Flood in 40k

>hey guys look at these eldritch zombie monstrosities that came from nowhere and wiped out the Forerunners

Holy shit that's cool and interesting.

>actually they're angry precursors who brooded so hard they turned into evil space dust lmao

Fucking Christ, what a way to ruin a great antagonistic species.

tfw no flood faction(yet)

the precursors are pretty interesting themselves. Like they literally were like, "you dare rise up against us? alright we'll let you win and then take you down at the height of your hubris" Not to mention they themselves are some sort of horrific eldritch abominations.

You fucking wot. Flood don't eat life, if anything they proliferate it. Their purpose isn't to just consume, it's to take over and subsume, and not just biomass, but intelligence.

I dunno, I'm just a firm believer in "The monster you don't see is scarier", essentially. Not explaining where the Flood came from made them exciting, in my opinion. Their origins being revealed was a bad idea in the first place, but them being fucking evil space dust? That the races at the time were dumb enough to sprinkle on their animals and shit? Doesn't sit right with me, but then again, I might just be a huge autist.

>Brooded so hard they turned into evil space dust
As I recall, their only way of surviving the Forerunners (Without galaxy-breaking wars) was to turn themselves to dust and reconstitute later, but stellar radiation turned them into spores before they could. The whole thing was that they just didn't want to fight initially, if I'm remembering right. And then they became an omniphage.

to be fair they did say that the powder made the dogs "really appealing" to humans. its dumb but they did at least think of why they sprinkled the space dust on their dogs. I think it would've been better if the flood dust ship just crashed on a human planet once and the dust got everywhere, unavoidably into the atmosphere. But it works the same way as it did with the dogs too. It doesn't do anything initially, but after generations, many generations, after the humans and animals on that planet have spread to the far corners of the human empire, things happen the same way they did with the dogs. Now THAT is a horrifying fucking concept.

thats a completely different interpretation than I got. They were so far above the forerunners that they were amused by them and let them win so they could test them later.

They would not due to their entire deal already being divided up amongst 3 preexisting factions

Really? I haven't touched it the Precursor lore on awhile, but the thing I got from it was that they had abstract kinds of tech that would have devastated star systems, and the Ps figured "Fuck it, we'll give'em this one".

The Flood are scarier than the Tyranids.

Tyranids are scary because there are a lot of them. They come from somewhere else, and they eat planets, and spit out more of themselves.

But there's no malice to them. They will do nothing worse to you than what a vicious animal would do. You will be eaten, you will be digested, and you will be fuel for more of them. They're nothing more than a rapidly expanding alien biome.

The Flood hate you. They hate you and they hunger for you -- not to eat you, not even to consume you, but to change you into something horrible for the sake of twisting something good into something hideous. It's worse than rape; it's rape and un-creation at the cellular level. Even a single spore on your skin can turn you into a vector for more Flood. If the Tyranids are an alien biome, the Flood is a cancer on the soul.

And once they do that to enough of you, and consume all the biomass in the galaxy, they can start to do the same thing to time and space. It's not directly described in the lore, but the ultimate goal of the Flood is to warp the universe into a twisted reflection of itself.

When the Forerunners realized that was the Flood's ultimate goal, and that it was so close to realization, they committed collective suicide.

And that was the only sane response.

The Flood are scarier.

>Tfw Flood literally use a Logic Plague

i mean they do have abstract kinds of tech, namely the star roads that are literal biological roads in space that they can use to bludgeon shit and can only be destroyed by the halo's pretty much. But that was used during the end of the forerunner flood war when mendicant allied with the gravemind and gravemind was like, Oh hey I remember these things lets use them. And this was hundreds of thousands of years later when the forerunners had tech that could touch the precursor tech. Like the precursors were so far ahead of everyone that they could beat them with what was basically their basic transportation infrastructure.

>Even a single spore on your skin can turn you into a vector for more Flood
Chief literally had one stick him in the throat on the first Halo ring and he's fine.

So basically if they had inhibitions about using their tech to beat them they sure didn't when they became the flood. Which by the way the flood had access to the domain which housed the consciousness of the precursors so its not like the flood was any different.

He's a bit wrong. A single spore won't do shit to a person, but that spore CAN grow into an Infection Form, which can theoretically bring down at least a continent

Because Cortana intentionally caused a short circuit in his armor to zap the flood infection form and shake it off, iirc

The thing with the Precursors is that they had a specific favoritism towards one of their other creations (that being humanity) at the expense of everything else they had made. Their other creations, the Forerunners decided that they hated this sheer unabashed favoritism that the Precursors showed towards only ONE of their creations, whilst effectively telling the rest to go rot in the dust forevermore, and went to war with them. The war was catastrophic, but in the end the Precursors were beaten and mostly destroyed or banished. Suffice to say, the Precursors did NOT take their defeat well. It was with this uprising by one of their very own creations, one of the races that THE had created and built up, that the Precursors decided to go full "Everything Must Suffer For All Eternity". If their own works wanted to stand against them, then they would make certain that ALL of them would suffer and know anguish for all eternity. Everything they had ever built, ever species they had ever designed and made, all of their own creations would suffer. Every man, every woman, every child would suffer. Over and over, they would experience never-ending torment and despair, anguish unimaginable. They would feel every form of torture conceivable, every horrid experience and nightmare, every terrible thought and feeling, and even then it would only be the barest iota of the Precursors raw -Hate- for them. The Precursors did NOT take their creations rising up against them well, at all.

