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How many Eldar there are in the galaxy left?

From what I gartered from your posts and Lexicanum, the Eldar only outnumber the Tau by population.
What population can 1 Craftworld sustain? And what do Eldar do when it comes to children?
Are they doing something to stabilize the population?

We don't know how many craftworlds or maiden worlds there are so we cna only guess.
I'd say they outnumber the Tau but that could easily change.

Some craftworld are the size of Planetoids. Personally, I believe there's over a trilion Eldar.

Oh yeah.
There are probably loads of Eldar but their population isn't going up.

Depends if you count DE in all that? Their numbers are increasing

Delephont wrote:Depends if you count DE in all that? Their numbers are increasing

I'm not. Trillion just craftworld imo.

I don't think so...
They have probably formed seperate species by now...

Brother Coa wrote:How many Eldar there are in the galaxy left?

No one really knows, but I'd go with somewhere around a trillion like everyone else has said.

Brother Coa wrote:From what I gartered from your posts and Lexicanum, the Eldar only outnumber the Tau by population.

Maybe, maybe not. We don't actually know the population of the Eldar. I'd agree that they out number the Tau but who knows.

Brother Coa wrote:What population can 1 Craftworld sustain? And what do Eldar do when it comes to children?

Craftworlds come in a different sizes. The largest is Ulthwe, and I'd take a guess and say it's population is in the billions. The smallest isn't realy known, but more than likely it's Iyanden (population wise). As far as children go, not a ton is know, however we do know that incubation comes in stages with the father prividing his genes several times to the embryo.

Brother Coa wrote:Are they doing something to stabilize the population?

If I were to take a guess, I'd say that there's not a lot they can do, other wise they would be doing it. If Eldar are anything like elves in other fantasy worlds then they have 1 maybe 2 children their whole lives, which is a long long time.

BRB lists 11 craftworlds.
1 craftworld was lost recently ( Malantai ) but wasn't included in the BRB listing.

11+ craftworlds and exodites should make Eldar common enough to be encountered but also one of the smaller populations of the established species.

Yeah the ones listed in the BRB are the biggest ones...
There seem to be a few dozen smaller ones and then maiden worlds on top of that.

Well for all we know there are a few thousand smaller craft worlds. I mean the eldar in thier day had more worlds than the Imperium so even if only half of those planets had craft worlds and only half of those servived think how many survivers there could be. Not to menchon eldar pirates who have smaller version of hives on different astroids. And who said that Uthwee are the biggest I would think its Beil-tan thier motivation to rebuild thier empire would call for more soldiers and more soldiers would mean a higher population. Also Exodite worlds must have some amount of eldar on it numbering in the hundred thousands. On top of all that Lexicanum states that most of the craft worlds have doubled thier numbers over time so i would say they are easily numbering in the 10's of trillions. Also depending on the population of the craft world there can be space add on or taken off or so i would imagine since its only a bunch of raith bone and eldar know how to mold it.

I always thought they were only a few dozen million, the fluff always makes them out to be a dwindling race massively outnumbered.

Oh well, guess my mental vision is ruined

Eldrad wrote:Well for all we know there are a few thousand smaller craft worlds.

Wow. That sounds a bit exaggerated IMHO.

GW fluff always described the eldars as a dying race, and their craftworlds as being extremely rare.

In addition, it seems that a single craftworld can cause a lot of troubles for the IoM. So, the eldars would have surely taken over the galaxy if they could field thousands of craft worlds.

It was only a small part of the Eldar empire that pegged it.
The rest thought it was a stupid idea which is fair.
I'd say there are between 30-60/70 odd craftworlds of varying size.
Including maiden worlds and pirate bases the Eldar still have a fair sized population but due to their long reproductive cycle they cannot replace losses quickly and they keep incurring losses, so yeah they are a dying race.

There are probably a hundred or so small craft worlds.

then there are the Maiden worlds and the large craftworlds.


