The good, the bad, and the bees

[ShneekeyTheLost]

I've been a bit... bogged down... lately, and I have only just now been able to go over the changelogs and realize why people were complaining about the changes to bees in Forestry for 1.62. I must say, it came as a rather rude awakening, although I am a bit puzzled why it happened.

For those who are not aware, there are now 'ignoble' and pristine' bees. Ignoble bees are rather like the old Swarmer bees, in that they will eventually 'die off' and not leave a princess. There isn't a countdown anymore, it's apparently a flat percent chance each generation simply doesn't produce a princess. And they make up 80% of the bees you find 'in the wild'. Now, they won't die off in a bee house, the lowest tier apiary, so you'll at least have a chance to build the resources necessary to use a beealyzer to determine if your bees are ignoble or pristine, however it is pretty clear that you simply don't want to do any bee breeding whatsoever until you can find sufficient lines of pristine bees.

This is pretty much a kick in the teeth at being able to get any early silk wisps. Jungle bees have always (at least for me) been the hardest to spot (always being under a dense canopy means that even if they do emit light, you won't be able to spot it on the minimap), this just means that my odds are stacked against any of the ones I do find being able to last more than a few generations, which makes it impossible to really get enough silk wisps to make anything you'd want to make early game (like an apiarist's suit), and requiring an absurd amount of exploration to find enough jungle hives to be certain that at least one of them will survive.

Having said that, the solution is fairly straightforward: break five times as many hives as you used to in order to obtain the same sustainability numbers, at least in the initial phase. Once you get past that, however, everything else about bee breeding remains unchanged. You just need to do a whole lot more exploring and breaking of hives to get to the point where you can get started with breeding.

I'm just curious as to why this change came about. It doesn't really stop any of the powerful aspects of bee breeding, or really anything about the bee breeding process whatsoever. It just makes you grind harder to get there. Honestly, simply reducing the rarity of spawning for beehives would have achieved the same effect, since no one in their right mind is going to want to touch ignoble bees with a barge pole.

 

[Hydra]

Forestry has been more about making stuff annoying than actually add new and interesting gameplay for a while. Dunno. Guess Sengir just ran out of inspiration or something.

This change is actually one of the reasons for is NOT to upgrade to 1.6 for now. There's not a lot of interesting stuff happening in 1.6 it seems and some thing that just break the fun.

I mean, I have been spending this entire weekend breeding a lot of bees again (I have craptons of species serums, there's just SO many) to breed the perfect bee. I would not want to do that if actually getting decent bees is such a fuss.

I also just don't 'get' it. What's the bloody point? Basically Sengir asks you to spend 5 times as long finding bees. Pretty pointless. He's basically asking for someone to create a new bee mod that uses his good ideas without the bad ones.[DOUBLEPOST=1378111648][/DOUBLEPOST]This took me long enough to create already:

 

[frederikam]

Yeah I don't get it either. This is pretty bad. Hunting for bees is not a very exciting aspect of bee breading.

 

[SpitefulFox]

Finding bees on an active server is bad enough without having to lose most of them.

Is there some sort of memo being passed around the modding community telling everyone to "NERF ALL THE THINGS!" ?

 

[Omicron]

This is pretty much a kick in the teeth at being able to get any early silk wisps. Jungle bees have always (at least for me) been the hardest to spot (always being under a dense canopy means that even if they do emit light, you won't be able to spot it on the minimap), this just means that my odds are stacked against any of the ones I do find being able to last more than a few generations, which makes it impossible to really get enough silk wisps to make anything you'd want to make early game (like an apiarist's suit), and requiring an absurd amount of exploration to find enough jungle hives to be certain that at least one of them will survive.

I'd just like to point out that this change has absolutely no influence on early-game silk wisp gathering... since you're going to use bee houses anyways. Bee houses have higher productivity than apiaries with single or no frames, and make your bees last longer so you have less manual maintenance to do while you can't yet afford apiarist pipes for automation. They also cost no seed oil to build, meaning you don't have to worry about building a farm and squeezer and carpenter and power infrastructure and whatnot first.

If you're using apiaries early-game, you're doing it wrong

So you only encounter the whole business with pristine and ignoble when you've already progressed to the midgame and have the infrastructure and resources to properly use automated apiaries with frames and analyzed bees. It's simply a matter of progression - you start with simple tools playing by simple rules, and then you progress and encounter additional complexity.

As for how it plays, I can't say... haven't fiddled with 1.6.x at all yet, and I'll reserve my judgement until I do.

 

[Hyperme]

So you only encounter the whole business with pristine and ignoble when you've already progressed to the midgame and have the infrastructure and resources to properly use automated apiaries with frames and analyzed bees. It's simply a matter of progression - you start with simple tools playing by simple rules, and then you progress and encounter additional complexity.

