Rock Puncher

The Rock Puncher is a large, aggressive species of Fauna.

Appearance
The Rock Puncher has a bulky, armoured body. It has six articulated feet and two arms at the front. The head shows four, orange eyes at the front and and a pair of mandibles directly underneath. Its body ends in a small, short, shrimp-like tail.

Attached to the arms are two large club-like extremities, presumably used to deliver powerful strikes against hard objects.

The Rock Puncher's underside is gray with a green shade while its back is yellow with red patterns. Its arms and legs also share the similar patterns, with their tips being dark brown in color.

Behavior
Rock Punchers are slow moving, aggressive crustacean-like creatures. They move along the sea floor until approached by the player. At such a time, they will begin following the player, and will even occasionally jump if the player swims above them. They can be distracted by Rockgrubs, which are their main prey item.

Despite its relatively small size in comparison to many predators, the Rock Punchers' phenomenal strength and tough exoskeleton protect it from all mid-sized predators, leaving it vulnerable only to predators in the Leviathan class.

Design
The Rock Puncher is heavily inspired by crustaceans of the order Stomatopoda, the mantis shrimps. Some members of the group possess club-like forelimbs that are used to deliver extremely powerful blows to their prey: all types are noted for the incredible acceleration of their forelimb strikes, which can exceed 10,000 Gs and are delivered so fast they generate cavitation bubbles that further damage their prey. The Rock Puncher is essentially a scaled up mantis shrimp.

Gallery
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Trivia

 * The Rock Puncher's design is most likely based on the mantis shrimp.
 * Early animations for the Rock Puncher can be found here.
 * Gamefiles refer to the Rockgrub as "Rock Puncher Larva" but an early Trello card refers to them as "RockPuncher Food".
 * The Rock Puncher was originally planned for Subnautica, but was later cut and repurposed for Below Zero.