I would say a Trillion is a safe number.


and as to Eldar reproduction: Eldar require multiple couplings to concieve. the Gestation time is unknown, but I would assume it isn't much longer then Human Gestation.

its the Multiple Couplings that takes time. that and the Eldar's avoidence of extreme emotions to avoid Slannesh would make sex a delicate operation.


on the other hand, this method of reproduction allows for an individual to have multiple Fathers, increasing genetic diversity.

I was also under the impression that the eldar where extremely limited in size [millions] , but after thinking about it i think they'd have to be in the billions to lower trillions.

Edit: Also if they are space elves, wouldn't their be hardly any offspring?

The major craftworlds are the size of Earth (see BFG), but are populated throughout the volume rather than just the surface. With this in mind, trillions per large Craftworld is not actually unreasonable.

With the expansion in size of Craftworlds since te fall (as stated in wd127 and possibly later), we can only assume they have had some population increase since the time of the fall.

Daba wrote:The major craftworlds are the size of Earth (see BFG), but are populated throughout the volume rather than just the surface. With this in mind, trillions per large Craftworld is not actually unreasonable.

With the expansion in size of Craftworlds since te fall (as stated in wd127 and possibly later), we can only assume they have had some population increase since the time of the fall.

Small ones = Pluto
Medium ones = Eath
Large ones = Jupiter

And the Craftworlds had expanded 10 to 100 times in size since the fall...

( all from Lexicanum )

AS for population...I read that Eldar need a lot of time to have a child. And that their numbers is falling faster than they breed a new kin. So if nothing else their population is falling. You can see that by Craftworld Idharae, witch was destroyed by 1 Space Marine chapter ( who had only 300 marines in the moment of attack ).

Brother Coa wrote:How many Eldar there are in the galaxy left?

From what I gartered from your posts and Lexicanum, the Eldar only outnumber the Tau by population.
What population can 1 Craftworld sustain? And what do Eldar do when it comes to children?
Are they doing something to stabilize the population?

A craftworld is the size of a small planet, and populated throughout. Assuming a comfortably low population density, due to excessive use of open space and whatnot, there's probably a lower limit on their normal population around that of the average hiveworld. I haven't heard anything about the craftworlds' populations doubling since the fall, since the Codex says that each generation is smaller than the last, though the two aren't necessarily exclusive considering the extremely long lifespans of Eldar; the initial generation of refugees produces a generation smaller than their own, which produces a yet smaller subsequent generation, and so on, with each generation surviving for nine or ten generations (or more, since we have no clue what an Eldar generation actually is), meaning a large population boom on board the craftworlds after the fall, that's slowly dwindled since (each generation unable to replace the generation dying off in its time, due to reduced births and attrition from war and young Eldar realizing how arbitrary and self destructive the craftworlder philosophy is, and deciding to become pirates instead), so now it's only twice the original population, and dwindling ever faster. That actually seems like a more entertainingly absurd situation: with every advantage, the craftworlders still couldn't help but kill themselves off through adherence to a philosophy that prevents them from thriving, while driving away their young.

Exodites are stone-age barbarians following a hunter-gatherer lifestyle on a handful of worlds. That puts their population in the low millions on the outside.

Commoragh is a city that compares to the largest of Imperial hives as "a soaring mountain is to a mound of termites", leaving it at roughly the size of a solar system in volume, which meshes well with the whole "contains seven stars" and "is a conglomeration of every old Eldar webway city and estate, technically located across the entire galaxy" things.

