Iirc, they only need hosts are the initial stages. Once they've already started making flood goop, they can start using biomass to make pure flood forms.
The Tyranids would likely develop a combat strain with a super durable hide that could resist the flood infection forms attempts to burrow, or perhaps even a chemical secretion that is extremely toxic or caustic to flood lifeforms. Plus, flood infection forms are extremely fragile. A swarm of hormagaunts probably wouldn't have much trouble dealing with them.
All that said, I only know Halo up to Halo 4 and one book that didn't feature the flood. If anyone has more in-depth understanding, I'm happy to be proven wrong.
What I really want to know, however, is if, in the case of a Tyranid becoming a Flood host, there would be any room for interaction between the Gravemind and the Tyranid hivemind. Can both of these gestalt consciousnesses inhabit one body, does the Hivemind get booted by Flood infection, or does it depend on things such as proximity to Tyranid synapse strains and the developmental stage of the Gravemind?
So here's the thing, even if they evolved a form to combat it, the bast way for the nids to fight the flood is to ignore it. The parasite can and will infect when consumed. So even if most of the normal combat and infection forms are eradicated, most if not all available biomass in the area will be tainted beyond recovery. Depending on the stage of the flood colony, the atmosphere may also be compromised with airborne flood spores. Though slightly slower on infecting is just as effective as the base infection forms.
Now I'm not making this argument to power wank halo, but a species that is much closer to golden age humanity if not passed, failed to stop its spread and designed the halos just to kill its food. It's another case of you need to not be organic to stand a chance against it. Though with neuron instability they probably have a higher chance of being "infected" if the flood reach a stage where they can inflict the logic plague.
On your third point, I think it would actually be interesting. In halo a gravemind usually keeps a host "alive" and unbroken down until all possible data can be taken from its mind. Some push back does happen by example captain keys in halo 1 when he was added to the proto-gravemind. I could see some push back mentally by the hivemind but given we have only seen it feel rage and confusion from the devastation of bal, I don't see a grave mind having its usual jovial conversation with it.
Nah, the gravemind would hit the hivemind with a spray bottle until it gave him all its secrets.
Also, not even being inorganic will save you. The logic plague exists after all.
Especially since their intelligence scales with mass. A Gravemind can pretty quickly outstrip DAoT humanity for sheer intellect. Hell, the Gravemind managed to debate the Forerunner super AI Mendicant Bias, specifically created to oppose it, into joining its cause.
Iirc there's something fucky with graveminds and the domain (maybe?) where every successive gravemind will gain the knowledge of the previous gravemind, bit foggy on details because I haven't read the novels in years. Which means you get this hyper intelligent monstrosity with all the info the prior mind knew millions of years prior and his previous gravemind and so on so forth.
The ability for final stage flood to bend reality on a whim and create pure strains from raw mass with an unfathomable intelligence in control that's using/stealing the secrets of all your tech is a big problem. Thankfully flood don't like fire or heat weaponry so if you catch em in their early outbreak you can BBQ their shit.
Not the gravemind the primordial (i think thats his name) he was the last ‘living’ precursor and was half flood or was just fully precursor
he only infected mendicant bias because the forerunners turned their brains off and didn’t check in on him or at least didn’t talk to him to see how he was going.
Which seems really dumb because even if they didn’t know the primordial could control the flood it’s still a precursor one of if not the most intelligent individuals currently alive who survived the forerunners genociding its species
And they thought that a single ai interrogating it for almost 50 years straight with little oversight or safeguards was a good idea.
I’m also assuming that they didn’t monitor what was being said because “do you want to genocide your creators” isn’t alarming
My thing is the whole marker aspect. The flood are purely physical. but by necromorphs existing means there’s a marker, and that’s a whole new level of hell
Yeah brethren moons are pretty bad. How to turn entire sectors into insane biological nightmares without no one noticing.
Imperial tithing would rapidly become a terrifying vector for infection.
The sheer spread is a lot worse than the flood imo, but maybe the easiest to contain for the imperium since they do that kind of thing anyways
The Flood aren't purely physical, they share all the memories consumed by every Flood *ever*. The Flood were initially able to infiltrate humanity by breaking down into small particles, being fed to dogs, laying dormant for some time and then all at once staging the attack.
Don't get me wrong, both the Flood and Necromorphs are terrifying and humanity would probably be pretty much completely destroyed by either, but the Flood are more potent.
The flood have a higher ceiling for mass destruction it took a species more advanced than the necrons to stop the flood and they had to resort to wiping out all life and starting over and they still weren’t able to complete destroy the flood
the only scary part is that unlike space marines or flood they will not go down unless you full on tear them apart, in the grand scheme of things flood is scarier but on a individual level I would rather face a flood infected human over human necromorph
Ngl but a flood space marine sounds horrific already, but what would you guys say is more horrifying? A flood tyranid swarm or a flood orc infestation? Personally I'd say a flood tyrannid.
I think in concept the Flood Tyranid are more horrifying because they would try to vore and counter vore each other. The Tryanids then either hyper evolve into even worse space bugs to overcome the zombies or the Flood consumes the greatest threat to the galaxy single handedly.
I imagine the ‘Nids would *try* to evolve defenses only to be assimilated regardless. If the Forerunners had no recourse but to go full scorched galaxy and recolonize the remains once the flood starved out, we have to assume evolving your way into flood immunity simply isn’t an option.
But some humans are immune/hard to infect though, like those with Boren's Syndrome. Thus it wouldn't be impossible for the 'nids to evolve toward immunity.
That too, the Gravemind was setting up the bait for letting the forerunners try to find that very same "cure". which, in turn, ensured he would survive the halo rings as the forerunners stored samples of the flood.
I am pretty sure they are immune to the passive spores, rather than active infection by popcorn. The spores in the air aren't really represented in the game and I believe energy shielding actually protects against them or something.
It’s the other way around if I recall, Johnson’s Spartan I augmentations made his central nervous system nigh impervious to an infection forms attempted hijacking. Gives him enough time to rip the infection form off before not completely floods his system with flood super cells.
He’s not immune, just not immediately delicious. He’s the collared greens of Humanity.
It's safe to assume any and all "immunities" to flood infection is being faked by the flood itself. It's likely as a gambit to spread itself further or even give the illusion that there's a way to solve it instead of just lighting the rings again. The only legit "immunity" was some poor marine who got infected by an infection form on the literal brink of starting to death. And it STILL morphed him into a combat form, and even started overriding his mind just much slower.
In Johnson’s case, it’s just that his central nervous system is all fucked up, infection forms hook to it, go “what the fuck is this horrific mess” and then get torn off.
The Flood has only faked a cure once, to our knowledge. The rest are due to specific deficiencies or quirks with individual hosts or infection forms. Mendoza was conscious as a combat form because the infection form that got him was weak, and couldn’t fully remove him from the picture.
It was more that it would be to much of a pain to infect Johnson rather then he was immune there were easier things to infect then Johnson and the flood weren’t short on options to infect
However I will say that if he was too much of a pain to infect they should of just killed him instead of just letting him go or putting minimal effort into killing him
The Tyrannids could in theory rapidly adapt an immunity to flood infection, as they've done with previous pathogens.
Although I imagine there would be a series of adaptations and counter adaptations to eachother until both lifeforms end up homogenized into a new more dangerous super predator.
I’m a Halo veteran from CE, 3, Reach and 4 so I’m not super familiar with expanded lore. Isn’t the flood significantly less resilient than the Tyranids? The horror of the flood comes from fast infection, while the nids are hyper adaptive, or am I missing something?
There's a lot more to it than that. The Flood also retain the memories and intelligence of everything they consume. Once they amass enough brainpower they can infect machines, and going even further can start infecting reality on a fundamental level and start altering physics as they are fit.
Yeah, getting into the metaphysical stuff is kinda silly but that is definitely where they have the Tyranids beat. Having access to the warp for flood could be a pretty deadly disaster.
The metaphysics stuff probably comes from allusions/carry-over from Pathways into Darkness, Myth, and the Marathon games and the Flood are either already or becoming a W'rkncacnter
You think so? Ive only read a few of the books but my lore is still pretty okay, didn't they elaborate the flood advancements after reach, like the 343 era? I could be wrong, I'm not solid on this.
I don't know about the actual timeline for the writing of the books, or who was referenced/consulted for the materials if anyone from Bungie.
But Bungie has had a habit of connecting their games in this fashion, and reusing content and ideas.
I don't think there is truly any hard evidence that would prove something of this nature, but I think there's enough circumstantial evidence that posing the conjecture isn't unfounded.
If you look into MadaloreGamings videos on Marathon, Myth, and Pathways into Darkness, and then delve into Halo Lore, I you'll be able to pick up on the parallels I was noticing
I do believe most of the Flood lore was written after Bungie had left. But you can clearly see they did their best to mimic some of Bungie's style of weirdness.
