Just a few random notes/tips I found out experimenting with some bee-related stuff. I’m no master of bees (or Forestry for that matter), but maybe some of the information here will be of use
| Bee Frames | Durability | Territory | Mutation Rate | Lifespan | Production [5] | Genetic Decay | Bee Real Estate | Slowest | Blinding |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Untreated Frame | 80 | 1 | 1 | 1 | +1 | 0.9 | Apiary with nothing | 0.542 | 1.093 |
| Impregnated Frame | 240 | 1 | 1 | 1 | +1 | 0.4 | Bee house | 0.872 | 1.76 |
| Proven Frame | 720 | 1 | 1 | 1 | +1 | 0.3 | Alveary with nothing | 1.793 | 3.619 |
| Healing Frame | 240 | 1 | 0.5 | 1.5 | -0.25 | 1 | Apiary with +1 frames | 3.23 | 6.517 |
| Chocolate Frame | 240 | 1 | 1 | 0.75 | +0.5 | 1 | Apiary with +2 frames | 4.593 | 9.266 |
| Restrained Frame | 240 | 0.5 | 1 | 0.75 | -0.25 | 1 | Magic Apiary with Aer/+1 frames | 4.055 | 8.181 |
| Soul Frame | 80 | 1 | 1.5 | 0.75 | -0.75 | 1 | Magic Apiary with Aer/+2 frames | 5.219 | 10.53 |
| Nova Frame | 240 | 1 | 1 | 0.0001 | +0 | 1 | Apiary with +3 frames | 5.655 | 11.409 |
| Magic Frame | 240 | 1 | 1 | 1 | +2 | 0.6 | IApiary with 0 production upgrades | 5.94 | 11.98 |
| Temporal Frame | 300 | 1 | 1 | 2.5 | +0 | 0.8 | Magic Apiary with Aer/+3 frames | 6.181 | 12.472 |
| Metabolic Frame | 130 | 1 | 1.8 | 1 | +0.2 | 1 | Alveary with optimal Stims | 7.826 | 15.79 |
| Necrotic Frame | 280 | 1 | 1 | 0.3 | -0.25 | 1.2 | IApiary with 8 production upgrades | 9.6 | 19.38 |
| Resiliant Frame | 800 | 1 | 1 | 1 | +2 | 0.5 | |||
| Gentle Frame | 200 | 1 | 0.7 | 1.5 | +0.4 | 0.01 | |||
| Oblivion Frame [2] | 50 | 1 | 1 | 0.0001 | -9001 | 1 | |||
| Accelerated Frame | 175 | 1 | 1.2 | 0.9 | +0.8 | 1 | |||
| Mutagenic Frame [3] | 3 | 1 | 5 | 0.0001 | +9 | 1 | |||
| Working Frame | 2000 | 1 | 0 | 3 | +3 | 1 | |||
| Decaying Frame | 240 | 1 | 1 | 1 | +0 | 10 | |||
| Slowing Frame | 175 | 1 | 0.5 | 2 | -0.5 | 1 | |||
| Stabilizing Frame | 60 | 1 | 0.1 | 1 | -0.9 | 0.5 | |||
| Arborist Frame | 240 | 3 | 0 | 3 | -9001 | 1 | |||
| Blood Frame [4] | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | +2 | 0.8 | |||
| Maddening Frame of Frenzy [4] | 1 | 1 | 10 | 0.0001 | -9001 | 10 | |||
| Sanguis Artus [4] | 1 | 1 | 1 | 0.0001 | -9001 | 1 |
Durability is how many bee ticks the frame has before it breaks. Frames in Alveary Fame Houses take 5 durability damage per bee tick. Frames have no effect on the bee tick they break. Forestry, Extra Bees and Magic Bees Frames can be repaired in a Thaumic Restorer. GT++ Frames cannot Territory is how large of a radius bees will pollinate Forestry trees. I don’t believe this stat has an effect on how large of an area bees will search for valid flowers and/or spread those flowers, but I can’t say for certain. Note that Bee Houses get Territoryx3 by default Mutation Rate is a multiplier to the chance that a bee mutates into another species, if the conditions for it are met. Usually this is what you want, but it can be detrimental in some cases when you want to work on getting a purebred princess/drone before mutating them further Lifespan is how long a bee lives, though I’m not sure if this effects the number of bee ticks it gets before dying or whether this effects the length of each bee tick. Or both. In any case short-lived bees are better for breeding to breed them faster, long lived bees are marginally better for production Production, speaking of, is a multiplier to the chance that bees produce something each bee tick. If this multiplier is too high there is a chance each bee tick that a Pristine queen will turn Ignoble! Production odds cap at 200% for regular produce/100% for specialty produce Genetic Decay influences the chance that overworked Pristine bees turn Ignoble if one exists at all, and I believe also the chance that an ignoble queen (won’t) produce(s) a princess. If the latter is true this stat is useful to try and keep ignoble worker species around for a bit longer
Notes: [1] Nova Frames are Creative only. They’re listed here mostly for reference, or in case someone wanted to do tests involving production rates which would get ruined by other frames that influence lifespan [2] Oblivion Frames can be found as loot in Stronghold chests, and possibly other locations. If you do find one be extremely careful not to break it, because they are incredibly expensive to craft [3] Because of the production bonus using more than one frame carries a risk of turning Pristine bees Ignoble (albeit not too large of one, since bees will only get a single bee tick). In addition these frames cannot work in an Alveary due to it’s durability destroying the frame before it does anything [4] These frames consume 1000LP per cycle, or 5000LP when used in an Alveary Frame Housing block. These frames must be bound to a player in order to link to that player’s LP network, from which LP will be drawn. Without LP these frames will consume durability instead, and end up useless [4] To bind frames (or other LP-related items, obviously most from Blood Magic itself) simply right-click the air with the item in hand. The item, or frame in this case, will be bound to that player and draw LP from their LP network, if any is available. Totally didn’t forget this initially, BTW. Totally not… [5] GTNH has different calculations for bee production, resulting in different modifiers for frames. Also, yes, the -9001 production numbers were entirely necessary. The pack simply wouldn’t function without it, you see
