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I have for a while thought about what the eldar empire's robot armies looked like before the Fall. We know a few things about the empire that allows us to infer some features or capabilities of these robots without actually seeing one.

The eldar empire was unassailable until the fall - no one could threaten it and the citizens were kept in indolent luxury, ignorant of any threats

The eldar seemingly had no involvement with their robots - they were autonomously working for unknown thousands/millions of years

The eldar seemed to keep the orks pretty suppressed throughout the galaxy - if they had no impact on them, the galaxy would be split between eldar and ork domains, but instead we see plenty of upstarts appearing like humans

The eldar used psychic engines to power everything - giant machines that pulled warp energy to use to power their civilisation, a literal perpetual energy device

Wraithbone and similar psychoplastics are completely renewable by channelling warp energy into them, growing them back - making anything from wraithbone means it rarely would be permanently destroyed

The eldar built nano bots out of wraithbone to scour planets for rebuilding as maiden worlds -see 'wraithbone parasites' in the void spinner super heavy and the namesake of the warp spiders

So my inference is that the robots they used were built of wraithbone around a psychic engine and contained/manufactured nanobot swarms and/or wraithguard esque foot soldiers.

What this does is basically make an immortal perpetually repairing/growing machine that never runs out of energy, directed to kill orks and anything that threatened its domains. They could manufacture themselves and their parasite swarms as the energy feed was endless. They were great foes of the orks because they never stopped, always repaired and were down to fight in perpetuity. The parasites would also be good at destroying ork spores, so it was the one technology in the galaxy that could actually halt ork infestations, hence the comparative lack of ork dominance in the galaxy until the 10k years preceding the eldar fall.

But because their power source was warp energy and they were completely beholden to it, the disruption caused by Slannesh's birth and the eventual psychic detonation of said birth basically cascaded through the entire robot armada, detonating/driving mad/possessing them all. Wiping them out with their masters.


I would love to see what an army of these would look like. I have an image of wraithbone titan/cross treeman bigger than an Emperor Class as a mothership robot with portals that spews out endless robot swarms, flying from planet to planet killing all orks and forming an impenetrable border around the eldar domains.

Unlike humanity's robots, the eldar robots fought until the very end, loyal to their masters. And also seemingly undefeatable.



The exodite world spirits are the last remnants of these robots, the motherbots that landed on a planet to scour for maiden world creation, sinking into the ground and sending their wraithbone tendrils out through the planet. So each maiden world has a sleeping robot god buried beneath it, waiting for its masters to call it.

Ah so this is the idea for a Wood Elf + Treeman army in 40k.

Certainly helps tie a few themes together.

We get a lot of imperial and human history but they gloss over everyone else's. The eldar empire needed to be unassailable for them to concentrate on debauchery, so it's interesting to consider what kind of tech they had and how potent it would have been.

The novel Dominion Genesis currently on pre-order on GW's website supposedly is all about the search for one of the Eldar terraforming world engines, which is supposedly as big continents.

Though:

Just looked it up and apparently that book is a year old! How is it that I never saw and advertising for it?

Still fits my concept pretty closely, although the hand waving magic crystal transmogrification rays are a bit of a cop out...

I don't remember where I saw it, but I got the idea that the old war robots are today's wraith constructs. In the time of the empire they operated as described above, but after the fall the eldar had to use spirit stones to activate them.

This is somewhat reinforced by the development of the model range during the RT era. Alongside the eldar dreadnought that later became the wraithlord, there was a separate kit for a spirit warrior that also labeled as an eldar war robot.