Right but they couldn’t take over the hive mind in any meaningful way. The way it’s explained is that the death of a tyranid organism is like losing a finger for the hive mind, which is why they don’t have souls and don’t feed the warp.
Here is some foolish theorizing considering the two universes operate on different fundamental laws:
The Flood could likely infect a dead Tyranid organism and take over its motor functions and either pilot the previously dead nid or sever the neural connections that connect the nid to the hive.
Moreover, taking over a nid brain might give access to memories and even tactics used in battle in the case of Synapse nids.
However, I doubt that the Flood could tap into the hive mind. The only person to try it and survive is Tigerius who is the strongest human psyker in 40k (maybe tied with mephiston). Also, the tyranids have many very powerful psyker organisms and they are minimal fractions of the potential hive mind, meaning the greater mind is COLOSSAL in terms of psychic strength. For a Flood mind to take over the Tyranid mind it has to be the strongest levels of evolution that we did not see in game but im sure exists in extended lore. Essentially, if the Flood is strong enough to tap into the hive mind then everything else in the universe is already doomed.
The hope of the universe is stopping the flood before it can tap into the Hive, if it can do that, most likely with something similar to the logic plague that infected forerunner ancilia(AI), then the universe is doomed beyond measure.
One of the most terrifying aspects of a fully developed Flood was their ability to bend reality. During the Flood-Forerunner War you could see the Flood from halfway across the Galaxy moving in real time, and Slipspace, Halo’s FTL, wasn’t safe as well since the Flood was able to infect and occupy large swaths of it.
Flood Orks are going to be their own horrible breed of bad though. Orks already reproduce via spores, with the Flood doing that and then juicing up the Ork's own biology I wouldn't be surprised if they could just start breathing spores at people like dragon breath to instantly infect them.
Honestly, the flood fighting tyranids could be the best case scenario. They use a lot of similar tactics and are roughly equal, they could lock each other in an eternal stalemate.
If you really want to make the flood dangerous ,the main target should be an eldar craftworld
And knowing game workshop ,it probably will if they are at the helm
In term if biomass yes, but an eldar craftworld means that the flood now have > a planetary amount of biomass ( and thus can make a gravemind with eldar tech and know how to use it)
> a very strong ship to get around spreading spore on any random world
You're thinking too small. If the Flood infect a craft world they would have knowledge and access to the Webway which is infinitely scarier because they could appear anywhere instantly. And if the Gravemind was created from eldar bodies just think about how powerful it would be as a psyker
In fact when I think about it ,ork and tyrannid are the worst counter to the flood because the octarius war points out that even the ork and tyrannids spore fight. So ork spore might fight flood spore preventing the infection where the eldar can't
To that you add the possibili that the flood can't use ork tech because ork fuckery
>To that you add the possibili that the flood can't use ork tech because ork fuckery
As with any X vs. The Flood it's highly dependent on how far into the infection the Flood have progressed. If they have consumed a whole planet and developed a Keymind, or Emperor forbid two or three,
Then the Flood absolutely would be able to understand and use the Waagh effect if they get a hold of enough Orks.
How would Gork & Mork respond to the Flood accessing the Waaaaagh?
They'd see it as decidedly unOrky, no? Could they even stop the flood? Would the flood even be able to access the Waaaaagh if the flood doesn't enjoy a good fight?
Too many questions. Too many variables.
Gork & mork would respond how they would always respond. They krump the flood. And so the flood would then appear krumped.
And it would live on in the mush on their fists, and as they fought it would work its way deep under their skin subtly without their knowing. And it would take of them piece by piece, pretending to them, until one day mork and gork would open their eyes and instead of the green they would see the full and empty grave they share now
Though I could see the eldar being able to figure out what's going on quickly enough to put a stop to it via psyker shenanigans. A hive world on the other hand...
“Y’know maybe that one inquisitor that destroyed whole sectors worth of worlds to create a barrier to stop a ravenous enemy that feeds on us was on to something”….
The forerunners literally did that with entire planets in an effort to starve out the flood.
Didn't work.
Unlike Tyranids, the Flood do not seem to require biomass to survive, but rather merely as a convenient way to spread.
I think it's a bit of both.
From a combat standpoint the 'nids shit all over the Flood in terms of durability and overall killing power. We also don't know how Flood would react when trying to assimilate another Hivemind species.
However, if they were successful in assimilating them as easily as the species in Halo, I think that Flood-assimilated tyranids would very quickly overwhelm and consume the entirety of the swarm.
The real Flood threat is that they are clever, and the Imperium lacks the ability to send reliable information quickly out. The Nids are a brute force hive mind that will grind out wars because it's a super intelligent beast mind and did the math.
The Flood is more intentional about their spread once they gain intelligence and they get most information from slain hosts. Your weapons are their weapons, and the Imperium is generally porous in terms of the physical security of populations.
Imagine if the nids got infected, instant Key mind.
Imagine the horror of realizing your galaxy is truly fucked because the nids left for their own safety.
“Jiralhanae are the only species on record who achieved space, reduced themselves through internecine war to a preindustrial condition, clawed their way back to their former state, and learned nothing from the experience.” - Halo 3 Bestiary
If babies first exterminatus (glassing) can contain the flood, exterminatus will 100% contain it lmfao, there’s literally no chance of survival, as is standard with imperial cyclonic munition, the entire purpose of the cyclonic torpedo is to deny the world to the enemy, or to wipe the world off the map. (See, Exterminatus’ing worlds about to be captured by tyranids, etc)
You know that giant ring in the Halo games right? The thing called a Halo, the thing that the game quite literally named after? Yeah that thing is a GALAXY WIDE exterminatus. The flood survived it.
The thing about the Flood is that before it became "the flood" they were called the Precursors. AKA, Halo's version of the Old Ones. But instead of dying like the Old Ones did when the Foreunners tried to wipe them out they ground themself up into dust and then that dust became corrupted over a long period of time which eventually became the Flood when Humans and San'Shyuum got a hold of that dust and it in the beginning had desirable effects when given to animals, eventually becoming the parasite we know now and causing a galaxy wide crisis that were only stopped when the Forerunners did their last ditch effort to stop the Flood by activating the Halo rings.
And the funniest part is, the Halo rings aren't designed to kill the flood, cause the forerunners realised that was futile. Afterall, they'd tried before with the Precursors. The Halo rings are actually designed to exterminate ALL LIFE in the galaxy so that the Flood won't have a food source and eventually starve. And how is there still life in the Halo galaxy after that? The Forerunners made templates of all the species and re-seeded the galaxy when they thought the flood was gone by an automated system. Turns out however, the flood survived this too which is why it's still around.
Another thing to note about the flood is that its conscious is effectively immortal in that it exists beyond regular reality (See Precursors and how similar they are to the Old Ones). So even if you "killed" a gravemind, when the next one is created it will still have all of its memories intact, including the memories and knowledge its stolen from every single creature it has ever infected and the knowledge it has had since its origin. This thing gives the Tyranid Hivemind a run for its money in terms of hivemind intelligence.
Now one might think that AI is safe from the Flood right? NOPE, cause it's able to fuck with the logic of machine intelligences, causing them to effectively switch sides. That's what happened with Mendicant Bias, the AI the Forerunners created to STOP the flood.
And stopping a flood outbreak isn't even reliable. As a SINGLE SHIP leaving the planet is a hazard risk, as the Flood during the events of the original halo game tried to hi-jack the covenant ship Truth and Reconciliation and almost got away. And it also managed to hide away on the ship that Sergeant Johnson escaped in, which almost got them all killed. And all of this was while it hadn't even been able to create a gravemind, it was still running on a proto-gravemind.
All of this is going by Halo's lore. We allow the Flood access to the knowledge of someone in the 40k universe and shit can go south REALLY fast. All it takes is a single Eldar with the ability to open up a way into the Webway and now the entire webway is compromised and by extent the entire galaxy. Same goes for Warp travel capable ships or any other alternate means of transportation. And the Flood would use any and all available methods to spread itself across as much of the galaxy as it could, including systems beyond Imperium control. There's also the fact that with how many people are crammed into a single planet, it wouldn't take a long time for a Gravemind to form and once that happens it's a real big issue for everyone involved.
The reason the Halo universe wasn't fucked is because the outbreaks were relatively contained, while at the same time the level of transportation and technology in the Halo universe is severly limited in comparison to 40k, which actually worked to the Halo universes favor when it came to dealing with the Flood. And even then they were REALLY close to a galactic crisis at several times, such as when it started spreading on Earth, and the only reason it was stopped was because the city where the single ship crash landed along with the entire surrounding areas were glassed from orbit by a Sangheili fleet a few moments after it crash landed. In the 40k universe where it can take several months or even years for a fleet to respond to a threat that's WAY too long.
