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[Neonivek]

Heh... no.  That's an extremist interpretation which belies the facts.
They can operate, almost like the Imperium worlds operate.
And sometimes they can go much, much deeper into nonsensical reality-warping production...  Much as Holy Terra is far more orderly than a backwater Imperium conquest world.

Well they are ridden with diseases (Chaos doesn't exactly benefit from chaos), the land is usually near unusable, they readily kill and slaughter their people for any reason (including no reason), just by being in chaos you can transform into a willess cultist who doesn't work, and the infighting amongst chaos is arguably even worse than the Orks and Necron combined.

What am I missing here?

To admit I cannot remember if Orks or Chaos sometimes kill their people to lubricate their machines.

[Grim Portent]

Chaos worlds do have a civilian populace that basically just lives day to day lives like anyone else in 40k. They're ultimately slaves, but the vast bulk of Chaos adherents know they need to keep the chattel around to do basic work for them, so apart from a few particularly psychopathic individuals who flay their slaves for funsies at random most just ignore the mortals working their fields and mining their ores.

The Iron Warriors in one book have mortals perform almost every task in their army and civilian roles, largely because they lost a lot of marines to infighting and are too proud to ask for reinforcements from Medrengard. Humans grow the food, enforce the rules, man the defences, repair their machines, process the dead, culture new workers at the embryo farms, guard their prison (with one inmate), mine their resources, man their factories and every other task needed. The marines themselves largely hang around their main fortress, govern and bicker. With a few exceptions the marines only kill humans when they have a reason to do so, such as needing human blood to sate their daemonic artifacts.

Huron Blackheart's space fortress in the Night Lords books has a huge civilian populace. They have markets, bars, prostitutes. Hell they even have fruit stands! The place is dangerous, roamed by psychopaths, the odd daemon, and occasionally the odd crazed marine out to kill for what entertainment they can get out of mortals, but people still live there in vast amounts and grow stuff, make things and barter with spacefarers that berth at the station and the human raiders that serve Huron.

[Neonivek]

Your forgetting it isn't JUST Psychopaths.

Chaos is rewarded for gathering souls... even if that soul is from the populous... and are often given incredible unplayable debt.

That is just one way chaos benefits from killing its populace and they have absolutely no gumption about doing so (they REALLY REALLY don't think long enough term for that...)

If Chaos was ever depicted as being tyrannical rulers who work their people to death but are otherwise effective leaders... I'd buy it...

But the biggest compliment you gave them is: "Most of chaos doesn't care... though a few of them do... you can't even walk down the street without a life or death situation"...

Goodness... come to think of it what kind of fertility treatments is chaos giving their people?

[Grim Portent]

Your forgetting it isn't JUST Psychopaths.

Chaos is rewarded for gathering souls... even if that soul is from the populous... and are often given incredible unplayable debt.

Chaos champions do not owe anyone souls nor use them for anything apart from rare sorcerous rituals, nor do they get rewarded for killing slaves. They actively protect what belongs to them, be it a suit of terminator armour or ten million slave warriors. If someone else takes what's yours, you have to kill them or risk being ganged up on by those who see you as weak. If you fail to keep your property safe from others, and fail to avenge it when someone damages it, everyone around you will smell blood in the water and start looking at you as prey.

Obviously this protection does not extend to everyone who is a slave to chaos, the Night Lords semi-regularly murder their slaves for fun, at a rate of 1 or 2 every few months, but they also punish slaves who kill others, chastise any of their own kind who kill too many or too often.

[MetalSlimeHunt]

The implausibility of it isn't much of a counterargument due to the authorial power of Grimdark. Think of a place like Mogadishu in the 90s. Even worse then than it is now. Just going outside could easily get you killed. There's no clear rule of law besides the bands of men with the most kill. But most people aren't and can't get involved in that and the world keeps turning, if on a squeaky rusted out wheel. Guys with guns still gotta eat.
 
