PowerRankings

Ranked on the record, class printedseries i · later series

Classes,MisreadThe SCP Foundation power ranking

Every other franchise on this site publishes a number and leaves you to work out that it is not a power ranking. The Foundation does the work for you. Its object classes sort anomalies by how difficult they are to contain, the documentation states outright that Keter does not mean dangerous, and the deciding question is a thought experiment about a box: put the thing in one and see whether it stays. Then everybody reads the classes as a threat ladder anyway. What ranks an entry here is what its own file records.

The short answer

SCP-914 is Safe, and it can turn almost any object into almost any other object. SCP-999 is Safe, and it is a friendly orange slime that makes people happy. Safe does not mean weak — it means the box holds. Meanwhile SCP-055 is Keter and cannot be ranked at all, because nobody can retain what it is for long enough to describe it. A classification that puts a transmutation engine and a therapy animal in the same bracket is not measuring power, and it never claimed to.

Continuity

EvidenceCrowdΔ
Tier 00 · not on the scale

The box holds nothing describable

Anomalies whose own documentation cannot hold still. Where the record exists but refuses to stay legible, there is nothing here to weigh, and saying so is more useful than guessing.

00.1––·

SCP-055Keter — series I

Series InovelcontestedOff-scale

The one entry on this site that defeats the method rather than testing it. Its documented property is that nobody retains what it is: personnel can record facts about what it is not, and an extensive log of observations sits on file — the notes, sketches and recordings all persist. What fails is the reader: the description leaks back out of whoever takes it in, so the data is recorded and cannot be studied. So there is no feat to weigh, no capability to compare, and the only honest thing a ranking can do is print the gap where the evidence should be. It is filed Keter, which under the Foundation's own rule means the box does not reliably hold it — a statement about containment that tells a reader nothing at all about power.

Tier 01 · apex

Ranked on the logs, not the letter

Ranked on capability recorded in test logs, incident reports and interviews rather than on the class stamped at the head of the file. Three are filed Keter, two are Safe, and one is Thaumiel — a spread that would be meaningless if the bracket were measuring what people read it as measuring.

01––·

SCP-343Safe — series I

Series Inovelcontested

It says it made the universe, and the file does not argue. Staff call it God. Asked for proof it walked through the wall of its chamber and came back with a hamburger; on a later visit the bare cell had furnished itself in Old English style and read as many times larger inside than out. The description credits it with apparent omnipotence, and the containment section states plainly that further precautions are unnecessary/impossible — it is detained willingly, because containment has proved impossible. It is filed Safe. Any other page here would owe you a paragraph explaining why its strongest entry carries the gentlest label. This one needs only the definition: the box holds, because the thing inside has agreed to stay in it.

02––·

SCP-3812Keter — later series

Later seriesnovelcontested

The file opens by declaring a Level 13 existential threat and admitting the object is only partially contained. What it does is alter reality to remove the cell rather than escape it, and the Foundation's own instruments are the argument: Hume equipment cannot return a figure for it, which the attached memo reads as either a value past the scale or a mechanism the scale does not describe. Ranked second and not first because the record's strongest claims are about narrative layers rather than about anything it was seen to do — enormous, and argued at a remove.

03––·

SCP-2000Thaumiel — later series

Later seriesnovel

A facility built to restart the human species. After an extinction-level event it manufactures people, rebuilds infrastructure and edits the surviving record so that nobody afterwards knows it happened. Nothing else in this setting operates at that scale, and its class is Thaumiel — a bracket reserved for anomalies the Foundation uses to contain other anomalies — a heading that means useful. The most consequential object in the setting is filed under the bracket for tools.

04––·

SCP-2317Keter — later series

Later seriesnovel

Six of the seven chains are already gone. Behind a wooden door is a hundred-kilometre chamber holding a humanlike thing of immense proportions, anchored by chains made from the bones of something similar, and each rupture so far has been followed by a worse event in this world than the one before. The remaining chain is the last of them, and failure is documented as an XK-class end-of-the-world scenario. The daily ritual performed against it is conceded at the top clearance level to do nothing — it is kept up for morale. A countdown with a stated end and an admitted placebo is a strange thing to file under the same word as a staircase.

