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How and why.

Lexi is rather vague about how a world recessed to primal states, yet alone the reasons behind it. As such, I was wondering if it would be possible for a Feral World to follow a path very similar to Earth as we know it today: Science, Medicine, Military etc.

I was hoping someone else out there could tell me if that would be possible, and also why a world goes feral to begin with, beyond "they forgot how to human"

Many thanks

You could have a situation where nobody in an area knows how to fix things and as a result the amount of technology decreases untill you're barbarians. I think thats what happened to parts of the Roman Empire actually.

Any source which might describe the worlds of the Imperium often uses the idea of 'long isolation' to describe Feral Worlds. Pretty vague as you say.

Obviously something more has happened in order for the people of these worlds to have regressed to a stone age state; Deathwatch: Rites of Battle goes so far as to say these feral worlds might make up the majority of worlds in the Imperium but they are left alone as they are generally strategically unimportant worlds and potentially a good source of hardy recruits for Space Marine Chapters. The Third Edition Rulebook indicates that these worlds might only be eight in every hundred though.

The main reason for why human worlds as a whole degenerated so much was due to the slow gestation of Slaanesh, with the unborn god's dreams feeding into the minds of countless mortals, driving them insane and seeing whole worlds consumed in madness.

It could well be that feral worlds were hit hardest during the Age of Strife with only a few scattered survivors left and the technology and culture of the world effectively reset to zero. The Age of Strife lasted for many thousands of years and so these survivors may have been unable or unwilling to advance technologically; they might have some racial memory of those times and believe that humans were punished for getting above themselves et cetera.

There is however vast regions of Wilderness Space, which may well contain human worlds and even empires that have perhaps, relearnt everything that was lost and reached and even surpassed a level of technology and civilisation similar to modern day Earth's. One of these civilisations is encountered in one of the Soul Drinkers novels.

 IHateNids wrote:
I was hoping someone else out there could tell me if that would be possible, and also why a world goes feral to begin with, beyond "they forgot how to human"

Well, you usually can't have science before there's a society beyond bands of hunter-gatherers. We invented "real" writing for keeping track of grain, taxes and such only when there was agriculture and a society larger than your tribe and village.

As for how a world could descend back into the stone age, that's a good question. They would have to lose their STC machines and so many specialists that manufacturing anything needed for settled life got impossible. Large scale war, maybe, or some huge natural disaster. Lose enough people and no one knows how to really get anything done, especially when their technology was so advanced they didn't even think about it. I know the theory of smelting iron and smithing items from it, but that doesn't help when I don't know how to get iron ore. And I'm not going to be prospecting for ore when I need firewood and food NOW. Besides, even if I had iron ore and made some iron tools I have no idea about how to progress from there. Our present technology is so complicated and reliant on so many different disciplines that one ordinary man with some book knowledge can't rebuild it. Ten or a hundred thousand of me still can't.

Humanity lost all of its STC machines at some point between the DAoT and the Great Crusade. The Age of Strife and the war with the Iron Men is largely credited as the major causes of this.

With all of that stuff gone, then you no longer have the ability to produce anything, A fully-functional STC requires no scientific understanding or knowledge to use, it is generally described as a "push button, receive tank" sort of device. I imagine it has picture-driven menus and you just sort through the categories, find the picture of what you want, and press a button. Assuming the raw materials are on hand, the STC creates the item for you.

Now, though, there are no known fully-functional STC. So on those worlds that did not have living, breathing (or semi) techno-logicians or other mechanically-inclined personnel, once your STC died/got destroyed, you had no one who understood how to build anything by hand. And if your cities were being bombed by killer robots or Xenos or whatever, and you fled into the hinterlands, you'd be living off the land and, within a few years, reduced to wearing animal skins and using stone or Copper Age tools.

 Psienesis wrote:
Humanity lost all of its STC machines at some point between the DAoT and the Great Crusade. The Age of Strife and the war with the Iron Men is largely credited as the major causes of this.

With all of that stuff gone, then you no longer have the ability to produce anything, A fully-functional STC requires no scientific understanding or knowledge to use, it is generally described as a "push button, receive tank" sort of device. I imagine it has picture-driven menus and you just sort through the categories, find the picture of what you want, and press a button. Assuming the raw materials are on hand, the STC creates the item for you.

Now, though, there are no known fully-functional STC. So on those worlds that did not have living, breathing (or semi) techno-logicians or other mechanically-inclined personnel, once your STC died/got destroyed, you had no one who understood how to build anything by hand. And if your cities were being bombed by killer robots or Xenos or whatever, and you fled into the hinterlands, you'd be living off the land and, within a few years, reduced to wearing animal skins and using stone or Copper Age tools.

And that's before the grimdark.

Another very likely possibility is that a planet was just starting to be colonized when it got cut off from everything else. The early settlers wouldn't have access to a lot of technology to begin with. Then, as that technology failed because they lacked the means to reproduce it, but their numbers grew, they'd basically have to start civilization over from scratch.