The multitude of references in the Apimancy Thaumonomicon tab about specific frames draining the local Aura/releasing specific aspects as Flux, to my knowledge, are holdovers from TC3 which had different Node and Flux mechanics. If they have any tangable effects in TC4 I’m not aware of them
Escritoire This little known block is Forestry’s in-house solution to figuring out bee breeding paths without NEI or external wikis. If you’re curious why you’ve never heard of it before, well, “without NEI or external wikis” does not cover a whole lot of people. Certainly no one who plays GTNH (I seriously hope) The way it works is that you place a bee inside the middle hex with the question mark. Depending on the complexity of the bee’s breed a specific number of hexes will light up, showing book icons. Click on a book hex to reveal a bee, then try to match it with that bee’s same species bee. If you fail match the same species you lose, though there’s no concequence for failure other than having to retry from scratch. The centre bee will not be consumed
Of course without hints you’re just randomly hitting buttons, which is no fun. On the left there’s a number of empty squares, again with a numer crossed out depending on the complexity of the centre bee’s breed. Place a drone of any species in those squares, and hit the button above the squares This will consume the drones, but reveal two random hexes on the centre grid. From there it’s a question of luck, intuition and memory. I trust that anyone capable of playing GTNH doesn’t need the concept of a memory game explained to them. The UI, sure, but not the concept of the game itself
If you succeed at playing the memory game you will be rewarded with ~1-7 of the centre bee’s produce (regular and specialty), and - if applicable - a note describing one of the possible mutations of the centre bee. Right clicking the note consumes it to give you a boost to that specific mutation’s mutation chance, though as it is not listed in NEI I’ve no idea how much of a difference it really makes. That said it’s the only bonus to mutation chance you’ll get without access to Plutonium, (Blood) Magic or an Alveary, so go ahead and make use of it early on when you’ve got nothing else to help
So what’s the use of this thing, exactly? Well, effectively it’s a way to turn drones and/or manual work into bee produce. I can’t see a serious use case for that bar the very early game, where Tropical bees make you wait on their combs to upgrade your Forestry backpacks, but that’s about it. For what it’s worth an escritoire will spawn in every(?) bee keeper villager’s house, so you don’t necessarily have to craft one yourself to use it. Also you can get duplicate notes if, for some incomprehensible reason, you wanted to start a collection of them
Bee progression (early) With access to villagers you can technically start bees as early as the stone age. Of course that’s far from sane, let stand optimal. The earliest you can realistically start bees is mid-late LV, when you’re able to make either an LV Scanner (MV circuits) or Beealyzer (Alu plates) to scan bees. The optimal - or, if not that, most convenient - time to start bees is around HV, however, when a Thaumic Restorer is able to keep your precious Stronghold-looted Oblivion Frame repaired, or an Implosion Compressor lets you (eventually) work your way towards crafting Maddening Frames of Frenzy
The first long term objective for all budding apiarists is to breed up to Imperial and Industrious bees. These will produce the Royal Jelly and Pollen Clusters respectively that you’re going to need to produce Alvearies, multiblock apiaries that are the single most powerful bee breeding tools in the pack bar Gendustry. They’re not the best for getting bee produce, that badge of honor goes to the Industrial Apiary and it’s effective mega version, but the Industrial Apiary requires Alveary parts to craft anyway. And getting bees that produce good stuff means breeding. So first step: Alvearies
NEI can show you what bees to breed in order to get new species, as well as what requirements said new species have to mutate, so I won’t repeat easily found information here. What I will mention is that the bee breeding tree tab intentionally does not show all possible combinations to avoid ungodly amounts of clutter. Common bees have a solid 72 possible mutations, so you can imagine how quickly the bee breeding tree tab would get out of hand if, say, you asked it to show all possible methods to breed a bee that required two or more common drones. Instead look at the regular bee breeding tab if you’re looking for every possible combination that results in the bee you’re interested in, or if you want a list of all the species a given species of bee can mutate into
