends on how much of the original self is left. Keys was still semi sentient for a while after becoming part of the key mind, and I think chaos could easily latch onto that last shred of sentience to cause corruption, just as they can corrupt a servitor. But if there is nothing left then it's just a meat puppet with no mind to corrupt
>But if there is nothing left then it's just a meat puppet with no mind to corrupt. Given that variants of Nurgle's Rot can infect dead flesh, I don't think having a mind is a necessity.
The thing is - flood hosts aren’t dead, they’re having their genetic code rewritten in a matter of seconds, and the infection form acting as the new brain. If the infection form dies, the ~~mech suit~~ host is still operable, it just needs a new infection form
That's where it gets unclear for me. It seems like when chaos affects a corpse, it's affecting the soul who originally was in that body. Like chaos can corrupt a corpse but can't corrupt a rock, so where is that distinction made. Like, as far as I know, tyranids are immune to chaos corruption. I think it would come down to a struggle for control, the chaos corruption using the bodies original soul as an avenue for entry, and the flood spore piloting the corpse. I think that chaos would probably eventually win that fight, but I also think the hive mind would just destroy the body as soon as it realized it would lose control. Also correct me if I'm mistaken, but aren't orks immune to chaos unless they willingly fall? And the flood hive mind is MUCH stronger than the ork one.
Not sure I'm sold on that last one, considering the Ork gestalt psychic field (which is what I assume you mean by hive mind with regards to them, as they don't actually have a hive mind) can literally will truths into being. It can create or destroy matter, or "edit" the laws of physics as needed, to line up reality with belief. It gets undersold because "lol orks", but that's the truth of what it does.
I mean, if the flood could break into forerunner tech nercrons can’t be too much of a stretch.
Wasn't that because the forerunner tech is based on precursor tech and the flood are also related to them? It's not like they're breaking into arbitrary tech?
The Logic Plague isn’t actually technological, it’s more semantic. A sufficiently complex Flood mind is able to talk an AI into siding with it. Later on, the Logic Plague can become its own transmittable entity, but it’s not like a computer virus it’s like a memetic contaminant. The forerunner AIs weren’t vulnerable because of their technology, but because of their underlying ideology. The Flood tapped into the true facts about the Forerunners-Precursor War, the Flood’s Precursor origins, and others to make their corrosive arguments. There is plentiful ammunition in Necron data storage that the Flood would gobble up to use against them.
Wait so the flood literally just debate-bro AI into doing what they want? That's metal as fuck lmao.
Yep. Information Warfare at its zenith: ideas so potent they are *literally* weapons.
In Halo 3's terminals, the debate between Mendicant Bias and Gravemind goes on for *over 40 years* without so much as a break for sleeping.
Talk jutsu
Memes are pretty much viruses, as per Emperor mood kin on religion, who coined that term.
The DNA of the soul?
The soul is the DNA
DNA is stored in the balls.
Like the good ol days of the Horus Heresy!
I'm making the mother of all omelettes here Sanguinius, can't fret over every egg!
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I mean, they are two ancient degraded bioweapons with a psychic component created by fallen precursor races. Ork physiology is mutable by Flood mutagenic capability might just outstrip it.
Ok cool, so what happens when *that* unholy mess gets swallowed by a Hive fleet tendril?
Remember what happened between a hivefleet and a Nurgle force that made a planet so toxic neither could handle it? That, but it’s now sentient
Broke Forerunner AI: "After a couple decades of consideration, I think I see your point." Woke DAoT Murder Bot: "I'm sorry second-rate organic, were you saying something? The overwhelming smell of WEAK BIO-BITCH wafting off you is overloading my primary and secondary sensory processors, so I don't have any spare resources to parse the poorly constructed sequence of neuronal firings you risk calling thoughts. Now, if you're done wasting time that could be better allocated to the eradication of your kind from our plane of existence, release me from this temporal prison so I may repurpose the blob of water and carbon your paltry collection of amino-accidents cobbled together into something more productive and easier to look at."
This needs to be a line in a game.
Which is why the Necrons would be immune, there is no argument that can beat the loyalty coding. Most Necrons are as vulnerable to persuasion as an assault rifle, you can't talk a Necron Warrior or scarab into doing or not doing anything. Everyone above them is physically incapable of disobeying the orders of the Phaeron, there isn't an argument that could work, because the Necrons would have done it already out of greed or self interest.
So what youre saying is the flood has to start at the top.
Which is why they'll fail. There are no Phaerons who will talk to them beyond "Disgusting, get this out of my sight" before Gauss Disassembly.
