Necropede

The Necropede is a massive, centipede-like entity encountered in The Playrooms. It is most notable for its reliance on smell, and its unsettling use of decapitated human heads.
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=== Appearance ===
==== Body ====
The Necropede’s body consists of 20 individual segments arranged in a marked color pattern, collectively connected by dark purple soft tissues. Starting from its tail, the segments are arranged in the following sequence: a small, differently-shaped red segment, followed by an orange, then alternating between a yellow and a dark purplish hue for the next 13 segments. Near its head, the pattern transitions back to dark red, orange, and finally red. These vibrant colors provide camouflage with the multicolored environment of The Playrooms. The Necropede has a glossy exoskeleton composed of chitin, which is typical for centipedes (source). This exoskeleton provides protection and support for centipedes, which is confirmed in the Necropede by the numerous scars and scratches it bears. Additionally, this raises questions about the entity's length of life. 
Each segment is equipped with a pair of spiky, dark green legs, giving the Necropede a total of 40 legs. However, only 30 of these legs are used for movement. The top four segments’ legs and the ultimate legs at the end of the tail end are not used for mobility. In real-world centipedes, the ultimate legs often serve as sensory appendages, but the Necropede’s ultimate legs lack this function. The top two legs of the Necropede are slightly longer than the others, barely allowing them to hold the human head in place. The spine fits neatly between its two large antennae. The Necropede’s top four body segments always remain upright, with their legs continuously moving in the air.
==== Real Head ====
The entity’s head is dark purple and features two large red antennae, each segmented into ten distinct parts. Real-life centipedes use their antennae to detect smells and vibrations, and the Necropede exhibits similar behavior, continuously moving its flexible antennae. This is likely the source of its acute sense of smell and ability to track disturbances. The necropede four small, blue, eye-like structures along the sides of its head, arranged in a non-linear fashion. Despite their appearance, these structures are presumed to function as smelling or sensory organs, as the Necropede is entirely blind. It also has curved, sharp and powerful mandibles, that are dark purple and bloodstained. This blood likely comes from its previous decapitated prey.
==== Human head ====
The most grotesque and iconic aspect of the Necropede’s design is the human head it carries in front of its actual head. This head is held using the legs of its foremost body segment. In its default state, the head appears to belong to a girl with long brown hair, entirely white eyes, a creepy wide smile, and a severed neck that reveals exposed muscle, along with six visible vertebrae. Many players initially assumed the human head was part of the Necropede's body, believing it to be its actual head. It later became apparent that the head was being held by the entity's top pair of legs. Despite possessing a human head with functional eyes, ears, and a nose, the Necropede cannot utilize these sensory organs in any way.
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=== Behavior ===
The Necropede’s ability to hold and manipulate decapitated human heads serves no biological purpose. The head appears to serve as a trophy or a decoy strategy, confusing predators or prey, according to the entity's ARC document. 
If it has the ability to smell, the Necropede will display a unique behavior when in close proximity of the player: It will perform a second-long charge, then pause before repeating the action. This occurs even with deodorant active, suggesting its smell capabilities bypass the deodorant’s effect at close range. The Tenant exhibits this behavior too.
The Necropede emits distinct alien-like sounds upon detecting disturbances, labeled as “Alien Insect Static [number]” in the game files. This, combined with the entity’s egg design, suggests it may be a mutated or alien life form. However, the files and their names originate from an audio asset pack, which weakens this theory.
The Necropede is not attracted to the smell emitted by stink pipes, likely because it is accustomed to them. However, it will become alerted and start chasing a player who has been caught by the stink pipe’s smell. One possible explanation for this phenomenon is that the stink pipe smell mixes with the player’s scent, creating a new detectable smell.
==== Idle Animations ====
The Necropede has two idle animations:
# First Idle Animation: Plays when the Necropede is inspecting the source of a disturbance, such as detecting a smell or sound. For example, if it has the ability to hear enabled in Custom Mode, this animation will trigger when it investigates a noise. In this animation, the Necropede moves its four top body segments and head rythmically side-to-side.
# Second Idle Animation: Plays only briefly after the first animation finishes. In this one, the Necropede faces forward, mostly staying immobile.
In the necropede's idle animations, it periodically taps some of its legs on the ground. These legs are predetermined and are not randomly chosen, as the animation follows a looping sequence that only lifts certain legs, leaving others completely still throughout the loop.
Because the Necropede uses the first animation for the most part during gameplay, capturing moments where it looks directly ahead is especially difficult.
==== Movement ====
The Necropede is capable of traversing walls and ceilings seamlessly, a behavior unique among entities in The Classrooms.
After running for a few seconds, the Necropede accelerates, maintaining a high-speed chase unless it needs to stop or make a turn.
The Necropede shares several similarities with the Whispering Wyrm. Both entities feature an animal-like design, human-like faces, and tails that behave in a comparable manner. However, the Necropede is more agile, turning corners with greater ease compared to the Whispering Wyrm, which struggles to control its movements because of the extreme momentum it builds up.
==== Stink Eggs ====
Introduced in version 0.6.2, the Necropede has the ability to lay large, yellow stink eggs with a veiny texture and a faint glow. These eggs function as smell traps, similar to stink balloons, popping with a visual smell effect and fleshy sound upon being touched. The Necropede can only lay one egg at a time, with a maximum of four existing simultaneously. If a fifth egg is laid, the oldest one disappears. Shortly after being laid, the eggs briefly move twice, mimicking the motion of hatching, before becoming completely motionless.
