40K - HIVE CITIES - Structure, Economy, Currency, Daily Life | WARHAMMER 40,000 Lore/History

[Music] [Music] it was a town of machinery and tall chimneys out of which interminable serpents of smoke trailed themselves and were never uncoiled it had a black canal on a river that ran purple with ill-smelling dye vast piles of building full of windows wherein there was a rattling and trembling all day long where the piston of the machinery worked monotonously it contained several large streets although i like one another and many small streets still more like one another inhabited by people equally like one another who all went in and out of the same hours with the same sound to do the same work and for whom every day was the same as yesterday and tomorrow and every year the counterpart of the last and the next charles dickens hard times 1854 this small opening quote penned in the ancient world of humanity comparative to the imperium i felt necessary so as to better illustrate one thing that despite all the vast and glorious achievements of humanity throughout its golden age and subsequent descent into the age of the imperium your average human citizen remains barely better off than they were during the 19th century they existed condemned to a lifetime of grinding physical labor the daily threat of unspecified dangers from themselves or unforeseen forces generally poor sanitary conditions widespread unchecked crime permeating everything so with all of that in mind today we'll talk about the vast vaguely monolithic structures known as hive cities i'll also bother to note that this will be the first video discussing hive cities and their inhabitants but because there is so much to these places you cannot simply cover it in one singular piece or well i could but it would just probably be six hours long so i won't be digging deep into gang specifics and whatnot just yet today we're talking more about the hive cities as structures how they operate their economy and an overview of the citizenry and the speculative origins of these vast megastructures that believe it or not are said to exist on 85 percent of the worlds which constitute the imperium now in truth i should note that it would be unfair to allow such a broad characterization as i just made to stand in regard to all hive cities being singularly places of condensed human suffering this is simply the most commonly evocative generalization of how hive cities are seen and that's because by and large this is going to be fairly accurate however of course in a galaxy of what's estimated to be a million human worlds there can be no definitive state of condition that is universally true it's nearly always going to be a sliding scale where some worlds could even be what we might consider relatively comfortable whereas others you might best describe as more representative of a literal hell on earth it's also worth as a small side note that there are planets out there in the galaxy who still remain undiscovered by the imperium and may be entirely ignorant of all that has happened over the past 15 millennia there are also those who have been via some administrative error just lost and may have also completely forgotten by now that they were ever part of the imperium or a imperium even though they may be dotted still with relics and symbols of its order in short there is room for almost any description remaining of course within a reasonable framework of rationalization however much to our disadvantage as seekers of narrative and information the outlining of worlds within the imperium which are seemingly more pleasant or more like a post-industrial society are extremely sparse so just how they function and fit within the structure and bureaucracy of the imperium and that's also not to mention obvious burning questions about just how we might consider that the imperium can or would allow something like an educated population which then has to balance various ideological considerations that are theoretically enforced upon the citizens living there but also has to contend with their opinions regarding the imperium this is also unclear while such worlds in theory can and do exist the specifics are elusive for probably obvious reasons that from the perspective of just how these places would fit within the general structure of the imperium is indeed a bit of a tricky one the imperium stretches across the entire galaxy it's worlds containing untold billions who are encompassed by the glorious psychic power of the god emperor of mankind as we've explored already at length these worlds are greatly varied both in population purpose and technological capability and this is only made more difficult to quantify given the distances involved as well as the danger of warp travel and the strange distortions on time that this can create not to mention of course these standard threats within the materium itself of xenos invasions civil disorder grabs for power by governing traitors and corruption by the darkness of chaos something that is less regularly noted though is that the imperium continues to expand into new worlds many are marked by exploratory forces as being feasible for habitation if not purely for acquisition of natural resources so where some worlds will have small working populations that fulfill something of a caretaking role others support cities saturated with human populations and these are what are known broadly as hive planets or hive worlds many millennia ago these planets were some of the first to have been settled by humanity as it reached out into the galaxy to begin the process of colonization and this was the period that is now known as the dark age of technology these colonists isolated and without any form of support network some of these colonies perished or were simply lost but the majority found worlds to begin new human societies they would often then cannibalize their vast ships that had taken generations to reach these new virgin worlds and so few if any vessels from this time likely survive now in some cases the salvage materials would in fact be used to create new settlements that over time have grown to become the huge megastructures known as hive cities it's possible that in some cases the power sources that fuel some of the very oldest surviving hive cities are in fact archaeotech salvaged from these vessels but as this was so long ago and the nature of hive cities means that although they can be scoured for any fragments of dark age technology these are very likely hidden and lost within their seemingly unending depths hive worlds although supporting a huge population may additionally be militarily focused industry based or some hybrid of needs most hive cities at a minimum will hold a level of base industry and manufacturing but others are solely focused upon production for example those upon a forged world will have a very likely high percentage of the citizenry operating as a very huge workforce for the mechanicus most industrial activities or those related to infrastructure will be controlled also by what are known as guilds now guilds are an ancient concept and basically amounts to a clan or group who come together to represent a certain product being produced or a resource they want to control and this can be through respect expertise or let's say other as we learned previously though whilst a hive city may well produce machines munitions and other products of value its most important product of all for the imperium is people and this is where it is worth us to remember that hive cities are reported to contain anywhere between five and 100 billion people and so their birth rate and general availability of manpower is extremely significant not to mention the fact that on planets which are designated purely as hive worlds they can contain anywhere from around five to twenty hive cities across the planet and if you were to say have multiple hive clusters dotted around the planet's surface you can begin to realize that one hive world of the imperium could contain anything within the realm of let's say even conservatively 50 billion humans up to a high end estimate of something like 2 trillion that's 2 with 12 zeros after it to put these numbers in some sort of perspective on earth it's estimated that the total human population exists as of march 2020 at 7.8 billion people so when considering this scale you can begin to realize why it is that the imperium of mankind tends to see humans as a resource to be thrown with weight at a problem unless as valuable individuals and we have talked about this before as well the difficulty that humans have in gauging empathy outside of their own personal sphere of experience and i'm not going to go off rambling on another analogy today as i have done in the video discussing resource worlds and pandemic apocalypse but the point still stands and i think all too starkly that numbers of people past a certain point start to lose meaning to your average citizen because it is just outside the terms of human understanding and that is just how the imperial operates when you exist as an individual in a hive city of many tens of billions of citizens who have in all likelihood not even seen outside the walls of their vast structure maybe never even seen the sky and who often live uneducated lives of very menial labor it shouldn't take too much realization to understand that they will have no concept of the losses being incurred out there in the darkness of space on some distant world imperial soldiers transported off world rarely return even if they were to survive multiple engagements so their lack of return to a hive is nothing particularly of note on the other end of the scale imperial troops are going to appear within the upper command system as just numbers on a board being moved around almost like some horrifying numbers game meanwhile other zeno species like the tao and eldar will take genuine caution in battles often demonstrating willingly how discretion is the better part of valor xenos like the orkin tyranids on the opposite end of the scale will wage unrelenting waves of horror upon their enemy seeking to just drown the object of their brutality in a literal tsunami of bloodshed and attrition so while humanity does wield its elite and less plentiful forces like the astartes it will also use its own wave of bodies to crush its enemies in the form of the imperial guard so it may seem strange but now hopefully clear that in many ways the imperium appeared to behave more like the xenos who we consider to be abhorrent monsters crudely drowning their enemies in bodies imperial commander's tactics by and large appear to be much the same crush your enemy through saturation sending wave after wave of their own men at the enemy the imperial guard didn't earn the title of the imperium sledgehammer for nothing they are the embodiment of brute force a blunt instrument to smash its enemies careful thought is not required just a vast mass of human flesh bone sinew and seoul for many hive cities this is in fact their true purpose the manufacturing and so on has its value but their most important task is to simply output a continuous supply of raw manpower the vast majority of which will be indoctrinated into the belief system of the holy emperor trained in and around their hive and finally called upon to leave their world never to be seen again now before we come to talk more about a hive cities anatomy i thought i'd get this one specific thing out of the way early and that is to address the issue of economy because people always want to know how does this work how does trading work in 40k do average citizens earn money can they buy their way out of the horror surprisingly the answer is not really but sort of the first thing to note is that this is the 41st millennium it is not our world now i know that seems absurdly obvious but i really want to underline that because how we think about wealth is not how most things work within hive cities or the imperium there are many forms of what we may consider currency in the imperium credits crowns aquilas thrones or basically you name it some of these are accepted on a galactic scale most only within a sector a system a planet a hive and even as low down as singular guilds territory now the only existing true currency in the imperium is what is known as thrones or throne gelt it basically means the emperor's coin now many people will say that the imperium has no real system of currency and that is true in one respect because it does not operate any sort of centralized economic system certainly nothing like a stock market however at the same time you have those individuals like rogue traders and the imperial merchant fleet even ordinary imperial citizens be they a guardsman an acolyte or others who seem to be able to accrue thrown gelt or at least some localized form of currency so it can become somewhat confusing and it is never been especially clearly stated just precisely how this works like a lot of 40k details it's all nods and winks and you guys can fill in the blanks i will however now though try to do this and i might also later lazily cut this piece out for a separate video so what's important to keep in mind is that the imperium operates something in between a barter system and a proper economy and if that sounds vague it's because it has to be i think the most likely comparison is going to be the medieval period and again i want to note that that's very vague because things related to trade and coinage developed at different times all over the world in the 20th and 21st century even your average person has to have a fairly basic understanding of long-distance trade because we see it and we use it people have been making international trades even at an individual level ever more than we have before because we have far more reliable means of communication economy currency and so on than we have done in the past plus we're able to easily record the vast amounts of information to keep track of all of it in real time but what did people do before this well before things were digital people