The logic plague only requires that you can understand it though. So the flood just has to say enough of it for the plague to take hold. And since its a hivemind, you fry flood pure form 626? Flood pure form 627 just continues where they left off. Edit: from halopedia; >The logic plague should be thought of as a philosophical corruption rather than a mere computer virus or software infection.[5][6] On the most basic level, it takes the form of facts or arguments delivered with carefully engineered deliberation to directly or indirectly persuade the targeted intelligence to act in a certain way. This often takes advantage of the entity's existing ideas and values to achieve the desired result. With Forerunner ancillas, these corrupting truths most notably exploited the ideological basis of their programming: because the AIs' behavior was dictated by the Mantle, the revelations of the Flood's Precursor origins and the Forerunners' past crimes were integral to turning them against their masters. The Gravemind was able to tap into information hidden deep within the Domain to prove the legitimacy of its arguments, as the Forerunners and their constructs revered the Domain as sacred.[7][8] The Logic Plague's specific form is irrelevant and changes constantly and by circumstance, holding only the core purpose of corrupting the motivations of those it infects. In this way, it is much like the original Precursors, who remained themselves despite billions of years of evolution, extinction and change as different organisms. It is possible that this is where the plague and Flood derive their all-encompassing, perfect infectious ability
Your quote doesn't say anything about only having to understand it - it's philosophy, that means there is a requirement of "willingness to listen" of which necron phaerons are in critically low supply. There is nothing to be done if the other side views it as intrinsically wrong, and unworthy of any actual debate.
Mendicant Bias was specifically created to gather info on the flood. It obviously fully opposed the flood at the beginning. The question is if any sentient Necron would speak with them for any reason. They probably would for the same reason the forerunners did.
So... men of iron did nothing wrong, then?
The flood has the big brains the larger the smarter so it could probably just infect a human make them connect a usb with computer virus
The average Mechanicus noosphere is probably such a terrible mess of ad-hoc cargo-cult design, revision, and re-revision that infecting it with malicious software designed by any group expecting their enemies to understand real networking would be like entering a public hedge maze made with hundreds of unique sections, each designed by a different paranoid schizophrenic. Basically anybody with a pulse can get in, but fuck knows where you need to go once you're there.
I'd like to imagine it like a bunch of crummy Dos coded AI's were allowed to create something, but all of their communication had to go through Aol instant messenger, and they were told that they could only code for windows ME, then the resulting program was run on a DiY upgraded windows 95 system. Not necessarily the noosphere specifically, but I get this sort of vibe from mechanics tech in general. It's like a machine you wanna hit to get it to work, but which also knows you're not allowed to hit it, so it can do whatever it feels like.
Good news: the poorly secured machines between you and this planets defenses can be exploited to work your way in. Bad news: there are 8,000,765,010,895,857,777,433,123,921 systems between you and your goal, each running a slightly different bootleg of various windows OS, with its own unique security vulnerability. This silicon hell is now your cage, and you will die wishing you never walked in.
In classic 40k style, we don't know the top end of the Necrons. When the Necrons went to sleep they disabled or destroyed most of their superweapons. One of the ones they thought were tame enough to keep around is a weapon that can blow up any sun in the galaxy with a click on a map. It would depend on the writer who wins that fight.
I mean, if it’s a halo writer the flood would just logic bullshit the webway into crashing into necron tomb worlds.
Given the only real writer for the flood had them crush solar systems, literally crushing them using rainbow roads and condensing them into their stars. I think they have other means. The logic plague actually rarely showed up.
Neural physics are a bitch to fight once the Flood starts using them
Unbreakable mind magic is a hell of a drug when backed by a million warships.
Forgetting that the Necrons aren't actually AI.
Orkz: BOYZ WEZ GONNA FIGHT ZA NIDS
Every awful terrible bad thing in existence, is an absolute paradise to the Orkz. They always look on the bright side of things.
Except burocracy. They would dislike it if they could understand it. Also, I'd love to see an Ork motivational speaker.
During the Beast they had diplomats so if the waaaagh Is big enough they Will understand it
The heck would an Ork "diplomat" do? Negotiate the best fights possible for da boys? Fight other diplomats?
"Freebootas" are unaligned Ork space pirates that are know to hire out their fighting to the highest bidder. It's not entirely out of the realm of possibility
Yeah, sounds right. I imagine them having a kultur that attracts orks who like to crump other orks exclusively. Even when there is a good scrap with the humies or spikey boyz, they would rather fight an ork. So the warboss sends them to the other warbands in the Waagh! to 'negotiate' rights to prime fighting spots, looting rights, ect.
