Brindle Grub

“Did you read that description of the grubs?” I said as I wiped my foot on a cinderblock. I could barely feel the bottom of my soles. The sides of my foot were still as sensitive as ever. “We can’t just leave corpses lying around. Even their own corpses. Not in this part of the dungeon. From now on, we do our best to leave as little behind as possible.”^[1]

Brindle Grubs are the janitor mob of the Second Floor. One to fifteen Brindle Grubs are spawned every time a corpse is created until their numbers cap out at 5,000 per quadrant. Destroying corpses prevents Brindle Grubs from leveling up but not from spawning, and eventually causes hoards of the mob to swarm crawlers, thus chasing crawlers out of otherwise secured neighborhoods.^[2]

Subtypes

Brindle Grub

Brindle Grub. Level 2.

Have you ever found a dead, bloated, and decomposing body? Have ya poked it with a stick just to see what would wiggle out? Perhaps rubbed it with your bare foot? You know you’ve wanted to.

Well, wonder no more. Here on the second floor, rats are yesterday’s news. Brindle Grubs are now all the rage, and janitor duty falls unto them. The more monsters you kill in an area, the more the grubs eat. The more the grubs eat, the bigger they get. Once you start finding them in the pupa stage, you best move on. Grubs are easy to kill. Their older siblings are not.^[3]

At level 2, Brindle Grubs are fuzzy, fat, cat-sized worms with tortoiseshell-like black and brown coloring. They move slowly, make pitiful squeaking noises, and their squishy innards explode into white goo on impact. They have no special attacks and are easy to kill, but killing them does not yield much experience.^[4] Their corpses drop Brindle Grub Hemolymph, a type of alchemy material.^[4]

Cow-Tailed Brindle Grub

Cow-Tailed Brindle Grub. Level 3.

The final form before they hit the pupa stage, the Cow-Tailed Brindle Grub is finally able to defend itself, kind of like the way a toddler holding a plastic baseball bat is able to defend himself.^[5]

Level 3 Grubs are roughly twice as large as Brindle Grubs, and armed with "long, pointed tails that they whipped ineffectively."^[5]

Pupa Stage

Grub – Pupa Stage.^[6]

The grub pupae are wet, pulsating sacs and roughly the size of a human standing up; inside the sacs, red and yellow lights flash.^[7] A countdown timer (of at least 10 hours) appears above the mob and in the mobs' icon.^[8] When the countdown reaches zero, the Brindle Grub emerges as a Brindled Vespa. If the sac is destroyed before the timer expires, then "uncooked" human-sized creatures "vomit" from the sac and begin convulsing.^[7]

Brindled Vespa

The Brindled Vespa stage looks like a hornet that spit acid globs of white goo. The System AI determines that the proliferation of the mob is too high and halves the number on the floor. Additionally, the Brindle Grubs now only have a 50% chance of proceeding to the Pupa stage. ^[9]

Trivia

The Rage Elemental on the Second Floor will disappear after consuming 666 souls. It tears through thousands of the grubs but does not disappear, indicating that the grubs may not have souls. ^[8]

References