used to of course keep heavily written records of goods being traded ports of entry would have to log ship manifests and so on and during and previous to these times you would have had groups like a merchant's guild who essentially facilitated the trading of goods and ensured prices were being kept relatively stable and this is of course my grossly simplified version of how all of this works so trading at a local level with simple goods was never going to ever be particularly complicated because people didn't move around that much in the olden times you lived in an area and visited nearby towns so chances are you probably knew what you could trade your sheepskin or your grain for these prices changed one day you'd probably want to know why and maybe there would be some official in the town who could mediate if there was a dispute now later on this is why you would have figures like a customs officer to ensure that goods were being sold at the right prices and also that people weren't for example watering down their wine or selling you poor quality goods but generally local trading is relatively stable because you're going to know the people you're buying and selling from and you know what's happening in your local area so you can fairly well gauge the price and the worth of goods and things being exchanged also much like the imperium generally the nobility of this time they didn't really care too much about who was selling what or who was being ruined at local levels you know so long as they got what they wanted the rest was fairly irrelevant that's a bit simplistic again but it's basically how the imperium operates they're not worried too much about local level stuff they only care about the high end and making sure that their demands are met but what if you wanted to travel a huge distance say between two countries or continents or in the case of 40k planets and even star systems well just like in the olden times in the imperium as an individual or guild leader you can't very easily make a phone call ahead and say hi there i've got this huge cargo to sell can you guarantee me a price you'd need a very powerful astropath for that and so in the imperium it is much the same as things were in the medieval time as an individual you may well have a valuable cargo to move on but who's to say after chartering an expensive ship and traveling for months when you arrive at the planet you previously thought needed your wares or you'd been told that they needed your wares they turn around and say oh i'm really sorry but we just traded another shipment so we'll still buy your goods but we can now only offer you half the price that you are wanting to sell at this is the fast track to ruin and it's why you don't see much of that kind of activity in the imperium along with some other reasons but we'll come to that but goods and resources still need to be moved around right so how does that happen in the imperium and this is where merchants come in you have a merchant guild at a fairly local or much larger scale and they're acting basically as middlemen for the people wanting to shift their resources and goods around when you've taken the time to set up a trade network you're going to have contacts and you can more reliably know the prices that you're able to buy and sell at over distances to a degree this is beneficial for both the buyer and the seller because it means that the producer can likely sell for a higher price than their local area and the buyer can purchase goods unavailable in their local area the person making the most money of course is the merchant beyond the local hive city you will have what i noted as the merchant fleet and these are basically the trading ships of the imperium very similarly to the navigators guild of the imperium they are known to be significantly wealthy and powerful for exactly this reason that they are indispensable no local system trader is going to be able to afford to run their own trade routes so the merchant fleets are the ones moving high amounts of goods between systems and making the maximum thrones in the process the more complex this becomes of course you start to get merchant agents looking for opportunities investors contributing to movement costs for goods while taking profits and again this may or may not be allowed within specific regions so nothing is universally true to say still most of the time this kind of trading will involve high-end manufacturing orders and bulk raw resources within a star system and hive city or cluster the proper local dealing is done within the markets and merchant districts of hives these merchant guilds may operate in their local system depending on how that system is governed and how powerful the guild or it may rely on the merchant fleet again when we think about trade within the imperium we're mostly thinking about it being between planets in a system because here there will be some sense of regional economy even though unofficial people have a sense of what can be reliably delivered and you'll have something akin to like i say unofficial economy that's just kind of organic forming this will of course play out throughout the imperium the goods being exchanged at this local level will probably be fairly basic but some hives may specialize in weapons and higher end goods as well so now we have a rough idea about how trading is taking place but what about currency well as i noted the generally accepted as being close to a universal currency is what's known as a throne gelt or throne traders are known to use these as well as our inquisitors mechanicus and anybody moving around the galaxy and not just in a local star system now i will note and sorry because i have to jump out of the immersion here in the rpg game dark heresy they note how even guardsmen and various other imperial roles will use thrones as almost like a basic income now i think this is really debatable it's certainly possible that this is the case but i think it is equally possible that they just needed a currency system to make the game work so you can kind of buy and trade and whatnot so i take this concept with a pinch of salt i'm not entirely sure that is how things actually are what is far more certain is that within local systems across the galaxy thrones are accepted as currency however there is still no real system to determine their value so again this is not unlike ancient times if you were traveling around one gold coin might buy you a bag of apples in one region or two bags of apples in another or in another just one apple so although thrones are generally accepted everywhere across the galaxy if you need to do that you might have to try and establish your own sense of if something was going to be a good trade or not for what you understood the value to be maybe they're interested in other goods you have and you can make a better deal through barter this is very much something still applicable across the imperium so often money need not even change hands if you had goods or services to exchange within a local planetary system or hive though there are often local currencies that will have appeared and these will be specific to those locales and not be accepted generally anywhere else the value of these again will be locally determined however these kind of currencies may bleed into the local population somewhat but most of the time it's going to be used by the wealthy elite merchants and suppliers who are doing deals between the planets in a system but let's get down to the real deal what about your average pleb in the street what are they earning are they earning anything the answer is that is extremely variable on some worlds they may use just precious shells as tokens on others their own localized coinage based on the rare metals that are there some may use something like a script or script uh may even use some digital formal currency which only tracked through cogitators and connected to citizens via bio implants in their arm or hand or how about they use all of these things because that's also possible depending on how the hive or the district is set up i've never seen it specifically stated but i would speculate that on many systems it would be something akin to a high crime to deface coinage within the imperium or to attempt to counterfeit it because that's fairly standard when you have currency this is because again in ancient days when you had literal gold and silver some people would cut very small pieces off of their gold and silver tokens what were essentially proto coins so they could then make their own tokens from those little scraps this is one reason why they started to stamp coins along with other things this came into effect to prevent people from basically abusing the system so when you can see the marks on these coins they used to actually serve an important purpose to ensure that when you gave someone five silver coins you knew that they were worth their value and you weren't being cheated by having one tenth of each coin clipped off so i would speculate that something similar occurs in various regions of the imperium to prevent people being shortchanged and ensure stable local trading but that's just off of my own head so call it a coin a token a credit a chit the point is they'll be very difficult to manipulate and replicate and will likely only hold value within the hive and potentially only hold value within a specific sector of a hive this is because most of the population in a hive city are not on the up and up they're probably locked into a system known as a company scrip now scripts again are not explicitly stated anywhere this is just my logical assumption because it kind of has to i think this makes the most sense but i just want to be clear this is not something that's like written in the law and set in stone it's just my kind of logical assessment and you'll see why i think that's the case scripts are basically a substitute for an officially produced currency and it usually is handed out by a specific business or a company there's real world examples of this or for us in the case of a hive now this may be handed out by a guild or a clan or i suppose an ability depending on how your hive is structured it's essentially a currency that is only redeemable within the company that you're working for or guild that you belong to and this is most likely how ordinary citizens within a hive city have money to spend and i'll bother to note it probably works the same also for imperial guard because if you're a guardsman stationed in a localized region far away from any services you'll probably be paid in that because they will have brought their own services along with them with the camps and districts and barracks and whatever that they have going on there if you were moving around more in the galaxy maybe yes they would then pay enthroned so you had a more universal way of buying and trading or whatever when you reach certain destinations within a hive sector or district though there will be a store bar other establishments that you might expect but they'll probably be controlled also by the guild or the clan in that sector and district so any credits you earn will then be placed directly back into the pockets of the guild now you could save up your credits but if you're very limited on where they can be spent it significantly reduces your opportunity to really do anything other than work by goods and just continue to exist now there will usually be some option to exchange those script tokens or credits for a more general currency like thrones however this will likely be offered at an exchange rate that is not really in the favor of the person wanting to exchange and also that rate is not going to be some independently determined rate based on a larger economy it's far more likely that it's just going to be whatever they feel like setting the rate at so it's a very vicious cycle for the worker having probably the most difficult if not impossible time to dig themselves out of their grinding poverty now there are of course variations on this theme depending on the guild that you belong to or role that you fulfill a guild or a clan may split your pay between hive credits resources like power air water accommodation clothing equipment this may be optional or not so you may be thinking hey this concept of a script sounds really terrible and yeah it's not fantastic however it does seem the most likely form of payment that would be operated in both hive cities and wider imperial services namely because by using a system like this they can easily tie it in with the wider administratum and the tithe system the imperium remember is not going to be fussed by johnny guardsman getting screwed over with his earnings because he's probably going to be dead by tomorrow anyway same goes for the imperial navy crew administrators and so on and so on but within a hive or within the locality of a system you may find something akin to a administrative script house where people could cash in their scripts as i noted previously or this could be a way by which the administration were given scripts by guilds in bulk that then could be switched to regional currency and perhaps offset contributions by a hive toward an imperial tithe essentially you're counting not just the output but also general daily work into your calculation else something like this there are many benefits to this system but best of all being that it works not only for civilians but also for the imperial guard it's probably the most likely system used the downsides are that it almost inevitably is going to spawn a black market for acquiring goods that are not available and that's just an inevitability it's a whole different ball game there's also no real sign of any kind of institutional banks in a wide scale or anything like this but again you may have trusted merchants who are able to store large sums if you're a wealthy person if you're high up in the spire you probably again just have very heavy lockdown areas where you can put stuff or like a family vault essentially so the answer to the question is there