05––·

SCP-682Keter — series I

Series Inovel
Kills

The Foundation has tried to destroy it repeatedly and written down every attempt, which makes it the best-evidenced entry on this page: the record is a series of documented failures by an organisation with unusual resources. It has been seen moving and speaking with its body 87 per cent destroyed or rotted, and it adapts to whatever nearly worked last time. Durability is not capability, though: nothing has removed it, and it has not remade anything either.

06––·

SCP-914Safe — series I

Series Inovel

Put an object in one end, choose a setting, and take a different object out of the other. The settings run from Rough to Very Fine and the outputs are documented across a long test log, which is why this sits on evidence rather than on reputation — the record is an experimental series, not an assertion. It is filed Safe. That is correct and it is the whole argument of this page: a machine that transmutes matter to order is trivially contained, because it is a large clockwork device in a room that does nothing whatsoever until somebody turns the knob.

Tier 02 · the greats

Reliably lethal, reliably contained

The famous ones. What each of them does is understood well enough to be written down, which is exactly why containment is routine and the class sits mid-range. A thing can be perfectly easy to describe and still kill everyone who meets it.

07––·

SCP-106Keter — series I

Series Inovel

It passes through solid matter, corrodes what it touches, and takes people into a space of its own that they do not come back from. Containment requires an arrangement rather than a wall, which is precisely the condition Keter describes. The effect is also narrow — enormously difficult to hold, and one thing done to one person at a time.

08––·

SCP-076-2Keter — series I

Series Inovel

A humanoid sealed inside a ten-thousand-year-old stone cube, which revives some time after each death and comes out fighting. The file credits it with strength and speed far past a person's, materialised blades drawn from a rift it opens itself, and survival of injuries that should end the argument. What keeps it here rather than higher is the shape of the threat: it is a combatant, and the containment answer has always been to shut the box again. Casualty figures are expunged, so what the record actually supports is that people die and the number is withheld.

09––·

SCP-2935Keter — later series

Later seriesnovelcontested

Underneath a cemetery in Indiana is a cave, and through the cave is a copy of the modern world in which everything alive is already dead. Not damaged, not depopulated: a duplicate Earth, complete, with every biological thing in it a corpse. The placement is awkward and deliberate. No mechanism is described, nothing is depicted doing it, and the anomaly is a place rather than an actor — but the scale of what the file records as having already happened there is larger than anything ranked above it has been seen to do.

10––·

SCP-096Euclid — series I

Series Inovel

Seeing its face — in person, in a photograph, in a frame of film — starts a pursuit that ends in the viewer's death regardless of distance or obstacle. The trigger is what makes the class Euclid rather than Keter: the containment problem is a documented condition with a documented remedy, which is do not let anybody look. An effect this reliable and this easy to state is a management problem, not an unsolved one. Put in a cell with the entity ranked fifth it lasted twenty-seven hours, came out severely wounded, and afterwards would turn away from it screaming — the one recorded case of this thing declining to pursue.

11––·

SCP-035Keter — series I

Series Inovel

A porcelain mask that talks, persuades, and rots whatever it touches. The fluid seeping from its eyes and mouth decays material down to more of itself, and a person who puts it on stops being the one making decisions while their body fails around the mask. Its own appearance edits the record: when the face changes from comedy to tragedy, every existing photograph and drawing of it changes to match. That last property is the reason for the placement — an object that rewrites documentation is a direct problem for a page built out of documentation.

12––·

SCP-049Euclid — series I

Series Inovel

It believes it is treating a disease nobody else can detect, and the treatment kills the patient and reanimates the body. What earns the placement is not force but conviction plus contact: the effect requires touch and produces a compliant result every time. Lethal at arm's length, and a scheduling problem at any distance greater than that.

