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I understand that Tyranids absorb the biomass of enemies and use them to strengthen the hive fleets, but do they absorb the psyker soul and it's powers? It would explain why the Tyranids are drawn to the galaxy, and how the Hive Mind became so fething powerful. I think that they could, because the Doom of Malan'Tai did it, so for the Hive Mind it would be relatively simple.

Probably, it has never really been stated (to the best of my knowledge) that they don't. Really it's mainly know that Biomass is their main source of energy/life.

I think they are drawn to psychic power because it usually indicates life, which is, of course, more yummy biomass!

Other than the Doom of Malantai, no Tyranids have been stated to absorb psychic energy. The Doom only uses it to strengthen its own power though, it's not redistributed like biomass is, and was a specifically created mutation to exploit the infinity circuit on the Malantai craftworld.

They're drawn to Psychic beacons because that's how Tyranid vanguards attract hive fleets to tasty planets.

Nothing has ever pointed to them doing this.

The Hive Mind is a warp entity at this point but its not a Chaos God. It just scrambles the warp and causes utter confusion. Even Chaos has patterns, albiet impossable to comprehend patters. The Hive Mind causes true chaos, no pattern, no sequence.

Ok. I was just thinking about how or why the Hive Mind would have special eyes to hunt down major psychic powers, and have natural psychic defences.

Grey Templar wrote:Nothing has ever pointed to them doing this.

The Hive Mind is a warp entity at this point but its not a Chaos God. It just scrambles the warp and causes utter confusion. Even Chaos has patterns, albiet impossable to comprehend patters. The Hive Mind causes true chaos, no pattern, no sequence.

Do you have a source for this?

Logic,


How can the Hive Mind create such confusion in the warp so that Psychic powers that arn't its own have trouble manifesting? The Warp is supposed to be chaos right?

Obviously there are patterns in the Warp. It has its own rules after all. Beings grounded in the material realm can't detect patterns because they don't have the proper reference point.

But the Hive Mind can see the patterns(as can all psykers) and so its able to scramble them. It forces its own order on the Warp, one which beings of the Warp and other Psykers can't read. hence the SitW.

The way I see it, the Hive Mind is either so truly chaotic that other psykers can not function in it's vicinity, or it is so powerful that it can willingly shut down other psykers. And has it ever been mentioned what the actual gods of the other races think of the Hive Mind?

No, im pretty sure the Tyranids only absorb organic matter and turn it into biomass.

Hunchkrot wrote:The way I see it, the Hive Mind is either so truly chaotic that other psykers can not function in it's vicinity, or it is so powerful that it can willingly shut down other psykers. And has it ever been mentioned what the actual gods of the other races think of the Hive Mind?

A bit of both and neither. Logically, the shadow in the warp IS the hive mind. The 6th edition rulebook says the entire race is psychic, and the hive mind has been compared to a gestalt consciousness. This would mean the entire race has a warp presence, even if only small per creature. Synapse and the hive mind controlling them means that there's communication going on in the warp, one way for normal Tyranids and two way for synapse creatures (for control). Logically, the shadow is this communication, billions upon billions of alien presences overlapping and talking. This is what blocks out other warp communication (by smothering the area) and drives non Tyranid psykers insane (to many voices at once). This is also how it sees psychic beacons - because it's in the warp already. Synapse creatures are its way of seeing the material realm.

The Shadow in the Warp is an effect caused by the presence of so many billions and billions of inter-connected minds. It is, in a sense, Psychic Static or White Noise that simply drowns out or disrupts all other signals. This is not a conscious decision on the part of the Swarm, just an added benefit to their nature of being.

Weren't Zoanthropes, like the Doom, bought about from Eldar Biomass?

Hence the big pointy heads and shooty powers

Psienesis wrote:The Shadow in the Warp is an effect caused by the presence of so many billions and billions of inter-connected minds. It is, in a sense, Psychic Static or White Noise that simply drowns out or disrupts all other signals. This is not a conscious decision on the part of the Swarm, just an added benefit to their nature of being.

Depends how you want to think about it. The shadow is never described in great detail, just like the hive mind itself. The hive mind is a gestalt psychic conciousness, we know that much. It has to be somewhere in the warp. It actually being the shadow in the warp makes sense - it's not actually white noise, it's undecipherable communication drowning everything else out. This solution solves two things - what the shadow is, and where the hive mind is. And this still wouldn't be a consious descision, just, as you said, an added benefit.


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Pilau Rice wrote:Weren't Zoanthropes, like the Doom, bought about from Eldar Biomass?

Hence the big pointy heads and shooty powers

That's 4th edition fluff. While it's not directly contradicted in the 5th edition codex, it's doubtful it's considered by the design team anymore considering the Tyranids had everything at Tyran and the first battles in the Ultima segmentum. The 4th edition fluff had them gradually gaining new creatures as they encountered more species in this galaxy.

I sort of prefer this method - I doubt they would have conquered a dozen galaxies without some of the things they gained in the milky way. That added a bit of fun to the fluff, but didn't make much sense.

-Loki- wrote:I sort of prefer this method - I doubt they would have conquered a dozen galaxies without some of the things they gained in the milky way. That added a bit of fun to the fluff, but didn't make much sense.

I agree. Personally I'd love to see a fluffy special Tryanid unit based on their mass absorption of the Orks which the space marines are so worried about should the orks fail to stop Tyranid invasion.

Well, the other dozen galaxies they've devoured would have to pre-date their arrival in the Milky Way, because there's no way the Tyranids have had enough time to eat something here, assimilate its genetic material, find something cool to do with it, and then ship it halfway across the universe to build units in another Hive Fleet in another galaxy.

