Life in a 40k Hive City

What is life like in a 40K hive city? Do people have jobs? Do they know about the different aliens the Imperium fights? What do they do all day?

Imagine a shittier and more authoritarian contemporary Chinese city.

>What is life like in a 40K hive city?
Shitty

>Do people have jobs?
Nah man. They just sit around on their couches all day and talk about the Emperor.

Wait, is 40k literally Californian suburb?

Imagine this if you will.

Picture the mega cities of Judge Dredd. Sprawling, state sized metropolises of varying degrees of living. At the bottom it is a hellscape of unimaginable rampant crime and filth, and at the top, the rich and powerful live in relative comfort. the middle ground is still a hellhole, and more than likely you work 20 hours a day at a super factoy making products you'll never see, let alone afford, making $3 every 5 hours, only to come home to an apartment the size of a particularly spacious bathroom. You never see sunlight, you never smell anything but pollution, your life is miserable and you know that unless a miracle occurs, it will never EVER change.

Now imagine that, but the mega city is the size of either your entire planet, or maybe the size of North America if you're lucky. The mega city is ALSO piled on top of 12 more mega cities until it is a literal mountain of steel and concrete so large that it has frequent cave ins, quakes and other hazards that don't even effect the entire city at large. Around 95% of the population will never see sunlight. The ones in the underhive literally have no law whatsoever, and are constantly dealing with sewage and factory waste raining from above that is so toxic that it may as well be molten fucking lava. That, is a hive city.

Read Dead Men Walking. One of the main characters is a guy who lives in a hive city and describes it fairly well. There's also some looks at hive city life in the Ravenor series.

Short answer: Shitty if you're poor and live on the lower levels, great if you're rich and live on the higher ones.

OH and if some asshole decides to worship chaos you can either expect to die for no other reason than "you might be tainted", contract a disease so deadly your intestines will iterally begin to eat you, only for you to reanimate as a being of pure chaotic rot, be dragged into a slaaneshi death orgy, perhaps be sacrificed in the name of the almighty axe father, or be subjected to warp experiments by a cult of tzeentchians! And if a cult of Tyranid Genestealers decides to hole up in your hive, don't even think of leaving that cube you call an apartment. AND if an ork incursion occurs, well, you may as well get ready to experience the cleansing flames of holy exterminatus, because fuck you you are a mere spoke on a nanoscopic cog within a galactic machine where your life is counted amongst potentially quadrillions of others.

for the rich though, do they just live well in the sense a medieval king lives well, or do they actually have access to computers and things like the internet and digital devices?

But don't worry! There is a way out!

If you are lucky enough to get drafted into the innumerable guard tithes you may actually experience sunlight and fresh air before some horrifying xenos abomonation rips you apart.

They have access to the very best the Imperium has to offer, barring some Admech bullshit.

You must remember, hivewords are 'massive' production centers and rely almost entirely on off-world food shipping to sustain themselves. This means they are natural trade hubs and so anything not produced locally can easily be bought by the immesurably wealthy nobles who own the place

>They have access to the very best the Imperium has to offer, barring some Admech bullshit.


I guess my question revolves around that, what is the best the Imperium has to offer? Do things like personal computers exist in the 40k universe, or are they all monopolized by the Admechs now?

i like you

>likely you work 20 hours a day
So what you're saying is that there's no middle ground because they've all been killed by their impractical shifts.

>Life for a Hive dweller.
>Wake up in your hab block, have a quick breakfast of retextured protein and other substances.
>Head to work at the manufactory.
>Dodge street urchens begging and collecting scraps falling from higher levels.
>Arrive at work, take your place at assemly belt.
>Your neighbour passes you two parts of a data-slate, it's your job to put them together and pass them to your other neighbour.
>Take break to pay to golden throne.
>Eventually your shift is done, you head to get paid.
>Go out drinking with coworkers, drink too much rotgut.
>End up buying substandard cooked rat from stall.
>Get home, pray to porcelain throne.
>Fall asleep.

You forget the 1984 aspects.
Big Emp is watching you

do hive cities have the ridiculous gothic excess that a lot of Imperium stuff does? Gargoyles on the architecture, brass everywhere, that type of thing?

Some do.

So, I know that there's a middle ground between 'hive world' and 'primitive world', but are there a lot of planets in that space? Or are most inhabited worlds hive worlds?

The Imperium is an empire of more than a million worlds. 5e MRB says there's about 32k Hive Worlds. So not even 10% are Hives.

Huh. So the average planet isn't a hive world.
Then again, they have so damn many people, and there are probably so many sparsely-populated worlds, that it's still possible that the average Imperial citizen lives on one.
Maybe, I dunno, the Imperium's confusing; I suppose it's likely that there really *isn't* an average planet or average citizen.

The 'best' the imperium has to offer involved melta guns being worked into your signet ring or necklace.
Things like personal computers certainly exists, the most hand-holdy versions falling under "Datapad" which as is the case with most imperial tech is a broad categoty covering everything from a calculator to a handheld computer wirelessly connected to its very own servitor that does all the work for you.

You'd also have all kinds of sillyness like hologram projectors worked into the clothes so you can change style on a whim, not to mention the tailor made cybernetics or narotics.

The Imperium is advanced, very much so.
The reason you don't see alot of it is a simple matter of logistics, you could make tens of thousands of lasguns for the price of a single digi-weapon, so thats what they do.

But the Imperial nobility? Oh my friend, go wild. These are the people who might install anti-grav engines in their floor so they won't have to risk stepping on dust or import live specimins from death worlds just so they can have a little safari with their friends.

That would be an "Imperial" or "civilized" world depending on the scribe, which is a 'modern' world without any specialized purpose. A self-sustaining world capable of providing a net contribution to the Imperium without to much logistical support, and yes they are the majority.

Other designations include: Agri worlds (Farmlands, mostly to feed the hives). Forge worlds (Admech run), Fortress worlds (think Cadia) Shrine worlds (owned and run by the Ecclesiarchy), Penal colonies, the afromented hives, Marine recruitment worlds, etc etc.

onemindsyndicate videos covered it fairly well. there is also plenty of reading on the subject.

basically imagine the shittiest life you can imagine. now make that shittier. "job" is low gothic for slave labor. the general population is kept ignorant of xeno threats until they "enlist" which is also low gothic for forced conscription and even then the uplifting primer is propaganda which keeps guardsmen ignorant to the threat xenos pose until they make contact. and daily life consists of wake, work, lose a limb, drink, sleep, get turned into a servitor while you sleep because servitors don't need sleep, EMPEROR PROTECTS BEEP BOOP WORK

OP it sounds like you need some Necromunda in your life...

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