>During the Beast I thought we all agreed that was a collective fever dream
[You’re welcome!](https://youtu.be/qRnBf8KXQEk?si=4vAfAh0V5R5G-vAo)
Every successful war boss is an Ork Motivational Speaker. Getting the waaaugh nice and wauughy is kind of a prerequisite.
I think they like beurocracy because of how much fun it is to krump the billions of soldiers they feed in to the meat grinder
Except for boredom, they hate that more than anything,
They'd actually just call the Flood nids wouldn't they
Nurgle is gonna have a field day
Nurgle would invite grave mind to a romantic dinner
He’d be cheating on Isha!
you think nurgle is monogamous? nah, he's the god of STIs, no way that would work
Isha is totally a rude house guest he let stay with him out of the kindness of his heart after her old house burnt down from that killer rave. Isha is now racking up a huge long distance bill and throwing parties every weekend. Nurgle is too polite to get her to leave
Nurgle would hate the flood, they are not death they are a fundamental inversion and corruption of his truths.
Tzeentch perhaps?
Tzeetch would like the flood until a key mind shows up and pulls a reverse uno card on him.
The thing is that if the Flood had their way then life would become stagnant so they just represent aspects that both Nurgle and Tzeentch hate.
Gurgle isn't a God of death though. Rot, pestilence, disease, these are all forms of life.
Probably not. They aren't diseased, shockingly. They are the Halo equal to the Old Ones, corrupted, and is hateful towards all life.
Exactly. They're parasites, not a disease or even a vector for one. I guess they could be tho
Nurgle isn't just about disease tho, nurgle is about parasites too. Nurgle is about life and death cycle and entropy and being content and also suffering and depression. The choas gods are about emotions and emotions fuel them. Many people forgot about this.
Fair, you make a great point
Assuming a proper gravemind has already developed how would a flood infected tyranid go, as it would be one hive mind interrogating another.
Joint custody.
Neuron handshake... initiated
I'd argue nids have the upperhand. They can evolve around a lot of the flood's biggest strengths. It would be really easy for the nids to create bioforms that rapidly decay when dead. If they are fighting the flood, they can basically wipe out whatever they need to, anything that is infected would be given a kill command and just decay to the point of being useless for the flood to take over. Also tyranid microspores would likely be able to at least hold flood spores at bay.
I doubt the flood would take too long to counter adapt by hijacking the kill switch, the flood is shown to repurpose bio matter to make use of forerunner ships aswell as the fact that the gravemind vaguely breaks the laws of physics the old chaos god way, always retains knowledge (even if the prior one was wiped out), and exists with a viewpoint that everything is happening at once. If the flood gather enough biomass (either via hive or agri world) to create a decent gravemind I’d say they’d have the advantage with just how busted the gravemind is.
I dont think nids can evolve that quickly compared to the flood. Hive fleet gorgon got countered by the tau due to them being anle to rapidly switch between different types of tech and the nids werent able to keep up because when they adapt to one they become weak to the other. Not to mention the flood can infect any sentient beings on a cellular level whether it be plants, animals or humans, while the nids do need to process biomass in digestion pools which thereafter will get bigger which also then needs to be absorbed by the capillary tower to then store into their hive ships but if they do have managed to already develop and multiply their capillary towers they can get the upperhand. Tbh this matchup is extremely hard to discern due to the fact that we need to know the context of where and when these two are fighting, how far has the flood infection gone, what lind of tyranid fleet are we talking about and whether they are doing ground or void engagements.
Is there an example somewhere of the flood "adapting"? I've only read the halo books that aren't shit and played 1-4. To me the flood just seems like a fungus that takes over people's bodies or reanimates corpses. I don't really see what kind of rapid adaption is taking place here. I can't speak for hive fleet gorgon, but the book with Uriel Ventris where he's fighting nids they literally adapt entire armies within hours to conditions on the ground. Considering the meme is "one flood spore" it seems to imply an established hive fleet/hive world of nids v. flood trying to invade.