Completely lost as to where to begin with these seeming millions of different types of bees? If Forest bees are an option for the mutation you want to get, generally speaking, they’re a good choice. Forest bees have 3x fertility by default, meaning you get three drones out of a Forest queen rather than the usual two. An extra chance to roll good results is never wasted, and rest assured that without tools early bees is going to be a lot of RNG. Rocky bees are the opposite - only 1x fertility, but they’ve got Both 1 in temperature/humidity tolerances, Tolerant Flier and Nocturnal traits
Of course when you finally have imperial/industrious bees you realize two problems. One, your production of pollen/royal jelly is woefully insufficient. Second, and more alarmingly, you realize (belatedly) that each full alveary requires ~40 buckets of Seed Oil and a bank breaking ~216 buckets of honey. The pollen and royal jelly basically requires an alveary (or industrial apiary, if you’re at that stage) to address, so not much more can be done there.
Seed oil has a few solutions. The best is an IC2 crop, ideally stat levelled, so if you’ve got a crop bot or are fine with doing crops manually, that’s a solved problem. Various Forestry Trees can also be used for seed oil, of which the best by far is Coconuts. You can either breed trees yourself or, if you’re lucky, end up buying a sapling straight off of a Lumberjack villager. Do note that the equivalent fruits from Pam’s trees won’t (necessarily) produce seed oil at all let stand in the same quantity, and if you’re doing Forestry trees, beware of butterflies. Left unchecked they’re a major lag risk! In terms of Pam’s trees, Walnut is the best for seed oil. Apply Forestry Fertilizer to the fruit node to grow a bunch quickly, if manually. For non-IC2 farming the best crops are Peanuts and Sesame Seeds. If you’re desperate vanilla wheat/pumpkin/melon seeds aren’t the worst, but they’re quite bad
Honey has, basically, two solutions: The straightforward way and the “make a deal with the devil, then shortchange him” way. The straightforward way is simply to realize that imperial and industrious bees are not the best at producing honey. Their Dripping and Stringy combs only have a 40% chance at yielding a honey drop, whereas a basic honey comb has 90%. Not only that, but Cultivated bees - a required stepping stone on the path to Imperial bees - are twice as likely to produce combs than industrious/imperial bees. Cultivated bees are also Fast workers inherently, so even if you aren’t paying too close attention to genes this early on it’s pretty easy to get a stable breeding pair of fast cultivated bees, which will be much faster at honey production
But of course you want to know about the awesome method instead. In the Nether, thanks to Biomes of Plenty, there are giant beehives protected by angry bees. Some, though not all, of these are filled with honey. This, however, is there the shortchanging comes in: Solidify a bucket of honey into a honey block, and place it in your old Ore Finder Wand. Filled BoP hives have a layer of these honey blocks in them to serve as a solid layer on top of the otherwise liquid honey, and the Ore Finder Wand is able to detect them if they’re within range. That’s not to say empty hives are completely devoid of honey, but empty hives only have honey in the form of filled honeycombs, which are basically Forestry honey combs in terms of honey density - nice, but a literal 90% drop in one of 216 buckets. Filled hives are full of actual buckets worth of honey, for which I highly recommend a Thirsty Tank to do the collecting. This BoP honey has two quirks: It gives you Slowness III if you’re in it, and it has weird flowing mechanics where a full block worth of fluid will break into fractions and spread around. Buckets cannot collect fractions of a full fluid block, neither can Universal cells from IC2 despite being able to hold less than a full bucket of fluid in them, but a Thirsty Tank is able to automatically collect the odd numbers off the floor. Finally you will need to centrifuge this BoP honey to convert it into Forestry honey, but that’s a very fast and cheap step. Much faster than bees, at least
With all that, you should be able to (eventually) put together your first Alveary. If you’re not at the stage of Industrial Apiaries yet, expect to use your first few Alvearies to speed up the production of more Alvearies. If you are at the IApiary stage you shouldn’t need to invest too heavily into Alvearies
Optimizing Alvearies So you’ve got Alvearies, how to get the most out of them? You can craft a number of upgraded blocks - the questbook explains most of them, so I won’t repeat that here - but one that requires further explanation is the Electrical Stimulator. And, in turn, the changes to bee production math in GTNH
The TL;DR - which is, for the record, all I can offer since I didn’t understand the underlying math before and I don’t understand the underlying math any better these days - is that GTNH has completely revamped the production calculations for bee produce. This is critical to Alvearies because of the chance a pristine queen can turn ignoble if they are overworked. In vanilla Forestry/Extra Bees, this overworked penalty starts at a 16x production multiplier, and the Electrical Stimulator can give alvearies a total production bonus of 15.625 - safely below the limit, and functionally a maximum bonus.