To take the mountain/termite analogy way too literally, and waste about half an hour waiting for various wikipedia pages to load, in addition to gratuitously making up the numbers that those pages don't contain, for reasons amounting to "I think it would be funny": if we take the average large termite mound (something like three meters high, and one meter wide, for a very rough volume of 2.4 m^3, considering it to be a cylinder for simplicity's sake), and the volume of mount everest (because this is already ridiculous, so why not go all out?; 8,848 meters high, and we'll assume it's a cone with 45 degree slopes because it's 4am and I don't feel like coming up with something more accurate, giving us 181,252,390,836 m^3), we find that everest is roughly equivalent to 76,964,921,799 termite mounds. The largest Imperial hive is Terra, which has a surface area of 510,072,000 km^2; we have absolutely no information on how deep the hive is, so I'm going to make a guess of five kilometers, which I assume is grossly underestimating it; for simplicities sake, let's ignore the issue that it's a crust on an approximate sphere, and pretend it's a flat box, so we get 2,550,360,000 km^3. Now, to convert that based on the analogy: 196,288,257,959,297,640,000 km^3 (196 quintillion; for reference, the area of a disk with a radius equal to the average distance pluto is from the sun is 106,883,258,684,868,356,273 km^2 (107 quintillion), making the offhand "roughly the size of a solar system" comment not too inaccurate, if conceptualized as a thin disk).

I took some gross liberties in calculating this, and I wouldn't begin to suggest it's accurate, but it does give a nice frame of reference (namely, that mountains are quite a lot bigger than termite mounds), and if we took a more average mountain (I don't know, maybe a third of everest's volume? I confess I don't know the first thing about mountains), and made a wild guess as to the size of a more average hive (maybe the size of the US, about 2% of the Earth's surface?), decided Commoragh was 99.9% empty space for some reason, and gave what remained a population density similar to Alaska (.46 people per square kilometer), only made it per km^3 instead of per km^2, it would still have a massive population (601,950,657,741,846, which is a bit saner, but still patently ridiculous). My math may be off in places, not least of which because I flagrantly ignored significant figures and on account of it being 4 am when I started this, not to mention because I just made up numbers that sounded reasonable when I was doing this.


Of course, this really just goes to demonstrate the complete lack of scale that pops up in 40k fluff, with things like Cadia having a population less than that of the US, or Eldar living in a couple dozen planet sized ships, which notably provide significantly more living space than a thin layer covering a small portion of a planet, and yet being treated as though they had a total population barely larger than Cadia's...

Commoragh is a size of a Solar System?

IT's declining.

No sex please, we're Eldar!

Safe to say that their maybe a couple trillions of them left.
Their craftworlds are big as planets (most are)
Of ourse they are trying t stablelize population but the problem is that they loose more then they make so thats a problem.
There are many eldar "tribes" Some are dieing out pretty fast while others increase.
The Imperium as gvein hard and major popultion hits on the eldar when they fined and destroy their craftworlds (but it doesnt happen that often.)
Many of the eldar "tribes" are dieing out beacuse of Necrons, Imperium, and chaos pushing in on them. But some such as the Ulthwe are improveing very well, unlike the Bein-Tall (I do not know if I wrote it correctly)
But keep your hopes up! Maybe in couple of years they will make a new story that will tell which "tribes" have died out and which are doing very well.

There are more Dark Eldar than Craftworld Eldar, DE numbers are unknown but growing, sort of

Grey Templar wrote:

and as to Eldar reproduction: Eldar require multiple couplings to concieve. the Gestation time is unknown, but I would assume it isn't much longer then Human Gestation.

its the Multiple Couplings that takes time. that and the Eldar's avoidence of extreme emotions to avoid Slannesh would make sex a delicate operation.


on the other hand, this method of reproduction allows for an individual to have multiple Fathers, increasing genetic diversity.

Ermm...where are you getting this from? It reads more like some kind of sick Fan fiction that WH40K "fact".....so far, given how sqeamish GW are of anything remotely sexual, the only hints about the "Eldar" reproduction are given in the DE Codex, and that's a very top level sexual education at best....I've never read anything along the lines stated above.

I belive it comes from Xenology



GW came out with it because they were retconning the fluff so that Eldar and Humands couldn't interbreed.

Indeed, it's from Xenology, designed to retcon the earlier fluff about human-Eldar hybrids. IIRC earlier editions had the Ultramarines having some kind of super Librarian who was a cross between a human and Eldar. Given that back then 40k was fantasy in space, it wasn't surprising....I think GW was trying to move away from that though

Highly unlikely Eldar outnumber Tau.