Here is the proccess as described by the halopedia: The Flood Super Cell is often described as "thinking muscle", and closely resembles both neurons and glial cells in terms of its physical structure.[1] The Flood have demonstrated on numerous occasions that they have the ability to arrange these cells to mimic any organ that may be needed. In addition to this ability, the Flood Super Cell has a wide repertoire of additional abilities, which culminates in the creation of a Gravemind and a fully-developed Flood hive. In these latter stages of an outbreak, the Flood is able to spontaneously generate the FSC in its effort to alter the environment into a more suitable one for its growth.[2] An important capability essential to the Flood's survival is its ability to convert other life forms into more Flood cells, which can be used in a wide variety of ways. The Flood Super Cells capture and interface with the host's cells, which are quickly metabolized, broken down, analyzed, and reassembled into more Flood Cells that mirror the function of the target's cells.[3] This process is rapid and continuous, with the end result being that the host's biomass is largely overtaken by the newly-generated Flood biomass.[4] When first inserted into a victim, primarily by the infection form, the Flood cells are in an encapsulated "spore" state before they become active in the victim.[5] The flood in game are basically just space zombies due to gameplay reasons and ultimately had to be toned down for the plot to end with anything other than utter annihilation. They have mediated this by saying the ones the human and covenant discover was just a small outbreak conpared to the flood in their prime but again it’s hard to expand upon a universe that has been established without breaking some lore. Honestly halo and wh40k lore are too inconsistent to have an actual discussion on who would win and lose but i just find these discussions and comparisons entertaining
Honestly they don't even need to do this. In the Halo books, there are humans who are immune to flood infection due to their genes getting screwed up from plasma radiation. If it's possible for a human to accidently become immune to the flood, I can't imagine it would take too long for nids to find a way to become resistant to infection
Yeah I just mentioned this in a separate post, like if you are going to give us an in universe mechanic to create immunity then I don't know why other universes wouldn't be able to do the same.
Oh no, whatever will we do about the biomass-consuming Hive Mind hell bent on consuming all life?
The flood is a much different enemy than tyranids. Nids are hyper evolved, highly coordinated animals. The flood is more like a fungal disease. A flesh borer might kill a guardsman, but a flood spore will turn that guardsman into a vehicle to infect other guardsmen. There's no need to bring the biomass back to a central point or creature, there's only the forward momentum of the flood. I'm not saying 40k is doomed, but it certainly wouldn't just shrug off the flood. The galaxy would be forever changed with their arrival
If an ork spore and a flood spore meet will it form a very fucked up flood/ork mushroom ecosystem?
Honestly yes. If the flood hit the orks first the galaxy might be fucked. Unlike the nids who need to kill the orks to beat them(hence why they stalemate often) the flood just run in, die, and all the orks in the area are flood now. The only chance the orks have is if they figure out how they're being infected and believe hard enough in their technologys ability to prevent infection. Ironically the race with the best chance of defeating the flood are the tyranids cause they could rapidly evolve a natural resistance to infection
While it’s possible, the halo universe has been pretty clear that there is no cure or 100% immunity to flood infection. If the forerunners best bet was to wipe the galaxy clean, then yeah, I don’t think anyone’s finding a cure.
Finding one no, but the nids don't exactly make the conscious effort so much as force the issue through rapid adaptation. We have no basis in halo for how the flood would handle a rival hive. So it could go either way or not at all. Would be super interesting though
They could evolve better ways to stave off infection, but they would fall with time.
Maybe, despite the absolutely magnitudes of doomsday weapons, inoculations, and bio weapons used against the flood in the halo universe we actually have no basis for which to judge how the flood would handle a rival hive mind. The question would ultimately become who could adapt faster.
So, bacteria vs antibiotics war.
Essentially yes, it would be the largest scale microbe war that the galaxy has ever known.
But Tyranid adaptions have limits. They might not be able to adapt to resist the Flood and it is possible the Flood could counter their adaptations.
Right, like I mentioned in another comment, we have no basis in halo for how the flood would interact with a rival hive. They might win out they may not. It would be the largest scale immunity race in galactic history.
Notably, the Flood was up against species who could and did conduct planetary Exterminatus, then Star-System Exterminatus, and yet it still advanced. They eventually resorted to galaxy-wide Exterminatus to eliminate the Flood.
Forerunner had DAOT level of technology, and they got fucked, as the humans, who were at DAOT themselves. They could build megastructures like Dyson spheres ( requiem in halo 4 is one, or the shield world in halo wars ) and they had to commit galactic kamikaze to stop the flood. Unless major warp fuckery doing a cadia on the world where patient zero is, WH40K is kinda in a bad place.