In GTNH things are very different. First, the production chance and multiplier are shown on WAILA - you’ve probably seen it already on Apiaries in fact. If so you maybe also noticed that the production multiplier shown by WAILA includes the working speed of the bee in question. This confuses the whole “what is the overworked limit?” issue, since that limit does not (should not?) include the bee’s own contribution to production speed. Lacking the knowledge to code dive I’ve had to rely on someone else telling me what the optimal combination is, after spending about a dozen hours testing ingame and praying that across thousands of RNG rolls surely one of them would have rolled double snake eyes if they could do so…and still not getting the perfect answer because of course I forgot something. Go me
Anyway, the TL;DR is that 2x Intricate Circuit Board with 4x Diamantine electron tubes, plus 1x Intricate Circuit Board with 2x Diamantine and 2x Iron electron tubes results in the highest production bonus an alveary can get without risking bees turning ignoble due to being overworked
There is one final note to mention about optimizing production in alvearies, and that is a bee’s lifespan. In short, based on (limited) testing, longer lived bees are better for producing low chance items in apiaries/alvearies - IApiaries are another story I’ll get to in a moment. The difference in production between a Shortest life bee (10 bee ticks per life cycle) and Eon life bee (600 bee ticks per life cycle), all else being equal (that being Blinding production speed and optimally stimmed Alvearies), starts to manifest below ~30% production chance (as shown in NEI). Down at ~10% the difference still isn’t major, something like a ~2.5% difference in production yield between the two extremes, but all the way down at 1% this jumps to a much more significant ~33% difference
That all said Industrial Apiaries will eventually replace Alvearies as production power (bee) houses, and they’ve got their own quirks RE: lifespan. Alvearies will retain a niche as a breeding tool. Electrical Stimulators can also boost mutation chance, with each full Intricate Circuit Board giving a 5x multiplier to mutation rates. This is multiplicitive - two will yield a 25x bonus, three a 125x bonus, and four - for all intends and purposes - a Yesx bonus. There are bees with a listed mutation chance of <1%, so even 125x isn’t guaranteed in all cases, but it will be enough in most cases. BTW, note that blocks/fluids required for a mutation to occur must be placed below the centre bottom Alveary block, and this block must be a regular Alveary block. Otherwise it won’t be recognized, and the mutation will not work. Note also that when using Frame Housings the frames inside will take 5 times the durability damage they normally would, or in the case of the Blood Magic frames, consume five times the LP they normally do. Frames also do nothing the bee cycle they break, so any frame with less than 6 durability minimum is straight useless in frame housings
Of course Alvearies have one critical weakness - they cannot be affected by a WA, since the block you’d need to WA has to be surrounded on all sides with something other than a WA machine. This is why Alvearies will never be your production solution even short term. And speaking of which…
So you’ve got a dedicated field of breeding alvearies with every possible climate the overworld has and hasn’t seen, thank you Witchery, and you’ve got IApiaries patterned and ready to start crafting to give bees their own industrial revolution…now what?