The eggs appear to defy gravity, remaining suspended in mid-air if displaced. This phenomenon occurs because the eggs retain their "sticking" mechanic from being laid on walls or ceilings, even after being moved. 
The method of egg-laying raises questions about the Necropede's biology, as there is no visible organ or opening on its last body segment to explain the process. Instead, the eggs appear to materialize from thin air, clipping into the last body segment upon spawning. They can be destroyed from a safe distance by throwing objects at them.
Considering the egg's properties, it likely did not go through much development and was a quick addition.
==== Senses ====
The Necropede lacks traditional senses of sight, hearing, and touch. Instead, it relies entirely on its advanced sense of smell, using its antennae. These allow the Necropede to detect even faint scent trails, making it nearly impossible to evade without managing the game’s smell system effectively.
===== Smell System =====
Smell sensitive entities, including the Necropede, follow a special smell mechanic, the smell bar, that dictates their behavior:
* 100%–75% filled: Directly chases the player.
* 75%–50% filled: Occasionally pauses to sniff while chasing.
* 50%–0% filled: Follows the player’s scent trail, periodically recorded on the map. Once the smell bar depletes fully, the trail disappears, rendering the player invisible to smell-sensitive entities.
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=== Kill Animation ===
When the Necropede touches the player, a quick, gruesome sequence unfolds:
# The Necropede coils its tail around Robert Chen’s body.
# The entity swiftly decapitates Robert, marked by the sound of his spine snapping and the spray of blood.
# Using its foremost legs, the entity triumphantly lifts Robert's head, while his face is stuck in a screaming expression. (-> This element is often missed by players because of the animation's sheer speed)
# The scene glitches with VHS noise before transitioning to the "Generating Level" screen, accompanied by a sound similar to a toilet flushing.
During the kill animation, the Necropede’s default human head attachment transitions to Robert Chen's head. Watching the footage frame-by-frame reveals that this process is a simple, instantaneous switch between the heads rather than the "swift motion of its powerful mandibles" described in its ARC document. Shadows and visual effects, added in the first Playrooms patch, makes this harder to discern.
Upon release, the kill animation's moment of the Necropede lifting Robert's head was visible, however it became obscured in the following updates: In version 0.6.0.384, also known as the first Playrooms patch, the developers added VHS noise at the end of the kill animation, which was intended to obscure the animation freezing at the end. Unfortunately, the VHS noise was made too appear too early in the animation, entirely concealing the moment when the Necropede holding Robert's head.
This detail was restored in version 0.6.3, by setting the VHS noise effects to start later, after the developers realized its accidental obscurance.
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=== Bugs and Glitches ===
* Stink eggs have an oversized hitbox, sometimes triggering when the player is not directly touching one.
* In Custom Mode, the Necropede will move faster than the player if "See Moving" is enabled, making it harder to run away from. This bug also affects Screecho the Clown.
* The Necropede’s tail frequently clips inside of itself and through walls. Additionally, the last segment of the tail can twist itself in all directions, occasionally causing it to clip into the preceding segment.
* The Necropede’s kill hitbox was oversized upon release and reduced in size in the first Playrooms Patch. Its head or upper tail area also has a collision box that players can stand on, though this is extremely risky.
* A bug in earlier versions of The Playrooms' update allowed players to force the Necropede into its second idle animation. This glitch, which since doesn't work anymore, was caused by enabling both the "See Moving" and "Walk on Walls" abilities in the Custom Mode menu for an entity. With these settings, walking continuously on specific elevated surfaces, such as air conditioners, would cause entities to stop moving. For the Necropede, this triggered its second idle animation, which is rarely seen during normal gameplay.
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=== Development Notes ===
The human head's spine remaining attached was likely a deliberate choice by the development team to enhance its visual horror. While it defies anatomical logic, since the spine would presumably have been cut off along with the rest of the neck, it appears the developers prioritized the unsettling factor, deciding to keep it.
The Necropede’s ARC document and that of The Tenant were not included upon The Playrooms' release, causing players to question their existence. Both were later added in version 0.6.1.
==== Old Model ====
The Necropede’s Custom Mode icon still displays its original design. This icon was likely created early in the Custom Mode overhaul and was not updated after the Necropede's design changed. Developers may have decided to keep the older render due to the effort required to create a new one. Additionally, the small size of the Custom Mode icons makes the differences less noticeable to players.
The Custom Mode icon, extracted from the game files, reveals a high-quality render of the Necropede's original model. This earlier design featured a dark purple exoskeleton, red legs, and red soft tissues. Its human head was expressionless, with blue eyes and ginger hair. While the hair's shape and texture remained unchanged up to the current design, its color visibly was. The expressionless face was likely a placeholder during the early stages of development, prior to the creation of its creepier finalized design. The overall color palette of the old model was darker and more ominous, dominated by red and dark tones in contrast to the vibrant colors of the final version.
The earlier design included visible clipping issues, such as the guts and spine intruding into the Necropede's real head and the hair clipping through its mandibles. This is because of its top pair of legs were slightly too short to hold the human head in front of its real head, causing the head to be mispositioned. This explains the Necropede's top pair of legs being slightly longer than the others.
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=== Trivia ===
* The Necropede’s name combines “necro” (meaning corpse) and “pede” (a suffix denoting footed creatures).
* Players mistakenly speculated that the default head belonged to Grace Chen, the protagonist’s sister, but it has since been proven false.
* In the game’s settings, disabling blood and gore alters the human head's appearance. The head gains a shiny, plastic-like texture with no guts or spine. This also applies to Robert Chen’s head when attached, with the bottom of the head appearing smooth and circular.