WHAT IF TYRANIDS RULED THE 40K GALAXY? | WARHAMMER 40,000 LORE / SPECULATION

Timestamps:
0:00 Intro
6:04 The Greatest Threat?
15:56 Dataslate 001
18:00 Is it achievable?
26:18 vs Imperium
34:37 vs Orks
40:14 vs Tau
48:58 vs Aeldari
53:25 vs Votann
58:12 vs Necrons
1:05:04 vs Chaos
1:12:13 Final Thoughts
1:22:37 Dataslate 002
1:26:52 Outro

BGM Credits:

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[Luetin]

As usual, tell me your own scenario with the Tyranids consuming the entire galaxy - and what do you want to see next in this series. Enjoyed? Please drop a LIKE - consider sharing the vid. PRAISE LORD OF ALL ALGO.

[Arclight]

Tyranid ruled 40K Galaxy?! A Galactic scale graveyard with the bulk of the nids moving on to the next galaxy and the remaining ones in the Milky Way going feral or killing each other off in a last deperate attempt at getting more biomass. The Milky Way mostly re-starts from microbial life and in a couple of billion years, new races emerge to assert their dominance of the Galaxy..before the Hive Mind is unwittingly alerted again and rolls back into town to start nom nom noming everything all over again..

[knasbollolo]

Really happy with the ending of this and a few of the previous videos. No insanely loud hardrock music. Probably not alone in listening to your videos when I go to bed. Nothing worse than falling asleep and being blasted awake at the end of a nigh 2h video.

[Obiwan]

In Warhammer 40K the biggest food for the Tyranids are the Imperium with more than 1 Million planets and the Orks who know how many planets they have, The Taus are just a snack.

[MrSaywutnow]

I like how for the Orks the Tyranid invasion is not a crisis, but rather an opportunity.

[declanreiser]

My personal speculation on the Tyrranid end game also ties into the reason for their coming to our galaxy in the first place. The idea comes entirely from outside the lore and is all because I grew up with a bee hive in my back yard, but the behavior of real life hives seems a likely inspiration for tyrranid motives and engagement is engagement so ill drop it anyway ; )

Bees reproduce on an individual scale but one of the most fascinating things to witness is how they reproduce on the scale of a new hive. The way in which a bee hive comes to be has a lot to do with the life stage of the queen. An infant queen landing in a suitable hollow and beginning a nest looks much different from the power struggle of an elderly queen at the end of her fertility becoming replaced in her own hive by several rising queens.

What I find relevant to the tyrranids is between these two, when a hive in its "golden age" the middle of a thriving queens life cycle. Hives in this stage will grow to fill the confines of their location, and actually send out a colony mass complete with an nascent queen out of the hive when the hive has essentially grown too big. A fully mature and fertilized queen can't actually fly, they are bound to their established home. So when an offshoot colony forms they form around a young still maturing queen. This pre-queen will perch near the original hive, and near half of the colony will be "ordered" to go with her. They form a protective mass around the future queen, piling all around in a shield of bodies, keeping her warm, protecting her, and bringing food to her from the outside of the mass in. From this roiling pile you can observe individual bees flitting off, scouts searching for the colonies ideal location. When a suitable location is reported this staged colony will leave the area of the original hive and form a home elsewhere, rich pollen not competed over, and a safe structure to form a hive within being ideal.

What I find so interesting about this is that this is done under the sort of direction of the "old" queen. It is a kind of pragmatic move, culling her own hives population by half lets her sustain her reign all the longer. Remember, she alone cannot fly, so her management of where she stands is what matters to her. Further a nascent queen reaching full maturity inside her hive will lead to conflict. Either her workers sensing a new healthy queen will side with the new queen and kill her, or she will win out and kill this new queen. Therefore the future queen must be sent away while she can still fly off. Essentially this colonization is in a species sense a means of reproduction, but to the queen it is a move of survival. All this is just to help us imagine if the Hive Mind where in a similar cycle. Perhaps it is physically rooted in its home galaxy, and some biological trigger has led to the seeds of new not yet mature Hive Minds being born. The tyrranid fleets we see are still under the orders of the original Hive Mind but they won't be forever. The Hive Mind could be ensuring its own survival by casting out these off shoots to other galaxies. Culling the population of its own. Perhaps the home galaxy they hail from is significantly smaller than ours, and the Hive Mind is a mass so titanic and established, sitting upon some unmovable source of nourishment or psychic power that it cannot be moved from.