I mentioned before that the first long term goal is to get an Alveary - this is both for early production, but mainly for the mutation boosts. The second, given the state of Gendustry in this pack (read: nerfed with unavoidable failure chances and gated behind some pretty advanced bee combs) is to breed a “template” bee, with all the traits you want on your bees long-term, so that you can quickly and easily breed those traits onto any new species you breed to get them started producing as fast and painlessly as possible. Normally you’d retire old-fashioned breeding bees for Gendustry, but even if you’re willing to tolerate the unavoidable chances to turn bees into genetic waste…you still have to get to highly bred bees to actually open up Gendustry. Also Assembly Line for LuV tier robot arms. Unless you’re rushing tech progression and intend on rushing bees, I’d suggest slowing down, getting comfortable, and doing some prep work to make the journey to your eventual end destination easier, and if not that at least able to actually accomplish something in it’s own right. IApiaries will also massively benefit from this bit of prep work, so again, highly recommend getting to it
In total, bar species obviously, bees have twelve different traits that you can manipulate via breeding. In short the traits, and the specific traits you want on an ideal template bee, are:
Lifespan Production Pollination Flower Type Fertility Territory Effect Temperature Tolerance Humidity Tolerance Diurnal Nocturnal Tolerant Flyer
So that fills the list of traits you’ll want on your eventual template bee. The next step will be actually getting access to all of these traits to put onto a single bee. Incidentally, this is the reason why I don’t recommend going down this path until after you’ve gotten Alvearies and their mutation chance boosts - when a bee mutates it’s traits are set to the default of it’s species. But if your mutation chance is not 100% and you end up with a hybrid you can lose precious traits before even getting access to them. In example, say you breed Forest + Common to try and get Cultivated. You end up with a Common-Cultivated hybrid and at least one Cultivated-Common drone - the Cultivated sides both having Fast production inherent to their species. You breed those two bees, but are unlucky and neither Fast production traits end up inherited by the next generation of princess or drone. So you either accept the loss of a desired trait, or you try the breeding again from scratch. Now with Forest/Common the latter solution is fairly painless, but when you’re five breeds deep into a chain you’ve saved no other part of? Ouch. And that’s just the first step…
Alvearies, and their ability to get up to Yes% mutation chances, takes a lot of RNG and potential failure states out of this process. Instead of dealing with hybrids and potentially losing traits you instead produce purebred mutated bees - and purebred mutated drones to keep that lineage going - with zero randomness or non-default traits to start with. This leaves you free to breed up a stack or so of drones, in case you ever want to convert another princess to this species, and in the meantime use the initial excess drones produced to start trying to get desired traits onto a template bee
So what bees have these desired traits? Well, NEI to the rescue. Simply look up a trait (I.E. “Speed: Blinding”), and check the recipes for the Gendustry Gene Sample that shows up. This will tell you what bees have this particular trait, and from there you can see which of those bees you’re able to get, which would be easier/quicker to breed to, etc. Navigate the NEI jungle, plot your desired course, and get to breeding. With an Alveary this will be significantly less painful than it otherwise would have been
One note regarding Temperature/Humidity Tolerance: You can use an Acclimatizer from the Genetics mod to modify this trait directly. Doesn’t require anything special, just power and basic materials to help acclimatize your bees. I often dismiss the importance of these traits since bees require their preferred environment to produce specialty goods, meaning you will end up investing in some solution to that problem regardless, but tolerances can still come in very handy while breeding. Even be required, in some cases. In example: Vibrant Alloy bees require a temperature between Hot and Hellish to breed. But the Energetic and Phantasmal bees that mutate into Vibrant Alloy only tolerate up to Normal and Cold respectively. In this case you need a good high temperature tolerence trait in either bee to allow it to survive the high temperatures required to mutate at all
What bee is best to use as a template bee? Certainly a bee that cannot be mutated into any other bee, since that would wipe it’s ideal traits if it mutated. A bee that has average climate requirements, meaning lower levels of tolerance allows it to survive in harsher climates, would likewise be good. Finally, a bee which already starts with one of the traits you wish you have on your template bee could save you a bit of breeding of trying to get that trait onto a different, unrelated bee. It’s unlikely you’ll find a bee that fits all three criteria, though, so enjoy finding your optimal template bee
With a plan and the tools to make it happen at hand all that’s left is to pray to RNG, again and again and again, until eventually you end up with a stable breeding pair of bees that possess all of the traits you want - a proper template bee. Once you have this precious, precious bee start printing drones, and from that point forward all you need to make a given species of bee into the bee you want is to either breed it’s species onto the template bee, or breed the template bee’s traits onto the species bee. Either/or, however you choose to look at it. These carefully bred bees will thrive in Industrial Apiaries with minimal extra effort/upgrades needed, produce stuff as fast as bees are able to produce stuff, and will always produce more drones if you feel like you need another couple princesses converted to make more bees for faster production. All it costs is time, RNG and sanity
So you’re probably familiar with the Acclimatizer, an absolutely wonderful machine that lets you directly add temperature and humidity tolerances to bees. But this is just one machine that the relevant mod, called Genetics, adds. So what all else can be done with this mod?