currency in the imperium the answer is yes and no there is currency but generally only at a very specific local level there is economy but only in a quite ancient sort of feudalistic sense medieval there is trade and there are merchants but the role which they play will vary very greatly if you're ordinary hive citizen or even your trader you're not going to be doing more really than trading between hive sectors and people you locally know probably for guilds at the most part it's going to be between hive cities in a cluster and not beyond that the spire and the under hive are something of a law unto themselves of course and the rules for these places are really anybody's best guess my guess is that if you got caught trying to fake a trade in the under hive or rip someone off with some fake coins they probably do something like just cut your hand or even your face off so now we get into the real meat of it the structure of a hive city now by the period of the 41st millennium this is not something that could be considered a standard template but generally they do follow some common structural relations with one another this is of course though only a rough generalization and the condition the environmental factors and historical events of each individual hive will have played a part in determining its long-term structural layout and state many areas will have been repurposed over time or had structures added to them at the base ground level of a hive though some have been noted as being as small as 50 miles in diameter whereas others will stretch for many hundreds if not even thousands of miles in diameter this will generally reduce to about half by the time a hive spire has begun to taper into its core and mid levels and then reduce steadily the higher up the spire you climb the lower middle third will be the most densely populated and busy part of a hive with all of its heavy industry while administrative sections and light manufacturing run from the ground levels up to the lower tiers within the upper hive the wealthiest and those with hereditary ties live in what is known as the spire or the spires these are the highest sections of a hive city and are physically separated from the lower levels by usually a heavy physical barrier and there is not necessarily one singular spire section there may in fact be several these will often have specific local titles and names of course there are guarded transport systems to enable movement between the lower and the upper levels and throughout the hive city lastly you have the subsurface areas and these are usually referred to collectively as the under hive this is where the criminals the exiled the disgraced and heretical individuals will generally occupy but these are not just a few ram shackle below ground dwellings the underhive is usually nearly as wide as the hive at its base level from there it will then continue downward into abandoned or sometimes active mining operations or manufacturing the underhive of most hive cities is very much a city in and of itself and has developed a complex subculture of gangs guilds and merchants all of its own albeit far more lawless and prone to solving disputes with casual violence throughout the hive there will be large areas perhaps even sectors that are locked down and declared off limits this may be because they have become excessively contaminated from the centuries of manufacturing they have been used for however these dark and empty sectors of a hive can be very useful for those who wish to not be seen or be monitored habs and factoriums are rarely abandoned without good cause but some areas will eventually reach a point where they are just too difficult to maintain either structurally they're dangerous or for the fairly non-existent concept of worker safety the area has maybe just become too saturated with pollution to allow most hive cities workers to operate there in terms of hive construction and location there are most certainly hive oddities where they have been built around a strange power source that is almost seen as a strange magic now to its citizenry or engineers and even the mechanicus others may exist even underwater having been long ago drowned by some extraordinary planetary event millennia ago but were adapted so as to be able to continue functioning in some capacity others have been constructed from materials even unknown to the mechanicus which points us to something else that i'll come to shortly some may be entirely dedicated to one's sole purpose like the worship of the emperor essentially becoming one behemoth shrine cathedral some hives are even vast penal colonies with its workers engaged in extremely dangerous manufacturing or mining processes others have become vast necropolis hives having suffered from some apocalyptic battle long ago and are now dedicated to honoring the dead and the shrine to the emperor and of course many hives can be a strange mixture or any number of factors or blended together this is especially true in this later time where for example the ecclesiarchy the mechanicus the sororitas the inquisition and so on basically the administrative and militant structure of the imperium may at any time deem it necessary to requisition a part of a hive city for its own operations and it would be fairly unusual for such a request to not be granted by a hive cities ruling nobility or by a planetary governor but of course this would always be determined on a situational basis all hive cities are deemed to be of significant importance to the imperium and as such the military forces ready to defend them will generally be significant the imperium employs an approach to defending hive cities that could be characterized as suicidal to the point of madness they see hive cities as being the definitive mark of mankind upon a world and as such they will deploy any force necessary to defend them against their enemy this is likely why although inquisitors as we have learned may employ exterminatus upon a world this is hardly something that passes easily and any destruction of a hive city is a devastating black mark upon imperial records there are of course some circumstances where this last man standing approach does not occur because insane or cowardly hive nobles or planetary governors may always put their own interests above the imperium as sad as that is to believe or they may just be taking a more inquisitorial big picture approach and consider that the destruction of one hive may be necessary to save the others on a world this though is far from the preferred option which is generally to saturate any hive engaged with xenos with human fighters even if they're left fighting over nothing but rubble in fact on some high planets where zenos have destroyed hive cities patrols will still investigate and walk those ruins every day to purge any remnant of the enemy for many hundreds of years primarily of course to be sure there is no chance given for any resurgence especially in the case of the orc and the tyranid species who are very pervasive and can leave their biological seed behind for decades if not generations suddenly to then reappear again and ravage a world without warning each imperial citadel is a grand symbol of the achievements and power of humanity but in the 41st millennium they also signify the reach and divinity of the emperor's rule over mankind in the imperium to allow a hive city to fall without expending significant resources would be a disgrace to the glory of the emperor and the imperium and if that means expending many billions of human soldiers to save even the tatted remnants of a hive city then so be it the surroundings of many hives are devoid of any natural life whatsoever and this is because they have suffered from millennia of pollution and exploitation of resources this leaves them as little more than wastelands or polluted or sometimes irradiated ash referred to often as unsurprisingly the ashen wastes now some human characters will still exist here though either in micro settlements or in and around the base external areas of the hive itself perhaps to salvage scrap metal or materials or making repairs to pipelines and transport tubes many words can contain hidden rewards in the form of available scrap or even lost technology those who do scout the wasteland may even be lucky enough to venture upon say a rich oxide vein or accumulation of valuable chemicals that have leached from the bedrock below these pockets will be mined or collected for return and processing within the hive city the aforementioned transport tubes are an ancient tech not seen on all hive worlds but on those where they are present they usually exist in connecting hive clusters together and that is multiple hive cities in relative close proximity these tubes are usually suspended from cables above the wastes although sometimes they could also be buried below ground these can be few or many and one good example is the hive city of necromunda where it's often described how these resemble something like a spider's web now the outer surface of a hive city can sometimes appear to be solid but it is in fact pierced with various shafts and tunnels these shafts are small compared to the bulk of the spire in general but this is where the low amounts of light will enter the hive city and these tubes and shafts also connect to the air processors that we'll discuss momentarily the shell is where the majority of the interspire travel tunnels and tubes will also begin and end and tunnel stations and gateway fortresses compounds and garrison blocks are all located at the shell so they're best able to contribute towards the regulation and defense of the city as well as traffic between and within the hives the shell is also the first line in the hive city's active defenses against planetary invasion they will often have giant defense lasers that are capable of striking orbital targets and are mounted at many points across a hive city and these will be used to defend against either human or xenos spacecraft the shell is also critical in protecting the hive city from various environmental conditions be that glass ash thrown at the hive during a storm solar radiation blizzards and all manner of other extreme conditions throughout the galaxy but i am sure that some of you are now pondering a burning question which is how is it that if a planet's entire ecological system has collapsed because of hive cities how there may be any oxygen for these huge populations and this is indeed a tricky and fair question the short answer is that for many hives similar to as was seen on mars during its descent into anarchy there will be a small assignment of mechanicus within most hive cities who will tend to the more complex systems required to perhaps not fully but mostly support a hive city's population but remembering that the majority of hive worlds will rely on supply from agriworlds and so on who will farm essential raw resources for human life by utilizing the entirety of these planets as gigantic biofarms moisture farms and so on within the hive itself though it will still do what it can to minimize how much reliance is placed on these imported resources from the wider imperium so in terms of breathable air this will be variable depending on the hive and its planet some hive worlds may still have a very simple ecology and this can be enough to sustain a very basic level of breathable atmosphere others like on necromunda whilst its surface is devastated and a wasteland of pollution it is believed that within the ashen waste surrounding it that covers also the entire planet's surface there still exists some low levels of life like a bacteria and algae and it is speculated that these are able to produce very extremely minimal levels of oxygen but enough to provide something for the hive cities many hive citizens will of course have simply become adapted to the conditions on their world over many generations and so have adapted physically to lower levels of breathable air especially considering how they work already within polluted conditions inside hive manufacturums where respirators are often mandatory if they're available at all that is overall though the mechanicus will have infrastructure fitting the broad description of purification processes to help in the delivery of breathable air for a population but this will often be coordinated as well with guilds within the hive city in terms of distribution the external air is sucked in via the vent ports on the hive shell and then pass through a complex system of purification filters to extract contaminants that are pumped back out into the atmosphere or sometimes maybe utilized in processes these mechanical teams are present in as i said most hive cities and they also maintain the more complex core energy systems where it's necessary water processing facilities and so on but as i also said this may be done in collaboration with various guilds of humans that are committed to singular areas of a city much like large feudal towns may have done in their ancient history of mankind where cities could be divided into sectors with a specific guild of a city committing to the upkeep of their own district because you see within a hive city the idea of a centralized control was mostly abandoned long ago and now what's formed within most hives is something like a decentralized form of feudal governance with the hives noble rulers able to overrule generally where necessary but also not really needing to get involved in the day-to-day affairs of hive sectors planetary governors meanwhile overviewing things for the wider bureaucracy of the imperium only stepping in or making demands when necessary and of course you're going to have various institutions and representatives that are just dotted around a hive keeping an eye on what's going on generally next we come to the central heart of all hive cities where you'll find what are referred to as heat sinks now these are basically vertical shafts that run down from the uppermost levels of a hive in the spire all the way down through the hab levels the