Minecraft Headcanons That Don't Really Matter

Hostile Mob Headcanons: Silverfish

The stronghold is dark. The stronghold is concealed death. Iron bars and black tunnels surround you in what seems to be an endless stone labyrinth, filled with skeletons and zombies and perhaps even spiders. But these things are familiar; you know how to fight them.

You check your inventory; you're running low on stone. Pickaxe in hand, you lean over to one wall and try to make this quick, breaking a few stone bricks to grab something, anything to help you traverse the End.

There's a scuttling sound. You get your precious stone bricks, but now, you're surrounding by bizarre creatures who tremble constantly, staring you down with brainless black eyes. They're crawling on top of you now, all of them, suffocating you, thin legs tracking up and down your arms, mandibles snapping at your ears. You try to scream, but you can't, you've been knocked back and there's a slim gray creature posed on top of your mouth. 

Your skin goes red. You're gone now, in a cloud of white smoke, inventory scattered across cracked gray stone.

Someday, future explorers will find your remains, and, as they have no need for bricks, wonder what happened to you. What foul beast vanquished this brave explorer? What was powerful enough to do such a thing?

The beasts you speak of are called silverfish.

...

- Silverfish are strange creatures. They are among the oldest species of arthropod in Minecraftia, and have been around since before the time of dinosaurs (or the Minecraft equivalent of dinosaurs).

- They're quite like angry land trilobites, actually, more than real-life silverfish.

- They are quite prone to diseases, so be sure to wash up after being attacked by silverfish.

- They flock to strongholds because the people who used to use them (be they illagers, villagers, players, what have you, it's a mystery) would bring food with them, and the arthropods would get into the supply. Nasty little rat expies.

- They're related to spiders, though not very closely. Spiders have been known to eat them.

- They have a colony system similar to termites or bees. The queen silverfish is the one who lays the eggs of all the younger silverfish (which, unlike most baby mobs and their real-life counterparts, don't even look much like their older siblings), the eggs are cared for by the "nurses" (older silverfish with specific jobs), the drones mate with the queen, several workers go out to gather food, and although nothing similar to honey is ever created, they're similar to bees to the point where the place where a silverfish colony lives is referred to as a hive.

- Queens live longer than workers and drones, but when she gets too old to lay eggs, she's put in an "arena" in the center of the hive and forced to fight with a newer, younger queen. The fight is planned about two months in advance by the workers, who choose a random female egg to be the new queen. Like with bees, a new queen-to-be is fed royal jelly to give her the queen body type. The chosen queen is raised separately from the other young silverfish, growing stronger and more powerful, and when she's ready to battle, workers gather around the unsuspecting old queen and force her to the arena, sort of like a cattle drive. If the old queen can't prepare herself fast enough, the new queen will kill her almost instantly, and she can invite several workers of her choosing to join her and eat the old queen's corpse. Silverfish are terrifying.

- Alternately, an old queen may find out about the new queen's uprising, be it by the way the workers are acting around a certain area or by walking in on a royal jelly feeding, but if she finds a soon-to-be-queen before the younger is ready, she will eat it. The workers don't even try to stop her, because if they do, they might lose their heads; the queen will go into a frenzy and pin the wannabe, then behave in a manner similar to a swarm of hungry piranhas, leaving nothing but the exoskeleton. She'll often end up eating royal jelly and bits of stone surrounding the new queen in the heat of the moment, so the workers back up so as not to be caught in the crossfire. This is one of the many reasons why silverfish do not make good pets.

- Inside groups of infested blocks are cleverly disguised tunnels, rooms, arenas, food supplies, and unhatched eggs. The queen's specific room is the largest, perhaps taking up an entire block. Small silverfish hives that are close together but separated by normal blocks are probably different parts of the same hive, with the normal blocks just being tunnels that happened to not be occupied at the time they were broken.

- Infested stone blocks are bigger than they look on the inside, perhaps as a result of magic, perhaps just the wonders of silverfish.

- Silverfish are very protective of each other and the hive, especially the current queen, so if you happen to break the walls of their home, they'll come for you. They recognize players as deadly threats, so it's no surprise when they come to the aid of a struck silverfish. They can detect another silverfish's specific hurt sound amongst the noises of a chaotic cave, and you'd better bet they'll come running.

- Silverfish are one of the simplest mobs in Minecraft, but they often do things that are shockingly intelligent. For example, if the current queen is bored, she'll call in several workers to come and perform intricate dances before her, which include the silverfish gathering in circles that become hexagon-shaped, conga lines, kaleidoscope-like formations, and shrieks that can only be described as singing. It's very entertaining.

- Small hives will sometimes merge into one larger hive. This expands the gene pool, but the queens will fight to see who gets to rule the hive. The loser will commonly die and be eaten, but sometimes, she'll escape and live as a weird-looking worker.

- The plural of silverfish is silverfish, although "You'll be sleeping with the silverfishes" is a popular expression among wandering traders.

- Silverfish wiggle constantly because that's just how they walk (moving their bodies to give their legs better access to the ground), but some have diseases that cause them to tremble and shake, even when standing in place.

- There has been spectulation that they evolved from trilobites.

- The bizarre pixels covering their bodies is fuzz, similar to the fur on a kiwi fruit. It's used for courtship displays in drones ("Pick me first! Pick me first!") and to keep warm in workers. The softness of a silverfish's fuzz will tell you if it's a queen or worker (queens being the softest and cleanest).

- Drones will do dances for queens to ensure that the queen stays near them more, as she'll often choose a favorite to spend the most time with. The "king" drone typically lives the longest of all drones.