The swarm is a form of highly negative energy created by this guy to keep the his creations on clockwork in check. The mission of the swarm is to harvest essence off entities that are grown on cradle (hence why dead bodies are left behind) and memorise their designs in order to replicate and fabricate more later on (explaining why they are numberless and powerful). However, the lords of the clockwork overthrown 'him' and took the power of the swarm for themselves while keeping their master locked inside the core. Each lord that taken a part of the swarm power mutated by the will of the swarm and turned into different beings. ( vanaduke->darkfire vanaduke ect.)

>The wiki
TIME OUT! Found the problem.

This game's lore is largely left up to speculation, and the wiki does a terrible job of documenting it. A lot of it is opinion, fanon or very vague statements rather than actual, game-derived lore. I can't think of any reliable sources of information on the swarm that actually occur in-game.

"By that logic, various monsters in the compounds are swarm-infected despite not obviously being them. This even includes bosses since bosses don't technically drop anything."

For some reason I knew as soon as I posted that someone would bring this up.

There are obvious exceptions, but as a general rule of thumb, your average enemy will drop items. Obviously some exceptions include but are not limited to: Black Kats that always spawn, bosses (technically you could consider the tokens and/or treasure boxes right after as a drop), Compound enemies for difficulty purposes, respawning enemies for obvious reasons, prestige mission enemies, and etc. But these are all for balance/difficulty purposes, rather than lore purposes.

That said, I say again, "Swarm-infected monsters don't drop items, unlike non-swarm-infected monsters."

But hey, that's just a guess. This is lore; quite honestly almost anything is possible.

The exact origin of the swarm versions of monsters isn't known afaik. I'm pretty sure someone just assumed they were infected and added that in.

The swarm zombies aren't called "Swarm-infected zombies", rather "Void Zombies". I would assume it is safer to say the swarm creates these monsters, not infect ones that already are alive.

Funny because zombies are already dead. :P

Anyway, most of the lore comes from modules and echo stones. There is a stone which says that the swarm/void consumes all. This makes it sound infectious.

>Parasthesia: I always figured that the swarm "consumes all" and then makes copies of what it has absorbed with it's swarm essence.
This is roughly my view of it.

The word "swarm," to me, implies that swarm creatures are not exactly once-non-swarm beings that have been corrupted, but rather elaborate shapes composed of a multitude of very small "swarm entities" which are controlled by a hivemind. This game's concept of swarm reminds me very much of Twilight beasts from LoZ:Twilight Princess - when you defeated them, they just kinda burst into little crystals or entities.

>Fangel: In the alpha squad moduals, we hear of one of the squad members becoming "infected", more or less.
I assume you're referring to Rulen "being enveloped in the shadows" as recorded by the final module. Might be an unpopular opinion, but this doesn't strike me as "being infected." An "infection" sounds more like something that enters a being and damages or destroys them from the inside. Being "enveloped" sounds more like drowning - having access to life cut off externally.

Further, if it were supposed to be an infection, like a fast-acting plague, it seems to me that it would not be contained to only the unknown passages, even if the knights were immune.

Gremlin: Hey, me and my buddies, *Points towards a lichen, a wolver, a lumber, and a zombie* would like a haircut.

Bechamel: Half of you don't even have hair...

Zombie: JUST DO IT.

Bechamel: Uh, ok. *mischievious smile*

Lichen: I'll go first, can I have a buzz cu-

Bechamel: *Randomly splashes everyone with black dye with purple sploches too."

Gremlin: WHAT HAVE YOU DONE?!? ONLY THE LUMBER WANTED TO BE DYED BLACK!

Bechamel: At least I got a fifth of the orders right. Now that you are all black, why don't you go into a tiny clockworks and use a defect cloning machine that will break and spawn infinite of you who will use more defect cloning machines to spawn infinite of you and also create somehow invincible turrets and seeds with some defect extra parts?

Gremlin: Great idea, why didn't we think of that earlier?

Wolver: Yeah!

Lichen: I agree.

Zombie: So brilliant.

Lumber: Can I change my arm to a axe when we clone?

Gremlin: Sure.

Bechamel: That was sarcasam...

Gremlin: Who cares? The idea is still amazing, we will do this right away! /everyone leaves

Bechamel: ...Either they are also using sarcasam or are just plain stupid.