under hive through to the geology of the planet itself and these heatsinks can be miles across in parts usually constructed from dense layers of plastil it will have built into it various service access points chambers and so on to allow inspection and maintenance access to the heatsink because of its importance usually becomes less the lower down you go and if access points do exist those are going to be heavily sealed behind vast doors of adamantium likely under permanent guard you can never be sure who might find a lost or compromised access point and the potential for this once discovered to be exploited or to cause disruption for those who seek such disorder becomes very dangerous indeed but what is a heatsink well the idea is fairly as it sounds it's to take geothermal heat from the planet and turn this into power for the city and the spire so dotted throughout the spire will be generated stations used to convert this heat into usable energy and this power is then conveyed to the factories hab levels and so on these heatsink generators are usually going to be controlled by guilds or clans their various levels of habitation and the maintenance of them is very important role however it also means that they're able to use this as a power chip and gives them a powerful level of control over the localized population in their area because if you want power you need to ensure that the guild or clown controlling that generator is going to allow it other groups may control power junction points and demand something more like a toll to ensure smooth transmission of power to a sector within some hive cities this provides something on a small scale economy but in other hives this devolved system of power over sectors will not at all be tolerated where they lean toward a more controlled centralized system of governance which is probably more in line with how the imperium operates overall but as i said it's very different and dispersed depending on which hive you're at some hive cities though are run by those who have very little interest in the lower goings-on providing things just remain relatively stable and that they are able to maintain their quotas for resources to the imperium and so the mid and lower levels of a hive are basically left to just get on with things however they please and this can be beneficial or problematic for obvious reasons in the upper spire this kind of control over power systems is far less likely to occur here the ruling noble family will maintain control and armed troops will guard any generator stations it will be highly regulated and part of the more structured nature of the upper hive spires but it's worth noting that whilst most all hives will utilize a heat sink for temperature regulation as well as power additional power sources often will exist within the manufacturing areas or even the habitation sections of a city some of these power sources can be actually pretty strange and unknown even and continue to operate within the mechanicus not wanting to really tinker around too much given the chance that something could just go horribly wrong and destroy the entire city some will also rely on nuclear power to run areas of a city or power manufacturers again that have been constructed during the age of the imperium or when the mechanicum was still establishing forge worlds across the galaxy the majority of the lower levels of the hive will be dedicated to industrial processes although various more specialized facilities may exist throughout the city and up into the spire obviously if these exist within the upper spire they're going to likely be more advanced processes and may involve levels of things like dna augmentation bioengineering facilities that are designed even to extend life for those in those senior positions or the nobility down at the factory levels things are very different the scale of the manufacturing of most hives is required along with the production of citizens to deliver products to the wider imperium in exchange for food and other materials that are needed to sustain these vast populations many factories that exist on the lower periphery of the hive city and ground level will be continually pumping out pollutants and if the city is not constrained by an exterior city wall or even if it were for that matter eventually these pollutants will build up and solidify enabling the ashen material outside or whatever situation the world is in to just grow ever higher it could be a dense jungle it could be ice you know whatever over the centuries this can create a problem where the lower factories become gradually submerged by the outside material and once they're unable to pump out their pollutants they then will become essentially inviable for production so similarly to the power generation manufacturing will also be controlled in part by guilds or clans and although dependent on how a hive city is organized and governed we can already note that this varies significantly between planets now this seems actually a good place for me to make a small side note i say small we're talking about planetary organization related to hive cities now many may mistakenly assume that how we see the wider imperium run at its highest levels is then filtered down and replicated throughout all of its galactic sectors its systems and its worlds now in one sense this is not completely inaccurate to say because we know the imperium has no real concerns about deploying its ultimate authority as and where it deems necessary by the hands of the inquisitor or any of its high-level representatives however it is worth noting that the majority of worlds for the most part are as i said left to their own devices and this means that there is not what we might consider to be a standardized or enforced system of governance within the imperium making decisions for systems and worlds there is of course the administrator that will keep track of what's happening and who needs what where what's coming and going but so long as the planet is delivering its tithes and materials to the wider imperium and not encountering any major problems with xenos or within their population then they're more or less left to their own devices because what does the imperium care also most planets will have within their hive some imperial representation as i said before the ecclesiarchy and so on so it's not as if many hive cities and their planets can really get up to anything without it being noted soon enough it should of course be remembered that because of the very nature of the imperium and its other factions departments and organizations there are some established restrictions that will influence any decisions made this means that most worlds do lean toward a more top-down power structure of a singular leader for a planet and as i've noted before something like a governor an imperial representative a high-ranking noble will fill this role it wouldn't be out of the realm of possibility though for a hive city or even a planetary system to be run by something more like a council of representatives or even something like a parliament there is some precedent for that within the imperium and the mechanicum had this basically back in the time before the heresy now it just would be unlikely though that those members would be chosen by citizens because that is not how the imperium generally operates it would take time and resources to educate the citizenry and these are all things which are not considered worthwhile use of time or resources also the entire concept of something like a council means that by its nature there should be a sense that said council could make decisions about what should or could or couldn't happen now in a wider sense this again really kind of goes against the way in which the imperium operates because usually they tell you what's going to happen and then you better do it or you're going to be replaced or worse the point of all this is coming back to what i was originally saying about different planets and hive cities being governed you might be able to have something like a council of representatives who just represent different sectors within a higher city but more so as to facilitate a coordinated understanding of the production to reporting on dangerous problems slacking workers or rumors of discontent and so on that need to be cracked down on then that council could be overseen by a higher level representative it would almost certainly be one person in a position of authority if not placed there by the imperium then certainly on the understanding that whatever their decisions are they should be within the best interests for the imperium first and all other considerations second i would liken any council structure within a hive city to be very similar to the concept of the inquisition's imperial representative so a hive council member would probably be chosen within say already senior members of a clan or a guild and they act more like a mouthpiece to facilitate the smooth running of hive activities and the preservation of their own group more than espousing sort of personal opinions but overall they have no special level of power beyond that and they're more like a token gesture of cooperation than anything else so now returning to manufacturing within a hive as factories rise and fall over the centuries guilds and clans or even what we might think of as organizations will gain or lose power and territory and this can sometimes lead to conflicts and territory disputes over resources power and facilities you might see things like acts of sabotage and this can at the extreme level even occur between hive cities on a planet if he had noble houses feuding holding long-standing vendettas against one another and seeking to make one another cities appear inept or incapable of delivering their resources to the imperium in some cases this could even spill out into a state of a small civil war although again similar to the inquisition the tolerance for such events like this would be very very minimal and so not many would risk such an outright conflict because they would have the understanding that the overall result would probably be the imperium stepping in and abolishing nobility replacing them with a selected imperial governor which is not what they want at the lower levels though these unending squabbles over production and facilities are one cause of gang wars albeit not such a violent or flamboyant level as seen in the under hive within the production areas it's more akin to groups of workers giving a brutal kicking to their rivals or carrying out sabotage to ensure they get more work and more likely hive creds now you can imagine again these these sort of gangs of workers maybe they have a color tied onto their their sleeve or their neck or something like this just to kind of indicate which group that they work for now over time the factories which become fully buried by these ashen wastes will be abandoned decay and very often collapse under the weight of the new pollution being pumped out over the top of them continuing this cycle again now very gradually over millennia what this means is that the hive has to grow and this can also mean that the under hive will slowly become ever bigger so for many hive cities the under hive by now is already a vast cavernous realm that slowly is growing into an almost mirror image of the upper hive albeit one that is extremely polluted violent and bleak it's not unusual for the most unstable of buildings to in fact crumble to ruin often with workers still toiling within if however these structures serve no obvious need then the bodies and equipment are just going to be discarded and left to the scavs be they animal or human carrying in the darkened filth of shadowed pipe work watching for any opportunity to rip off some rotten scraps it's common enough to see such ruined buildings even in major thoroughfares that are regularly active in a hive city and they will eventually be repurposed with the old site serving as a new foundation just has happened for many millennia in the center of the hive above the worst of the most polluted and noisy factoriums and forges are the hab levels now these are of course the habitation levels where the vast majority of a hive's citizenry will live and a good proportion also work the quality of this can range from being semi-luxurious for high-ranking guild members to appalling squalor akin to almost a shanty town or worse for those who are out of work and without any purpose where citizens and their families live will obviously be relative to their standing both as a worker and also socially not unlike any standard human civilization the best accommodations being for the wealthy elite the lower tiers for the workers and the destitute the spire exists outside the normal sphere because of how luxurious these upper areas are it's probably with good reason why these sections for their nobles of a hive city are near enough inaccessible to the lower hive because should ordinary workers realize how hard done by they are it may be enough to trigger some form of rebellion although as and when these may arise they will almost instantly be crushed with the uncompromising militant forces operating on behalf of the imperium before they can really get a grip which would be a very dangerous thing but this also answers common question which i see asked which is why would people tolerate living in such conditions and again the answer is well sometimes they don't it's just that when you're a civilization that can very easily handle losing millions in a single battle without even blinking so the idea of purging a hive sector of some tens or hundreds of thousands of citizens rebelling is not something that anybody is going to lose any sleep over they're just gonna deal with it and put those rebellions down if things truly deteriorated further then the imperial guard will take over so yes attempts to overthrow the powers that be will happen from time to time this is the normal order of human civilization it's just that they will nearly always fail and if things