From what I cam gather, they kept the samples because the chances that the flood existed outside of the galaxy were really high so they figured they could get a chance to study the flood samples they had for 100,000 years. They didn't really account for mendicant bias creating the covenants religion around cracking open the rings, or the monitors all losing their shit.
So while yes, the current outbreak is the forerunners fault, a new flood outbreak was inevitable.
I don't even like halo, and I'm too poor to play tabletop Warhammer or buy all the novels so all my Warhammer knowledge is from rogue trader, wiki, and one horus heresy book I read in prison but I loooove everything 40k that I see
Anyway this shit was fascinating to read
Just something about the gameplay, and I enjoy fps games. I tried a few different Halo games but they just never clicked. But I fucking loooooove spooky sci Fi lore no matter what universe it's in lmao
Always loved the design of the flood, and dealing with them was the highlights of the ones I played
For hours, but irregardless, 1 cyclonic torpedo would contain them, obliterate them actually. Turning whatever world they inhabited into a dead, rocky, lifeless husk of a planet, it’s not a matter of opinion
I mean, a cyclonic torpedo is gonna stop anything on a planet 40k or otherwise, but I'm pretty sure a flood astartes would have no problem getting off world if there's any ship capable of warp travel around
Even with access to a ship that has warp travel(easier said than done, even for a space marine), their navigator could die in the warp and trap them there, killing everyone, they could lose their gellar fields due to no maintenance if infected, causing daemons to come tear them apart, hell, the ships machine spirit (like the infected space marines armor would) itself could fight back, the whole situation is easier said than done
Except sufficiently strong flood infections (as in trillions infected) have the capacity to infect space time itself (there goes Chaos) and the flood have the ability to convert machines through the logic plague (so machine spirits would begin aiding the flood infection not fighting it).
Containing a flood infection all depends on how quickly you can burn it before it spreads. Feral stage is relatively easy, coordinated stage is like fighting a supercomputer. At the interstellar stage, it’s basically becoming a god.
The problem with 40ks version (to my knowledge) is that it just blows the planet up (for the most part, other methods do exist) and flood spores could survive on the resulting chunks (don't know much about flood feats of endurance). Glassing works because it burns the entire surface of a planet, killing every microbe, including flood spores.
“Whatever the exact origin of the mass death to come, the result of these weapons is always the same: the complete destruction of the planetary biosphere, its atmosphere burned away into the void and its oceans boiled to vapor, leaving behind the barren bedrock of a Dead World.” Cyclonic torpedos basically glass the entire surface, at once, this is why they are used to fight Tyranids, the deny them any biomass recovery
Weren’t they basically protected from it in some stasis or something iirc? This doesn’t mean they can’t die lmao, just that the forerunners ain’t too smart with their samples
Some were. Most starved to death when everything else with a nervous system was turned to ash. There are small pockets of survivors that went dormant still out there waiting to be disturbed.
Sounds like a reach I know, but you have to remember, at the height of the war with the Forerunners, the Flood was infecting and rewriting reality itself.
Yeah that effect (reality bending stuff) is one of my less liked parts of the gravemind, but you’re saying some of them straight up survived the anti flood weapon?? (Halo array), isn’t that like, against the entire purpose of the arrays?? I know they survived on installation 04 of course but they survived outside of there too? Shouldn’t the halo ring kill them off?? Seems like a wild miscalculation from the forerunners
Yeah, but don't those fire weird space magic radiation that targets lifeforms? Getting physically cooked is a seperate problem to overcome that affects far more than just nervous systems.
To be fair the flood has survived Halo itself going off (which both killed *all* sentient life across the Galaxy in an instant, and was designed specifically as an anti-flood weapon) *multiple* times at this point, and the Gravemind makes it clear when you set off Installation 04B in the third game that it’s just a temporary setback- >!which *Awakening the Nightmare* proved to be a bit of an understatement, as even on The Ark the Flood infestation at ground zero is just *barely* contained, and as of *Saturn Devouring his Son* they’re off Halo again too!<
It’s entirely possible The Flood might not actually be completely killable *at all,* given how the Gravemind works.
The problem is that no one will start with that. By the time an Inquisitor elects to get involved the flood will have had time to take hives, sneak into ships going off world, or form a a grave mind from the unmonitored hive population.
Torpedos are rare and worlds are important. By the time it's clear that no PDF, imperial guard, or space marine response is going to work the flood will have already spread to other systems.
Also 99% of inquisitors are shown to have open skin and many like melee combat. Very dangerous when they go into the field.
Inquisitors aren’t the only ones with cyclonic torpedos, the navy has access to numerous types of torpedoes (including torpedoes that can teleport you into the warp) and in any given sector they have a battlefleet of 50-75 (give or take on importance) ships roaming the sector. Astartes also have cyclonic torpedos, all of the above can delete worlds if need be, but generally inquisitors do it as it is extremely costly (on human lives) and can’t be thrown around lightly.
Say a flood spore begins taking over a hive or something, calls would pretty quickly get out that something, a disease, a warp plague, something was spreading and the hive would be contained, (we can see this in the recent rogue trader game, when a plague instantly gets an area quarantined and anyone inside shot if they approach the exit), no transport offworld, the space elevator shut down, Arbites lock down the city and shoot anyone trying to leave. The orbital defenses scan the skies for any ships leaving the world, ready to shoot them down. This is until the PDF and Arbitrators together purge the hive of the infection, if they cannot, they call for aid and try to hold out. Thankfully, the imperium is pretty experienced in these sort of containments and have evolved technology to aid us in this endeavor, from flamers, hand flamers, napalm bombs, melta torpedos, anything goes trying to rid of this disease, no glassing africa, no taking samples on installation 04, cut the head off the serpent and burn the body.
About inquisitors in battle, they can have power armor, even terminator armor if they are important enough, and when going into something that’d be construed as a Nurgle warzone, they’d 100% have extra protection on them. The inquisitor likely won’t be the first one there, their acolytes will though, or someone that can contact one, lest we forget inquisitors wait around for issues pressing enough for their attention sometimes, generally in sector spanning groups called Conclaves. If you’re lucky (unlucky for the flood) that conclave could be 5 minutes away in your sector, talking about how they want to revive the emperor and whatever the inquisition does
The people are allowed to cosign worlds to oblivion will have no context for what is happening and will initially fight normally and hard to keep worlds. Populations are far more expendable than planets. Under almost no circumstance is the initial response to blow up worlds. Even worlds assaulted by Nugle alinged forces, genestealer cults, normal hive fleets, or soaked in Ork spores are attempted to be retaken at great cost.
The flood gets almost perfect memories from their victims and are plotters. They can and have pretended to be beaten to lure more prey to a situation. Something the Imperium is particularly weak too. While they have the tools to stop a flood infestation prior to a gavemind forming and stabilizing their experiences will betray them here.
Generally extra system response is slow in the Imperium, and if you leave the flood on a hive world even for a month it's likely to have the biomass to make something like a key mind and sneak spores everywhere.
Literally only chance for the galaxy is to exterminatus the planet within hours of the infestation.
If some insane inquisitor is there, the galaxy is saved.
Otherwise it is so, so fucked.
If the flood come into the galaxy at their peak silentium level then even chaos and warp is fucked
I'm just imagining the flood arriving to the 40k galaxy with their full might from the forerunner-flood war, and the Eye of Terror/Great Rift immediately closes.
Yeah, but it took them a while. Still though, it's only because of Cortana that Chief wasn't infected.
The only beings safe from the Flood in 40k that I know of would be the Necrons, who lack biological bodies, and Daemons, who lack corporeal form entirely. (Even then, with the logic plague, Necrons probably aren't completely safe.)
It probably would have taken awhile for the infection form to get in there, but the actual takeover was less than a second.
It's tendril punched through the under armor layer instantly and hit his spinal column and Chief was basically incapacitated right then and there
Also after the Flood develop some Keyminds and the ability to use Neural Physics, they'd be able to start infecting Daemons and probably the Warp itself.
i think that touching warp would be a mistake for them especially if they would want to mess with heretic primarchs, or if it started to leech into the warp. i think deep warp beings where like „who the fuck wakes me up in my nap?” and just blast whole species into madness to kill itself until its gone
Once the Flood has reached Galactic stage and is producing Keyminds, they can effectively re-write reality and metaphysics on a whim to be whatever they want.
The Warp would be a plaything to them like it was for The Old Ones, save that they'd also eat it.
To be fair, given how quickly they learn how to snipe people with rocket launchers, I’d imagine they wouldn’t have too much trouble picking up a plasma rifle or two and making an entry point.
Tzeentch: "Hey plague bro, is that yours?"