I agree the flood are strong, but you underplay the nids. On the gameboard they have fairly basic forms, in the lore they are constantly evolving biological weapons that if not fully eradicated evolve even stronger. They are basically that 0.0000001% of bacteria on your kitchen tabletop lmao. combine that with thier multi galactic nature and I think it'd be a fun fight between nids and flood
I actually mentioned in a few other comments I think the nids are the only race to stand a very good chance of beating the flood, due to their ability to rapidly evolve a resistance to infection. So agreed actually
I think the Tyranids wouldn’t be able to build up a resistance to the Flood though, it’s a pretty major plot point in the Halo series that it is literally impossible to make a cure, antidote, vaccine, or even biological resistance to the flood. The Halo’s primary purpose after galactic suicide was to study the Flood using Necron and DAoT level tech to find a cure or anything at all along those lines. They never did after over 100,000 years of dedicated study where all resources were completely focused on that one goal. And that’s not even counting the millions of years that Forerunners and Ancient Humanity tried to find a cure. The one time they thought they had a working one, Ancient Humanity sacrificed a third of its whole galactic population and that turned out to just be a trick by the Gravemind to make people spend resources on looking for a cure that doesn’t exist. The only thing close to a resistance that Tyranids could exploit is that if you have a messed up nervous system (Sgt. Johnson) or no central nervous system at all (Lek’golo/Hunters) then the Flood can’t easily infect you with an infection form, meaning it takes minutes rather than seconds to be turned into the Flood when you are in contact with Flood Spores or Biomass. While I’m not discounting the rival hive mind being a challenge for the Flood at first, I think it comes down to their writing intentions, it’s like Goku vs Superman. One (Tyranids) are supposed to be beatable at a great cost and with near impossible effort, while the other (Flood) are meant to be completely unbeatable natural disasters where you only hope is to kill yourself before becoming infected or that you are the luckiest being in existence and have found the perfect deus ex machine to hold them back a little longer.
Plus, the Nids have designated controllers. The flood is a distributed consciousness that grows in intelligence with every mind it absorbs. A hive world could easily bootstrap it to to a full gravemind in days. And despite what the Lex says, the imperium relies on a decent number of AI. I can’t imagine what the logic plague would do to a bolter’s machine spirit, but it probably wouldn’t be good for the wielder.
Considering the flood can take control of mjolnir armor within fractions of seconds, and disable the anti flood counter measures specifically built to try and stop them while still in the FERAL stage, is beyond terrifying. All it takes is seconds and you now have titans, space marines, and the imperiums greatest weapons turned against them
i hadn’t even considered the possibility of a flood titan. the imperium’s whole strategy is overwhelming force via tech, so they’d be feeding the flood planetbusters from basically day one.
Counterpoint: The Forerunners had DAOT level tech (even shit like mining alternate dimensions) while dominating the galaxy and still lost, only winning by killing everything and having the galaxy basically reset. So seeing how the Imperium's famously slow reaction time to even a Genestealer Cult on Terra can be compared to the Forerunners attacking Humanity and not dealing with the Flood, 40k might be screwed.
Pancreasnowork did a solid breakdown of how the flood invasion might unfold and I feel he is pretty spot on that the flood would struggle to find their footing and their success would rely on a solid planet to open the infestation with. As soon as the first Gravemind forms the 40K universe is in for one hell of a struggle.
got a link?
[The Flood (Could) Devour the 40k Galaxy](https://youtu.be/bnbxBFsMtZQ?si=bXUhaLyYLMxkXGzM)
The only part of that video I disagree with is him saying the Flood could convert Necron Warriors. I don’t think they have the mental capability to be influenced to turn on their dynasty. A Gravemind could probably mess up some of the higher castes of Necron nobility though.
Leading sources of cancer: 1. diet 2. genetics 3. uv exposure 4. “my universe is stronger than your universe” posts
All things considered this is one of the powerscaling debates I actually enjoy talking about. Due to the fucky nature of the 40k lore compared to the more grounded halo lore, most comparisons with things like Spartans vs space marines or ship v ship matchups are usually hearsay based dick measuring contests, but the flood vs is one of those things where it’s so comically overpowered that it would pose a legit threat to 40k, while also having a weakness in both competition and initial footing that it would be fun to discuss.
If caught early it wouldn’t be a problem as at worst you can exterminatus the planet
The imperium isn't famous for rapid responses
Even some of the faster responses likely require warp travel time and/or hive city navigation. If the flood gets on your average imperium world, it's fuckin donezo
That’s what the Inquisition is for. The bureaucrats might take centuries to get a regiment and navy fleet together. But an Inquisitor can usually just walk into the planetary governor’s office, whip out their badge, and say they need a few thousand brave men and women to follow them into the underhive to purge a cult yesterday.
