Orkoid beastSquiggothArtwork coming soon

Site-made title card, not a depiction. Artists: permitted fan art of Squiggoth is welcome through the Art Call.

Orkoid Beast · Snakebites herds · Feral Ork worlds

Squiggoth

A squig grown to the size of a tank or a Titan, saddled with a fortress and driven into battle by Orks who think nothing is funnier than a stampede.

Type: Giant fungoid beast, war-mount
Origin: Ork ecosystem, bred from squigs
Size: From main battle tank to small Titan
Bred by: Snakebites Pigdokz and Beastbosses
Used for: Carrying boyz, heavy guns and howdahs
Weakness: Temper, hunger and loose control

Artwork coming soon: no permitted independent art of Squiggoth is on file yet. Art Call

At a glance

The Squiggoth is the largest beast that the Ork ecosystem has ever produced, a squig grown to such a size that it can carry a whole mob of boyz on its back and still have the strength to trample a tank. Some are the size of a main battle tank. The largest, the Gargantuan Squiggoths, rival a small Imperial Titan, and they walk into battle with a ramshackle fortress of planks, scrap and armour plate lashed to their backs, bristling with guns and packed with screaming Orks.

Squiggoths are not a separate species in the usual sense. Like every other creature in the orkoid web of life they are fungal organisms, and Imperial Magi Biologis have classified them as part of the same spore-born cycle that produces Orks, gretchin, snotlings and squigs. What makes a squig into a Squiggoth is feeding. A Squiggoth keeps growing as long as it is fed well, and the specialist breeders of the Snakebites clan guard their feed-formulas like treasure. A poor formula produces a stunted beast. A great one produces a monster that never seems to stop getting bigger.

To the Orks a Squiggoth is a war-mount, a moving gun platform, a battering ram and a status symbol. A Warboss who rides into battle on the biggest Squiggoth in the Waaagh! is making a statement that every Ork understands. To everyone else it is a living siege engine that smells of rot and fungus, eats anything it can reach and does not care whose side it is on once it gets going.

Anatomy & size

There is no single shape of Squiggoth. Most resemble huge, heavy quadrupeds with thick hides, short powerful legs and a head that is mostly mouth. Some have the look of a great reptile, with a broad skull and a heavy tail. Others are shaggy and tusked, with long curved teeth that the Orks decorate with iron bands and trophies. All of them share the basic squig design taken to a ridiculous scale: a body built around a gut and a jaw, and a temper to match.

Imperial records divide the beasts into two broad kinds:

Big Squiggoths are the smaller and more common breed. Many are young beasts or animals whose feeding was less effective. They are still enormous, roughly the size of a battle tank, and they often travel in herds.
Gargantuan Squiggoths are the giants, grown on the best secret formulas of the Snakebites. They can be as large as a small Titan and are often the personal steeds of powerful Warbosses.

A Squiggoth's hide is tough enough to shrug off small-arms fire, and the Orks bolt extra armour plate onto it to protect what they call their ride. Its jaws can crush a vehicle hull. Its tusks can gore through a bunker wall. Its legs can flatten a squad of infantry without the beast noticing. Because it is a fungoid creature, a Squiggoth is very hard to kill by blood loss alone. It will keep moving with wounds that would drop any normal animal, and it often has to be blown apart before it stops.

The howdah

The most recognisable feature of a war Squiggoth is the howdah, a fortified platform strapped and chained onto its back. These are built by Mekboyz and are never the same twice. Some are simple wooden towers with firing slits. Others are armoured gun decks with heavy weapons such as a supa-lobba or big shootas, ladders for boyz to clamber up and down, and banners showing the clan glyphs. A single Gargantuan Squiggoth can carry a full mob of boyz, a battery of guns and a small crew of grots to feed ammunition and steer the beast with goads.

Breeding & handling

Squiggoths are grown, not born in the usual sense. The work belongs to specialist breeders known as Pigdokz, especially among the Snakebites clan, the most traditional of the Ork clans and the one closest to the old ways of beasts, poisons and herding. A Pigdok's reputation rests on the size and temper of his animals, and his formulas are mixtures of fungus, meat, scrap, spore-mush and anything else he believes will make his beast grow bigger. Some formulas are passed from Pigdok to Pigdok. Others are stolen. A few are said to be traded only after fights to the death.

Handling a Squiggoth is a job that kills many grots. The beast is steered by Orks and gretchin who goad it with spears, prods, chains and loud noises. When it is calm, the crew can turn it towards the enemy. When it is angry, there is no steering at all. A Squiggoth in a rage goes where it wants, eats what it wants and stamps on whatever is in front of it. The Orks consider this an acceptable risk, and often a feature.

Feral Orks and the Snakebites

Squiggoths are most common among Feral Ork tribes and Snakebites war bands, where beasts of every kind are central to war and status. On feral worlds the Orks herd squigs, boars and Squiggoths across the plains, and a tribe's wealth is counted in its beasts. When a Waaagh! gathers, these tribes bring their herds, and the arrival of a Squiggoth herd can turn an ordinary Ork assault into a stampede.

Squiggoths at war

On the battlefield a Squiggoth does three things very well. It carries boyz into close combat without making them walk. It carries heavy guns that would otherwise need a vehicle. And it smashes things. The Orks use Squiggoths as living assault transports, driving them straight at enemy lines so that the boyz on board can leap down into the trenches while the beast tramples the defenders.