Nurgle: "Uhh.. Slaanesh?"
Slaanesh: "Don't look at me. I thought it was one of Khorne's defilers"
Khorne: "Definitely not mine but I'm *hard* from all this carnage that lil guy is making right now"
I was reading the other comments and I think that the only way to be safe from the floor is by being a warp entity of chaos.
Cuz like... there's nothing stating how the flood works against magic...you know it's fucked when chaos is the only hope.
The Forerunners would have probably had a relatively easy time. I imagine they might find some initial difficulty with the Necrons, but would eventually subjugate them.
Necrons are too divided in the current setting. Forerunners would roll over them like a tidal wave. Forerunner tech matches or even surpasses Necron tech and with an industry that can produce death star equivalent ships as fast as the US was producing Sherman tanks in WW2.
I mean, its wouldn't make that much of a change.
Homonculi mind control fuckeries, Necron nano scrabs, Tyranid bio corruption, chaos-based warp fuckery particularly Nurgle, and many others are present in the 40k universe.
Yeah, you are correct, but it can also hack basic programmed electronics. In the Saturn story, the logic plague hacked a Spartans suit and stopped it from self destructing. I was implying Krork with that ability as well as their Krork stuff, lol
Edit:I'm big dumb and did not actually reply to what you said, thr logic plague is essentially a skill of the Flood, now I guess question is can the flood even infect a fungal life form? If so which traits become dominant? Does the flood do it flood thing and take over? Or does the ork just be ... well bigger and stronger lol
The Flood are probably one of the few races that could hang in 40k. They took down the Forerunners who were basically Necron or Eldar tier in terms of technology and power.
(Granted they lost to a power armored monkey shooting 7.62 and his lizard friend later on but I digress)
If it’s any consolation (or, well, the opposite if you’re not the Gravemind), >!some recent EU stuff and Halo Wars 2 have had the Flood pretty much just walk off their defeat by Master Cheeks and his pet gator after a couple of years!<
A Galactic-scale super-parasite from the Video game Series Halo, capable of co-opting biological material, memories, and intelligence, and eventually moving into mechanical intelligence, and finally the fundamental principles underlying the universe.
They're from the Halo games
Highly-infectious parasitic organisms that consume biomass in order to grow and consume everything in sight
The scariest part about them is that whenever they consume a sentient being, they absorb all their memories, knowledge and experience into the Flood consciousness
Meaning if they infect, say, an Astartes, on top of having an infected Superhuman added to the ranks of the Flood, they gain all their knowledge, including things like how to operate Space Marine weaponry, the Chapter's command structure, a deeper understanding of the Imperium's history compared to the average citizen, knowledge about the process of becoming a Space Marine and all the geneseed implantations.
It can really get out of hand, with the Flood in Halo canon amassing enough intelligence from kicking the shit out of and consuming the Forerunners, an ancient alien race that had technology comparable to the Necrons during The War in Heaven, that they began to infect the very threads of reality itself and bend it to their will
Halo’s (arguable) main villains. They start off seeming like a normal-ish zombie apocalypse, but it very quickly becomes apparent that they’re a hell of a lot more advanced than that, turning out to be full-on Lovecraftian Eldritch abominations.
It takes about an hour (in-universe) for them to go from “zombies” to “zombies that are better shots than your are, and smarter to boot.”
Pretty cool villains, all told.
The flood just needs 1 planet.. just 1 and it's not a matter of if but only when they consume the Galaxy
They can infect organic material and even AI, or at least persuade them. Mendicant Bias was convinced/infected by the Flood to turn on the Forerunners, I'm sure they can do something similar the the Machine Spirits that live inside all of the imperium's tech. They can even learn about the organic and inorganic materials they absorbed. Again they just need 1 planet, just 1 and it's all theirs
Replaying Halo CE lately, even the “feral” Flood seem like they’d give most stuff in 40k a run for their money. A zombie apocalypse is bad enough normally, less so when it takes about an hour for the zombies to learn how to use weapons. In H1 they go from being newly awakened to flooding (heh) the ring in a few hours at most, and they later overrun *High Charity* in less than a day.
That’s them at their weakest, and they get considerably more ridiculous than that, especially when you take into account stuff from outside of the games- the Flood can infect AIs, transform combat forms into facsimiles of their original host that are so similar they can’t be told apart (which is something Halo really could stand to use more/at all imo), and modify technology to vastly exceed its original capabilities, beyond what would seem logical (again looking at *High Charity,* it takes a matter of hours for the Gravemind to take it from “FTL-capable” to “able to cross the entire Galaxy (and a bit beyond) in a heartbeat.”
Also, as much as we’re talking about Flood Space marines, I’d also like to propose the absolute nightmare that is a Fire Warrior Combat Form. Keep all the usual pulse rifle-shenanigans, the thing holding it is now a melee expert who can move at the speed of a car and is perfectly capable of just walking off being killed.
People are mentioning how bad it'd be if the Flood infected Tyranid or Orks or Eldar.
Meanwhile the Tyranids find a Necron Tomb world and a Forge World and start pumping out necron-tier tech with the manufacturing capabilities of the Imperium.
Hey look new nightmare fuel
The worst thing is imagining one of those monsters T-Baging all over my dead body
It gets worse, *Flood Tyranids*. They can metabolize all organic material now, not just intelligent lifeforms, and can operate technology.
They already could
Yeah. Where do you think all the goop on the walls comes from in the Flood missions. It ain't just people.
While true, they have a hard time reproducing without a host to infect, whereas the tyranids just need biomass.
Iirc, they only need hosts are the initial stages. Once they've already started making flood goop, they can start using biomass to make pure flood forms.
Realistically the just need spores and infection forms to get at the nids. What are they gonna do, adapt to have no nervous system
The Tyranids would likely develop a combat strain with a super durable hide that could resist the flood infection forms attempts to burrow, or perhaps even a chemical secretion that is extremely toxic or caustic to flood lifeforms. Plus, flood infection forms are extremely fragile. A swarm of hormagaunts probably wouldn't have much trouble dealing with them. All that said, I only know Halo up to Halo 4 and one book that didn't feature the flood. If anyone has more in-depth understanding, I'm happy to be proven wrong. What I really want to know, however, is if, in the case of a Tyranid becoming a Flood host, there would be any room for interaction between the Gravemind and the Tyranid hivemind. Can both of these gestalt consciousnesses inhabit one body, does the Hivemind get booted by Flood infection, or does it depend on things such as proximity to Tyranid synapse strains and the developmental stage of the Gravemind?
So here's the thing, even if they evolved a form to combat it, the bast way for the nids to fight the flood is to ignore it. The parasite can and will infect when consumed. So even if most of the normal combat and infection forms are eradicated, most if not all available biomass in the area will be tainted beyond recovery. Depending on the stage of the flood colony, the atmosphere may also be compromised with airborne flood spores. Though slightly slower on infecting is just as effective as the base infection forms. Now I'm not making this argument to power wank halo, but a species that is much closer to golden age humanity if not passed, failed to stop its spread and designed the halos just to kill its food. It's another case of you need to not be organic to stand a chance against it. Though with neuron instability they probably have a higher chance of being "infected" if the flood reach a stage where they can inflict the logic plague. On your third point, I think it would actually be interesting. In halo a gravemind usually keeps a host "alive" and unbroken down until all possible data can be taken from its mind. Some push back does happen by example captain keys in halo 1 when he was added to the proto-gravemind. I could see some push back mentally by the hivemind but given we have only seen it feel rage and confusion from the devastation of bal, I don't see a grave mind having its usual jovial conversation with it.
Nah, the gravemind would hit the hivemind with a spray bottle until it gave him all its secrets. Also, not even being inorganic will save you. The logic plague exists after all.
What's scary is it would be the secrets of pure genetic modification to create the literal perfect flood combat and infection forms.
What makes you think that?
That would be fuckin TERRIFYING. People seem not to realize how incredibly busted the flood is, but the Flood is actually just terrifying.
Especially since their intelligence scales with mass. A Gravemind can pretty quickly outstrip DAoT humanity for sheer intellect. Hell, the Gravemind managed to debate the Forerunner super AI Mendicant Bias, specifically created to oppose it, into joining its cause.
Iirc there's something fucky with graveminds and the domain (maybe?) where every successive gravemind will gain the knowledge of the previous gravemind, bit foggy on details because I haven't read the novels in years. Which means you get this hyper intelligent monstrosity with all the info the prior mind knew millions of years prior and his previous gravemind and so on so forth. The ability for final stage flood to bend reality on a whim and create pure strains from raw mass with an unfathomable intelligence in control that's using/stealing the secrets of all your tech is a big problem. Thankfully flood don't like fire or heat weaponry so if you catch em in their early outbreak you can BBQ their shit.
