Alright so... I already know how well this is probably going to go over... but please hear me out.

I think I speak for many when I say that the Crimson Mosquito is terribly designed. It ruins the entire rest of the mod. For most, they're just extremely annoying and frustrating. For me, and for several others, they lock out the nether entirely with their existence.

In my specific case, I'm talking about phobias related to giant flying bugs. When I first came in contact with them in Enigmatica 6, I literally screamed, kept my eyes shut, threw my headphones off my head, and covered my ears. However, looking back at it, it feels like these are designed specifically to trigger phobias like mine. They're massive, buzz around, latch on to your face, kill you, and cover your entire screen while doing so. It's also not very clear how to get it off (if possible).

I can empathize with the idea that the nether should be scary, but the Crimson Masquito is beyond a reasonable level. I also understand that there are configs to disable the Crimson Masquito, but by disabling the Crimson Masquito, you lock yourself out of a lot of content and nether interactions that the Crimson Masquito is a major part in. Also, a player has no control if they wish to join multiplayer servers for instance, or a modpack utilizes the Crimson Masquito in some way.

I'm not sure what the perfect fix for this is, so I'd like to open this issue as more of a discussion, but I think it's pretty clear that the Crimson Masquito needs to change.

adding to this, maybe add a config option to change what the mosquito looks like, to a less phobia triggering model. I'm reminded of factorios spidertron, and the abundance of mods that change it to appear non spidery.

Concept: If the model was tweaked to be smaller, and the face latching was thrown out, I think that alone would make it much better. Perhaps this could be a client side option somehow that could be used on servers?

For what it's worth, I think reducing their base health and the amount of health they can restore while latched on would be enough to make them less of a nuisance, as currently they are nearly indestructible while drinking.
Also, if possible making the player not be knocked back by their drinking would help a lot with the experience, as being bounced around is more life threatening than the mosquito itself in such a dangerous environment.

The latching on mechanic itself is unique and arguably would be worth keeping (if not made optional), but the way it's balanced does make traversing the Nether far more of a challenge than need be.

This won't help players with more intense phobias who just need this thing to be much less like its current implementation, but one thing that I will point out that makes the crimson mosquito particularly frightening for me is the fact that, should it approach the player from behind, it will suddenly appear on screen when it touches them, creating a jumpscare scenario that only worsens my anxiety, especially should the mosquito knock my character off of a ledge at the same time.
The game Fallout 4 features the Bloodbug enemy, which is very similar to the crimson mosquito in that they both are large mosquitos that latch onto the screen. However, the Bloodbug will actually turn the character to face it somewhat slowly and do an animation of latching on, instead of just appearing on screen.
Perhaps the crimson mosquito could

• Need to approach a player entity from a narrow cone in front of them in order to attempt to latch,
• Go around the player to accomplish the above, and
• Play an animation of latching on, as opposed to just attacking.

Also, I'd like to bring attention to the cave centipede, because that thing is also freaky for people with phobias.

Drone Mosquito.zip
Here's a resource pack that turns mosquitos into blackstone drones, sounds are kept, only visuals are changed, i sent this to darth pikachu thru discord but thought other ppl here may want it too, also affects the mosquito pre-mosco transformation