Tau populate dozens of planets in dozens of systems with world size populations. The species is also short lived, indicating they most likely reproduce very quickly. Given city layouts in 40K for most races, I'd clock Tau in at perhaps 100 billion+ depending on how much new fluff has them expanding.

Eldar have a few Craftworlds with a few million apiece on them. Malantai was described as being one such large Craftworld and was destroyed by a few Nids and the "doom"

Had they billions on the craftworld it is unlikely a few nids would of been able to destroy it.

I would estimate the remaining Eldar at 300 - 500 million at the very most including the Dark Eldar. Remember, a single chapter brought a war to Commoragh, if they had billions the Space Marines would of been wiped out in minutes.

The Eldar also have the Exodites.

No-one knows how many Exodites there are, but they have been quietly getting on with things for 10,000 years so it could be a lot by now.

Brother Coa wrote:Commoragh is a size of a Solar System?

That was an offhand joke. Hilariously, it matched up with the extremely unreliable calculations I did.

To try to make it more realistic, let's assume the "soaring mountain" in the analogy is actually just a big hill (say, 2,000 times the size of a termite mound), and the hive in question only covers a third of the surface of a planet roughly the size of Terra, we still get something around 1,683,237,600,000 km^3. If it were as sparsely populated as Idaho (and we decide that per km^2 should be per km^3, further reducing the density since people live in an effectively flat plain on the surface, less than a hundred meters high under most circumstances; 7.3 people per km^2, the seventh lowest in the US; for comparison, the most densely populated state, New Jersey, has a density of 462 people per km^2), it would still come to 12,287,634,480,000 (twelve trillion), in the same ballpark as estimations of the Guard's numbers.

BeefCakeSoup wrote:Highly unlikely Eldar outnumber Tau.

Tau populate dozens of planets in dozens of systems with world populations The species is also short lived, indicating they most likely reproduce very quickly. Given city layouts in 40K for most races, I'd clock Tau in at perhaps 100 billion+ depedning on how much new fluff has them expanding.

Eldar have a few Craftworlds with a few million apiece on them. Malantai was described as being one such large Craftworld and was destroyed by a few Nids and the "doom"

Had they billions on the craftworld it is unlikely a few nids would of been able to destroy it.

I would estimate the remaining Eldar at 300,000 - 500,000 million at the very most including the Dark Eldar. Remember, a single chapter brought a war to Commoragh, if they had billions the Space Marines would of been wiped out in minutes.

You're underestimating the Eldar and possibly the Tau as well. The Tau have... seven, isn't it? main populated worlds, and a few dozen small colonies. We don't know how populous their main colonies are; they could have smaller populations than Modern Earth, making the entirety of the Tau less than the population of a single craftworld, or they could have populations in line with the average hiveworld, leaving them with a total population roughly equivalent to that of a single craftworld.

For reference, the space marines that were allowed/lured into Commoragh were large contingents from three chapters, with a battle barge and a dozen strike cruisers. They suffered in excess of 75% casualties, and lost every ship apart from the battle barge and the cruiser they came to recover, in the span of a few minutes, facing only a disorganized resistance from those who happened to be close enough to react before they fled, further complicated by the campaign of sabotage and assassination Vect's servants carried out against the nobles leading the defense.These were Space Marines, the Mary Sues lugging around several metric tons of plot armor each, and they were slaughtered.

Kilkrazy wrote:The Eldar also have the Exodites.

No-one knows how many Exodites there are, but they have been quietly getting on with things for 10,000 years so it could be a lot by now.

Good point, I forgot to factor them in.

Hard to really tell how many Eldar there really are.

A friend brought up a good point to me, he thought it would be plausible that they have the current population of Earth spread out among the stars.

roughly 5-7 billion could actually exist throughout the galaxy.

Between craftworlds and maiden worlds I think that could also be a distinct possibility... No way to know for sure though.