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[isitanos]

Reading this update on beekeeping made me realize that the game doesn't as far as I know have killer bee hives or other flying nasties such as hornets.


It seems to me that having those on the map would provide an interesting challenge to deal with, since the swarm would attack on sight any creature it considers a threat (unfortunately, that includes humanoids) that gets within a certain distance of its hive. In addition, voluntarily breeding these abominations could provide a new, alternate way to dispose of pesky nobles and goblins. Pull the lever to find the nice surprise behind the door! I suppose that those insane dwarvish enough could also attempt to harvest the honey from the killer bees (supposedly, it's done IRL).


Implementation-wise, it seems most of the work is already done: the game just needs to understand that you can breed other kinds of hives than honeybees, and to have the raws for the new insects and artificial hives, as well as the crafting recipes for the latter. Perhaps some kind of way for creatures to deliver small doses of poison that stack is also needed - one sting only hurts, a dozen make you sick and a hundred promptly kill you.


The idea would be to leave it open enough so modders can add breeding of other kind of insect hives ("friendly" fire ants, don't worry dipping you in honey is standard dwarvish custom for visitors). Some of them could allow the harvesting of all kinds of weird products instead of honey. And just think of the !!possibilities!!... evil biomes and necromancer experiments could produce swarming insects that do far worse than just kill you.


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Upon further research, there was already a small discussion along those lines 12 years ago. One cool suggestion in there is to run into the lair/hive of giant bees or giant beemen underground - think Hive levels in Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup or Spelunky 2. Which leads me to think that giant bees could be domesticated by giants, if we ever get those in civilized or semi-civilized form.

[Mobbstar]

You'll be pleased to know that "other kinds of hives" already exist:  Bumblebees and termites, as well as various modded critters.  Furthermore, poison that stack also already exists:  Alcohol! 

The only new mechanic that would need to be added is aggression.  Currently, only a single bee sting occurs on rare occasion, and there is nothing players can do to reduce or increase the chance of this happening.

If we could put those aggressive bees into a cage and link it to a pressure plate, we'd have a Bee Mine, perfect for valentines day!