Symbiote

Find an asteroid, bond. Try and live with it at your own risk.

Symbiote adds one creature to Minecraft: one that lives inside you. It protects you better than you can protect yourself. Symbiotes lie dormant in asteroids, waiting for a player to get close.

The entity has desires. Refusal causes stress, eventually forcing the symbiote to take what it wants.

There are 5 unique strains of symbiote, as follows:

Predator: Built to chase. Feeds on the hunt, but starves fast. Keep it fed.

Guardian: Protection is the game. Holds the lines, blocks anything and everything.

Shadow: Doesn't like the sun; night feeds it. Moves quicker in the night and sees even better.

Sculk: Hears the world move. Tracks their movements, hears their heartbeats.

Royal: Pure Apex. Pridefully the strongest, and it's not close. Fights for control more often than not.

Usage notice: Free to use in any modpack. Anything else, ask.

How it works/FAQ

Controls (all rebindable)

Understanding your symbiote

Open the radial (X) and pick the bottom node: the Status panel shows your strain, stage, and every meter. This explains most of the symbiote's behaviors.

• Bond: How deep it's rooted. Grows from feeding, fighting together, and time. Drives your STAGE. If it hits zero, it consumes you.
• Trust: How much it listens. Feed it, fulfill its requests, fight beside it.
• Stress: How wound up it is. Ignored requests and pain raise it; stressed symbiotes act out.
• Hunger: The fuel that keeps the symbiote going. A starving symbiote takes matters into its own hands.
• INTEGRATING: shown for ~20 minutes after a fresh bond while it settles in. Random misfires during this phase are normal.

Stage is not obedience

Two different dials, most common mix-up:

• Stage (Attached → Integrated → Cooperative → Dominant) comes from Bond. Higher stages = more power for you, more of the wheel for it. "Dominant" means that it is deeply bonded, not obedient.
• Helpfulness comes from Trust and Stress. A symbiote that ignores commands, refuses abilities, or acts on its own has LOW TRUST or HIGH STRESS, regardless of the stage. Feeding it, fulfilling its requests, and fighting beside it naturally calms and builds trust with the symbiote.

Feeding

Hold any raw or cooked meat and press B. It refuses when full. Rotten flesh counts as food for all strains except Royal. The royal strain finds carrion disgusting. Symbiote Biomass is concentrated symbiote food, fed the same way, but unobtainable in survival. It is currently vaulted content that may resurface later on.

It asks for things

Periodically, your symbiote will request things: meat, a kill, the deep underground, a hunt under the open night sky, or to be worn. Fulfilling these requests builds trust. Ignoring it builds stress, which causes your symbiote to act out.

When it takes control

Sometimes your keys stop answering. This is the mod working. Every hijack ends on its own. Sometimes the symbiote will control you and take you somewhere, dig down, or it might decide to look at something. 

There is no cure

You cannot remove it. There is no item, ritual, or command that undoes the bond currently. The only ways out: neglect it until the bond decays to nothing (it will consume you at zero), or by death. Which, at higher stages, will only become harder and harder.