Daddy Long Legs



Daddy Long Legs, or DLLs for short, are a significant mid-game threat, and the main obstacle faced throughout The Leg and Underhang. They are large, tanky, voracious and dangerous, but blind - great caution must be taken to navigate around them. The Brother Long Legs are their smaller counterparts.

Daddy Long Legs
Daddy long legs are large, black bulbous masses, with several blue-tipped tentacles extending from their core, accented with blue X shapes. The number of cores and tentacles they have may vary.



Brown Daddy Long Legs
The brown daddy long legs is encountered only as Hunter in Garbage Wastes, in the brother long legs arena unlock room. Other than the brown colouration and lack of aggression towards brother long legs, it is identical to normal daddy long legs.

Proto Daddy Long Legs
Found exclusively in Unfortunate Development, Proto Daddy Long Legs are a stationary threat infesting the walls in the area. They are considered hazards rather than creatures (and as such are unkillable), nor are they mobile, but can still grab onto the player with their stubby tentacles should they stray too close - and are near inescapable once they've latched onto you. The long tentacles connecting patches of proto-growth can be safely grabbed onto like poles, and used to propel oneself through zero-gravity.

Interestingly, proto-daddies also have the ability to hear and will emit circular particles indicating they heard something.

Combat
As daddy long legs have absurd amounts of health, combat is very rarely a viable strategy against them. Spears can be used to disable their tentacles and, once all of them have been disabled they will no longer be able to move, but this is time consuming, alerts them to your current location when hit, and they can still consume anything that comes near their core when completely disabled, thus it is not 100% safe. They can be killed instantly with one hit to the core with an explosive spear, but these are near impossible to come by in the regions they are found in and their tentacles will often block it.

Stealth
Navigating around daddy long legs is your primary method of dealing with them. The Leg, Underhang and Five Pebbles all have numerous tunnels which you can use to your advantage, but be careful - daddy long legs, whilst too big to squeeze their cores into tunnels, can still root around inside them with their tentacles. Daddy long legs are very noise-motivated and will nearly always immediately move to investigate the source of any noise they hear; when they hear something, their core will emit particles in the direction of the sound. Throwing rocks and spears against walls, and cherrybombs will all attract them, but so will the sound of slugcat running, jumping, hitting the ground and using a grappling worm.

Evasion
Directly running away from Daddy Long Legs once you are on its radar is not recommended as this tends to produce more sound, therefore making it even easier for it to track you. Additionally, they are fast and large, making it all to easy for them to catch up with you. Furthermore, just moving into another room does not guarantee your safety as they are in fact capable of moving through connection pipes and will do so if they suspect you have gone through one. Daddy long legs also do not lose interest easily and will gladly sit around in the same spot for several minutes if that's where it last heard you. If a daddy long legs is onto you, try finding a secure tunnel with multiple entrances to hide out in, and throwing a rock or spear out of it to lure the daddy long legs away.

Trivia

 * Daddy long legs are one of the 10 backer-created creatures.
 * Loud noises produced by explosions or thunder seem to temporarily deafen daddy long legs.
 * An unreliable, but somewhat amusing method of evading a daddy long legs is by using a grappling worm to restrain them.
 * Daddy long legs were accidentally created by Five Pebbles in an experiment, growing quickly out of hand shortly after.
 * Daddy long legs are able to consume nearly every creature in the game short of the very largest (e.g. Leviathans), unlike brother long legs, who are too small to absorb larger creatures (e.g. Vultures and Green Lizards).
 * Daddy long legs are, by default, aggressive towards brother long legs and will consume them.


 * Lizards, Scavengers, and other creatures seem to regard the daddy long legs as significant threats, and will tend to run away from them.
 * Developer commentary on the AI and design of daddy long legs can be found here.