@frogsquadron: To sumurize organize and (trying to) help, my conspiracy theory is a few things:

- The Bilgeli research project would be an Endless project aimed at saving the Eaürs from the begining, not fondamental research aimed at nothing. That's why Icarael, savers of Eaürs, would have wanted to go there.

- After the discovery and the spread of the virtualization, since Eaürs had a lot of problems with their bodies, the Virtuals would be most if not all the Endless of Eaür origin + not that much of Tandu / Hadun origin (who had no problems with their bodies).

That's why we saw no concrete Endless of Eaür origin in the games.

- Since the Eaürs were after the space adaptation, half-failed with mutation, and saw their Endless brothers being adapted and not them, they may have considered the Tandu / Hadun bodies to be the ultimate perfection, bodies to imitate.

That's why when we see a Virtual in the games, he never takes a strange alien-like silhouette of Eärs form but a more "human-like" silhouette, like a Tandu / Hadun. They use just what they consider to be the perfection as images, since they made the jump from genes to memes.

- Since Tandu / Hadun would be the proto-Concrete and would have a lot of respect for bodies, they would not destroy the Eaürs bodies after virtualization.

- Since Eaürs are supposed to be multi-arm people, mutated into monstruous forms, and Cravers are multi-armed people, have an hivemind, they may be in fact the former Eaür bodies.

- Vodyani did not found the virtualization, they found the dust swapping used by Icarael to swap his heart for dust. Fathers of Dust are the Eaürs, so they may have found a concrete Eaür (the "ancient demon"). Or something close, like an ancient tomb of an important Eaür, protected by a Virtual, speaking to the proto-Vodyani archeologist like they were the ghost of the remnant.

I found strange that the Vodyani to use only human silhouette aswell, since they are from multirace. They must have been told by the ancient demon to use this form ? An Eaür, who woud say "shape your bodies to perfect silhouettes, never use something else".

Vodyani swapped their bodies with dust, so their bodies should be somewhere (unless they burned them), soul-less, waiting for the signal to walk... Alien zombies ?

-edit- now Lumeris may be a succesfull mutation of Eaürs returned to renaissance level... That would explain their love of Dust :p

solrac137 wrote:

Maybe the cravers have one tiny bit of necrophage DNA since as mentioned above they are made by DNA of several species, also something worth mentioning is that we know that the virtual endless are still alive according to the craver questline. 

The Vodyani "Saints" also bond/share their suits with a Virtual. The problem is, most surviving Virtuals are not what they used to be, having gone crazy from millennia of isolation and"hardware" degradation. Not to mention most of them had a titanic ego and lack of empathy before the Dust wars... now that their civilisation has fallen and they have nothing left, most of them will try and play the lesser races for their own greedy needs.

As for the Cravers and Necrophage.... well, I doubt they share DNA in the traditional sense of the word, but I wouldn't rule out the possibility that an insectoid species native to Auriga was a gene donor for the Cravers. We will never know, as the Devs have never given us a lot of details regarding the history of these two races.

godman85 wrote:

way too much linking to one race. The cravers are the Necrophages.

When you play the necrophage storyline, they have a foreign leader who was released from the husk of knowledge AKA the most dangerous lab in history.

I believe when the vaulters crashed into the husk, they released all types of hell and in that confusion, they released HIM.

He eventually joined the necrophages as a strong alpha but he seemed determined to do SOMETHING very specific. As the missions progress, the original necrophage leader starts realizing this other guy is too refined, too determined to find secret knowledge, too against their nature.

THe missions end with them discovering ancient endless tech that mechanizes them, causing them to consume their entire world. THe old leader accepts this fate as he loses the hive to the new guy whose determination is legendary and who knew all along of the endless relics.

Are the necrophages in endless legends the cravers? Probably not. It doesn't say whether they escaped the planet. But the necrophages and the cravers are the same exact race. Also, Auriga is the homeworld of the necrophages while every other advanced race was placed there as an experiment.

There is no way the Necrophages are linked to the Cravers for several reasons:

1) The Necrophages were created by the Concrete Endless, while the Cravers were created by the Virtual Endless.

2) The Necrophages were native to Auriga (I don't think they made it off the planet, but their eggs might have survived), while the Cravers are genetic chimeras with DNA collected from different species across the galaxy, enhanced with cybernetics and "native" (built/born) on Kovanyuv.

3) The lore of the Cravers specifically states that the Virtuals took them all to Husk and bombed the bejujus out of them. Only recently did they develop space fairing technology and ventured out again.

There is no way they had a connection to Auriga and the EL storyline seeing how that takes place, chronologically, before ES2 (as Auriga is an Ice world now).

I think a lot of people assume they are connected somehow because both factions are insectoid and can't have diplomatic relationships. Also they are both  weapons and toys developed by their Endless masters to wage war on each other.

I can definitely see some overlap in the themes of these factions, but that's about it. They are not the same, Cravers are not "evolved" Necrophages.

solrac137 wrote:

I have the theory that the demon is a concrete endless and that both the virtuals and the concretes survived the war ( well a small part of them, hiding hibernating ) and now they are back and they are trying to manipulate the younger races to fight against each other, their old war. 

If the reason is "let's still destroy the other ones", the problem is the one who are still there forget / was not there / forgave / was peacefull, so I think this wouldn't work.

If the reason is "let's destroy old weapons", like the Cravers, that could work. But still there is a problem of power : the one who left have little to no control over those billions of individual, I think you lend them too much power : whereas the Endless civilization ended to be "magical" in the trope sense popularized by Clarke's third law ("advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."), giving them those mindcontrol-over billions-of-individuals possibilities is a little over the top, to me.

And giving them mindcontrol over emperors wouldn't work too : if irl you have trouble to approach a medium city mayor, approaching a billion of individuals emperor would be a problem no individual could scheme. Approaching 8 of those ? Nah.

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I think there is a "conspiracy", but not this one.

Anytime we see an Endless, we see a human-like character and I think there is an historical and a cultural reason.

I think the Tandu people and the Hadun people were genetically compatible (or solved their incompatibilities with genetics quite early) gathered & melt.

The Eaür people, a people that "evolved from many-armed sea creatures", fathers of Dust, after their semi-failed experimentation with the body mutations in their quest to be adapted to space travel, became the Virtuals. Being Virtuals, they don't care about the body image : they use the human-like form to represent the acheivement of their Holy Grail quest, the beautifullest thing ever done, the space adaptation "as good as Tandu/Hadun".

For me, Aevum, Fatum & Letum, the Bilgeli stations, were hosting an Endless project to save the Eaürs. This is the reason why Icarael (Icarus + Rael...), who "saved an enormous population of Eaür from death" wanted to go there.

It was not love that made him travel, he fall in love only when he encountered Spotora.

The remaining and horribly mutated bodies of the Eaürs were not killed nor destroyed by the Tandu-Hadun people Concretes-in-becoming : they loved too much the bodies.

In the war, those bodies happenned to be tools, puppets controled by the Virtuals.

Those many-arms hivemind puppets, with little sense of body preservation, are still animated by a furious hunger, now their soul left : they are now known as the Cravers.

That would mean that since the Vodyani found the virtualization secret (they did not in fact. They found the dust-switching secret that Icarael knew). They may know about this theorical Cravers origin from "an ancient demon" aka an Eaür that did not virtualize.

Vodyani even could be the dads (or gods) of a new puppet people: their former bodies.

Of course, this is a theory in my mind, not based on many facts :)

First schism then. Ancient demons would be the mut(il)ated Eaürs.