Genetics is basically a low tech version of Gendustry - you’re able to isolate genes, analyze them, stabilize them, and splice them onto bees, trees, butterflies or plants as your heart desires. Unlike Gendustry this mod’s full features are available post-Cleanroom, with the most expensive machine needing an HV motor and a crafting component made in an HV tier Assembling Machine. Of course in return this mod has two major drawbacks (at least in GTNH) - you’re not able to splice genes onto fully grown organisms (the Acclimatizer is actually an exception in this regard), instead needing to add a Hatchery block to an Alveary to generate bee larva to splice genes onto. And, realistically, a lot of power thrown at WAs. Are these machines worth using? Truthfully I’m not convinced of their usefulness, but if you really don’t want to wrangle the manual breeding RNG, this is an option
One general note that applies to all of the Genetics machines, including the Acclimatizer: They consume RF, which (in)famously does not always understand the concept of GT’s voltages and/or amperages. Powering them directly through GT EU is not adviced, instead use Capacitor Banks to turn GT power into RF, and send that to the Genetics machines through energy conduits (or a line of capacitor banks, if you prefer). For the record, if you place a single block generator directly against a capacitor bank it’ll generate 115 RF/t at LV, 460 RF/t at MV, 1843 RF/t at HV, 7372 RF/t at EV, and 29491 RF/t at IV. Make sure the capacitor bank can input at least as much RF/t as all attached generators are generating, otherwise it won’t accept the power input. When WAing Genetics machines you want to add the given acceleration multiplier times the machine’s base energy cost to the base energy cost - 8x acceleration makes a machine consume 9x RF/t, not 8x. It’s a quirk with how WAs work, but it’s a quirk in your favor ultimately, so don’t worry too much about it. But keep it in mind when deciding what tier energy conduit to use, or whether a line of Capacitor Banks might be better
To start with you’re going to want to gather a supply of several resources. Key to the whole operation is Growth Medium, which is used to generate Bacteria, Polymerized Bacteria and (if you choose to use the Inoculator) Bacteria Vector. Bacteria is used to produce Enzymes using Sugar, which are another key material. Another required resource is Ethanol, which is used to isolate genes and turn excess organisms - which would be Drones for apiariests - into Raw DNA, another required material. Finally you’ll want a source of Fluorescent and DNA Dyes, and the materials to make them
For machines, once you’ve got a production of the above required materials set up, you’re going to want to start settting up multiple Incubators. These machines cost a measely 2 RF/t to run, and are used for multiple processes. The main ones are turning Water + Growth Medium into a steady supply of Growth Medium (needed to grow Larva into drones down the line), duplicating Bacteria, Polymerized Bacteria, and Bacteria Vector (if you choose to use that) again using Growth Medium, and finally combine Bacteria + Sugar into Enzymes. There are other ways to produce some of these materials, using Bio Vats and/or Breweries, but personally I’m not sure if the extra hassle those machines require is worth the extra/faster output. Bacteria in particular requires a source of radiation for the Bio Vat recipe, and while that isn’t impossible (or even necessarily hard) it also can be skipped
For the record I’m not sure how many machines you’d want to keep a given later machine fed, but if you’re going to be using the Genetics mod a lot I would highly suggest building generous buffers for basically everything. If you’re really strapped on some kind of input material set up more production
The next machine you want to set up (to start building up a buffer) is the Genepool. This machine consumes 20 RF/t, roughly 12mb Ethanol and 0.25 Enzyme per drone it turns into 10mb Raw DNA. Note that the fluid is called Liquid DNA when stored in a tank, but Raw DNA when stored in a cell. The reason for this is because GT adds its own Liquid DNA fluid, which is also called Liquid DNA in cells. This GT fluid has different uses and production methods, completely separate from the fluid Genetics adds/uses. Hence Raw DNA refers to Genetics DNA, even if in tanks it’s called Liquid DNA Anyhow, Raw DNA will be used later on by the Polymeriser to strengthen gene sequences/add charges to DNA flasks, we’ll cover that later. For now set up one (or more) Genepools and a buffer tank for Raw DNA. Raw DNA has no uses outside the Genetics mod, but is used a lot within the mod