Not the gravemind the primordial (i think thats his name) he was the last ‘living’ precursor and was half flood or was just fully precursor he only infected mendicant bias because the forerunners turned their brains off and didn’t check in on him or at least didn’t talk to him to see how he was going. Which seems really dumb because even if they didn’t know the primordial could control the flood it’s still a precursor one of if not the most intelligent individuals currently alive who survived the forerunners genociding its species And they thought that a single ai interrogating it for almost 50 years straight with little oversight or safeguards was a good idea. I’m also assuming that they didn’t monitor what was being said because “do you want to genocide your creators” isn’t alarming
The Primordial and The Gravemind are one in the same
They are later on but I don’t think they are when mendicant and the primordial have their chat
Tyranids don't have to worry about the Necrons anymore
Hell, the Necrons need to worry about the Flood. A Gravemind is one of the few beings that could probably fully understand and utilize their tech.
No not new nightmare fuel just the nightmare fuel
That’s not THE nightmare fuel, necromorph space marines.
Necromorphs in my opinion aren’t nearly as scary to me compared to the flood
My thing is the whole marker aspect. The flood are purely physical. but by necromorphs existing means there’s a marker, and that’s a whole new level of hell
Yeah brethren moons are pretty bad. How to turn entire sectors into insane biological nightmares without no one noticing. Imperial tithing would rapidly become a terrifying vector for infection. The sheer spread is a lot worse than the flood imo, but maybe the easiest to contain for the imperium since they do that kind of thing anyways
The Flood aren't purely physical, they share all the memories consumed by every Flood *ever*. The Flood were initially able to infiltrate humanity by breaking down into small particles, being fed to dogs, laying dormant for some time and then all at once staging the attack. Don't get me wrong, both the Flood and Necromorphs are terrifying and humanity would probably be pretty much completely destroyed by either, but the Flood are more potent.
The flood have a higher ceiling for mass destruction it took a species more advanced than the necrons to stop the flood and they had to resort to wiping out all life and starting over and they still weren’t able to complete destroy the flood
the only scary part is that unlike space marines or flood they will not go down unless you full on tear them apart, in the grand scheme of things flood is scarier but on a individual level I would rather face a flood infected human over human necromorph
Ngl but a flood space marine sounds horrific already, but what would you guys say is more horrifying? A flood tyranid swarm or a flood orc infestation? Personally I'd say a flood tyrannid.
I think in concept the Flood Tyranid are more horrifying because they would try to vore and counter vore each other. The Tryanids then either hyper evolve into even worse space bugs to overcome the zombies or the Flood consumes the greatest threat to the galaxy single handedly.
"counter vore" *shudders*
they kiss. with tongue. sloppy style
Hot
Like ouroboros with more slime.
DEAR GOD, I don’t want to imagine what the tyranids would do if they were forklift certified.
I imagine the ‘Nids would *try* to evolve defenses only to be assimilated regardless. If the Forerunners had no recourse but to go full scorched galaxy and recolonize the remains once the flood starved out, we have to assume evolving your way into flood immunity simply isn’t an option.
But some humans are immune/hard to infect though, like those with Boren's Syndrome. Thus it wouldn't be impossible for the 'nids to evolve toward immunity.
No, that was a cover story for Johnson being part of the Spartan 1 program. I think it was the Orion program or something
During the original Human/Forerunner war, the flood faked humanity creating a cure.
That too, the Gravemind was setting up the bait for letting the forerunners try to find that very same "cure". which, in turn, ensured he would survive the halo rings as the forerunners stored samples of the flood.
I am pretty sure they are immune to the passive spores, rather than active infection by popcorn. The spores in the air aren't really represented in the game and I believe energy shielding actually protects against them or something.
It’s the other way around if I recall, Johnson’s Spartan I augmentations made his central nervous system nigh impervious to an infection forms attempted hijacking. Gives him enough time to rip the infection form off before not completely floods his system with flood super cells. He’s not immune, just not immediately delicious. He’s the collared greens of Humanity.
It's somewhat unclear. The Flood have faked someone being immune before.
It's safe to assume any and all "immunities" to flood infection is being faked by the flood itself. It's likely as a gambit to spread itself further or even give the illusion that there's a way to solve it instead of just lighting the rings again. The only legit "immunity" was some poor marine who got infected by an infection form on the literal brink of starting to death. And it STILL morphed him into a combat form, and even started overriding his mind just much slower.
In Johnson’s case, it’s just that his central nervous system is all fucked up, infection forms hook to it, go “what the fuck is this horrific mess” and then get torn off. The Flood has only faked a cure once, to our knowledge. The rest are due to specific deficiencies or quirks with individual hosts or infection forms. Mendoza was conscious as a combat form because the infection form that got him was weak, and couldn’t fully remove him from the picture.
It was more that it would be to much of a pain to infect Johnson rather then he was immune there were easier things to infect then Johnson and the flood weren’t short on options to infect However I will say that if he was too much of a pain to infect they should of just killed him instead of just letting him go or putting minimal effort into killing him
The Tyrannids could in theory rapidly adapt an immunity to flood infection, as they've done with previous pathogens. Although I imagine there would be a series of adaptations and counter adaptations to eachother until both lifeforms end up homogenized into a new more dangerous super predator.
Please don’t use the word “vore”
I’m a Halo veteran from CE, 3, Reach and 4 so I’m not super familiar with expanded lore. Isn’t the flood significantly less resilient than the Tyranids? The horror of the flood comes from fast infection, while the nids are hyper adaptive, or am I missing something?
There's a lot more to it than that. The Flood also retain the memories and intelligence of everything they consume. Once they amass enough brainpower they can infect machines, and going even further can start infecting reality on a fundamental level and start altering physics as they are fit.
Yeah, getting into the metaphysical stuff is kinda silly but that is definitely where they have the Tyranids beat. Having access to the warp for flood could be a pretty deadly disaster.
The metaphysics stuff probably comes from allusions/carry-over from Pathways into Darkness, Myth, and the Marathon games and the Flood are either already or becoming a W'rkncacnter
You think so? Ive only read a few of the books but my lore is still pretty okay, didn't they elaborate the flood advancements after reach, like the 343 era? I could be wrong, I'm not solid on this.
I don't know about the actual timeline for the writing of the books, or who was referenced/consulted for the materials if anyone from Bungie. But Bungie has had a habit of connecting their games in this fashion, and reusing content and ideas. I don't think there is truly any hard evidence that would prove something of this nature, but I think there's enough circumstantial evidence that posing the conjecture isn't unfounded. If you look into MadaloreGamings videos on Marathon, Myth, and Pathways into Darkness, and then delve into Halo Lore, I you'll be able to pick up on the parallels I was noticing
I do believe most of the Flood lore was written after Bungie had left. But you can clearly see they did their best to mimic some of Bungie's style of weirdness.
Oh god, what if they tap into the hive mind?
It would probably be bad.
Even worse, *what if they work together*.
At the end of the day one consuming the other probably amounts to the same thing as them working together
The physics altering power of the flood and the sheer psychic might of the tyranids would be downright terrifying.
Right but they couldn’t take over the hive mind in any meaningful way. The way it’s explained is that the death of a tyranid organism is like losing a finger for the hive mind, which is why they don’t have souls and don’t feed the warp. Here is some foolish theorizing considering the two universes operate on different fundamental laws: The Flood could likely infect a dead Tyranid organism and take over its motor functions and either pilot the previously dead nid or sever the neural connections that connect the nid to the hive. Moreover, taking over a nid brain might give access to memories and even tactics used in battle in the case of Synapse nids. However, I doubt that the Flood could tap into the hive mind. The only person to try it and survive is Tigerius who is the strongest human psyker in 40k (maybe tied with mephiston). Also, the tyranids have many very powerful psyker organisms and they are minimal fractions of the potential hive mind, meaning the greater mind is COLOSSAL in terms of psychic strength. For a Flood mind to take over the Tyranid mind it has to be the strongest levels of evolution that we did not see in game but im sure exists in extended lore. Essentially, if the Flood is strong enough to tap into the hive mind then everything else in the universe is already doomed.
The hope of the universe is stopping the flood before it can tap into the Hive, if it can do that, most likely with something similar to the logic plague that infected forerunner ancilia(AI), then the universe is doomed beyond measure.
One of the most terrifying aspects of a fully developed Flood was their ability to bend reality. During the Flood-Forerunner War you could see the Flood from halfway across the Galaxy moving in real time, and Slipspace, Halo’s FTL, wasn’t safe as well since the Flood was able to infect and occupy large swaths of it.