Speaking of the tyranids, I was always wondering. You know that virus thing that the Imperium uses sometimes for exterminatus that dissolves all bio-matter into flammable liquid on immediate contact? Whats the chance that they could just launch one into a hive fleet and fuck them immediately? Seems like an easy and cost effective workaround to the problem at first glance.

They did that already. And it was super effective.
Then they did it again, and nothing happened. The Tyranids adapted to it.

Well shit.

what about virus bombing a planet that is juuust being overrun? the resulting firestorm and shit could take down the lot of them

That sort of planet wide scorched earth is the current tactica reccomended by the Inquisition

Really the only thing that could stop the nids at this point would be the gods of bullshit coming down and nerfing them

it's not an all or nothing thing

Sometimes whatever bio-reagent the imperium makes works, sometimes it doesn't. Hive fleets aren't identical in how they've evolved.

>The monster you don't see is scarier
We saw plenty of the Flood in the first two games. What you actually want is a blank slate that you can headcanon about and when some actual worldbuilding gets done and destroys your headcanon you get butthurt.

Honestly Bear's trilogy is the best part of Halo, it's a shame illiterate /v/tards can't appreciate it because they can't self insert as a generic action hero and fantasize about a unexplained backstory for a unexplained ancient race.

> implying Khorne, Nurgle, Tzeentch, and Slaanesh aren't the setting's gods of bullshit

>Tyranids only eat and digest you
>Flood uncreate you on a cellular level
>Tyranids turn you into more Tyranids
>Flood turn you into something horrible Floodlike

Now I admire your dedication, but this is pretty much the same thing.

And if you really insist that the important part is the malice - "it hates you and is going to turn you into a perverted evil version of you":
That's pretty much exactly what Chaos does.

They'd die pretty soon.

They got wrecked by a couple of humans who are still in 2XXX AD.

Chaos is ammoral, and is effectively everyone's disgusting good and bad aspects made reality, though Khorne has been pretty much driven off the honor side of his portfolio now thanks to Orks and Angron's special breed of bullshit next to the fact that Tzeentch has forwarded everything to literally farming worship through mass torture sessions on a planetary scale so it can merge the Materium with the Immaterium.

Chaos is effectively incidentally bad, but the Flood are literally like the a physical version of Chaos and Evil made manifest, which is worse because Chaos does because it is and the Flood do it because they do it for Evil's sake, or something along that line of thought.

the flood are basically the end all of sci fi universes because whatever tech level you are at, the flood are also at. The real way to kill them is to take them very seriously as a threat from the start. basically in 40k that would me exterminatusing any planet that they found spores on. The real question is would they recognize it as something thats not just one of nurgles diseases before its too late? The flood at its height could theoretically control all the machine spirits in 40k. How would the imperium, or any faction really, fair against that?

> Getting eaten is the same thing as getting raped from the inside out

I agree with the Chaos note, though. The Flood is on a level with Chaos in the field of shit-that-kills-settings, especially with regard to the galaxy-warping angle.

So, everything Cruddace has been doing.

Wait you say spores? And advanced tech? Orks beat them, as they reporduce the same way and no one can loot ork tek, because WAAAGH!

what? thats like the most half assed lol u can't beat me cuz i said so I've ever heard but you may be on to something. The infection forms assume theres a nervous system, but doing some reading the orks do indeed have a nervous system, and are thus able to be affected by infection forms. As long as the flood keep the connection to the waagh, which I see no reason why they wouldn't, all ork tek should work for the flood as well. Hell the flood will enjoy launching rocks filled with infection forms at planets. It was a major tactic used in the forerunner flood war. As for the fungus part of the orks, its shown that the flood can take over flora and fauna, so i doubt that element would stop them.

One possible out the 40k universe has is the fact that its been shown that sufficient gene fuckery can fuck the flood over. Sergeant johnson and his radiation addled genes left him immune to the flood. Many races have shown to be quite good at gene fuckery, including the humans. If the Magos's could come up with a gene seed variant thats immune to the flood then they might have a fighting chance. The tyranids as well have shown the ability to adapt rapidly so its possible that they could make themselves immune, but the problem with the tyranids is since they're a hive mind, they might succumb as soon as an infection form took over a big synapse thing. so it could go either way.

I'm surprised noones mentioned the necrons, since they're essentially immune to the physical effects of the flood, but logic plague could get them being machines. The other point is the necrons might not care about the flood, since you can essentially just wait the flood out. Once theres no more things to consume for the flood you can just start purging the galaxy of the remainder.

>the flood are basically the end all of sci fi universes

The downstreamers called. They want their plague back.

>the flood are basically the end all of sci fi universes

The Bydo have come calling.