ever truly did get out of hand they're never going to get worse than a hive city being purged with a combined force of guard and maybe a supporting force of something like astartes scouts sororitas and so on crushing rebellion of course will mainly be coordinated and serve the purpose of maintaining quality of life for the nobility in the spire imported goods uncontaminated food clean air the high spire is for the nobility truly the lap of luxury below the physical barrier that separates the upper from the lower though this existence is near enough an alternate reality for your average citizen's daily life below the spire light is dim in many areas it's more like a perpetual twilight with only the glow globes to illuminate the maze of passages only recycled air or processed from the toxic exterior atmosphere is breathed in by citizens and food is often excessively processed recycled or extracted from the bodies of those no longer needing to be fed the universal synth diet their proteins and minerals extracted and repurposed in the form of the less than subtly titled blocks of corpse starch at least there's no illusions about what you're getting there it's often rumored by hive citizens that air and water has likely passed through at least several hundred others before reaching yourself though this is quite obviously fairly unquantifiable but then as we continue down you of course come to the under hive now as i've touched on already the under hive is a vast lawless realm that exists below the surface and directly below the hive city there may still be operations that exist within it connected to the upper levels for example mining for resources some storage areas near to but below ground level stockpiling materials and hardware for stationed imperial guard pdf and whatnot then of course there were just elements of hive infrastructure like the heatsink and for this reason the upper sections of the under hive will likely be patrolled to a degree by heavily armed and armored forces of arbites now as i already mentioned before any critical infrastructure will have heavy guard forces stationed there permanently along with the stockpiles the upper areas of an underhive close to the surface will still be rough and much like a disorganized shanty town although dependent again on the specifics of each individual hive city these may be more or less ordered some are going to be very violent in their state of continual power struggles but living in basically anarchy others might be relatively ordered more akin to some kind of frontier town where official law enforcement is existing and minimal but local groups have taken it upon themselves to maintain generally some sense of order because they just feel it's preferable albeit by their own definition of punishments accordingly one thing there is certain that the further down into the under hive you progress it is certain to get more dangerous and more abhorrent to the senses whereas the upper area will contain buildings and industry from relatively recent history the lower parts of the underhive originate from the long dead past and these ruins are likely a mixture of manufacturing works but also blended with the long forgotten true cities that were the original base of the hive city these were likely constructed during the dark age of technology but now bear no resemblance to that time having been picked apart over many thousands of years by people with no comprehension of whatever kind of masterful technology they were in fact undoing at the very lowest levels of the underhive it is possible that twisted among the deep tunnels now filled with highly polluted water that would dissolve almost anything it touches lay the last remnants of the colony ships which were first used to explore the galaxy the ships that humanity sent out during its golden age from the old earth and who were carved up by the original settlers to make their new homes and this is where lies the tantalizing possibility of stc remains or who knows what treasures could be unearthed this area though is often extremely unstable given the crushed material and crumbling ruins that constitute what is referred to as the sump now reaching these highly contaminated depths even by a team of mechanicus and accompanying forces is extraordinarily dangerous for one thing these areas are now far far down below the surface of the planet hidden among a labyrinth of extremely violent heavily armed gang territories not to mention all manner of environmental hazards and strange mutant creatures it's even said that there are small settlements of humans who have learned to cope with the environmental horrors and ruins from the age of strife who live in the shadows and have intuitive understandings of all these kind of environmental effects and hazards within the underhive at the upper and medium levels of the underhive there are many gangs who are merely brutish thugs who bash in the skulls of anybody who oppose them but there are others who have surprising access to technology and while these will still actively participate in trading with the upper levels there are then also the guilds bounty hunters traders slavers and so on the under hive is truly a rich region of scum-like society and it is this which of course heavily is focused upon within necromunda i'll begin to explore this in more detail as we go along because just as with 40k this continues to be expanded and built with and it's an area of the verse i have always enjoyed because huge galactic battles between superhuman warriors and near invincible alien killing machines is one thing but small gangs fighting to the death in a toxic wasteland hoping that their last shotgun shell isn't going to just blow their gun apart and take their arm with it is also somehow very appealing not to mention the other crazed characters that exist like i don't know a character able to ride a giant undead rat god so i'm looking forward to expanding more about the gangs and goings on and individuals within the under hive continuing on though although the life within the underhive may seem harrowing and pointless those within the under hive are not at all permanently consigned to exist there many simply do so out of choice so as to evade justice delivered within the upper levels of the hive and this is one reason as to why under hives are saturated with fugitives outcasts mutants and varying degrees of heretics not to mention of course the appearance sometimes of the xenos tainted like jean steeler cults for those in the main hive itself though those who choose to live in the under hive are barely considered human at all for the upper hive members who live within the boundaries of the imperium and especially for those living in the spires the denizens of the underhive are considered little more than vermin and for many likely not even that they are seen like an encroaching pest that must be exterminated and so for the patrols of arbites and the noble spires who descend into the darkness there will certainly be no oversight to what happens down below this makes the underhive of hive cities not only one of the most dangerous places to live in the imperium but also the source of some of the most harrowing brutality yet even despite this there is never a shortage of people who are willing to live there because for all of its abhorrent dangers torturous conditions and any number of other problems for a great many thousand if not hundreds of thousands even millions of humans who descend into the underhive it's still preferable to living under the oppression of the imperium because at least in the underhive you have some relative spectrum of freedom even if it's likely not for very long there is though one sliver of hope for those in the under hive and that is for those who are able to cope with its conditions who try to play within the extremely vague boundaries of acceptability and just those who are the most ruthless and cunning there is always a very slim chance that you may either achieve redemption or some upward mobility back into the slightly less lethal lower hive it may sound strange but remember that some astartes will in fact recruit from feral worlds because of their keen sense for survival and combat skills now this is similar within the underhive it's not especially common but some within the under hive can be of an age that make them appealing candidates for astartes usually they're battle hardened from an early age and open minded enough they can be molded easily by being given the chance to become superhuman warriors of the imperium rather than a miserable short death in the chemical pits of a hive city i think if somebody gave you those two options very easy to know which one you were going to opt for now it need not be astartes though many hive cities will contain in the upper levels what is known as a scholar progenium and this is where orphans are usually hardened into offices for the imperial guard or other branches of imperial service so even there down in the lower levels candidates may be chosen now say chosen it's more likely the arbites would smack them unconscious and they just wake up in a barracks being told this is what you're going to do now but either way the under hive can be a very fertile ground for some of its most high status individuals whose early life was tempered into the perfect skill set by the worst conditions and the terrible necessities of raw human survival which one might hope at least someone somewhere was able to appreciate the irony of five cities are sometimes referred to as an arcology to my mind this term should only be loosely applied in relation to hive cities if indeed at all i think i have possibly used this description myself in the past and if i did i would now retract that and i'll clarify for you why it's because when i came back to thinking about hive cities at first your mind thinks oh it's a big self-contained city it's an arcology well no because you see an arcology is not completely wrong it's just not a particularly good definition the primary reason for this being that the fundamental concept of what is known as an arcology while yes it is a large structure which will contain habitation industry and in general all the things we consider necessary for a city to function contained in one massive structure and i should know actually not necessarily just industry but work but this is coupled with the concept that by design an arcology is meant to actually minimize human impact on both its surroundings and environmental effect neither of which could generally be said to be true of a hive city in fact most imperial hive cities are incapable of even providing the base requirements needed by the citizens within which is generally another feature of what you would define as an arcology that it should be self-sustaining imperial hive cities are generally unable to be self-sufficient because of the sheer size of the population which additionally exerts a high degree of pressure on all infrastructure and resources when you think about it even a little bit more a hive city is the majority of the time the complete polar opposite of an arcology the only thing that you have in common is being a sizable artificial structure containing a lot of people and that's where the comparison ends on many hive worlds the planet itself has suffered to the point of death as a result of the obscene populations it was forced to try and support on many hive worlds they have nearly always been turned over to industrial processes or suffered complete ecological collapse millennia ago this is certainly at least in part due to a planet containing multiple hive cities or what are known as hive clusters it's definitely worse on these worlds and it's not to say that all worlds where hives exist are just bereft of an ecological system that still functions otherwise this would mean the majority of imperial worlds in the galaxy were just dead planets and that is not the case whereas an arcology is a futuristic idealistic utopian vision of human habitation designed to meet all the needs of its citizens efficiently optimizing space and having minimal impact on its surroundings in all respects if you line up all of that against what an imperial hive city is it's very clear that comparison does not fit at all so was there ever a time long in humanity's past where hive cities were what we might consider to be arcology now that my friends is the right question a hive city of the imperium might perhaps be best described at this point as simply a mega structure of course hives are not one singular structure it's simply how they appear externally because of their size so we might consider a terminology like something say a mega conurbation to refer to a development we have areas of habitation that just expand until they eventually fuse together into a large town or city or in the case of hive cities one massive mega city structure not all hive cities would necessarily have started out as towns or small cities that were spaced out and built upon organically they would certainly have begun structurally as a loose but planned collection of base structures back in the golden age of mankind maybe domes and so on and then they were built upon until someone or something decided the best option was building up and not out hive cities now exist as conglomerations of structures all layered endlessly on top of one another stacked structures built of heavy rock creek and plasteel so high on some worlds that their towering spires have begun to pierce the highest layers of the planet's atmosphere but the earliest foundations for these areas of habitation were set many many thousands of years ago although just as and when this exactly occurred is of course completely debatable but when you think about it the grand concept of what an arcology represents does seem to fit more within the outlook during the golden age of humanity that is the dark age of technology than it does within the age of the imperium because in the 41st millennium citizens well-being and environmental impact are not especially