13––·

SCP-953Keter — series I

Series Inovel

A red fox whose spine divides into nine tails, able to take other shapes and generally choosing a human one. Some vulpine feature always survives the disguise, which is how it gets caught, and it hides the tails when it can. Ranked here on method rather than magnitude: it kills selectively and by approach rather than by force, and it is one of the very few things on this page whose containment problem is that it can walk out looking like somebody who works there.

14––·

SCP-939Keter — series I

Series Inovel

Pack predators, red and translucent, that hunt by imitating human speech in the voices of prior victims — and the file records specimens doing it for victims they were never present to hear. They are quick, climb well, and are effective enough in a corridor that the containment procedures read like a hostage protocol. The ranking is set by the one time they were tested against something above them: both instances refused to attack, went on repeating their borrowed call, and were devoured. A predator whose whole method is the ambush has nothing left when the thing it meets is not listening.

15––·

SCP-173Euclid — series I

Series Inovel

The first article the site ever published, and the reason the format looks the way it does. It moves only when unobserved and kills by breaking the neck, so containment is a rota of people not blinking at the same time. It is fifteenth here and it is the most famous object in the setting, which is a gap worth noticing: influence and capability are different quantities, and this page can only rank one of them.

Tier 03 · where the class stops meaning anything

Nothing down here is a fight

The bracket and the record come apart most visibly at the bottom, and not because these are weak. Their capability is real and simply is not violence, which the ladder above has no column for.

16––·

SCP-500Safe — series I

Series Inovel

Forty-seven red pills in a plastic can. One of them, swallowed, cures the taker of every disease they have inside two hours, and attempts to synthesise more have all failed — so the supply is finite, decreasing, and irreplaceable. Nothing on this page is more valuable and nothing is less able to do anything to anybody. It is filed Safe, which is right, and it sits down here rather than nowhere because a ladder that cannot place the single most useful object in the setting is telling you something about the ladder.

17––·

SCP-179Thaumiel — series I

Series Inovelcontested

A humanoid figure holding station forty thousand kilometres off the sun's south pole, not orbiting it, apparently turning with the galaxy instead. It has been watched for forty-three years and it watches back — outward, at things arriving. The classification was changed from Safe to Thaumiel, which is the Foundation conceding in its own filing system that this is an asset rather than a specimen. It cannot be reached, moved or contained by anybody, and it is bracketed as equipment.

18––·

SCP-3008Euclid — later series

Later seriesnovel

Walk in through the front doors of the shop, lose sight of them, and the way back stops existing. What is inside is a retail floor without a far wall, and the people trapped in it have built settlements and fortifications — against the staff. Humanoid instances that pass for shop employees by day turn violent towards everything alive at night, which is what the walls are for. Fourteen people have got out since containment began, so it is not quite the closed box it is usually described as.

19––·

SCP-087Euclid — series I

Series Inovel

Thirteen steps, a platform, a half-turn, and thirteen more, for as far down as anyone has been willing to go. Its own design holds a descending figure to about a flight and a half of vision, and a brighter lamp does not buy more: anything above seventy-five watts has the excess absorbed. What the descent produces is a voice below and the sense of company. There have been four explorations and there will be no more — the result of the fourth is expunged and access is now closed. Nineteenth on a page about power for a stairwell, and it earns that on a documented distance that does not end.

20––·

SCP-999Safe — series I

Series Inovel

An orange gelatinous mass that induces happiness on contact and has been documented easing psychological damage in personnel. During an emergency lockdown it is shut in its pen for its own protection, which is the file treating it as a thing to keep safe rather than a thing to keep in. It shares a class with the transmutation engine ranked sixth, and the two of them together are the clearest demonstration available that the bracket is a statement about boxes: both are easy to keep, and they have nothing else whatsoever in common.

Nothing in that filter. Try Everything.