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Create independent "roaming bees" to spawn in areas with wild beehives

seraph of candles

By seraph of candles
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seraph of candles Stone Age Settler

seraph of candles

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This one's quite simple! Everyone knows wild hives can be super hard to find, and I think right now they're hard in a way that feels more frustrating than challenging, a way that forces backtracking and second-guessing, mod installment and music disabling. It's also super luck-based, rather than being a purely skill-based challenge.

I think there are a lot of ways one could fix this while still preserving the feel of a "honey hunt", but here's my thought for a simple, immersive fix: Similar to fireflies, small clusters of humming forager bees should spawn in chunks containing (or adjacent to a chunk containing) a wild hive. The forager bees function as ambience features and have no in-game effect... except telling you that there is a beehive somewhere in the area.

This would save people from making those infamous treks across the continent to find beehives only to find multiple on the way back. It would allow searches to feel genuinely productive, instead of people possibly worrying about being thorough enough.

For two other related suggestions, I think a lot of the problems with current beekeeping could be fixed if the team make wild hives a little slower to break (reducing the risk of breaking them by mistake while clearing leaves) and made the hive UI update more reliably. Currently, it seems like the tooltip recalculates (and notices "dirty" files) far too inconsistently, meaning you get very little feedback on whether a transfer is working until it's halfway complete.

People shouldn't be asking "is this a bug?" unless they have a bee on their finger and are curious about entomological categorizations.

Edited by seraph of candles
Accidentally left a relic from a first draft; clarified the bit about the tooltip.
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Thorfinn Historian

Thorfinn

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I agree it is not a challenge of your game skills, but it is a skill not too dissimilar to being able to pick out each instrument part in music. Definitely something you have to train yourself to hear, at least at any distance. 

Seeing worker bees around flowers would be cool, I'd agree. And definitely useful for the hearing impaired.  I'd suspect that even a single bee per hive would turn the quest for an apiary into an activity rather than a game, easier than even finding resin. Making the hive stand up to a couple bare-hand love taps? Sure, why not?

Edited by Thorfinn
-Glue- Bronze Caster

-Glue-

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Honestly, yeah. I've never had issues finding bees personally. They were everywhere in my world. But for the hearing impaired, or people who play in louder environments, such as a group call, or loud home. Having something visual to help signify their existence would be nice. I've had trouble finding a hive in a tree even when I could clearly hear it.
Plus, I am 1000% on board with any additions that improve ambiance and immersion. Flowers near a hive with swarms of buzzing bees. Or just occasional little bee particles flying around in the area around a hive. Even if you aren't in need of bees, the sense of life it would bring to the area would be really nice.

While on the topic. I really hope we get a less tedious way to manage bees. Having to break, and craft a new skep every time we harvest honey is really annoying. The addition of a bee smoker, to calm bees for harvesting without breaking the hive would be nice.

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-Glue- Bronze Caster

-Glue-

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22 hours ago, Thorfinn said:

@-Glue-, have you tried @Vinter Nacht's From Golden Combs? Used to be that offered a reusable clay something or other that did that. You removed the honeycomb with a knife, iirc, and then took beekeeping to a whole 'nother level. 

I haven't tried it yet. But its been on my radar! I will likely use it once I start my new save in 1.20, assuming it gets updated.

Quilleur Pro Berry Picker

Quilleur Pro

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Making a probability of spawning bees wanderings to find a place for their hive and passe by different  stage of development until their hive is completed. Also ading a way of moving them (with the aid of a bee smoker and a bee suite) into hand made hive. (If the player come to clause they can cause damage to the player and potentially kill him in a short amount of time).

seraph of candles Stone Age Settler

seraph of candles

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On 10/10/2024 at 7:34 PM, Thorfinn said:

I don't know what that means.

It's a reference to the game code, and is best read in context with the previous line, "and made the hive UI update more reliably." I misspoke slightly. Basically, to quote my girlfriend who explained it to me:

"the info shown in the tooltip is part of a tree of attributes / whenever an attribute in the tree is changed, it gets marked as 'dirty' / the next time the game goes to read that attribute or any attribute below it on the tree, all the dirty leaves on the branch are recalculated / which is why it will update the flower count at the same time that it swarms / the leaves are stale but the logic is internally consistent / if nothing ever tries to recalculate the tree, the tooltip will just never update"

This is why hives will randomly jump from detecting 0 flowers to detecting 80 after a lengthy delay where the tooltip refuses to move at all. It's why it's harder to establish causal relationships, like realizing that the hive stops growing at certain temperatures and resets when it gets cold enough, or realizing that sunlight levels matter for the advancement of the hive.

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Thorfinn Historian

Thorfinn

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On 10/14/2024 at 4:08 PM, seraph of candles said:

or realizing that sunlight levels matter for the advancement of the hive.

Wait, what?

Personally, I hope bees don't get to be even less of a challenge than they already are. Skeps are period accurate, and reeds make them just enough trouble to not go overboard, by which I mean more than 36 or maybe 49 skeps per apiary.

  • 2 weeks later...
Thorfinn Historian

Thorfinn

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Posted (edited)
On 10/14/2024 at 4:08 PM, seraph of candles said:

or realizing that sunlight levels matter for the advancement of the hive.

Oh, drat! Maybe that's how they fixed the exploit of having ~1500 flowers (don't remember exactly) such that every hour when the hive split, the new hive would immediately be harvestable.

Guess I'll have to see if it can still be done by removing all the blocks above each skep so they can see daylight. Should still be ~1300 flowers. Might not make a huge difference. Or maybe that's not the only change.

 

Edited by Thorfinn
Porkbrick Potter

Porkbrick

Posted
Posted (edited)

Hive finding tools are an interesting historical real thing. Basically a small two chambered box with a closable passage between. The idea is that you would capture a foraging bee or three at a flower patch in the first chamber. The second contains sugar water or honey. Find a nice open space, give the bees you’ve captured access to the sweet treat and let them go. They will fly back to the hive and more bees will return. Now you can note the direction they are approaching from, capture a few more and move in that direction. Do this enough times and you are able to triangulate the location of the hive pretty reliably. I’ve tried it in real life and it actually works. And it works really well. Anyway, bee hunting is fun! And you can find a hive up to two miles or so distant!

Edited by Porkbrick
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