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I know that once people become servitors that they are lobotomized, and FNP essentially becoming remote controlled cockroaches, But how many ways can the unfortunate get chosen for this fate?

I assume its a commonplace punishment, and that failed Astarte's aspirants and thralls can become servitors.
However it is simply slavery and there seems to be endless amounts of servitors in the 40k universe, I mean that merchant ship captain from the Eisenhorn series crews his ship entirely with servitors, and in some companies and organisations the servitors outnumber the actual people.

So there is a lot of them and I am not familiar enough with the lore to understand the multitude of ways servitors get chosen.

One of the servitors in the master of mankind books was a woman who threw a rock at a food riot when she was angry she couldn't feed her kids.

As I understand it, being turned into a servitor is a common punishment for criminals. Especially among the mechanicum or groups who have ties to the mechanicum. I've also heard it is the fate of failures who wash out of mechanicum training.

Skitarii Forgeworlds are just as bad, with most of their "recruits" either farm bred or cloned in a lab, just to be cut apart, operated, lobotomized and reprogrammed at birth.

 Nightlord1987 wrote:
Skitarii Forgeworlds are just as bad, with most of their "recruits" either farm bred or cloned in a lab, just to be cut apart, operated, lobotomized and reprogrammed at birth.

I thought cloning was a no-no? It is unofficially an accepted practice, but it still has to be hidden for propriety's sake ala Death Korps of Krieg.

IIRC, cloning itself is considered perfectly OK, and is actually the source of most servitors. What is not considered OK is treating clones as proper Imperial citizens. Not only do clones have no rights, it's illegal to treat them as though they have any rights (source: Red and Black).

Then why do the Death Korps keep their cloning facilities a highly guarded secret, almost as if they were ashamed of it? IIRC only the mechanicus knows.

"It should be noted that Krieg raises an unusually large number of regiments for a devastated planet. This is attributed to the use of the "Vitae Womb" birthing technique, which Krieg has been granted special dispensation to use as the result of their famous steel, determination and unswerving loyalty to the Emperor. Use of this technique is largely unknown and generally seen as dangerous and abhorrent by the Adeptus Mechanicus Biologis."

"Vitae Womb" is strongly implied to be a cloning technique of some kind. AKA, test tube babies grown in vats.

Because the Krieg have effectively replaced their entire planetary population with clones (because they had no alternative after nuking their own planet). Like I said, it's not the cloning that's the problem. Cloning to produce the biological components of servitors is fine, as is making a slave labour force even without servitorisation. But making clones and then treating them as ordinary Imperial citizens, and then going even further and giving them weapons and letting them fight as guardsmen... that's something that would never be tolerated in ordinary circumstances and required special dispensation (and some secrecy). If the Krieg were not such good soldiers, the Imperium would probably have just killed them all and recolonized the planet with 'real' humans.

EDIT: And, of course, all this comes with a big helping of "AFAIK based on my vague recollections of various bits and pieces of fluff I've read over the years". I might well be wrong, and the fluff isn't necessarily very consistent anyway.

So the source of the majority of servitors is clones?
If so the sheer number of them combined with the Imperium's reliance on them would suggest that cloning would be a widely accepted as part of every day life.

 Beersarius Drawl wrote:
So the source of the majority of servitors is clones?
If so the sheer number of them combined with the Imperium's reliance on them would suggest that cloning would be a widely accepted as part of every day life.

Exactly. Which doesn't mesh with the "...Use of this technique is largely unknown and generally seen as dangerous and abhorrent by the Adeptus Mechanicus Biologis." part.

I thought the main source of servitors was condemned criminals and the losers of the mechanicus' internal power struggles. I'm going to need a quote or a source on the most servitors are clones thing.

There are "untold billions" of humans in the galaxy. I doubt they need to clone anyone to field an appreciable number of servitors. They literally sacrifice thousands a day just to keep Big E running.

The Mechanicus might prefer to grow bodies in vats for quality control and to ensure their supply isn't dependent on how many people the Arbites have sentenced to servitordom that day. Although it's probably different whether we're talking about a fringe, sparsely populated sector and a central sector full of hive worlds.

Both Lexicanum and the WH40K Fandom Wiki (and 1d4chan too, but... yeah) state that many/most servitors are created from vat-grown clone bodies. I can't check their sources right now because all my books are in the UK and I'm not due back there until next month. It does fit with my own recollection of servitor fluff going all the way back to 2nd edition, but that could just be confirmation bias. I'll dig up some direct quotes from the books when I can, unless someone else can do that sooner.

 Duskweaver wrote:
Both Lexicanum and the WH40K Fandom Wiki (and 1d4chan too, but... yeah) state that many/most servitors are created from vat-grown clone bodies. I can't check their sources right now because all my books are in the UK and I'm not due back there until next month. It does fit with my own recollection of servitor fluff going all the way back to 2nd edition, but that could just be confirmation bias. I'll dig up some direct quotes from the books when I can, unless someone else can do that sooner.

I did look it up on the warhammer 40k fandom wiki, it says that most servitors are either clones or condemned criminals. So I guess we were both half right. I had just thought that cloning was seen as a kind of taboo practice by the mechanicum.

I would still like to know if that "clones to servitors" stuff is in the newer lore, or if it is in older lore.