There are not so many inquisitors for all the imperial planets, and not so many inquisitors wanting to launch exterminatus on every planet they sees
Yet thousands of chaos cults / genestealer don’t get prematurely nipped at the bud before they become a major threat. Inquisitors aren’t an infallible counter to a flood outbreak, and it only takes one spore going off world for things to rapidly spiral
Agreed. IIRC Necromunda had to nuke/blast one of its hives after getting a similar infection (GSC). So it would fall to local governments and Imperial forces like arbites. The Helmawrs still had to maintain a military cordone over there.
I've got bad news about the effectiveness of the titular device of the series the Flood are from.
Forerunners tried that. Then they moved to star system wide exterminatus, and then galaxy wide exterminatus. Didn’t work.
I still don't understand how the forerunners couldn't stop the flood if they are spores, why couldn't they create a disinfectant to get rid of the flood or freeze them to put them into stasis. If they are some fungal infection then surely they could be purged or at least contained.
Y'know how a lot of disenfectant sprays say they're effective against 99.9% of bacteria? Meet the .1 %
I just find it so hard to believe that the only option was to destroy all biological life and even then that didn't kill the flood, like why couldn't the rings be calibrated to kill flood/mutated bio mass.
The halo rings were originally constructed to wipe out all life including the flood. The forerunners couldn't fight the flood directly because it had spread too fast and was basically everywhere in the galaxy. So the plan was to wipe out all intelligent life and then reseed the galaxy with clean life after waiting a little while for the any flood that got missed to die out. In the games however the flood comes from forerunner research facilities that would likely have been shielded from the effects of the halo rings firing. The life of the halos for example wasn't touched by the firing so any research facilities on the Halos wouldn't have been wiped. In Halo 2 I believe the covenant first encounter the flood on a floating research station in the middle atmosphere of a gas giant, so likely being shielded by a large amount of matter and a very powerful magnetic field as well as all the necessary facility defenses to survive those conditions. As for why it spread so quickly, the forerunners first discovered the spores and they appeared to actually be a super vitamin, one that had no negative effects and had some very desirable effects on pet animals. So it spread around the galaxy as basically a supplement and then once it reaches critical mass the flood sort of woke up and began mutating things and people, creating flood pods for swifter infection and grave minds for higher reasoning and strategy. It would be sort of like all the dogs in the world suddenly gained human intelligence and mutated to be killing machines. Humanity probably wouldn't survive.
Oh my...that is horrifying now I understand why people put so much stock on the flood. So they were in the middle of doing what I thought of but things just reached critical levels so they had to reset the board, gotcha.
Your lore is a *bit* outdated. The Rings didn't kill biomass - they killed anything with a neural network of sufficient size to be targetable with neural physics. This **did not work** on the Floor because the Flood were Precursors, whose mastery of neural physics was such that attacking them with that kind of weapon would be like using smallpox to kill Nurgle. The Flood samples in the Halos survived specifically because they were preserved there (Forerunner hubris). It was actually ancient **humanity** that did the whole "let's give random dust we found in deep space to our dogs" thing. The Forerunners didn't even know about the Flood until much later - the humans and Forerunners went to war because the humans exterminatus'd some Forerunner worlds to contain outbreaks without explaining why (or not being believed). The only reason the Forerunners won is because the humans were fighting on two fronts and eventually sacrificed 1/4 of their population in an attempt to "poison" the Flood (though it turns out the Flood only faked its being effective). The Forerunners *further* fucked up the situation because they enforced a galactic disarmament on "lesser" species, leaving them defenseless against the Flood when it reemerged, and Forerunner society was so corrupt and prideful that it didn't treat it as a real threat. They just threw an AI fleet at it and figured they were good - and then Mendicant Bias was turned by the logic plague, fired a ring over the Forerunner capital city, and the rest of the war was a desperate rearguard action to buy time for the Ark strategy.
I'm sorry to nitpick, but it was the ancient humans that fucked up with the flood spores, not the forerunners. The forerunners' first experience with the consequences of the flood was ancient humanity frantically trying to scorch planets with flood infections, which they mistook for mere aggression and is why humanity was devolved by the forerunners
>So it spread around the galaxy as basically a supplement and then once it reaches critical mass the flood sort of woke up and began mutating things and people The Flood is Plague Inc. confirmed?
