#one of these days i wanna provide a comprehensive look into their life cycles bc its very fun for me to think abt :]

[definitelynotshouting]

hi so i've been turning hunger au in my mind again and like. you've mentioned that watcher larva are stupid easy to kill but like. how easy? could they survive their player cocoon respawning? if they can, what's the line? a particularly rough respawn like a hardcore death? a virus? someone specifically fucking around in their code? could a player theoretically be rescued from the watchers with a larva in their code and get it removed without causing the player serious damage? like. is their de-wormer but for watchers in your code? i dunno you've said that the young tend to be fragile and die super easily but i don't have a good enough grasp on the power scale to really understand How Fragile they are

OHHHH THIS IS SUCH AN EXCELLENT QUESTION!!!! Im happy to provide more context!!!

So Watcher larvae cannot survive a respawn of their Player hosts-- even one is enough to destroy them early on, although after a certain point the larva has beefed itself up on Player code to survive maybe.. one, two deaths at most (this is a previously established fact-- the larval stage is the only point in their species' life cycle that can physically "eat" and utilize code). They are super duper fragile, which is why hosts are looked after and protected so obsessively.

The tiny containment area Player!Grian was left in once he became a host is not an atypical method of doling out that protection-- although the Watchers kept an especially close eye on him since he was harboring such a vital experiment. They made sure he had adequate food to avoid starving, and diverted dangerous mobs away from the site he was stuck in so a stray creeper or zombie wouldnt just sneak in and kill him. He was kept under literally 24/7 surveillance in order to keep the larva within him safe, and every action he took was under constant scrutiny in case it was deemed too dangerous to allow.

TL;DR: if a Player became a host and then died/triggered a respawn, that would absolutely kill the larva inside them. But about ⅔ of their way through development (so anywhere between 8-10 months) the larva could survive a few respawns provided the host doesn't go through code-death; the other side of that however is at that stage of development the Player host has so many holes chewed in their code that they also might not survive a respawn, so it's sort of a lose-lose situation once enough time passes