(Not) Harnessing the bugs

[Grizzlyadamz]

These guys just cropped up in my Second-line defenses.
Locked off the area and cooked them up real quick, but given their location I was thinking about setting them up as a trap, DF style.

What I noticed:
-they attack walls & take them down pretty quick, seemingly at random. In less than 48 hours they took out 7 granite walls
-the bugs start stroking out somewhere around 150C, and at 200+ they begin catching fire
-they all rushed to the hive and began extinguishing eachother before the heat killed them
-the hive doesn't seem to be flammable, or they were extinguishing eachother before the fire spread to it
-the jelly DOES seem to be flammable, though it's likely due to the last bug dying next to it

What I'm thinking:
1.Set up a smallish 6x6 room centered on the hive, walls made out of granite/no flammables inside.
2.Vents, connected to heaters/flammables, connected to a kill-switch.
3.Kill off bugs if they start breaching containment, preferably right after a spawn hits- it'll allow enough time to repair the inner walls.
4.Power doors connected to switches could 'unleash' the bugs on invaders.


Problems:
-Royal jelly fires. Normally you could just vent the room, rush in & extinguish it, but bad timing in bug spawns could force you to lose the crop. (12 hours between spawns?)
-Do they attack doors/vents?





Honestly it would probably be easier to just set up a heat trap in the tunnels, rather than opening up containment & risking the hive to see its (preferably-paltry) defenders rip into our enemies.
Plus it would double as a fail-safe for the bugs...

[Bodog999]

If you get the temp in the room above 50 degrees and below 100 they will die of heatstroke but not spontaniously combust so your yelly is safe then, another method would be to freeze them, it costs a lot more electricity than heating them up but you dont have to worry about fires and hives will eventually die if the temperature is low enough (I think below -30 does the job).

They do attack doors and vents too, and I'm not to sure about the spawn rate but 12 hours is a bit long, after looking at them a bit they seem to spawn every 2-3 hours if there are not too many

[Grizzlyadamz]

Huh, these guys had been there at least 12 hours, (was thinking more like 24 or so), and they only had 2 megaspiders. Do they spawn in batches or one at a time?

They do attack doors and vents too

Hmm, so it'd be better to have a long, trapped hallway to pump the heat in.
Do they actually seek out & attack the doors/vents, or is it random like the rock walls?

[Bodog999]

They just randomly mine something out near them, and they do spawn in batches usually if there is enough room 2 megaspiders 2-3 spelopedes and a few megascarabs

[Listen1]

Do they freeze faster than have heartstrokes? I find it easier to freeze than to heat.

I made a 90°C room and they mined their way through before heartstroking, if I can heat it up to 150°c, they instanly die or just die alot faster?

[rexx1888]

they do tend to freeze quicker than die from heatstroke. possibly because frostbite does actual damage to a pawn. unfortunately if you want to farm them freezing isnt a good choice. hives die before any bugs do if the temp is cold enough to kill bugs.

[Grizzlyadamz]

Those campfires (plus a few enemy corpses) sent the temp through the roof so I can't really say what 90-150 is like. 250 killed them in moments, and made them cluster on the hive for some reason. No more mining.

[cultist]

The tooltip for the hive says it's flammable. I'm guessing Tynan figured it would be a good use for the often-neglected incendiary launcher. I was not aware cold damaged them, I thought the hive was just a structure like the poison/psychic ship.

[keylocke]

in one of my playthrus, the hive suddenly vanished when i left it too long in a cold temperature.

i dunno if it was a bug, so i just reloaded and built a heater to keep my jelly farm safe and warm.

[Grizzlyadamz]

Alright, so did some crappy science.

Here's what I found- they actually don't seem to spawn a group, just a single bug at a time.
And after killing them off at 19:00 the previous day, the next spawn was at 07:00. (12 hours, might be a coincidence.) Mega-scarab, followed 24 hours later by a spelopede.
Another hive had spawned at 0500, produced a mega-spider, and then produced a spelopede 24 hours later.

Re-ran the test, hive 1 spawned a scarab right on schedule, followed by a second scarab at 0900, (26 hours), and a third scarab at 22, (13 hours? might be off)
The new hive spawned a scarab this time at 0500, then a spelopede at 0100 the following day (21 hours)
Third hive at 21/2nd day, spider.

Once more,
Hive 1 spawned a spelopede at 07, followed by a spider at 05 (22hr), followed by a spelo at 04 (23hr)
Hive 2 spawned a scarab again at 05, followed by a spelo at 04 (23h), followed by a scarab at 04 (24hr)
3rd hive at 23/2nd day, scarab.
4th hive shortly after, scarab.

In test 2, Jelly spawned at 06->15->01->12  &&   07->16->02->13
Test 3, Jelly spawned at 15->01->12  &&   16->02->13


So jelly's produced at 11-hour intervals, and bugs are roughly 24hours.
I think the initial spawn was responsible for the extra critters in the first wave (why I had 5 or 6 bugs in <48hours).

Also, campfires weren't enough to heat them up again- must have been the burning corpses+accelerant.

-e
Oh, also, the hives seem to spawn 4-5 blocks away from the mother. But a daughter-hive can spawn another daughter back next to its grandmother- makes for a way to conserve space.

[Grizzlyadamz]

It seems like 1 hive is pretty easy to maintain & provides a nominal amount of free meat & jelly in a 24 hour period, spawning a second hive & requiring culling every 48-96 hours, (1-2 hive-spawns).
2 hives gets a bit more intense, doubles the output but requires a culling every 48 due to the shrinking windows of time between pawn spawns. The spawns also become more difficult to track- they aren't on a perfect 24-hour schedule, so you need to pay a lot of attention to which spawns when or come up with a clever way to set up defenses for the cleaning/repair/harvesting crew.
4 or more hives seems very dangerous, and may require a conflagration to bring under control.