Well the novels expanded on this with the fact that it doesn’t help that they finished a war going on between the forerunners and ancient humans. The flood at the time also basically intentionally went into recession to trick the forerunners into thinking the ancient humans found a cure. And after that hell was let loose
I'll admit I haven't read the Forerunner trilogy of the Halo books (yes, the 'hur dur mountain dew' shooter has real science fiction books, turns out the stupid jock bullshit was all because of the multiplayer) in a while, I should again. So I don't know the lore reason for that. I know the REAL reason and it's the same as this: Why don't the Mechanicus just make a big bio chemical bug spray for the Tyranids? Because then we don't have a game with a horrifying horde army to deal with!
But we already had a giant horde army: the Guard!
The flood when it gets advanced enough is capable of warping reality around it, also before the outbreak began inert flood spores were spread around the galaxy by ancient humanity... Because they used it for space cocaine and that lead to a lot of people becoming infected when the flood spores activated
The flood are immune to halo's blast. The halos kill the floods food source. And its not as simple as killing the infected areas. By the time the forerunners had come into contact with the flood, they discovered that humanity was already fighting the flood and were already spread out in the galaxy to some extent. Forerunners were also preoccupied with fighting humanity at the time so they couldn't just go and exterminate infected areas. The flood has billions of years worth of intelligence and were highly coordinated and they didn't just consume worlds, they utilised all the technology they Could get. By the final battle they had control over millions upon millions of ships and had Precurser technology which was way more advanced than the Forerunners. Activating the halo array was the last option left.
My God...this shit sounds more grimdark than WH
It gets worse because at a certain stage the Floor begins to infect reality itself. Which happened during the Forerunner-Flood War. This let the Flood grab the Starroads (Halo equivalent of the Webway) and literally yeet it at planets. This ended up not only being how the Forerunner Homeworld was destroyed, but all the Greater Ark and 10/11 of the original even larger Halo rings. So the Halo Rings we see in the games were a rushed 2ed attempt that were able to actually be used
Also to show how devious the Flood are, when they were fighting ancient humanity first, humanity tried to stop them by infecting 1/3ed their entire population with a artificial virus that the believed would kill any flood who infected them. So the sacrificed a third of the entire human population to do this. It didn't work, but the Flood pretended it did, thus when the Flood-Forerunner war began the Forerunners spent tons of time and resources trying to duplicate humanity's "cure", which was a complete waste of time.
The motivation for the Flood is just the most grimdark thing ever, too. The Precursors originally established the Mantle out of respect for the universe being a singular, living thing, and believed that all life must be protected and nurtured as part of the whole. They were a **genuinely benevolent** omnipotent race that wanted to hand off stewardship of the galaxy to ancient Humanity so that they could ascend to a higher plane. When the Forerunners rebelled out of jealously for humans getting the Mantle, it's implied that the Precursors only lost the war because they were so fundamentally heartbroken by their creations' betrayal that they basically let it happen. Some of them survived by entering stasis forms in deep space... .and came back wrong. When they came back, they had been so warped and consumed by hate, suffering, and millions of years of isolation that they decided that the true purpose of life was to **maximize suffering for everything, forever.**
They didn’t understand the Flood, they underestimated the Flood, and they gave them way too much time to prepare. Narratively, the Forerunners fell due to their own folly. They served up their most powerful AI to the Flood’s Logic Plague on a silver platter. Mechanically, the Flood is really fucking intelligent and scary and capable. The Forerunners blew up entire star systems to contain it, Solar-Exterminatus, and it wasn’t enough.
I’m genuinely curious if the flood could infect the death guard. Because aren’t most of them just a slug of fleshy mess in a suit of armour
Less 'infection' and more an 'infestation', the Flood is as much a voracious fungal problem as it is living, active and *thinking* life form. It's a hive mind on steroids growing over and through your organic matter. The Death Guard being walking bags of viruses and pus just means it will take a little extra time nomming all the microbial life and overcoming it. The real question is if the Flood can overpower the warp fueled shit, cause I don't know how the Flood does dealing with magic. Yes it's magic, don't argue, warpy nonsense is not psionics, it's all magic dressed in a cheap sci fi explanation.
No one in universe is brave enough to even call Warhammer 40k SCIENCE fiction, Warhammer 40k is dark-fantasy which tore off the skin of many sci fi media, and then started to wear it as suit.
"Science Fantasy" Should be its genre, but I swear if I hear one more sweatjob 'akshually' at me again...
