Picture a war graveyard sixty million years old. No bodies, no rust, no reclaiming vines — just silent black pyramids the size of mountains, buried under the dust of a dead world. Then, one quiet night, the lights come on. Deep beneath the sand, ten thousand metal skeletons open their eyes at once — and the lords who still have minds remember exactly who they were, and precisely how furious they are. The Necrons are awake. And they were here long, long before you.

Welcome back to Faction Files, our series prising apart the lore of Warhammer 40,000 one faction at a time — no dice, no meta, just who these lot are and why they tick. This time: the galaxy's oldest grudge, wrapped in living metal. If they get their hooks into you, our Necrons collection is where the tomb doors open.

FILE 01 // Origins: the Necrontyr and the worst deal ever struck

Long before the Imperium, before humanity had worked out fire, there was a race called the Necrontyr. They were flesh and blood, and they got a rotten hand: short, sickly lives spent under a dying, radiation-spewing sun. When your whole species can feel the clock running down, you develop opinions about mortality. Theirs curdled into a culture obsessed with death, tombs and getting even with a universe that had cheated them.

Then they met the C'tan — vast, star-devouring entities the Necrontyr came to worship as gods. The C'tan offered them a way out of frail mortality: new bodies of living metal, immortal and tireless. The Necrontyr said yes. What they got was biotransference — their minds poured into machine shells, their bodies rendered down for parts, and their spirits consumed in the bargain. They traded their mortality for immortality and lost almost everything that made them alive to do it. The great mass woke as mindless automata. A ruling few kept their minds — and their fury — intact.

FILE 02 // Living metal and the reset button: reanimation

Here is the thing that makes fighting Necrons genuinely demoralising, rather than merely dangerous. You can kill them. It just does not take.

Their bodies are forged from necrodermis — living metal that flows back into shape around a wound. Blow a Necron Warrior apart and, more often than not, it simply reassembles and stands back up, gauss weapon levelled, as though nothing happened. Land a blow it genuinely cannot repair and it phases out entirely, teleporting back to the tomb complex to be rebuilt at leisure. There is no glorious last stand against the Necrons, no hill of the enemy dead — because tomorrow the enemy dead are on their feet again. You are not fighting an army. You are fighting a save file.

FILE 03 // How they wage war: cold, patient and appallingly advanced

Forget hordes screaming across the field. The Necrons fight like a civilisation that solved war sixty million years ago and finds the whole business rather tedious. They advance in silent, unbroken ranks, and their technology is so far ahead of everyone else's that the Imperium's finest weapons look like sharpened sticks by comparison.

Gauss weapons do not wound — they strip a target apart atom by atom, flesh then armour then bone, until there is nothing left to strip. Tesla arcs leap between targets. Monoliths crawl across the battlefield as mobile fortresses and teleport gateways; whole Necron legions simply appear where the enemy least wants them, marched in from tomb worlds via deep-space translation. And behind the front line, the Crypteks — part scientist, part sorcerer-engineer — bend space, time and physics into weapons. Fighting Necrons is not a battle of tactics so much as a demonstration of how far behind the times you are.

FILE 04 // Trazyn, the Flayer Curse and other malfunctions

Sixty million years in a tomb does strange things to a mind, and not every Necron woke up right. The Great Sleep left the dynasties riddled with glitches, and the glitches are where the personality lives.

Take Trazyn the Infinite, the galaxy's most incorrigible collector — an Overlord who hoards living specimens, relics and entire preserved battlefields in his gallery on Solemnace, and who has a tiresome habit of not staying dead because he keeps backing his mind up into other bodies. Or the Flayed Ones, warriors afflicted by the Flayer Curse: a madness that convinces them they are starving for flesh they can no longer eat, so they drape themselves in the skins of their victims. Then there are the Destroyer Cults — Necrons who have concluded that the only logical response to a meaningless universe is to erase all organic life from it, themselves included. Even immortal god-machines, it turns out, can lose the plot spectacularly.

FILE 05 // Why collectors love them

If the Tyranids are the army you paint by the bucket, the Necrons are the army you paint by the airbrush and come away looking like a genius. Metallic ranks, glowing green weapons, sharp clean lines — they photograph beautifully and reward very little effort with a very finished look.

• Contrast and metal, best friends: a metal basecoat, a wash, an edge highlight and a glowing gauss recess, and your Warriors look tournament-ready. It is one of the quickest routes from bare plastic to a proper army.
• Your dynasty, your palette: classic Sautekh silver-and-green, or go Mephrit gold, Novokh blood-red or Nihilakh verdigris — the dynasties give you a licence to recolour the whole force.
• Genuine centrepieces: the Monolith, the Doomsday Ark and towering Canoptek constructs are some of the most striking kits in the 40k range, and a single one anchors a shelf.

New to all this? Our beginner's guide to Warhammer 40k covers the fundamentals, and the wider Xenos range is worth a wander if you want to see who else the Necrons look down on.

Threat assessment

The Imperium would dearly love to file the Necrons under ancient history. It cannot. The tomb worlds are waking system by system, the Silent King has returned to knit the squabbling dynasties back into one empire, and the enslaved shards of the C'tan are back on their leashes and pointed outward. This is a superpower that ruled the galaxy before your species existed, went for a very long lie-down, and has now woken up in a foul mood to find its property occupied by squatters. It intends to evict them. Politely, at first.

Final thought: the Necrons are the only faction in 40k that can afford to be patient, because they already own the deed and they simply cannot die. Everyone else in the galaxy is fighting for the future. The Necrons are calmly waiting for it to come back to them.

Further reading: crunch the numbers with our Necrons: Army Analysis, or get the lay of the land in the Warhammer 40k Factions Hub.