Imperial commanders who have faced Squiggoths describe them as terrifyingly hard to stop. Lasguns barely scratch them. Autocannon fire chews chunks out of their hide but rarely brings them down. Heavy weapons such as lascannons and battle cannon can do the job, but the beast keeps coming even with craters in its flanks, and the Orks on its back keep shooting. A charging Gargantuan Squiggoth has the momentum of a building falling over.

In great Ork invasions such as those on Armageddon, the Orks fielded every kind of beast and machine they could gather. A Squiggoth herd fits naturally into the chaos of a Waaagh!, alongside Gargants, Stompas, trukks and endless mobs of boyz. Even when Ork mechanised warfare dominates, beast herds remain part of the greenskin way of war, especially among clans that look down on the Mekboyz and their noisy toys.

Tactics and limits

Shock: the sight and sound of a Squiggoth charge can break poorly trained troops before contact.
Firepower: a howdah gun deck turns the beast into a slow but heavily armed fire base.
Transport: boyz on board arrive fresh and eager for a fight.
Unreliability: a wounded or hungry Squiggoth may turn on its own side, eat its crew or wander off after something tastier.

Place in the Ork ecosystem

The Ork ecosystem is a self-sustaining web of fungal organisms. Wherever Orks live and die they shed spores, and those spores grow into the creatures that support Ork life: fungus for food and beer, squigs for food and tools, gretchin and snotlings for labour, and eventually more Orks. Squigs are the most varied part of this web, and Squiggoths are its most extreme expression.

A Squiggoth's appetite is enormous. It eats fungus, meat, carrion, wood and the dead of both sides. It also produces huge quantities of spore-laden dung, which helps spread the Ork ecosystem wherever the beast walks. This is one reason Imperial commanders are ordered to burn Ork battlefields after the fighting. A herd of Squiggoths passing through a region can seed it with enough spores to sprout Ork life for years afterwards.

Brutal Moments

Brutal moments

The trench that became a feeding pit

The Guardsmen had dug in well. They had trenches, wire, mines and interlocking heavy stubbers, and they had held off three waves of boyz before dawn. Then the ground began to shake. The Gargantuan Squiggoth came out of the smoke with its howdah burning and arrows of tracer fire bouncing off its armour plates. The mines went off under its feet and it barely stumbled. It reached the trench line, stopped, lowered its head and began to eat.

The men in the trench could not climb out fast enough. The beast's jaws scooped up whole sections of the trench, sandbags, men and all, and the crunch of bone and flak armour could be heard over the gunfire. Men who ran were trampled into the mud. Men who stayed were eaten. The Orks in the howdah leapt down into the gap, roaring with laughter, and finished what the beast had started. When the Imperial counter-attack retook the line days later, they found the trench filled in with churned earth, scraps of uniform and the beast's enormous dung, already sprouting fungus.

The Pigdok's reward

A Snakebites Pigdok grew a Squiggoth so large that it became the pride of his tribe. For years he fed it only the best formula, which he refused to share. When a rival Ork finally killed him and tried to take the beast, the Squiggoth would not obey. It killed the rival, ate the rival's boyz and then wandered across the plains for a week, destroying three Ork camps before its own tribe brought it down with rokkits. The Orks considered this the best thing that had happened all year and sang about it for a long time.

The tank that was swallowed

A Leman Russ commander once reported, over a vox channel that was still recording, that a Squiggoth had picked his tank up in its jaws. The crew could hear the hull plates groaning and the beast's teeth grinding against the armour. The commander ordered the driver to keep the engine running and the gunner to keep firing the hull weapons into the beast's mouth. The recording ended with the sound of metal giving way. The tank was later found crushed and dented, lying on its side. The Squiggoth was found a few hundred metres away, dead, with its throat and skull burst open from within by the Russ's last shells.

The stampede at the river

At one river crossing, a herd of Big Squiggoths panicked under artillery fire and stampeded back through the Ork lines rather than forward. They crushed hundreds of boyz and gretchin and smashed their own Mekboy workshops. The Imperial gunners cheered. Then the herd turned again, crossed the river in a single surge and came up the far bank into the Imperial positions with their skins torn, bleeding and enraged. The defenders had spent their shells on the first charge. They had nothing left for the second.

Fighting Squiggoths

The Imperium has learned, through hard experience, how to deal with Squiggoths:

Heavy anti-tank weapons are needed. Lascannons, melta weapons and battle cannon are far more effective than massed small-arms fire.
Kill the crew in the howdah to remove the guns and the steering, but expect the beast to keep going on its own.
Target the legs to stop the charge. A crippled Squiggoth is still dangerous, but it cannot reach your lines.
Burn the dead afterwards, including the beast. A Squiggoth corpse is a mountain of spores.

Space Marines facing Squiggoths tend to rely on concentrated fire from heavy weapons and the use of close assault specialists with power fists, thunder hammers or chainfists to finish the beast once it has been slowed. The Leman Russ and Baneblade are favoured by the Astra Militarum because their main guns can kill a Squiggoth outright if they hit the right spot.

Trivia

The size of a Squiggoth is said to depend on its feed-formula, so its growth is limited more by its keeper's skill than by its biology.
Gargantuan Squiggoths are often compared to Titans by Imperial observers, not only for their size but because the Orks treat them like walking strongholds.
Squiggoth hide is so tough that Orks use scraps of it to make armour and shields.
The Orks think a Squiggoth stampede is one of the funniest sights in the galaxy, even when it is coming at them.
Squiggoths are a reminder that the Ork ecosystem is designed for war: even its largest livestock are weapons.