Next up is the Isolator, which takes organisms and uses 40 RF/t, Ethanol and Enzymes to extract gene sequences from them. There is a small chance the organism dies in the process, so only use excess drones to draw gene samples. “But how am I supposed to get excess drones from this 1x fertility bee?” you ask? Use the Hatchery to generate bee larva, and grow them into fresh drones. You won’t have changed any of their genetics at all, but if you’re trying to extract a specific gene from a bee you don’t need to. Anyhow, the Isolator is one of the first glacially slow Genetics machines, so unless you’re using an AFK strategy for the Genetics mod you’re going to want to apply generous amounts of WA power to this machine. Remember to supply more RF/t power when you do so the machine keeps running at max speed, mind. I’m not sure how much ethanol/enzymes this thing consumes and I’m loathed to test it right now because of a (known) NullPointerException bug that exists with this machine in 2.7 beta 3, so, eh…yeah. It shouldn’t be too much, just remember to increase supply accordingly if you’re going to WA the pants off of this machine
Once you start producing gene sequences you’re going to have to figure out what genes they contain. For that you’re going to want an Analyzer, which consumes 0.75 DNA Dye and 30 RF/t to scan a gene sequence and reveal what it is. This machine is (thankfully) fast, so you won’t have to WA it
From here there’s (practically) two things you can do with these analysed DNA sequences. If you’ve gotten a duplicate or unwanted sequence you can smelt it in a furnace to erase the DNA and recover the blank sequence item. If you have gotten a sequence you want to keep you should put it in a Sequencer. This glacially slow block - another prime target for WAs - will consume 30 RF/t and about half of a Fluorescent Dye to record a gene sequence and save them to the gene database of the person who placed the machine. The DNA will be consumed in the process, although the blank sequence item will be preserved. The machine’s UI plainly states which player it is linked to, for the record, so there should be no confusion as to which player’s database a sequenced gene will be added to
I should note that gene sequences have six different strengths to them - Very Faint, Faint, Weak, Average, Strong and Very Strong. Gene sequences extracted from organisms always start off as Very Faint, and their strength can be improved in a Polymeriser. This is a relatively fast process and speeds up the rate at which a Sequencer is able to record a gene sequence substantially. Fully strengthening a gene sequence will consume ~50mb Polymerizing Bacteria and ~250mb Raw DNA. The Fluorescent Dye cost of sequencing a Very Strong gene sequence is also roughly halved
Once you’ve discovered and recorded gene sequences they’ll be stored in a player’s Gene Bank. Access it using a Gene Database item (which can be placed on Lab Stand if you wish to have it accessible through a block), which requires an EV tier circuit to craft. Unlike a Beealyser, and similar, Gene Databases do not require Honey to operate. The Gene Database has separate tabs for bee, tree, butterly and flower genes, and further separates different genes by their type. In total bees have 13 separate categories of genes: Species, Production, Lifespan, Fertility, Temperature Tolerance, Cathemeral (known to normal people as Nocturnal), Humidity Tolerance, Rain Tolerance, Cave Dwelling, Flowers, Pollination, Territory and Effect. To grab a gene to splice onto a bee simply have a Serum Vial (or Serum Array, if you want to do multiple at once) in your inventory, pick it up in the Gene Database UI, and left-click on the desired gene. This can be done an infinite number of times, and you can freely swap between genes so long as the Serum Vial/Array has zero charges in it. You can also smelt both in a furnace to remove whatever gene is inside the vial/array and reset them
Once you have the genes you want to splice onto a bee in a vial you’ll need a Polymeriser to add charges to the vial. Each charge consumes ~10mb Polymerizing Bacteria and ~50mb Raw DNA per gene, and the machine consumes 40 RF/t while running. The speed of the machine depends on how many genes at once it’s adding charges to, so if you’re using Serum Arrays to add a full 13 genes to new bees you might want to strongly consider throwing a few WAs at this machine. Each charge of a Serum Vial/Array is good for one larva, which in turn grows into one drone, for the record (minor side note, but this machine can be fed gold nuggets to increase it’s work speed. Considering gold nuggets should be worth somewhere close to dirt circa HV - yes, demand for gold has exploded, but your supply income should put nukes to shame circa now to compensate - no reason not to)
With a usable vial of genes to splice, and bee larva to splice genes onto, it’s time to make a choice…in theory. There are two machines that you can use to add these genes to larva - the Inoculator and the Splicer. To first explain why the former is awful and should probably never be used is simple: Speed. The Inoculator takes a very long time to add genes to larva, up to a maximum of about 2 hours and 10 minutes for a full 13 genes per larva. This process also consumes Bacteria Vector - albeit not much - which is otherwise not used anywhere else. The machine is guaranteed to work, but unless you have an array of WAs speeding this thing up (or an AFK server) don’t even bother. The Splicer, in contrast, consumes a healthy 10K RF/t in order to splice genes onto larva more quickly, but at the cost of having a chance of failing and killing off the larva. This failure does not consume a charge from the Serum Vial/Array, mind, only the larva, and if you’ve got one you should have an Alvaery hatchery producing more much faster than a Splicer can consume bar ridiculous WA abuse. The Splicer also only requires power, nothing else fancy. So, eh, yeah, I recommend the Splicer