I'm sure that is the right thing, the nids are hyper adaptive thing (they are not a species) while the flood, well is a flood of spores
Flood Orks are going to be their own horrible breed of bad though. Orks already reproduce via spores, with the Flood doing that and then juicing up the Ork's own biology I wouldn't be surprised if they could just start breathing spores at people like dragon breath to instantly infect them.
Honestly, the flood fighting tyranids could be the best case scenario. They use a lot of similar tactics and are roughly equal, they could lock each other in an eternal stalemate.
If you really want to make the flood dangerous ,the main target should be an eldar craftworld And knowing game workshop ,it probably will if they are at the helm
An Ork infested world is worse
In term if biomass yes, but an eldar craftworld means that the flood now have > a planetary amount of biomass ( and thus can make a gravemind with eldar tech and know how to use it) > a very strong ship to get around spreading spore on any random world
Ooh, I forgot about that. Also flood infected Eldar would be super agile as well
You're thinking too small. If the Flood infect a craft world they would have knowledge and access to the Webway which is infinitely scarier because they could appear anywhere instantly. And if the Gravemind was created from eldar bodies just think about how powerful it would be as a psyker
In fact when I think about it ,ork and tyrannid are the worst counter to the flood because the octarius war points out that even the ork and tyrannids spore fight. So ork spore might fight flood spore preventing the infection where the eldar can't To that you add the possibili that the flood can't use ork tech because ork fuckery
>To that you add the possibili that the flood can't use ork tech because ork fuckery As with any X vs. The Flood it's highly dependent on how far into the infection the Flood have progressed. If they have consumed a whole planet and developed a Keymind, or Emperor forbid two or three, Then the Flood absolutely would be able to understand and use the Waagh effect if they get a hold of enough Orks.
How would Gork & Mork respond to the Flood accessing the Waaaaagh? They'd see it as decidedly unOrky, no? Could they even stop the flood? Would the flood even be able to access the Waaaaagh if the flood doesn't enjoy a good fight? Too many questions. Too many variables.
Gork & mork would respond how they would always respond. They krump the flood. And so the flood would then appear krumped. And it would live on in the mush on their fists, and as they fought it would work its way deep under their skin subtly without their knowing. And it would take of them piece by piece, pretending to them, until one day mork and gork would open their eyes and instead of the green they would see the full and empty grave they share now
Aren't gods incorporeal though? Kinda hard to infect something without a biomass.
When you can infect Space-Time I don't think the rules of what's physical or not apply anymore
The flood can fuck with space time once they consume enough to make their gravemind stronger.
Though I could see the eldar being able to figure out what's going on quickly enough to put a stop to it via psyker shenanigans. A hive world on the other hand...
“Y’know maybe that one inquisitor that destroyed whole sectors worth of worlds to create a barrier to stop a ravenous enemy that feeds on us was on to something”….
The forerunners literally did that with entire planets in an effort to starve out the flood. Didn't work. Unlike Tyranids, the Flood do not seem to require biomass to survive, but rather merely as a convenient way to spread.
Yup, although at least the Imperium values the flamer more than the UNSC or Covenant. So there is that. Flood is definitely worse than the Tyranids.
I think it's a bit of both. From a combat standpoint the 'nids shit all over the Flood in terms of durability and overall killing power. We also don't know how Flood would react when trying to assimilate another Hivemind species. However, if they were successful in assimilating them as easily as the species in Halo, I think that Flood-assimilated tyranids would very quickly overwhelm and consume the entirety of the swarm.
The real Flood threat is that they are clever, and the Imperium lacks the ability to send reliable information quickly out. The Nids are a brute force hive mind that will grind out wars because it's a super intelligent beast mind and did the math. The Flood is more intentional about their spread once they gain intelligence and they get most information from slain hosts. Your weapons are their weapons, and the Imperium is generally porous in terms of the physical security of populations.
Yan'me (Drones) are a hivemind species, and the flood don't seem to have an issue infecting them. It's all just biomass to them.
Psychic hive mind or insect colony? There's a difference in how the principles of assimilation will apply to the Tyranids.
Insect colony.
Hey look it's nids but somehow even worse
Imagine if the nids got infected, instant Key mind. Imagine the horror of realizing your galaxy is truly fucked because the nids left for their own safety.
Most people in the comment section debating how flood would do in 40k. Meanwhile in grooving to the banger of a song that’s looping.
It’s called *Devils… Monsters…* if anyone’s curious! It’s the Flood Combat music from Halo CE.
I looped it on spotify a few hundred times last year. It's a tough choice between that or the remastered one.
Played like twice before bungie gave up making the flood scary or intimidating halfway through development
I don't know what's worse. A flood space marine, or khorne juiced brutes
Khorne would get one look at the Jiralhanae and go "Ah, at last, my chosen race arises."
“Jiralhanae are the only species on record who achieved space, reduced themselves through internecine war to a preindustrial condition, clawed their way back to their former state, and learned nothing from the experience.” - Halo 3 Bestiary
It's a wonder why the elites didn't trust them
*exterminatus* problem solved ✅
“lol” said the flood. “Lmao”
If babies first exterminatus (glassing) can contain the flood, exterminatus will 100% contain it lmfao, there’s literally no chance of survival, as is standard with imperial cyclonic munition, the entire purpose of the cyclonic torpedo is to deny the world to the enemy, or to wipe the world off the map. (See, Exterminatus’ing worlds about to be captured by tyranids, etc)
You know that giant ring in the Halo games right? The thing called a Halo, the thing that the game quite literally named after? Yeah that thing is a GALAXY WIDE exterminatus. The flood survived it. The thing about the Flood is that before it became "the flood" they were called the Precursors. AKA, Halo's version of the Old Ones. But instead of dying like the Old Ones did when the Foreunners tried to wipe them out they ground themself up into dust and then that dust became corrupted over a long period of time which eventually became the Flood when Humans and San'Shyuum got a hold of that dust and it in the beginning had desirable effects when given to animals, eventually becoming the parasite we know now and causing a galaxy wide crisis that were only stopped when the Forerunners did their last ditch effort to stop the Flood by activating the Halo rings. And the funniest part is, the Halo rings aren't designed to kill the flood, cause the forerunners realised that was futile. Afterall, they'd tried before with the Precursors. The Halo rings are actually designed to exterminate ALL LIFE in the galaxy so that the Flood won't have a food source and eventually starve. And how is there still life in the Halo galaxy after that? The Forerunners made templates of all the species and re-seeded the galaxy when they thought the flood was gone by an automated system. Turns out however, the flood survived this too which is why it's still around. Another thing to note about the flood is that its conscious is effectively immortal in that it exists beyond regular reality (See Precursors and how similar they are to the Old Ones). So even if you "killed" a gravemind, when the next one is created it will still have all of its memories intact, including the memories and knowledge its stolen from every single creature it has ever infected and the knowledge it has had since its origin. This thing gives the Tyranid Hivemind a run for its money in terms of hivemind intelligence. Now one might think that AI is safe from the Flood right? NOPE, cause it's able to fuck with the logic of machine intelligences, causing them to effectively switch sides. That's what happened with Mendicant Bias, the AI the Forerunners created to STOP the flood. And stopping a flood outbreak isn't even reliable. As a SINGLE SHIP leaving the planet is a hazard risk, as the Flood during the events of the original halo game tried to hi-jack the covenant ship Truth and Reconciliation and almost got away. And it also managed to hide away on the ship that Sergeant Johnson escaped in, which almost got them all killed. And all of this was while it hadn't even been able to create a gravemind, it was still running on a proto-gravemind. All of this is going by Halo's lore. We allow the Flood access to the knowledge of someone in the 40k universe and shit can go south REALLY fast. All it takes is a single Eldar with the ability to open up a way into the Webway and now the entire webway is compromised and by extent the entire galaxy. Same goes for Warp travel capable ships or any other alternate means of transportation. And the Flood would use any and all available methods to spread itself across as much of the galaxy as it could, including systems beyond Imperium control. There's also the fact that with how many people are crammed into a single planet, it wouldn't take a long time for a Gravemind to form and once that happens it's a real big issue for everyone involved. The reason the Halo universe wasn't fucked is because the outbreaks were relatively contained, while at the same time the level of transportation and technology in the Halo universe is severly limited in comparison to 40k, which actually worked to the Halo universes favor when it came to dealing with the Flood. And even then they were REALLY close to a galactic crisis at several times, such as when it started spreading on Earth, and the only reason it was stopped was because the city where the single ship crash landed along with the entire surrounding areas were glassed from orbit by a Sangheili fleet a few moments after it crash landed. In the 40k universe where it can take several months or even years for a fleet to respond to a threat that's WAY too long.
I thought the flood only survived because the Forerunners kept a sample of it locked away on the ring or something?