high on the agenda for the imperial administratum on the other hand if this were the case you might imagine that hive cities would surely even now not be quite as bleak and dilapidated as they are well let's not get ahead of ourselves it's worth remembering that the war with the men of iron compounded by the age of strife which incidentally went on for roughly 5 000 years completely annihilated much of humanity's achievements and culture so it should not be unreasonable to imagine how over the course of some five millennia a period during which many worlds if not the majority were subjected to apocalyptic war internal conflict and just harrowing slaughter where humanity essentially fell back into the darkest periods of the low-tech and tribalistic barbarism so it should almost be expected that these structures could have been if not significantly damaged than at the very least extensively repurposed and stripped down from materials likely for war or for outlying settlements now i will note at this point the descriptions regarding hive city origin in terms of construction and materials used make for this to be a very confusing picture this is always the trouble with the 40k verse there is so much that seems contradictory or leading you off on different tangents half the puzzle is coming to your own conclusion based on what's available and cutting away the references that don't really seem to fit now in this instance i personally haven't come to a clear enough conclusion about this because hive cities are phrased sometimes as if they were only fully constructed after the golden age but that doesn't make sense because other evidence and logical context points to them being very much constructed in the golden age first let's explore more and then i'll give you my final thought on the matter so this is where we come to the classic linchpin for any and all of these origin debates stc designs now there's only one period where stc designs originate from and it is definitely referenced that some areas of a hive city at the mid level within a hive's spire structural space are designed to stc guidelines now this can mean two things of course it suggests to us that hive cities can be readily established well into the dark age of technology as this was the period when we know stc designs were being produced not before and not after although like i say devil's advocate this period is very unclear to us on the other side of things maybe it just means that they have found an stc in terms of building stuff and they're using it within a hive city although i will note as i've repeatedly said before now i've only found a few references to this not several so again take it with a pinch of salt still though as i always say references are certainly important but so is context and it seems fairly logical doesn't it that when placed in context structures like hive cities would make good logical sense to have originated from a period where humanity was operating seemingly on a standardized template system across the galaxy this would certainly help us also to explain why hive cities are so surprisingly widespread it also makes sense when we consider this scant details we know from humanity's golden age that in this time they existed at peak technological levels which even if we give the imperium a fairly wide amount of leeway i would argue it's very debatable that they would have the general knowledge to construct such vast towers all across the galaxy we know that they can construct big machines like titans they can create huge defenses they can create ships that travel the galaxy so they can create all this stuff however a lot of these things still have original origins to do with stc from the dark age of technology so as i say i just question whether or not they could do this on such a widespread scale whereas on the other side of things within the golden age the concept of creating a correctly functioning arcology seems considerably plausible and also fits within their world view of what we can estimate it to be anyway it just seems more logical that that would be the case also when you consider that many of these colonists arrived at worlds which would have to my mind at least initially wanted to concentrate their population to a large degree because remember these are not just a ramshackle bunch of frontier colonists looking to create the wild west checking out to stake a claim on a piece of land they were a very highly advanced population of humans both ideologically and technologically and were traveling to new worlds with the specific purpose of colonizing them so splitting themselves up all across the planet seems a very unlikely choice for them in fact from what is speculated about humans in futurism it's debatable if humans in the golden age would still have really even held concepts like individual private ownership for land and materials and so on and so it may simply have been the working collaboration with their stc system which as we know appear very likely to have been a form of advanced ai as well as yes being something akin to a 3d printer automated production system plus whatever other help humans had in this time in the form of the stone and golden men whatever they are they had a lot of help is what i'm saying basically now truthfully we can't really know to what degree humans were actually involved in planning or even overall decision making in this early time it may well have been that they just left this to their automated systems to decide knowing that they would choose the most efficient and best intention plans for human comfort and safety and this would also help to explain why hive cities are not commonly seen on say feudal worlds which can also be known as the night worlds now at a very basic level you could simply say well that's because hive cities are very technology based and feudal worlds aren't now sure that is a very blatantly obvious conclusion to make but it's also missing a very large part of the context so just allow me another small tangent here there was a period even during the golden age where some parts of humanity apparently started to decide to turn their backs and discard their reliance on ai and high tech over time not initially over time now they were resorting then to a simpler way of life this turned out to be quite the wise decision in the long term and why many night feudal worlds escaped the worst of the age of strife because many were able to survive fairly intact into the age of the imperium however despite their abandonment of technology there was still a time where they had produced things likely according to stc designs what are now known as imperial knights so these defenders of the population would then seem to have been these high-ranking officials of their colony but this eventually developed into the feudal system in the form of the noble families because those piloting the powerful night machines formed noble night houses which exist even today in the imperium this was a result of their mental interfacing with the knights machine spirit but anyway overall this rejection of technology seems to be the most likely reason why in feudal worlds hive cities are not very common if they do exist in any form they're more like a basic state of development probably having long been now adapted away from the type of high tech and more resembling something i would like into mervin peak's classic creation of gormangast now tangent within a tangent go look up gormangast along with the novels titus groan and titus alone for those of you on the audible bandwagon it's available there and it's about five hours each anyway the point is that the fact that hive cities do not appear commonly on knight and feudal worlds but do appear widely on just about most other worlds of the imperium as i noted earlier appearing as regularly as on 85 percent of imperial worlds this is not a figure that just occurs from random decision making in different places when such vast distances are involved between the worlds still as i said before i haven't decided exactly where i come down on this yet it's very difficult to say when hive cities were widely constructed but overall i would lean toward them being at least well in progress prior to the age of strife because it seems quite clear that this was a widely adopted and planned design for a different era to me and given that the vast majority of designs used by the imperium are created from a similar origin that being the stc products of the dark age it stands to fair reason that hive cities also and i want to emphasize this at a basic level or a product of aistc design and that although they now no longer operate by definition as a true arcology and have essentially rotted away over millennia to become a corpse like travesty of their original glory even in the described modern period within the imperium some cities on worlds will grow up so large as to become concentrated in huge urban sectors until they overlappers like a conurbation and then eventually begin to expand upward this is described but it's my estimation that the time prior to the imperium is in fact more accurately the origin of hive cities especially when we consider that some hive cities have been noted by the mechanicus as being built from materials on their external surfaces that are unknown and unidentifiable to them and this should lead us to conclude that the materials were constructed in a period where humanity had considerably more knowledge than now because no zenos would lend a hand in helping humans construct a city they're gonna only have been from our distant past and that for me is probably the real key there it is a common tale within hive cities that their original foundings exist deep in the subsurface region now known as the underhive and the most ruined and crime-ridden sector of hive cities contain actually the deepest secrets of all taking expeditions as i said before into this section of a hive is very dangerous extremely violent places often populated not just by the most brutal human elements but also strange creatures mutant tribes and so on there exists though the possibility that in a hive city's lowest levels somewhere in the imperium may exist very important remnants even technology that tell us about the most ancient history of humanity in knowing all this it seems quite a tragedy that they would have at one time been beacons of human achievement protected by a powerful godlike weaponry possessed by humanity during its zenith of the technological age who can now imagine just how these towering cities were meant to have appeared were they basic practical structures or were they dressed in crystalline glass or some composite material to make them appear like true beacons of power and light and peak achievement not perhaps entirely unlike eldar worlds during their age of glory before the fall life cities were similarly once long ago undoubtedly wandered to behold a quite literal pinnacle of achievement but now all the remains of the tattered rotting corp structures symbolic of both what we once were and also where we find ourselves now the disparity between the two should be greatly disturbing but as so few people in the imperium will ever know of the former glory of humanity this is a comparison that few will ever be able to take the time to contemplate or consider now the quite depressing downside to hive cities is that the area around many of them as i noted earlier will have been reduced to nothing more than what would appear to be an apocalyptic wasteland devoid of even the smallest levels of biological life these ash and wastelands surrounding hive cities are truly a tragedy to witness having long ago suffered full ecological collapse and perhaps for the entire planet itself [Music] this is then compounded by many more millennia of pollution they are chemically saturated lands extremely hostile to any life itself the composition of these ash and wastelands can vary significantly from planet to planet there are those some regularly found elements like microplastics inorganic chemicals the conditions will nearly always corrode metals within a relatively short period of time and its toxicity will be enough to kill almost anything but as always it varies some planets for example may be so large that they're in fact partly capable of handling the toxic output of hive cities whereas others may exist in different strange conditions if the hives are say based on what would be a largely an ocean world or an ice world and so on however by and large having at least one section of your planet being a destroyed desert wasteland is one of the most common for hive worlds which makes reasonable sense when you consider the effect of a huge population over time this is one of the reasons why terror is now an ecumenopolis but it's very notable that for any pdf or imperial guard having to defend your hive city while suffering the external environmental conditions is obviously not one that is particularly favorable to humans and so even a modest assault upon a hive city can in fact be quite problematic human defenders suffering significant casualties just from the passive environmental conditions and temperatures alone not to mention the effect that that can also have on their morale some wastelands surrounding a hive city may in fact be so dangerous that they're used as a form of capital punishment be that based on the temperatures being so high that they just burn the skin off your body in minutes before suffering a full system collapse or so cold the result is near enough the same just on the opposite end of the scale some wastelands the material is so abrasive that again can blind you in moments and cut your flesh to ribbons other hive cities will be surrounded by a toxic smog of chemical pollutants that simply being thrown out into the wasteland will lead the condemned to either choke to death potentially far worse those pollutants will attack the body and dissolve them into near enough from the inside out once the contaminants have entered the body likely though the worst fate will