The Hive Mind knows all about its constituant parts. It can replicate new biomorphs in all of the Hive Fleets even though only one hive fleet learned the trick.

But if it lacks the necessary genetic material, it's not going to be capable of reproducing those biomorphs, is it? Just because you know you can build a Zoanthrope out of four termagaunts, two Mycetic Spores, a Lictor and three Eldar doesn't mean that Hive Fleet Bocephus over in Galaxy Q has access to three Eldar to create the necessary genetic strands. If it could just whip up "super bugs" on a lark, why even bother with the smaller bugs? Why not just field nothing but Carnifax and Hive Tyrants? Or just endless Ripper Swarms? Drown the enemy in chitinous shell and bug-goo, Rippers are cheap. The Hive might not even have a net loss of biomass producing them, since they eat each other and themselves, too, along with everything else.

There is no evidence of them doing so.

Psienesis wrote:But if it lacks the necessary genetic material, it's not going to be capable of reproducing those biomorphs, is it? Just because you know you can build a Zoanthrope out of four termagaunts, two Mycetic Spores, a Lictor and three Eldar doesn't mean that Hive Fleet Bocephus over in Galaxy Q has access to three Eldar to create the necessary genetic strands. If it could just whip up "super bugs" on a lark, why even bother with the smaller bugs? Why not just field nothing but Carnifax and Hive Tyrants? Or just endless Ripper Swarms? Drown the enemy in chitinous shell and bug-goo, Rippers are cheap. The Hive might not even have a net loss of biomass producing them, since they eat each other and themselves, too, along with everything else.

I could feed you some random crap about strategy being necessary for them, but you're totally right. The answer is, they don't because straight rippers makes for one hell of a boring army.

Psienesis wrote:Well, the other dozen galaxies they've devoured would have to pre-date their arrival in the Milky Way, because there's no way the Tyranids have had enough time to eat something here, assimilate its genetic material, find something cool to do with it, and then ship it halfway across the universe to build units in another Hive Fleet in another galaxy.

That was my point. While it was a cool bit of fluff to show the Tyranids 'cusomising' its forces with genetic material it gained from the Milky Way, it doesn't make sense in practice. It means they've conquered a dozen galaxies without the Zoanthrope, Tyrant Guard, Biovore, and whatever else 4th edition claimed was made from the Milky Ways genetics. They make new bioforms to overcome new threats, not just because they ate a particularly tasty Farseer.

What I often wonder is why the Tyranids leave barren rocks after consuming a planet, they should leave nothing as any living thing needs more than just biomatter to exist. When you have to grow billions of bone structures that is alot of metal.

Because Tyranids aren't efficient or intelligent about resources.

-Loki- wrote:

Hunchkrot wrote:The way I see it, the Hive Mind is either so truly chaotic that other psykers can not function in it's vicinity, or it is so powerful that it can willingly shut down other psykers. And has it ever been mentioned what the actual gods of the other races think of the Hive Mind?

A bit of both and neither. Logically, the shadow in the warp IS the hive mind. The 6th edition rulebook says the entire race is psychic, and the hive mind has been compared to a gestalt consciousness. This would mean the entire race has a warp presence, even if only small per creature. Synapse and the hive mind controlling them means that there's communication going on in the warp, one way for normal Tyranids and two way for synapse creatures (for control). Logically, the shadow is this communication, billions upon billions of alien presences overlapping and talking. This is what blocks out other warp communication (by smothering the area) and drives non Tyranid psykers insane (to many voices at once). This is also how it sees psychic beacons - because it's in the warp already. Synapse creatures are its way of seeing the material realm.

Psienesis wrote:The Shadow in the Warp is an effect caused by the presence of so many billions and billions of inter-connected minds. It is, in a sense, Psychic Static or White Noise that simply drowns out or disrupts all other signals. This is not a conscious decision on the part of the Swarm, just an added benefit to their nature of being.

QFT this is also how I always imagined the Hive Mind.

Melissia wrote:Because Tyranids aren't efficient or intelligent about resources.

I would think that the Hive Mind (something capable of near perfect genetic manipulation) would be cabable of creating some for of collection creature that eats at mineral deposits.

BluntmanDC wrote:What I often wonder is why the Tyranids leave barren rocks after consuming a planet, they should leave nothing as any living thing needs more than just biomatter to exist. When you have to grow billions of bone structures that is alot of metal.

They do eat good chunks of planets, they are always smaller in diameter(noticibly) then they were when there was life.

So in effect they do mine the planet for minerals that are needed, but only so far as it is benificial. Minerals can of course be recycled.

BluntmanDC wrote:

Melissia wrote:Because Tyranids aren't efficient or intelligent about resources.

I would think that the Hive Mind (something capable of near perfect genetic manipulation) would be cabable of creating some for of collection creature that eats at mineral deposits.

You would ,but they aren't able to, or aren't able to do it efficiently enough for it to be worth doing.

I think not. They simply extract biomass to build more nids, not to give them psychic powers. Even though it would seem that Zoanthropes are created this way, they are not. They get their powers simply by using the collective might of the Hive Mind, which every Tyranid amplifies.

As told earlier, Doom of Malantai was the only Tyranid to absorb psychic power. It destroyed a craftworld this way, but it is not certain whether that mutant Zoanthrope is alive anymore.

And its possable that if the Nds ever caught another Craftworld they would make another "doom" so they could repeat what happened on Malentai.

Battle Brother Ambrosius wrote:As told earlier, Doom of Malantai was the only Tyranid to absorb psychic power. It destroyed a craftworld this way, but it is not certain whether that mutant Zoanthrope is alive anymore.

It is. The fluff for the doom ends with the usual 'of the mysterious creature, there is no sign' or something to that effect. Either way, the hive mind knows how to make it now.