Just make it 20% worse, add daemons, and make it go on forever and BAM, 40k pops out.

[Neonivek]

Think of a place like Mogadishu in the 90s

Oddly enough that place was quite a bit more stable then it is often depicted. Assuming I am thinking of that city in China where basically it was a law deadzone and even the police wouldn't go there. But maybe I should actually take the 2 seconds to look it up.

[MetalSlimeHunt]

You should, because that's Kowloon. Well, 2 square km of Kowloon. Mogadishu is the """"""""""""""capital""""""""""""" of Somalia.

[Tack]

Well say what you like about the fine tuning of chaos's economy, but the forgeworlds still do pump stuff out.
Which means they require labor, and that labor requires food. Maybe they're all cannibals, or possessed by daemons. But at the end of the day there's plenty of rhinos and predators being pumped out in addition to the standard daemonforge nasties.

[MetalSlimeHunt]

Hey, forge worlds grow plenty of food! Do you have any idea how many humans you can feed with a 50 km2 tank of algae? Especially if you throw the corpses in, all those carbons really enhance the growth period.

[spazyak]

Hey, forge worlds grow plenty of food! Do you have any idea how many humans you can feed with a 50 km2 tank of algae? Especially if you throw the corpses in, all those carbons really enhance the growth period.

Mmhmmm you can just taste those green algea chips, so soylient and crunchy in your mouth!

[Urist McScoopbeard]

Also isn't it implied/outright stated that chaos itself just kind of sustains life? Partly by just keeping stuff alive, but also partly by time dilation? Doesn't time in the eye/warp, beside being whacky and spitting you out at random points, generally pass slower than in the imperium?

[spazyak]

Also isn't it implied/outright stated that chaos itself just kind of sustains life? Partly by just keeping stuff alive, but also partly by time dilation? Doesn't time in the eye/warp, beside being whacky and spitting you out at random points, generally pass slower than in the imperium?

Yeah, one example I can think of directly right now is the description of the fallen in the dark angel codex who are listed as falling out of the warp randomly, some being just at the great crusade and horus heresy just days and weeks from when they alleared, others feeling years go by.

[MetalSlimeHunt]

It passes with no consistency at all. The tides of the warp usually (usually) only go forward, but the speed at which it flows is inconsistent. There will be warbands from the Horus Heresy coming out of the Eye long after the Nids have eaten the galaxy, thinking it's only been days since the Siege of Terra ended.

[Urist McScoopbeard]

Hmmm, sounds like heresy.

[nenjin]

Re: Chaos world populations.

There was a time when in the fiction Chaos wasn't all just RAWR RAPE SMASH SACRIFICE IMPERIAL WORLDS. In some fiction Chaos has its own multitude of existences, adventures, all with that peculiar Chaos feel. Which is why I like Daemon World so much. There's dozens of different population groups, from Slaaneshi cultists to sort of unaligned barbarians living in the mountains that view the powers of Chaos through the lens of tribes people, despite living on a daemon world in the Maelstrom. There's champions of Chaos living on the planet but they're not just endlessly slaughtering the population. In the case of the Slaanesh worshipers, they cultivate and breed new adherents to the faith so Slaanesh's temples are always filled with people getting weird with it.

It all does eventually culminate in an apocalyptic struggle between different powers of Chaos but the better half of the book is just laying out how life ebbs and flows on a Chaos world just like every where else. Current fiction gives too much time to Chaos rending and pillaging the galaxy because, I think, GWS sees it as the only safe venue to talk about Chaos for the most part. Gotta have a Space Marine in there somewhere to keep things morally grounded or it starts to look like snuff fiction, ya know? I still miss the old Rogue Trader/Realms of Chaos GWS though. When they were willing to entertain more fiction on the dark side of things without it just devolving into a gratuitous horror show. The same thing I like about Imperial fiction, good world building, is just as satisfying when it's done for Chaos.