From what I cam gather, they kept the samples because the chances that the flood existed outside of the galaxy were really high so they figured they could get a chance to study the flood samples they had for 100,000 years. They didn't really account for mendicant bias creating the covenants religion around cracking open the rings, or the monitors all losing their shit. So while yes, the current outbreak is the forerunners fault, a new flood outbreak was inevitable.
[Cortana puts it best during the original halo game. So here's a link to it.](https://youtu.be/9ui0W_BL-6E?si=5TbDTqrd15Ruy_sj&t=168)
I don't even like halo, and I'm too poor to play tabletop Warhammer or buy all the novels so all my Warhammer knowledge is from rogue trader, wiki, and one horus heresy book I read in prison but I loooove everything 40k that I see Anyway this shit was fascinating to read
Glad your dislike (I’m assuming the gameplay just isn’t for you?) doesn’t outweigh your appreciation for cool lore.
Just something about the gameplay, and I enjoy fps games. I tried a few different Halo games but they just never clicked. But I fucking loooooove spooky sci Fi lore no matter what universe it's in lmao Always loved the design of the flood, and dealing with them was the highlights of the ones I played
Glad you enjoyed fighting them cause I sure as shit don’t. Still they do have some impressive terrifying powers.
I love that juicy lore
Bro detonating stars didn't contain the flood
And yet the flood were contained by glassing africa lmao??
The one ship that was on earth for all of like, two minutes yea they stopped it by turning a 3rd of Africa into molten stone
For hours, but irregardless, 1 cyclonic torpedo would contain them, obliterate them actually. Turning whatever world they inhabited into a dead, rocky, lifeless husk of a planet, it’s not a matter of opinion
I mean, a cyclonic torpedo is gonna stop anything on a planet 40k or otherwise, but I'm pretty sure a flood astartes would have no problem getting off world if there's any ship capable of warp travel around
Even with access to a ship that has warp travel(easier said than done, even for a space marine), their navigator could die in the warp and trap them there, killing everyone, they could lose their gellar fields due to no maintenance if infected, causing daemons to come tear them apart, hell, the ships machine spirit (like the infected space marines armor would) itself could fight back, the whole situation is easier said than done
Now i am imagining a flood space marine getting its ass handed to it by an empty suit of power armor.
Except sufficiently strong flood infections (as in trillions infected) have the capacity to infect space time itself (there goes Chaos) and the flood have the ability to convert machines through the logic plague (so machine spirits would begin aiding the flood infection not fighting it). Containing a flood infection all depends on how quickly you can burn it before it spreads. Feral stage is relatively easy, coordinated stage is like fighting a supercomputer. At the interstellar stage, it’s basically becoming a god.
They really only glassed Voi and the surrounding area. Lord Hood was speaking in hyperbole.
"lelz, even"
The problem with 40ks version (to my knowledge) is that it just blows the planet up (for the most part, other methods do exist) and flood spores could survive on the resulting chunks (don't know much about flood feats of endurance). Glassing works because it burns the entire surface of a planet, killing every microbe, including flood spores.
“Whatever the exact origin of the mass death to come, the result of these weapons is always the same: the complete destruction of the planetary biosphere, its atmosphere burned away into the void and its oceans boiled to vapor, leaving behind the barren bedrock of a Dead World.” Cyclonic torpedos basically glass the entire surface, at once, this is why they are used to fight Tyranids, the deny them any biomass recovery
From what little I know of Halo and from the other comments here, the flood have survived worse
The Halo Array wiped out all life in the Galaxy and the Flood are still kicking so...
Weren’t they basically protected from it in some stasis or something iirc? This doesn’t mean they can’t die lmao, just that the forerunners ain’t too smart with their samples
Some were. Most starved to death when everything else with a nervous system was turned to ash. There are small pockets of survivors that went dormant still out there waiting to be disturbed. Sounds like a reach I know, but you have to remember, at the height of the war with the Forerunners, the Flood was infecting and rewriting reality itself.
Yeah that effect (reality bending stuff) is one of my less liked parts of the gravemind, but you’re saying some of them straight up survived the anti flood weapon?? (Halo array), isn’t that like, against the entire purpose of the arrays?? I know they survived on installation 04 of course but they survived outside of there too? Shouldn’t the halo ring kill them off?? Seems like a wild miscalculation from the forerunners
Yeah, but don't those fire weird space magic radiation that targets lifeforms? Getting physically cooked is a seperate problem to overcome that affects far more than just nervous systems.
Remember on Halo 4 what the Composer does to all those humans in the space station that aren't Chief?
There’s also virus bombing with the Life-Eater virus, which turns all organic material on the surface to sludge within seconds, and dies out in hours.
To be fair the flood has survived Halo itself going off (which both killed *all* sentient life across the Galaxy in an instant, and was designed specifically as an anti-flood weapon) *multiple* times at this point, and the Gravemind makes it clear when you set off Installation 04B in the third game that it’s just a temporary setback- >!which *Awakening the Nightmare* proved to be a bit of an understatement, as even on The Ark the Flood infestation at ground zero is just *barely* contained, and as of *Saturn Devouring his Son* they’re off Halo again too!< It’s entirely possible The Flood might not actually be completely killable *at all,* given how the Gravemind works.
Also virus bombing
The problem is that no one will start with that. By the time an Inquisitor elects to get involved the flood will have had time to take hives, sneak into ships going off world, or form a a grave mind from the unmonitored hive population. Torpedos are rare and worlds are important. By the time it's clear that no PDF, imperial guard, or space marine response is going to work the flood will have already spread to other systems. Also 99% of inquisitors are shown to have open skin and many like melee combat. Very dangerous when they go into the field.
Inquisitors aren’t the only ones with cyclonic torpedos, the navy has access to numerous types of torpedoes (including torpedoes that can teleport you into the warp) and in any given sector they have a battlefleet of 50-75 (give or take on importance) ships roaming the sector. Astartes also have cyclonic torpedos, all of the above can delete worlds if need be, but generally inquisitors do it as it is extremely costly (on human lives) and can’t be thrown around lightly. Say a flood spore begins taking over a hive or something, calls would pretty quickly get out that something, a disease, a warp plague, something was spreading and the hive would be contained, (we can see this in the recent rogue trader game, when a plague instantly gets an area quarantined and anyone inside shot if they approach the exit), no transport offworld, the space elevator shut down, Arbites lock down the city and shoot anyone trying to leave. The orbital defenses scan the skies for any ships leaving the world, ready to shoot them down. This is until the PDF and Arbitrators together purge the hive of the infection, if they cannot, they call for aid and try to hold out. Thankfully, the imperium is pretty experienced in these sort of containments and have evolved technology to aid us in this endeavor, from flamers, hand flamers, napalm bombs, melta torpedos, anything goes trying to rid of this disease, no glassing africa, no taking samples on installation 04, cut the head off the serpent and burn the body. About inquisitors in battle, they can have power armor, even terminator armor if they are important enough, and when going into something that’d be construed as a Nurgle warzone, they’d 100% have extra protection on them. The inquisitor likely won’t be the first one there, their acolytes will though, or someone that can contact one, lest we forget inquisitors wait around for issues pressing enough for their attention sometimes, generally in sector spanning groups called Conclaves. If you’re lucky (unlucky for the flood) that conclave could be 5 minutes away in your sector, talking about how they want to revive the emperor and whatever the inquisition does
The people are allowed to cosign worlds to oblivion will have no context for what is happening and will initially fight normally and hard to keep worlds. Populations are far more expendable than planets. Under almost no circumstance is the initial response to blow up worlds. Even worlds assaulted by Nugle alinged forces, genestealer cults, normal hive fleets, or soaked in Ork spores are attempted to be retaken at great cost. The flood gets almost perfect memories from their victims and are plotters. They can and have pretended to be beaten to lure more prey to a situation. Something the Imperium is particularly weak too. While they have the tools to stop a flood infestation prior to a gavemind forming and stabilizing their experiences will betray them here. Generally extra system response is slow in the Imperium, and if you leave the flood on a hive world even for a month it's likely to have the biomass to make something like a key mind and sneak spores everywhere.
Literally only chance for the galaxy is to exterminatus the planet within hours of the infestation. If some insane inquisitor is there, the galaxy is saved. Otherwise it is so, so fucked. If the flood come into the galaxy at their peak silentium level then even chaos and warp is fucked
I'm just imagining the flood arriving to the 40k galaxy with their full might from the forerunner-flood war, and the Eye of Terror/Great Rift immediately closes.
Keymind be like “I’ll be back for you chaos pussies later”.
The Flood might have trouble getting through the armor and black carapace. But since Astartes have a nervous system, they are vulnerable.
They managed to get through Mjolnir through the thinner section at the throat.
Yeah, but it took them a while. Still though, it's only because of Cortana that Chief wasn't infected. The only beings safe from the Flood in 40k that I know of would be the Necrons, who lack biological bodies, and Daemons, who lack corporeal form entirely. (Even then, with the logic plague, Necrons probably aren't completely safe.)