Also, it seems like heat transference between consecutive vents is pretty bad. Makes them useless, in-fact.
I'm thinking it might have something to do with relative room size as well, so I think I'll try making a small heater-filled room (achieving the highest-possible heat in the small room) and connecting it to the bug room with multiple vents.
Otherwise I'll wind up making a trap-hallway that directly links the heat & the bugs.



Any other bugkeepers have insights?


-e
Oh, forgot to mention: wood walls don't seem to spontaneously combust. So I'm using them as cheap/easily-replaced lining.
Also made the room big enough to ensure the first & maybe second hive spawns stay inside it. 11/11, (5 spaces on each side of the hive).
-e
Just got a hive spawn at 10 blocks away- also spawned with the message 'spot already taken'.
-e
6 heaters hooked up, connected to the room via 8 vents. The temps are pretty even, but the heating is taking a long time. First signs of heatstroke started at 70C, 20C above their max comfortable temp.
--In fact, 6 heaters can't seem to get above 72C with my current setup. I'll see how long it takes for them to keel over.
---Alright I'm calling it. 12 hours later they're at 44% heat-stroke, which isn't fast enough to keep up with the new hives & spawns. I'll have to cull & increase the number of heaters.
-e
Hmm, 11 heaters, and they couldn't get above 93C during a heatwave (35-45C). Might be due to the bugs destroying one of the vents and making it into one giant room.
-e
17 heaters, didn't get above 98 with an exterior temp of ~20C. From time of switching on the heaters, it took about 15 hours for the bugs to drop dead. That's a long, long time.

[Grizzlyadamz]

Well, I think I'm just going to wipe them out.

The extra meat's nice and all, but the drawbacks are too great-
-Heat's a pain to work with. Can't remotely open/close doors, so to vent the heat you have to manually construct/deconstruct walls, often one at a time. You can't direct heat through multiple vents either, so safely containing the bugs isn't easy. Same goes for doors, which (even when propped open) are rather poor conductors when in sequence. Nearest geothermal is halfway across the map too, so no easy heat/power to be had.
-The spawns are too quick/unreliable. Even if you nail down when they spawn, it shifts (likely a design choice) and requires continued monitoring. Same goes for new hives, which compound the issue with spawns & hive spawns of their own. Letting it go for too long (just 96 hours) makes reclaiming the area and pruning the growth too dangerous. Especially when it can take 15 hours for 95C to wipe out the bugs. There's just not enough time to do the necessary maintenance, and often you're doing it manually due to sleep patterns.
-Edit: Related to this, if anything should happen to your colony, (a big raid, lots of injuries, psychic phenomenon), a living hive is a live hand-grenade. The survivor would HAVE to switch on the heaters, pray everything in there still works, and then set the hives on fire while tending to the wounded/gatheringfood/taking care of themselves. Otherwise they'll get out of hand in a matter of days & utterly overrun their containment.
-Cleaning up the area is dangerous. Enough said. Though it was pretty nice with the quick fire-based killings- could just hang out in there for 19 hours or so, the living hive quivering at you in quiet malevolence, the crew mopping up verdigris, replacing the torn-up wall panels, & quickly hauling carcasses outside..good times.
-The rewards are kinda mediocre. Meat's nice, but I'm so overloaded from my farms that my produce is rotting. I'd rather just go for simple vegetarian meals at this point. And the jelly's only worth 3$ each. At 40/day, that's only 120 silver/colony/day. There are easier ways to make that kinda money.
-Everything is manual. Everything. This is why I'm dropping it- controlling the hive became my 7-man colony's #1 priority. My #1 priority. It's nifty, but I don't want to spend 80% of my time revolving my colony around it.

If I were to 'fix' it, I'd do this:
-Make it clear when the hive is going to spawn something. Something like 'Blisters are starting to form on the hive'- basically a 2-hour warning.
-Increase the time between spawns (and increase the number of bugs spawned- this'd give turrets more of a run for their money as well), make the bugs more susceptible to heat, or increase heater effectiveness. I don't want to micro-manage what goes in the burn-pile, and heaters as-is just aren't efficient enough when it comes to time & power.
-Possibly decrease the hive spawn rate. The jump from 2 to 4 hives is a big one, and it happens quick. Too quick imo.
==5/2 edit:
Making the hive spawn percentage-based would make it more interesting. Like a 50% failure rate- heavy spawns could still run out of control in just 4 days as they do now, or you could be stuck with just one hive for more than a week. On-average it would flatten out hive growth without significantly weakening the bug's potential threat, and make hive-keeping more interesting.

That's..really that's it. If it were a less-involved process, with bigger gaps to exploit, it'd be fun enough to keep, even with the current rewards.

Here's my setup before I abandon it:

[Luroshard]

I slow the bugs down with rock chunks and use their headquarters as a firing range for my colonists. The rewards are extracted through a tunneled door.

[Too-DAMN-Much]

@Grizzlyadamz, aren't rock walls bad insulation and will be harder to keep warm? i'm sure i recall hearing that, might be a factor in your science.

[b0rsuk]

Rimworld just got its magma... except that the rewards aren't there. Jelly is basically a meat that doesn't rot and can be eaten raw.

Looking at how many heaters you have, wouldn't it be easier to just set up a turret farm ? You could afford putting an incendiary IED trap every day to stop turrets from being overwhelmed.