be for those thrown out into hive cities surrounded by hundreds of miles of highly irradiated wasteland sometimes this can be mild and only be the result of past wars that has degraded over time but in the more severe cases some past immense disaster involving nuclear material has caused pockets of very extreme radiation to persist for those who are forced out into these invisible minefields they may initially think that they have escaped the worst just being sent out into exile not suffered some more brutal fate but it will in fact not be long before they start to see their skin turning red black generally feeling very unwell and within days their bone marrow will die followed by the rest of their body essentially disintegrating they're condemned to a very agonizing death only comparable to the worst attentions of the chaos deity nurgle although the most toxic areas of the waste tend to center around ohio city for obvious reasons beyond this the waste continues on for many thousands of miles if not covering the entire planet itself in ashen deserts while sadly the majority of the time this tends to be fairly typical for a world containing many multiple hive cities certainly it's the norm for those containing hive clusters still having said all of this some wastes around a hive can strangely still contain life albeit weird zenos life but life nonetheless in the ashen wastes of some hive worlds although more complex life is long extinct you may still find basic algae bacteria and fungi although it's usually worth noting that these can in fact also be quite aggressive and it's one of the reasons why those humans who choose to venture into the wastelands tend to be kept in hab areas separated from internal hive populations there they risk spreading some biological contamination one of the most extreme dangers of being out in the wastes are of course the actual dust and ash storms themselves that ravage planets some hive cities have even been reported as having become nearly buried by the worst of these storms and it's at least believed that some have also been and were lost long ago in their early periods of development because of this these lost hives are now unable to be detected having been buried so far underground i like to imagine again there is the rarest outside possibility that even if the population long ago perished there may be early hive cities containing a wide array still of dark age technology existing out there somewhere buried on a hive world waiting to be unearthed even now below thousands of years worth of surface matter for the current living members of hive cities though ash and storms are dangerous not just because they can be very disorientating for those who are able to or simply must work out in these conditions but also because the storms themselves whip up all the deposited material which as we already learned can be extremely dangerous just when it's lying on the ground being out without adequate protection in a waysand storm can mean a person having their flesh literally stripped to the bone in minutes leaving nothing but a bleached skeleton the tattered rags that once covered them undoubtedly on some hive worlds this will again be a punishment in and of itself no doubt you might see some sort of pillared structures dotting the wasteland around a hive city where the condemned are placed and left to be sand blasted back to a skeletal form that will then tumble into a pile of wasted bones below the conditions are harsh enough that it may even be worse than that and not even bone remains every piece of you being stripped back to dust beyond the individual level though ash storms on some worlds can in fact be a very serious threat not just to these wayward individuals but hive cities themselves the conditions are extreme enough that it's been known for entire exterior sectors of hives which are usually fairly well protected with reinforced materials to have been stripped right down and it has even been reported that some hives were compromised and destroyed by storms that whipped around the planet for centuries culminating in a truly apocalyptic storm that wipes away anything in its path on some hive worlds the scrapped remains of the base or mid-levels of hives that have suffered such destruction are periodically revealed by the shifting oceans of ash only to be hidden away again for many centuries on some worlds notably necromunda being one of them imperial scholars believe that these wastes actually have currents and tides of other subsurface pollutants that rise from the planet's bedrock and form undercurrents that shift these wastes around like an ocean in other areas where pollutants rise up and cover the surface they can dry to form what appears to be a dried lake bed hard enough to travel over but these are often dangerous environmental hazards because below the apparently secure surface is in fact a deep sea of ash and dust like a quicksand will swallow any who step out incorrectly onto the thinnest parts of these deceitful landscape features [Music] hive cities are of course fascinating in and of themselves in their design wider purpose and historical development to have now become one of the primary locations for humanity's population by the end of the 41st millennium however as curious as they are just as a place the far more interesting thing to learn about are the people who inhabit these vast spaces and this is a topic which you could talk about extensively so today i'll just be giving a flavored overview starting at the very top now the highborne are basically the elite ruling families of hive cities and just in general imperial worlds they are decadent wealthy often crazed and most certainly very disconnected from the reality for those living literally under them they will breathe clean air eat imported foods holiday on lush verdant paradise worlds and want for very little most of the upper spine ability will have been born into this life of luxury and never having known anything different has led them to have extremely twisted concepts of humanity ethics and morals and it's fair to say that they're generally not liked by many who serve the imperium's larger causes their lives are very much comparable to that of ancient royalty because most of the time they're dealing with political intrigue personal vendettas campaigns of revenge murder to gain positional status marriage illicit affairs decadent parties and any number of far worse offenses that would likely be classed as heresy they were discovered in the lower hive spire they're usually self-obsessed ignorant about the things that matter most of all hungry for power all character flaws that are a triple threat red flag for the inquisition will try their best to keep agents under cover within hive spires to hear just what they're getting up to if there was ever to be a very fertile breeding ground for cults of slaanesh and zinc hive spires would be the very place to look comparative to your average worker though spire nobles will be relatively well educated about their own lineage some history of the imperium but reminding them also that they are the finest examples of imperial citizens of course they will learn about wealth economics and trade politics and power not to mention continual personal tutoring by their families in the fine arts of social assassination how to cut down an opponent with razor sharp wit how to lay a verbal trap to best slight your enemies in public and so on they're not all of course disgusting spoiled brats some will have the wherewithal to pose as potential candidates even for the inquisition and be able then to infiltrate other hive spires to report in on the goings-on to their masters some hive nobility will be directly tied also to the goings-on of a hive world be it say a shrine world mining operation trade hub or astral military bastion this will to a degree influence those within the hive spire and they may be slightly less or slightly more corrupt and immoral as a result and this will generally be relative to how under the lens of the imperium they are on a backwater mining world that just spews wealth from lucrative or trading things are probably going to get pretty nasty but on an imperial military bastion world it's going to be more difficult to keep your disgusting murderous campaigns against rival offspring or questionable trade deals out of sight now the under hive may also see the occasional appearance of what are known as spyros as the name suggests spyros are upper hive noble members usually younger peers who are tend to essentially prove themselves by eradicating some undesirable vermin they will don highly advanced possibly even dark age level hunting suits that are constructed off-world the origin of these is unknown although a fair guess for me would be that it involves jakiro sometimes these suits are akin to something like an exo suit and it provides these high levels of protection firepower and camouflage as they engage in one of the most foul and decadent activities human hunting hive nobles would tell you that this is a rite of passage and that besides it serves a purpose in eliminating the worst elements of a hive city to a degree this may well be true however it seems almost certain that there is a darker side to spyro hunting and that within some hives it becomes more like a competitive sport and more than likely will involve excessive levels of gambling potentially with even live video feeds being pumped back up into the high spire by and large the activities of spyros are probably far more disturbing than just being some ancient occasional rite of passage that may sound surprising but various space marine chapters will in fact keep a form of structure on hive worlds that they believe hold either critical tactical importance or were just good for recruitment of course their home planet is discounted here is on that world they will be just everywhere but on other hive worlds it may be something more just like a simple chapel a keep an outpost it may not be permanently occupied either but it will nearly always be placed at one of the very highest levels on the hive city spire because it's very rare that ordinary citizens would be able to catch a glimpse of these glorious astartes coming and going now as i think by now we have easily illustrated for many ordinary human inhabitants of a hive their existence is grim in the extreme conditions are harsh and so is the work only those able to work will be granted accommodation and credits and this is usually a very overcrowded accommodation very unsanitary despite this many mid-level workers are considered in fact to be lucky by those forced to exist in the lower factorum levels because those lower level workers have never felt anything like a sun ray and will hold the open streets and spaces within the mid levels to upper spire sections as in fact glorious places and in fact it's reasonable to say that they are because at least in comparison to the choices of the infinitely more polluted and violently dismal locations in the lower hive you'd pick those upper areas every time the best summary for workers and citizens is that their lives are fairly simple they will grasp small pleasures where they can they will try and have a family where they can and put the majority of time in their work they will give prayer and faith in the emperor likely attending regular services at the behest of the ecclesia that are always patrolling the hive they'll try to stay out of trouble they'll try to make the odd black market deal here and there they have some children and then like i say probably an early death by the standards of anyone above the working class grade life in a hive is astonishingly comparable to the industrial period of old earth polluted simple often violent with the worker being exploited almost from the moment they're born to the day they die lying exhausted burned out in some appalling industrial accident the ministorum will maintain at least a very basic presence on nearly all imperial worlds in the current period they will be sure to maintain the heavy indoctrination of the imperial citizen into worship of the holy emperor of equal importance they will be very mindful to keep an eye out for anybody who is behaving suspiciously or reportedly speaking out against the imperial creed very unwise move for any imperial citizen who is probably unaware the consequences that are likely going to come their way which will let's say be probably very medieval sororitas like the astartes are not extremely common across the worlds of the imperium but if they find a reason through some miraculous event they personally witness or something or someone that they believe they must be protected for the emperor and his divine power to lead them to a hive world a hive city they may choose to found a small convent within the hive city this would be usually a very great privilege for the hive certainly for the ecclesiarchy and few would refuse such an honor to come their way the presence of a sororitas shrine or convent within a hive will likely lead the citizenry to if they were not already double down their faith for the emperor and it's possible it may be where hive world begins a path towards becoming designated as a shrine world as we've discussed within a hive city and its feudalistic power structures often being based around noble houses hereditary succession the mid to lower sections of hive cities are governed by guilds which are really just downsized versions of the larger spy and ability to control the hive itself and sometimes the planet or even the wider star system guilds though will usually be focused on mercantile operations or services for the population so for example the water guild is going to deal with you guessed it processing and recycling water extracted from polluted sources also supplying industrial processes where needed there are others like the promethium guild who deal with right again promethium which is basically a liquid fuel in the 41st millennium that can be used in industry but it's also used for weapons like