How Slow ARE Bees?!

[Nuclear_Creeper0]

Maybe, maybe not. Having a renewable source of odd things (prismarine for building blocks, redstone, glowstone, etc) can be as useful in late game, if not more than early. Again, if you have other methods to obtain them, it might not have the same appeal.

For oh so long, the answer to, "How do I get <insert item here>?" has been, "Bees."

I think the problem with bees is that they're a pain to breed without external mods and anything they make can be created in easier and more efficient fashions. Prismarine, Actually Additions Atomic Reconstructor. Redstone, Red Orchids. Glowstone, Void Ore Miner or Resource(Don't remember if Glowstone is technically an ore). Ender Pearls, Woot Mob Farm. Etc Etc etc.

 

[Inaeo]

I think the problem with bees is that they're a pain to breed without external mods and anything they make can be created in easier and more efficient fashions. Prismarine, Actually Additions Atomic Reconstructor. Redstone, Red Orchids. Glowstone, Void Ore Miner or Resource(Don't remember if Glowstone is technically an ore). Ender Pearls, Woot Mob Farm. Etc Etc etc.

I'll not say you're wrong. Many popular packs have ways to do all this now, and most of them are simpler. There was a time when the only answer seemed to be Bees. The mod scene has had a constant power creep, which has made any mod that doesn't easily make these resources available seem no longer worthwhile (to most). That's not a knock against anything in particular, as it just generally happens - both in power gen and resource acquisition. Unfortunately, the mods that first allowed the behavior often stick to their roots, and consequently, get left behind (or are otherwise talked about as if they are obsolete).

For some, Bees are a Zen Garden kind of thing. For some, they are the bane of RNG existence. For yet others, they're ignored completely. The unfortunate side is that bees are either something you do, or something you don't - dabbling in Bees rarely gets you far enough to make worth the effort.

 

[KingTriaxx]

Bees are like turtles. When it comes to fast, they aren't it.

One thing I like about bees is the ease of automating them. They're all contained in an easily interacted with block, and all the machines are designed with sufficient intelligence you won't end up sucking out your inputs, or feeding them something that will gum up the workings. Yes, you can Atomic Reconstructor Quartz into Prismarine, but you have to drop it into the world, and then fire, and pick it up again, and if you automate that you run the risk of accidentally grabbing it with a magnet and screwing up your system.

 

[Ieldra]

Bees are like turtles. When it comes to fast, they aren't it.

Uh....try ChromatiCraft-enhanced bees (among other things, it adds an extra speed trait at the upper end of the scale) in a Gendustry Industrial Apiary with 8 production upgrades. Once, I found my ME network had unexpectedly reached its storage capacity - it was filled with glowstone dust because I forgot to route my aparies' production into my formatted-only subnet and void their excess production...

One thing I like about bees is the ease of automating them. They're all contained in an easily interacted with block, and all the machines are designed with sufficient intelligence you won't end up sucking out your inputs, or feeding them something that will gum up the workings. Yes, you can Atomic Reconstructor Quartz into Prismarine, but you have to drop it into the world, and then fire, and pick it up again, and if you automate that you run the risk of accidentally grabbing it with a magnet and screwing up your system.

I think this is because Forestry is an old mod. Newer mods often try to do things differently and use different mechanics than "put x into y and let y do its stuff". Some are more successful at this than others, but in general I agree that "drop x into the world in order to let y do its stuff on it" has its disadvantages as a mechanic. It's the main reason why I usually avoid Botania even though in any other respect, I like its theme and what it does and I find many of its tools very useful and fun to use once you have them.

 

[KingTriaxx]

I never got far enough in Chromaticraft to do more than accidentally die when I got too close to the pylons.

Botania's okay, most of the stuff you'll want to do, will be stuff you do manually. You're not usually going to need to drop fifteen or twenty stacks into the world or have it sitting for hours like some mods. Most of it can be solved by not using a magnet, but at the same time, magnets are incredibly useful. Of course I'm also not in a rush to do most things, so I don't mind waiting for a slower process either.

 

[Cptqrk]

Bees are like turtles. When it comes to fast, they aren't it.

One thing I like about bees is the ease of automating them. They're all contained in an easily interacted with block, and all the machines are designed with sufficient intelligence you won't end up sucking out your inputs, or feeding them something that will gum up the workings. Yes, you can Atomic Reconstructor Quartz into Prismarine, but you have to drop it into the world, and then fire, and pick it up again, and if you automate that you run the risk of accidentally grabbing it with a magnet and screwing up your system.

If you have Botania in the pack, there is a flower that negates any magnet item you can wear/have in inventory over a small distance.

 

[KingTriaxx]

Yes indeed, and I keep ending up playing packs without it. (Solegnolia is the name, but probably the wrong spelling.)

 

[GamerwithnoGame]

Yes indeed, and I keep ending up playing packs without it. (Solegnolia is the name, but probably the wrong spelling.)

Now that's interesting - I thought the solegnolia only disabled Botania's Ring of Magnetization?

 

[Daihok]

Ok im fixin to start messing with bees. Only reason is for silky combs mostly for forestry packs till iron backpacks put the upgrades back in in the 1.12.2 version. What would be best way to go about getting silky combs. If anyone has messed with this would be greatly appreciated for tips and advice.

 

[KingTriaxx]

Forest Bees in Apiaries, one Ender IO conduit on each set to in/out and with self-feed turned on. Disconnect them if they're close together. Then on top, extract only conduits filtered to the combs. That'll pull them out, and keep the apiaries going until it fills with drones. I believe Forest bees have a return of only one drone, so it shouldn't be an issue.

Alvearies would be faster to produce, but would take ages to generate. If you have Gendustry, it's all about Industrial Apiaries which take power and work much faster, and are even quicker than Alvearies I believe.

 

[Daihok]

Ok i been watching some tutorials and just confused even more, Prolly will be using gendustry, but how do i create more tropical drones, I have several pristine princesses already. Even if you good just point me towards good tutorial that would be great. This really my first time messing with bees so yea huge learning curve here.

 

[KingTriaxx]

In vanilla Forestry, you basically have to cross a drone with another species of princess until you get back to the forestry bee you want, but that always runs the risk of them turning into common's.

Better option is to use Gendustry to melt some drones to get liquid bee and then use one of the machines to basically duplicate the bees you have already.

 

[izikiel]

Extract the tropical drones with the genetical extracter machine from gendustry until you get trait: race tropical or something like that, put that in a genetetic template and use the gene-imprinter ( name ? ) to imprint that trait into whatever else bee you want to change race on, drone or princess etc.