The bees sent with a nascent queen are at first of the old hive, acting on the direction of the old queen, with a powerful drive to propel far from their home hive to ensure her safety and thriving. Given time though the new queen will become their drive. I wonder if the tyrranid away fleets are surrounding Hive "seeds" lifeforms that are slowly turning into fully separate and powerful Hive Minds, too dangerous to be near the original. While the Hive Mind still has dominion it must order the dangerous soldiers of its kind to a far flung galaxy to make it impossible for a new Hive Mind to compete with it. I think then that maybe the tyrranids have an end goal for our galaxy beyond just stripping it clean. I think they could be guarding Hive Minds to be, and our galaxy is a proving ground for one to emerge as a new queen to rule all the tyrranids within our galaxy.

It is observed that bee hives have distinct personalities and adaptations. Hives retain a kind of memory and trauma, for example two hives of the exact same species might have different levels of hostility to human handlers. One hive having been mishandled in the past might be automatically more aggressive than its neighbor that regards humans as pretty much harmless. So again fully speculative, maybe the different tendrils with their differing strengths could be separate colonies originating from the same single Hive Mind. Each is carrying a unique Hive Seed, a different future Hive Mind. For now they are all still under the one influence of the Hive Mind... but eventually each queen will mature, and root itself as a nearer more overwhelming influence. The old Hive Mind will be forgotten as the Gorgon, Kraken, and Leviathan queens establish themselves into rooted and unmoving entities that must compete for the field of bio mass they have all landed in.

It is often bandied around in the 40k community that perhaps the Tyrranids we see are running from something. I think this theory brings some truth to that, but rather it is the Original Hive Mind sending these ticking time bombs as far away from it as possible. The Tyrranids we see are not running, they are being desperately pushed away. For the seeds they carry are perhaps the only real threat to the Hive Mind Itself!

[knoxminis]

"All Subjects Incinerated." I absolutely love the survivor records and first-hand accounts you do like this and the one on the titans. You could do an entire series like this.

[Chris-ryfr]

Nids winning is the equivalent of "rocks fall everyone dies".

[TitusCastiglione]

The thought of the Tyranid Hive Mind devouring/recycling the soul as well as the body is genuinely disturbing beyond belief. Sounds like something out of Berserk.

[PauperRulesCommittee]

I like this idea of the Tyranids starting as hunter-gatherers and then transitioning into farmers

[ethanhunstiger]

The ultimate form of the tyranid, in my mind at least, is an organic Dyson sphere.

[NicNacPaddyWac]

4 hours of quality content in 2 weeks, your spoiling us Luetin. Keep up the good work as usual.

[EvLchddr]

I recently rewatched your Octarius videos and was just thinking this. Super excited to see how you break it down. Thank you for the videos and hard work, as always. Blessed be the Loremaster.

[Short-N-sweetshorts]

Getting back into my artwork after almost a decade of my talent being shelved by my own choice!

This type of content is almost perfect background entertainment that allows for my escape into my craft!

Thanks brother for your diligence in keeping escapism somewhat healthy for me!

[FieldMedic]

Fun video! I do like speculating on these types of scenarios, I think a fun one of these to do would be the Orks or Necron. Also I loved the dataslate readings, Nat did a fantastic job!

[thebigh]

This video validates all the money I spent on a Tyranid army back in '03.

[MyViper]

And that's how you start the weekend... Thank you Luetin brother.. you got me into the Warhammer world almost a year back.. didn't look back since...
Regards from India

[GarthocEmpire]

The last recording right at the end brought shivers to my spine. Great work once again.

[patrickferguson]

I’d love to see GW make “Hungry Hungry Tyranids.” It would be the perfect way to introduce 40k to younger audiences. :)

[OneBlingedAngel]

The dataslate segments were a great addition to the video and to the horror of the tyranids. Excellent work Luetin!