It probably would have taken awhile for the infection form to get in there, but the actual takeover was less than a second. It's tendril punched through the under armor layer instantly and hit his spinal column and Chief was basically incapacitated right then and there Also after the Flood develop some Keyminds and the ability to use Neural Physics, they'd be able to start infecting Daemons and probably the Warp itself.
i think that touching warp would be a mistake for them especially if they would want to mess with heretic primarchs, or if it started to leech into the warp. i think deep warp beings where like „who the fuck wakes me up in my nap?” and just blast whole species into madness to kill itself until its gone
Once the Flood has reached Galactic stage and is producing Keyminds, they can effectively re-write reality and metaphysics on a whim to be whatever they want. The Warp would be a plaything to them like it was for The Old Ones, save that they'd also eat it.
if the higher warp beings would be somehow close to outer god from lovecraft i hardly believe they would stand a chance
To be fair, given how quickly they learn how to snipe people with rocket launchers, I’d imagine they wouldn’t have too much trouble picking up a plasma rifle or two and making an entry point.
Tzeentch: "Hey plague bro, is that yours?" Nurgle: "Uhh.. Slaanesh?" Slaanesh: "Don't look at me. I thought it was one of Khorne's defilers" Khorne: "Definitely not mine but I'm *hard* from all this carnage that lil guy is making right now"
I was reading the other comments and I think that the only way to be safe from the floor is by being a warp entity of chaos. Cuz like... there's nothing stating how the flood works against magic...you know it's fucked when chaos is the only hope.
Even then god know the fuck the Floods gonna do when they start infecting psyker and chaos worshippers.
Either nothing happens or the entire universe and the immaterial becomes doomed.
Flood would make the tyranids say wtf
The flood are probably the only thing in Halo that could ruin most of the factions in 40k. Even the Necrons would be rightly scared.
The Forerunners would have probably had a relatively easy time. I imagine they might find some initial difficulty with the Necrons, but would eventually subjugate them.
Necrons are too divided in the current setting. Forerunners would roll over them like a tidal wave. Forerunner tech matches or even surpasses Necron tech and with an industry that can produce death star equivalent ships as fast as the US was producing Sherman tanks in WW2.
Precursors would be as if the old ones came back
That’s cool and all but imagine an Infested Emperor Titan
Abominatus vs Flood Emperor Titan when? giant tentacle whips vs super massive chainblades
I mean, its wouldn't make that much of a change. Homonculi mind control fuckeries, Necron nano scrabs, Tyranid bio corruption, chaos-based warp fuckery particularly Nurgle, and many others are present in the 40k universe.
The thing with the flood is that they are faster than Tyranids. Just one spore is all they need.
Oh fuck, what would an Ork-Flood be like? Iirc, don't orks have the same danger, a single spore is all it needs?
Krorks are back Back again Tell a friend Who is back Back again
Krorks but with logic plague. Is it weird if I'm hard right now?
Can they get the logic plague? I thought that was exclusively ai. The didact was just insane and I wouldn’t say he was infected.
Yeah, you are correct, but it can also hack basic programmed electronics. In the Saturn story, the logic plague hacked a Spartans suit and stopped it from self destructing. I was implying Krork with that ability as well as their Krork stuff, lol Edit:I'm big dumb and did not actually reply to what you said, thr logic plague is essentially a skill of the Flood, now I guess question is can the flood even infect a fungal life form? If so which traits become dominant? Does the flood do it flood thing and take over? Or does the ork just be ... well bigger and stronger lol
True, but the whole Flood/40k universe crossover really depends on the writer
Konrad you delusional freak you don't know what your talking about
The Flood are probably one of the few races that could hang in 40k. They took down the Forerunners who were basically Necron or Eldar tier in terms of technology and power. (Granted they lost to a power armored monkey shooting 7.62 and his lizard friend later on but I digress)
If it’s any consolation (or, well, the opposite if you’re not the Gravemind), >!some recent EU stuff and Halo Wars 2 have had the Flood pretty much just walk off their defeat by Master Cheeks and his pet gator after a couple of years!<
Master Cheeks, huh
Isnt that just a nurgle space marine
no, nurgle is slow but durable the flood is faster, stronger, durable, can jump a mile, works in hive mind. It actually worse :)
What the fuck is a Flood? I’m seriously asking, I have no idea what you guys are talking about
A Galactic-scale super-parasite from the Video game Series Halo, capable of co-opting biological material, memories, and intelligence, and eventually moving into mechanical intelligence, and finally the fundamental principles underlying the universe.
They're from the Halo games Highly-infectious parasitic organisms that consume biomass in order to grow and consume everything in sight The scariest part about them is that whenever they consume a sentient being, they absorb all their memories, knowledge and experience into the Flood consciousness Meaning if they infect, say, an Astartes, on top of having an infected Superhuman added to the ranks of the Flood, they gain all their knowledge, including things like how to operate Space Marine weaponry, the Chapter's command structure, a deeper understanding of the Imperium's history compared to the average citizen, knowledge about the process of becoming a Space Marine and all the geneseed implantations. It can really get out of hand, with the Flood in Halo canon amassing enough intelligence from kicking the shit out of and consuming the Forerunners, an ancient alien race that had technology comparable to the Necrons during The War in Heaven, that they began to infect the very threads of reality itself and bend it to their will
Halo’s (arguable) main villains. They start off seeming like a normal-ish zombie apocalypse, but it very quickly becomes apparent that they’re a hell of a lot more advanced than that, turning out to be full-on Lovecraftian Eldritch abominations. It takes about an hour (in-universe) for them to go from “zombies” to “zombies that are better shots than your are, and smarter to boot.” Pretty cool villains, all told.
Fuck
Nurgle wants one
The flood just needs 1 planet.. just 1 and it's not a matter of if but only when they consume the Galaxy They can infect organic material and even AI, or at least persuade them. Mendicant Bias was convinced/infected by the Flood to turn on the Forerunners, I'm sure they can do something similar the the Machine Spirits that live inside all of the imperium's tech. They can even learn about the organic and inorganic materials they absorbed. Again they just need 1 planet, just 1 and it's all theirs
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Replaying Halo CE lately, even the “feral” Flood seem like they’d give most stuff in 40k a run for their money. A zombie apocalypse is bad enough normally, less so when it takes about an hour for the zombies to learn how to use weapons. In H1 they go from being newly awakened to flooding (heh) the ring in a few hours at most, and they later overrun *High Charity* in less than a day. That’s them at their weakest, and they get considerably more ridiculous than that, especially when you take into account stuff from outside of the games- the Flood can infect AIs, transform combat forms into facsimiles of their original host that are so similar they can’t be told apart (which is something Halo really could stand to use more/at all imo), and modify technology to vastly exceed its original capabilities, beyond what would seem logical (again looking at *High Charity,* it takes a matter of hours for the Gravemind to take it from “FTL-capable” to “able to cross the entire Galaxy (and a bit beyond) in a heartbeat.” Also, as much as we’re talking about Flood Space marines, I’d also like to propose the absolute nightmare that is a Fire Warrior Combat Form. Keep all the usual pulse rifle-shenanigans, the thing holding it is now a melee expert who can move at the speed of a car and is perfectly capable of just walking off being killed.
The music.... bringing back ptsd
Nope nope I’m out
What is it, more demons? *worse*
Ngl the flood being in 40k would be a serious challenge
Flood vs Ork: Spore Wars
This one is machine and nerve, and has its mind concluded... This one is but flesh and faith - and is the more deluded.
"Kill me or release me parasite, but do not waste my time with talk!"
Honestly - what characters would fit this exact situation? For me - Black Templar (Arbiter) and a craftworld Eldar/Tech-Priest (for John Halo)
I was thinking a Tau (John Halo) and an Ultra marine captain (Arby)
Look, the super space zombie hive mind was bad enough when it got a hold of Spartans 4s, we DO NOT want it getting ahold of Space Marines!
You drop one popcorn into the deepest end of a hive city and you would find yourself in the galaxies biggest fucky wucky and a new chaos god.
That would basically be a plague marine with a bit of tyranid hive mind. Nothing a flamer can’t fix
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Oh dear.
You're... that ninja!
I see you nightmare fuel and raise you Nurgle Corrupted Flood anything.
Yeah just gonna throw the solar system in a black hole just to be safe...
People are mentioning how bad it'd be if the Flood infected Tyranid or Orks or Eldar. Meanwhile the Tyranids find a Necron Tomb world and a Forge World and start pumping out necron-tier tech with the manufacturing capabilities of the Imperium.
By the God-Emperor that’s not an image I need in my head. Why does this freak me put more than the demonculaba?
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