I fell into a Jokaero rabbit hole at about 1am on a Tuesday. It started with the Imperial Agents datasheet — I was looking at the Digital Weapons enhancement, the one where you roll three dice and each 4+ does a mortal wound — and I noticed the flavour text mentions they’re “concealed in precious items of jewellery.” Ring-lasers. I vaguely remembered ring-lasers from somewhere, maybe a White Dwarf from the early 2000s, and twenty minutes later I was reading about a species of orange-furred techno-savant apes who build starships out of garbage and have apparently existed since before the Eldar.
Three hours after that I was still going. The Jokaero are one of those corners of 40k lore where you keep pulling on a thread and it just doesn’t stop.
Made in Desperation
The Jokaero were created by the Old Ones during the War in Heaven, roughly sixty million years before the current 40k timeline. That’s the same era that produced the Eldar, the Krork (ancestors of the Orks), and the Rashan and K’Nib — species most players have never even heard of. The Old Ones were fighting a losing war against the C’tan and the Necrons, and their response was to keep engineering new species to throw at the problem.
But here’s what gets me about the Jokaero specifically. The Krork were weapons. Massive, brutal, built for war. The Eldar were soldiers and psykers, designed to fight in the Warp as much as in realspace. The Jokaero were neither. They were builders. Fixers. The Old Ones didn’t create them to win the war. They created them to make sure something would survive it.
When the Enslaver Plague finally broke through and the Old Ones’ Webway network collapsed, the Old Ones were finished. Their empire shattered, their other creations scattered. But the Jokaero were never meant to hold a line or close a breach. They were meant to endure. Scavenge. Build whatever they needed to keep breathing for one more day. Sixty million years later, they’re still doing exactly that, drifting through the galaxy in family groups of about twelve, raiding lone power stations and mining vessels for parts, building things nobody understands from scraps nobody else wants.
The Imperium classifies them as xenos vermin. The Ordo Xenos occasionally captures one and calls it a resource. Neither description is wrong, exactly, but neither one gets close to what the Jokaero actually are: the last functioning product of the most advanced civilisation the galaxy has ever known, still running their original programming sixty million years after the warranty expired.
The Intelligence Problem
Nobody in the Imperium can agree on whether the Jokaero are intelligent. And I mean nobody. Inquisitors have debated this. Tech-priests have debated this. The official position seems to be “unclear” and honestly I’m not sure the lore itself has decided.
On one hand, they have no known language. No written communication. No culture that anyone has been able to identify. No religion, no art (well, except light-sculptures, but we’ll get to those), no social structure beyond family groupings led by a matriarch or patriarch. Their only observable motivation is survival. They build technology the way a spider builds a web — instinctively, perfectly, without any apparent understanding of why it works.
On the other hand, they coordinate complex raids. They pick targets carefully. When captured, they invariably build something that lets them escape, which suggests planning, not instinct. A spider doesn’t engineer a lockpick. And in the Blackstone Fortress game, Jokaero who arrived at the station called Precipice immediately set up as traders, medics, and craftsmen — adapting to an entirely new social and economic context in what seems like days.
Then there’s the Artemorra thing. The third edition Necron Codex states that the Jokaero have a name for the C’tan known as the Deceiver: they call him “Artemorra.” A species with no language has a name for one of the oldest beings in the galaxy. I’ve never found a good explanation for this. It might be a retcon. It might be an author oversight. Or it might mean the Jokaero understand a lot more than they let on, and the whole “no language, no intelligence” classification is the Imperium being the Imperium — wrong about aliens because it never bothered to check.
Actually, hold on. I want to come back to the instinct argument for a second, because I’m not sure I disagree with it entirely. Maybe the Jokaero really are running on genetic programming from the Old Ones. Maybe their ability to build a lascannon from a pile of scrap is no more “intelligent” than a bird knowing how to build a nest. The Old Ones were capable of encoding absurdly complex behaviours into species at the genetic level — they did it with the Krork too. It’s possible the Jokaero are the most sophisticated biological machines ever created, and that’s all they are. I don’t fully buy it, but I can see the argument. The truth is probably somewhere in the gap between “instinct” and “genius” that human categories don’t have a word for.
Rings, Force Fields, and Ships That Fold
So what do they actually build? The famous answer is Digital Weapons — or digi-weapons, which is a name I’ve always loved because it has nothing to do with computers. “Digital” as in fingers. Digits. They’re weapons built into rings, and the best ones pack the firepower of an Inferno Pistol into something you could wear to a formal dinner. Rogue Traders, Inquisitors, and Imperial nobles pay obscene amounts for them. Skitarii Alphas carry them. Erasmus Tycho of the Blood Angels had a whole gauntlet of them called the Dead Man’s Hand.
But the digi-weapons are the least interesting thing they make. Give a working group of Jokaero a pile of battered machinery — broken, half-corroded, doesn’t matter — and they’ll build you a starship. Or a lascannon. Or a food synthesiser. Or something nobody has ever seen before that does something nobody can explain. They never build the same thing twice.