This is wrong. Unless Bee Houses prevent bee death, the potential for your bees to die at random is there at the very beginning of bees. However, you have no way of knowing that your bee is shoddy until later. And then finding your bee is worthless just means you have to... go find more bees. That's it. From my experience with bee breeding, ignoble bees are pretty much useless since the mutation chances are so low, and you ideally want to cross breed pure bees as well. Even with a flat failure chance, there's no point working on ignoble bees, since your work could suddenly be lost. At random. Which is bad game design.

 

[Harvest88]

This is just a version of stalling like GT nerfiing UUM production with a Matter fabricator instead of allowing the use of mass fab (now though it's not too bad since the mass fabricator now need 10 million eu per UUM) I believe this nerf is just to make you take the extra mileages to the get your nuclear reactors running or getting your infinite metal plant rolled out.

 

[dgdas9]

Bees were fine! Why did you have to change them? Is there at least a config option?

 

[Omicron]

This is wrong. Unless Bee Houses prevent bee death, the potential for your bees to die at random is there at the very beginning of bees.

That is exactly what bee houses do, though, as seen in both the Forestry changelog and Schneekey's post up there...

I appreciate when people call out my mistakes, but please limit it to actual mistakes

 

[cynric]

Do drones you create from those queens also carry the bad gene or is it purely a fault in the princess? If the drones are ok, atleast you should be able to get a bunch of drones to convert the good princesses you find to the type you want.

 

[Hyperme]

That is exactly what bee houses do, though, as seen in both the Forestry changelog and Schneekey's post up there...

I appreciate when people call out my mistakes, but please limit it to actual mistakes

Well now I'm the person who is wrong. D:

Of course, random failure Bees still exist, meaning you don't want to start inter-breeding bees until you can make up for crippling design failures.

 

[KingTriaxx]

Which suddenly makes me glad I never got into bees. I wanted to, but frankly it's nothing more than one more roadblock in the path of progress. (Because Thaumcraft always decides to force feed me every single bee-research before I can go on to anything interesting.

 

[ShneekeyTheLost]

Do drones you create from those queens also carry the bad gene or is it purely a fault in the princess? If the drones are ok, atleast you should be able to get a bunch of drones to convert the good princesses you find to the type you want.

To quote the actual changelog:

Changed: Swarmer bees are gone - in a way. There are now queens of "Ignoble Stock" and "Pristine Stock". Pristine Stock: As before, but cannot be "infected" through mating with other drones. They make up ~ 20 % of the bee population. "Ignoble Stock": These have a low chance to die off. The mortality chance can be reduced via frames. They will never die off in bee houses. Amount of generations lived does not affect the chance to die off anymore.

To me, this means that yes, drones are also ignoble, but they won't pass that status off to queens during breeding. So, if I am reading this correctly, breeding a Pristine princess to an Ignoble drone will always result in a pristine queen.

Also, there used to be little more satisfying than finding a couple of apiaries in a village. Now the things are actively dangerous to your bees in the early game.

 

[SpitefulFox]

Bee Houses didn't need the nerf to make me use them. I always keep a few around even after getting a Seed Oil infrastructure just because they're so productive without frames and don't allow mutations. They're really handy for when you want to isolate an intermediate species in a family, such as Fiendish Bees, without having it mutate to the next step in the mutation tree. >:/

 

[Bellaabzug21]

I would normally have no problem with this except for one small detail... end bees. There are only so many of the frigging things. It's hard enough to get just one on a server and then when you finally get it, it dies!

 

[ShneekeyTheLost]

I would normally have no problem with this except for one small detail... end bees. There are only so many of the frigging things. It's hard enough to get just one on a server and then when you finally get it, it dies!

To be fair, once you get to the End, you aren't exactly needing EnderPearls anyways, which is all they really produce.

 

[PierceSG]

To be fair, once you get to the End, you aren't exactly needing EnderPearls anyways, which is all they really produce.

Now, if only they produce iridium nuggets instead ...

 

[Drawde]

Some breeds of bees need End bees to make. Which is rather difficult if they're all ignoble.

 

[SpitefulFox]

To be fair, once you get to the End, you aren't exactly needing EnderPearls anyways, which is all they really produce.

But you need them for breeding, don't you?

Edit: NINJA'D BY DRAWDE! * shakes fist *

 

[Bellaabzug21]

To be fair, once you get to the End, you aren't exactly needing EnderPearls anyways, which is all they really produce.

Yeah, but they're gateways to other bees. Like doctoral. I NEED doctoral![DOUBLEPOST=1378166271][/DOUBLEPOST]

To be fair, once you get to the End, you aren't exactly needing EnderPearls anyways, which is all they really produce.

Yeah, but they're gateways to other bees. Like doctoral. I NEED doctoral!