Symbiote: A Bonding Experience

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. What it shows you, only you see.
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.

Note: I highly recommend shaders with this mod! (ITRP works best)

How it works/FAQ
Controls (all rebindable)
Key Action
X Radial menu: commands (Protect Me / Hunt / Hide) + the Status panel (bottom node)
B Feed the symbiote (hold meat in either hand)
G Living Armor on/off
R Tendril Yank: pull enemies in, or launch yourself
C Wall Cling
U Consume: grab and eat the nearest creature
K Apex Form
O Assign held item to a Symbiote Arm slot
L Furl / unfurl the mantle
N Symbiote build: Wall / bridge / staircase from blocks in its arm slots (look slightly up for staircase, straight ahead and slightly downward for bridge, and straight ahead centered for wall)
Understanding your symbiote
Open the radial (X) and pick the bottom node: the Status panel shows your strain, stage, mood, 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. It drains naturally through the day now, and a starving symbiote takes matters into its own hands.
Mood: New in 1.1. Content, Anxious, Coiled, or Grieving, driven by how you treat it and what you live through together. You feel it from the inside: the screen bleeds at the edges when it's wound tight, its voice warms or curdles, and a grieving symbiote goes quiet.
INTEGRATING: shown for ~20 minutes after a fresh bond while it settles in. It stays quiet through this window, and most of what it is (its senses, the yank, the mantle, its combat reflexes) arrives all at once when the window closes. It will still save your life from minute one. 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.
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, and will cause your symbiote to deal with it itself.
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.
Death doesn't free you
New in 1.1. Dying no longer ends the bond. The symbiote stays at the death point as a breathing mass, holding your inventory. Walk back and it rebonds on its own. Deaths it causes itself (consumption, rejection) and the void still leave nothing behind.
There is no cure
You cannot remove it. There is no item, ritual, or command that undoes the bond, and as of 1.1 death does not undo it either. The only way out: neglect it until the bond decays to nothing, and it will consume you at zero.

Physics Mod users: disable mob physics for symbiote:tendril_fx in Physics Mod's settings. Photosensitivity note: control takeovers and emergencies pulse full-screen border effects.

Discord link: https://discord.gg/EbNBAcDQGr