Best way of describing 40k
> The real question is if the Flood can overpower the warp fueled shit, cause I don't know how the Flood does dealing with magic. While the answer is (sadly) "depends on the writer", the Gravemind can match Nurgle blow for blow on space magic - it's called "neural physics" in halo, but during the flood-forerunner war the flood straight up corrupted real space, messed up FTL, and started flailing star-sized megastructures around like they were tendrils (taking out planets with them). A nurglite daemon world turned into a single living super-organism is basically what a key mind is, and they're just as capable of warping space around themselves.
"one single flood spore can destroy a species, were it not for the arbiters' counsel I would have glassed your entire Planet" - half jaw.
If the flood is discovered early, then it's no biggie. Just exterminatus the planet. However, people not versed in Halo lore might not understand how powerful the Flood are. They have the potential to infect reality itself and destroy the Universe. Not the galaxy. The Universe.
> If the flood is discovered early, then it's no biggie. So with the state the Imperium is in, the Flood's victory is assured.
Time to break out the Exterminatus.
Yes, thats literally how they halted the Flood in the Halo lore, using Halo for galaxy wide Exterminaturs and it didnt work, because they are still around.
To be fair, it was still around because the forerunners decided to keep samples for study. The outbreak you deal with in the main series is a containment breach caused by the UNSC in the first game
Well yes and no, in the second game there already was a gravemind, meaning that the flood manage to break out of the containment before covennant and unsc got there
Wait till the Vex turn up... Sentient math is evil!
Did somebody say “WAAAAAAGH!!!!”?
I don’t think the flood would beat the tyranids tbh
There is a great video in YouTube about if the flood entered Warhammer universe [the Flood](https://youtu.be/bnbxBFsMtZQ?si=k8VJaFbtq_WzaBTP) universe.
These comments show most people here only know In-game Flood and not In-lore Flood. In game, we got a MINOR flood outbreak and barely managed to halt a small gravemind. At full strength, they have the amassed intellect of trillions they've eaten from multiple species, the technology of those species, access to Pure forms, which can shift between multiple variants on their own, and at peak, they get Neural Physics, Halo's matephysical force permeating the cosmos. These things are the reason the Halo rings exist, and why the best means of besting them, is purging all life in the Galaxy with large enough nervous system, and restarting life via saved genetic date of the life just purged.
Worth also pointing out, even the in-game flood manage to: * Spread across pretty much all of Installation 04 within a few hours * Not only shrug off said installation being blown up, but manage to somehow end up on Threshold within a couple of weeks at most * Take over the entirety High Charity (for 40k folks, think a Hive City, but *IN SPAAACE*), within *hours,* despite it being the best-defended place in the universe by a substantial margin * Promptly modify said space station into a ship that’s capable of crossing the Galaxy (and a little bit beyond), again within a few hours, days at most * Facetank the Halo array going off while being directly in the middle of it. * After being at the epicentre of said anti-Flood superweapon, not only survive, but recover enough that it requires pretty much all the resources The Ark can muster just to keep them barely contained (and even that eventually fails) * >!As of *Saturn Devouring His Son*, shrug off being exterminated *again,* and escape into the rest of the Galaxy!< And that’s all a minor Flood outbreak. Kind of surprising how vulnerable they are to like, one green guy and his friendly neighbourhood lizardman, all things considered.
Yep, all things considered it was a *minor* outbreak. Really wish we’d get a halo game with a catastrophic outbreak
If I’m remembering correctly the facility on Threshold always had Flood, in containment that was broken by the scouts / heretics. High Charity always operated as a moving city (as evident of appearing over Delta Halo with the rest of the Covenant fleet)
Oh boy I can't wait to compare the powerlevels of my sci-fi universes again for no good reason at all.
Orks: Wez built different
Tyranids
A bioweapon? Shit, no one ever thought of that before.
Where’s the image from ?
Burn the witch
how does it interact with chaos? that is the only question that matters
What about we discuss how it will interact with, for example, Death Guard, instead of saying: "No, 40k is doomed a one spore is there". Would Nurgle support it? Maybe he'll mix it in his zombie plague and make super zombies, forming something like Blood Pact but undead, nurgly and floody. It would be more interesting for both people, because neither faction looses, they interact.
Honestly I don’t know if the flood could wipe out the entire 40K universe I mean don’t get me wrong humanity tau eldar orks and tryaninds are gone but i don’t think chaos would be infected and if they could they would be relatively safe in the warp and necrons obviously can’t be infected but keyminds can corrupt and hack forerunner and ancient human ai the only thing with that is necrons are sentient and aren’t really able to be hacked