flamers and many others of course like the corpse guild air guild electro iron coin and so on some hives will have specific guilds others may not based on their individual purposes but essentially if it's something a hive is actively involved in importing or exporting there's probably going to be a guild for it thinly unifying all of these in a hive will be a more collective merchants guild as i covered whilst discussing the currency section merchants are some of the most important because they're often involved in making agreements contracts trades and so on between the necessary resources of the other guilds so they fulfill a role that is difficult for others to take the time to set up on their own and this places them as something like a middle ground that is often required to be fairly neutral and to best serve everybody's needs and it goes without saying of course including their own now i thought that i would take time to note one guild specifically as most are relatively self-explanatory water air electro etc but the guild of coin is deceivingly not quite so obvious by its name you would imagine that it is singularly related to currency except as we have explained many hives operate a very strange and unofficial system of economy that is a blend of barter worker credits and tokens so the term guild of coins suggests a more formalized currency system being minted and this is not in fact what it represents or sort of as we know within the hive most citizens are heavily restricted to the areas they can visit you cannot just take a trip up to a level that is outside your authorized area so within the merchants guild not unlike rogue traders merchants are given the freedom to traverse through a hive city so long as this is restricted to the operation of their business so it then follows that the guild of coin are the gatekeepers because it is they who control the roads and transport tubes that criss-cross a hive structure as well as between districts and sectors they oversee the transportation of all cargo and sometimes within hive worlds they may even be designated as monitoring incoming outgoing goods so although they're referred to as the guild of coin to me they more represent something like a guild of customs border and goods operation they're monitoring movement and materials internally and externally recording information flagging unusual requests not to mention seizing illegal trades and narcotics if they find them undoubtedly taking the odd backhander here and there so this title guild of coin likely originates from what are known as these masters of coin and they forge keys for the guild and the clan house convoys these coins though are more like a form of a token it's a powerful seal allowing the guilds and houses of a hive city passage past the very many way stations ash gates and high fortresses that they require free passage through the coin token or key is a powerful symbol of the guild of coin each of these coin masters carry with them staves which have many rings shackles hung with all manner of mysterious keys some clearly ancient others newly forged each one may be cast from the steel of different hives or stones of different roads granting rights and passage for the gilder who bears it in terms of currency the guild of coin operates not dissimilarly from any other they tax their passage ways and require tolls from those passing through so in that respect they're not unlike other guild depending on the hive this can come in the form of barter for them scripts credits or even thrones it may seem as if living in a hive is very much an anything goes kind of lifestyle and the people are just murdered on a whim and on reflection is living in the underhive really so bad and the answer is yes it is although living in the main spire is certainly no ideal life it's generally preferable to the under hive where clean air is basically not a thing and criminal enterprise is everywhere random killings shooting sprees crazed mutants on the loose brutality just to set an example to others and of course much much worse the underhive is a truly lawless environment for the most part and only the most hardened and well-equipped law officers will actually venture into these depths enforcers arbites bounty hunters spyros on occasion maybe even mechanicas roartus inquisitors and astartes but this is very uncommon and not without good reason the underhive is really a war zone in short and choosing to live there is very much only for those who have little to live for in the upper levels crime is not at all tolerated arbitees and enforcers will patrol the streets along with ecclesiaki and their ever zealous followers crimes for the upper hive dwellers may be far more difficult to detect because they're looking at things like traitors heretics those who seek to preach sedition all of these things fester and corrupt the minds of citizens and it is the law officers role to seek these out and purge them from society for any crime committed it would be important that the guilty party has each crime judy recorded with distinction so that they may be assigned to the appropriate punishment and if it's speaking against the imperial creed then the ministerum will administer justice if it's against the tenets of the adeptus terror the arbites will be involved mutants heretics and cultists they could fall either side of this as we learned earlier within a hive its citizens only option is to consume heavily recycled air water and food of usually very questionable origins it would be fairly stupid to not point out that this inevitably will have a debilitating effect on the citizenry over time so the mortality rate based on this and the heavy workload placed upon workers leads to very poor health beyond that though it also will lead to heavy toxins saturating through the bodies of citizens and in some cases this will start to cause genetic instabilities birth defects and mutations the effects of these are demonstrably worse the further down through a hive you travel my toxins are becoming ever more concentrated now depending on the hive city you find yourself on this may be more or less tolerated on some worlds mutation is more common and so minor deformities are tolerated to a degree even in the upper hive on others though any minor defects can be considered signs of chaotic contamination or potentially entire families could be put to death as a result so it's very understandable that mutations will want to be concealed and where necessary exiled to lower levels or you know or worse than this it's sadly all too common that conspicuous mutants will be rooted out and destroyed according to the strict laws of the noble houses in the hive administration those who are able to flee or newborns given passage may escape and perhaps start new lives in the depths of the underhive but here they're less likely to be called out because everybody is trying to avoid something only those though with the severe mutations will likely encounter difficulty and may again have to flee down into the lower sections of the under hive generally speaking though mutants can live relatively peacefully within an under hive as ever though it is a sliding scale mutants just like any citizen may just meet the wrong individual on the wrong day and things in the under hive have a habit of escalating to lethal violence very quickly the gangs of the underhive are of course synonymous with hive cities the lower regions of a hive city have sparse resources and where some gangs will fight for territory just to push illegal narcotic trades or for the rights to exploit resources others will do so simply to be able to just stay alive most will also fight for things like respect and fear induced prestige not to mention their personal wealth although the under hive economy is not necessarily directly linked with the levels above the hive gangs will of course be gaining access to the same credit system and potentially even thrones so they may be able to indirectly make black market trades or gain access to guilds above to make arms deals and so on in truth the link between the lower levels of the hive city and the under hive are probably more closely linked than authorities would want to admit legitimate guilds would be more than willing to sell wares down or bring stolen goods up the guilds carry significant power and usually have the guns and muscle to back this up and so represent just as much of a force to be concerned about as the gangs the underhive communities are nothing like the world above though with only a thin veil of order holding things together and despite the difficulties there is a never-ending stream into the underhive and those who venture down will have their own reasons for doing so but whatever the reason it likely won't be long before they run into their first gang encounter and for many this would be a very make or break experience it's rare for a gang to recruit from encounters with newbies into the underhive but on the off chance they're able to stand their ground or even kill a juvenile gang member there's a reasonable chance that they'll be recruited and gain all the benefits a gang offers like protection more reliable access to food and shelter and of course just a more enjoyable life than scavenging obviously the bad aspects of gangs are having to deal with your rivals not to mention bounty hunters and forces and being sent on raids for insane objectives with slim chances of success having been conceptualized by some drugged up crazed gang leaders of course any number of variations that can exist as something akin to a gang in the under hive renegade tribalistic offshoots of lost human souls from the age of strife bizarre xenos gangs and chaos cultists or you know just use your imagination perhaps you have a gang of traitor sororitas who have fallen the first stage of their testing and escaped to a life of blasphemy in a city's under hive what about escaped prisoners from a hive cities penal workforce or maybe deserters from the imperial guard working now as mercenaries just trying to survive it's one of the best and most interesting aspects of hive cities and the under hive the characters the backgrounds of those you will find they're almost limitless and we'll explore these in more detail in future overviews focused on specific groups factions characters and maybe speculative creations of my own lastly on planets where the surrounding environment may be very harsh but not enough to kill you within the hour or less there are those hive citizens who for one reason or another choose to leave behind the vast cities they may form a small group maybe at one time they were a small guild and decide they're better off leaving the hive behind they perhaps hope there is some small area of the planet not ruined by the seemingly infinite ash and polluted wastelands for others they may become these strange nomads surviving off of the very curious life forms that have found a way to survive out in the drifting deserts some of these nomadic tribes have been said they even come to appreciate the ash wastes that they see them as being beautiful displaying bright colors at times from undoubtedly the various strange metallic pollutant chemicals but just why human citizens might choose to leave the hive can be very hard to say but dwellers in the under hive might for example decide that things have become simply too dangerous there are those maybe in the upper hab levels of manufacturing who just become very disillusioned by the prospect of endless menial labor no matter how glorious the apparent cause is overall those who seek a life outside the hive will be seeking something but who can really say what perhaps they simply have just concluded that a life of extreme poverty and close quarters habitation in a decaying ruin of what might have been an arcology while being subjected to endless religious and strict judicial enforcement is not for them and the world outside as harrowing and extreme as it is becomes infinitely preferable who knows on many planets that hive cities are found upon the planet itself can be far bigger than terror or old earth and so by some miracle these nomadic humans may one day walk far enough they find themselves in an idyllic corner tucked away where they can find a small settlement and live out a subsistence life disconnected from the oppressive and often extremely hazardous life under the imperium of man in the darkened future of the imperium hive cities are complex numerous and almost infinitely variable in their internal structuring population and individual histories while they remain awe-inspiring in many respects all too often they are rotten on the inside decaying ruins build over upon and through the crumbling structures of once glorious colony domes to vast citadels they now exist not as icons of humanity's technological zenith but a far more depressing symbol of the need to churn out the raw materials of mankind the sacrifices of flesh and bone demanded by its leaders only to be endlessly thrown into the meat grinder of the imperium's unending galactic wars wars perpetually fueled by both internal and external conflicts themselves all too often stirred up by members of the imperium itself not to forget of course the numerous xenos who never cease in their violent testing the weak points along the imperium's borders hive cities serve mankind in all of its conflicts they feed its insatiable desire for the materials of war hardware munitions but most of all their never-ending production of millions upon millions of human souls that remains the only true currency of the imperium of mankind [Music] [Music] you

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Keywords: Gaming, Discuss, Channel, Future, 40K, Warhammer 40K, Imperium, Humanity, Mankind, Doom, Fall, Space Marines, Heretic, Heresy, The Emperor of Man, Lore, History, Guide, Warhammer 40000, Warp, Immaterium, Rift, War, Slaughter, Horror, Nightmare, Tabletop, Inquisition

Id: HkJpFvJQp4M

Length: 104min 51sec (6291 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 28 2020