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Just had a thought and thought I'd explore it.

We know very little of the Automata that defended the borders of the Eldar empire and cleansed and seeded planets to become maiden worlds.

They could be all sorts of sizes, no two alike (Eldar technology means individuality doesn't make things harder to construct).


The following is fan fic.

The Automata forces were centred around world shapers, colossal robots that traversed the webway, striding out on to planets earmarked for reshaping.

Their bodies were pure wraithbone, and powered by a warp reactor at their core..wraithbone is fuelled by warp energy, it repairs itself through warp infusion. By having a stable warp rift inside it, the world shapers were perpetual motion machines, eternally powered by the warp.

They could grow swarms of warp spider parasites off their energised forms, sending them out to scour the land. Smaller constructs, the ancestors of the wraithguard could be extruded from their bodies, rank after rank of implacable automata with the singular goal of cleansing the planet. With the endless power of the warp fuelling their wraithbone forms, world shapers were close to eternal.

The Eldar built these so they would never need concern themselves with the protection of their own borders. They were fire and forget weapons, psychically implanted with command engrams that gave them a golem-like half life, neither Alive nor truly dead, the psychic imprints of their makers creating an implacable drive incapable of being swayed from their mission.

During the cataclysm of the fall, the psychic shockwave damaged the psychic engrams that controlled the Automata, causing many to go insane and others to raze the land they had just seeded in a never ending cycle of destruction.

On thoes planets farthest from the eye of terror the Automata were cut off from the psychic web that connected the Eldar empire together. They slowly shut down after their planet had been seeded, unable to leave due to the turmoil in the warp

When the exodites landed, they found these behemoths half submerged in the ground, immobile.

Their bonesingers implanted one last set of engrams in them before sinking them entirely into the ground.

Over time the wraithbone of the world shapers branched out in dendritic tendrils, burrowing all the way around the world, forming a world spirit that would protect the souls of the dead and also when threatened could bring forth legions of constructs, still controlled by that overriding urge to destroy anything not Eldar.

In the novel Daemonworld

Well that certainly adds some support to the concept.

It's a cool idea, but your timeline is a bit off. The exodites settled on maiden worlds in the centuries or millennia leading up to the Fall, abandoning the core worlds of the eldar empire as they became more and more decadent and corrupt. They didn't land on the maiden worlds after the Fall had already happened.

 Duskweaver wrote:
It's a cool idea, but your timeline is a bit off. The exodites settled on maiden worlds in the centuries or millennia leading up to the Fall, abandoning the core worlds of the eldar empire as they became more and more decadent and corrupt. They didn't land on the maiden worlds after the Fall had already happened.

That was something I considered. My thoughts are that most of them fled in the lead up, but there'd be some that didn't. I also imagine there would be those in mid transit when it happened.

As for those who )eft earlier, the alternative concept is:

The world shapers, when finished, would shut down and become an energy generator for future colonists, as well as a guardian against future incursion. When the fall occured, the psychic shockwave scrambled their programming, sending many on rampages and destroying the exodite communities around them. The spirit singers had to soothe their corrupted engrams and decided to root them into the ground so the same thing couldn't happen again. By branching them out in a web it also created a safe space for the souls of the exodites who were now vulnerable to slannesh.

The exodite knight units are the last remnants of the world shapers Automata forces modified to be piloted rather than rely on the corrupted engramatic programming of the ancients.