Their force field technology is bizarre. Jokaero Defence Orbs are modified Imperial force field emitters that work on principles similar to Gellar Fields — the same technology that protects starships from daemons in the Warp. The Ordo Malleus in the Calixis Sector apparently prizes these things enormously, because a pocket-sized anti-daemon shield is exactly the kind of gear you want when your day job is hunting manifestations of the Ruinous Powers.
And then there are the ships. Jokaero starships look like nothing else in the galaxy — open-structured lattices shaped like polyhedrons, completely exposed to the void. No hull in any conventional sense. The structure itself is the engine: it draws on what the lore calls “unseen power-currents” running through the galaxy, channelling them the way a Force Weapon channels psychic energy. The Jokaero navigate by physically reshaping their ship mid-flight, altering its relationship with these galactic currents.
Data traders have noted the structural similarity between these lattice-ships and the Blackstone Fortresses — the ancient superweapons that predate the Imperium by millions of years and are themselves almost certainly Old Ones tech. If both were made by the same civilisation, it would mean the same species that built the most powerful weapons in the galaxy also built an orange ape that could build smaller versions of them from junk.
The Mechanicus Should Be Terrified
The thing I keep coming back to is how the Jokaero relate to the Adeptus Mechanicus. The Mechanicus treats technology as sacred. Every piece of equipment is manufactured according to Standard Template Constructs, blessed by tech-priests, maintained through rituals that haven’t changed in millennia. Innovation is heresy. Understanding the machine is less important than venerating it. The quest for STCs is the Mechanicus’s holy grail — recover the original templates, replicate them perfectly, and human technology is restored to its golden age.
The Jokaero don’t have STCs. They don’t have templates, blueprints, or rituals. They don’t even have words for what they’re doing. They just… build. Instinctively. And what they build frequently surpasses what the Mechanicus can manage with all its accumulated dogma and ten thousand years of institutional knowledge. A Jokaero Weaponsmith attached to an Inquisitorial retinue will start modifying everyone’s gear immediately — sometimes improving a lascannon beyond anything the Mechanicus could achieve, sometimes just adding decorative knotwork to the barrel for no apparent reason.
The frustration this causes Inquisitorial agents is documented in the lore and it makes me laugh every time. Imagine being a Scion of the Imperium and watching a space monkey rewire your sanctified bolter because it “felt right.”
So yeah, the Jokaero. One model. One. Games Workshop made a single Jokaero Weaponsmith in finecast resin back in 2011 for the Grey Knights Codex and that was basically it. You could run them as Inquisitorial henchmen for a while, and during 5th edition someone worked out you could take fifty-four of them in a single army list, each potentially firing a lascannon. Space monkey gun line. The model’s still technically available but it’s one of those finecast relics you buy knowing you’ll spend an hour scraping mould lines.
They showed up again in the Blackstone Fortress board game — not as a playable character but as NPCs who ran a trading post aboard the station. The Jokaero ship was the first to arrive at Precipice when the Seventh Blackstone Fortress appeared, and they set up shop before anyone else even finished docking. One particular Jokaero, dubbed “The Tinkerer” by the human explorers, was found deep inside the Fortress itself, working on some inscrutable device that the explorers had to defend while he finished.
I find it quietly moving that the Jokaero keep showing up at Blackstone Fortresses. If both were made by the Old Ones, there might be something like recognition going on — an echo of sixty-million-year-old programming drawing them back to their creators’ work. Or maybe they just smelled good scrap. With the Jokaero, you can never quite tell.
What We Don’t Talk About
There’s an odd detail in the lore that I think gets overlooked. The Jokaero produce light-sculptures — described as “an exotic form of alien art.” Art. From a species with no culture. No language. No motivation beyond survival. A species that’s supposed to be running on pure instinct, building things because their genes tell them to, suddenly makes art.
If there’s a better argument that the Jokaero are fully sapient and the Imperium just can’t be bothered to figure it out, I haven’t found one. Although I suppose you could argue the light-sculptures serve some survival function nobody has identified yet, the way a bowerbird decorates its nest to attract a mate. Maybe. But a bowerbird doesn’t also build force fields and warp-capable starships.
The Jokaero have been in 40k since the original Rogue Trader rulebook in 1987. Back then they were attributed to the Slann — an older version of the Old Ones concept — and they were the canonical source of Digital Weapons. Almost forty years later, they’re still the source of Digital Weapons, they’ve still got one model, and most players couldn’t tell you what they are. Meanwhile, every Inquisitor with an Ordo Xenos badge and a flexible attitude toward alien collaboration is still hunting for one to add to their retinue, and every Jokaero in the galaxy is still doing exactly what the Old Ones built them to do — surviving, building, and quietly making the rest of the galaxy look like amateurs.