With your genetically modified larva the final step is to use an Incubator with Growth Medium to grow the larva into usable drones. How many drones do you need to be guaranteed a princess that will produce more, identical drones? Well, infinite, if RNG is not on your side, so how many you really need is hard to say. If you’re letting this stuff run in the background Serum Vials/Arrays can have a maximum of 16 charges per, so maybe 16 is a good number? Especially with 4x fertility - which you’re all but guaranteed to have, given you must have gone through Majestic bees to get Alvearies to run Alveary Hatcheries to get larva in the first place - it would take ridiculous levels of RNG nonsense to not end up with a perfect bee. Of course 16 larva will take a long time to splice genes onto, especially without copious WA abuse. You’ll have to find your own balance for your own playstyle
Industrial Apiaries (and how to optimize them) Industrial Apiaries are Gregtech Apiaries, consuming EU/t to run bees really, really hard without working them to death and really, really quickly with their dedicated acceleration/WA upgrades. Don’t mistake these things for lategame/endgame items. They’ll start pulling their weight circa EV/IV
To first address the elephant, or in this case the Redwood in the room, Industrial Apiaries have one odd quirk to their crafting recipe. They require an Alveary Sieve, which in turn requires Pollen specifically from a Forestry tree. Pollen Clusters from Industrious bees will not work. You need Pollen from an actual tree. How do you get tree pollen? Well, the vanilla Forestry method is to use an Alveary Sieve to produce Pollen…which presents a bit of a problem. There’s two solutions: Raid villages and pray that a beekeeper house has some pollen, or craft Gendustry Pollen Collection Kits to collect some yourself. The issue with the latter method is that said kits require an IV assembling machine to produce, which seems like an unintendedly late gate for Industrial Apiaries, but it’s how things are (at least in 2.5.1). In any case, whatever the method, grab Pollen and craft an IApiary
With IApiaries crafted it’s time to get to work getting the most out of them, and that - for better or worse - starts with bee breeding. One downside to IApiaries is that they have a total of four upgrade slots, and basically every aspect of bees - production, acceleration, simulating daytime, simulating open sky, rain protection, changing the temperature or humidity, extra automation, etc. - requires one of those precious four slots. Not to mention that some of those upgrades are incredibly expensive to craft, with notably the climate upgrades requiring LuV motors, Uranium and Iridium combs, and all upgrades contributing to EU/t cost. And that last one is going to get out of hand real fast if you’re not careful. Fortunately well bred bees, alongside a dash of Shifting Seasons brew, will take care of basically all of the “QoL” upgrades, saving you precious upgrade slot space and power
That said it’s time to talk about the two most important upgrades IAparies have, which are not going to get bred into bees: Acceleration and Production. The former is a World Accelerator build into the IApiary (they aren’t affected by external WAs). The latter is your basic production boost upgrade
The key, key trick to getting the most out of your IApiaries is simply this: Prioritize Acceleration upgrades over production upgrades. In example: An IApiary with 6x Production upgrades and an IApiary with a MV tier acceleration upgrade cost basically the same amount of EU/t to run. The production boosted IApiary will have a 17.16 production multiplier, and produce something every full lifecycle. The accelerated IApiary only has a 11.98 production multiplier, but produces something (effectively) four times per full life cycle. I trust that “4*11.98 > 17.16” needs no further explanation (for the record, since production multiplier is obviously at best an indicator of items produced/unit of time: Brief testing suggests 1x MV acceleration produces items around 3 times faster than 6x production upgrades, while the latter costs (an admittedly meaningless) 2 EU/t more power to run)
Obviously using both at once is better, but this is where you’re going to quickly break the bank with regards to power. An HV accelerated, 8x production IApiary will run you 4880 EU/t, whereas just the HV acceleration upgrade costs 808 EU/t. Again, 6*5.94 > 19.38, pretty self-explanatory
So when do you start using production upgrades? When you’ve got the power to spare, really. The one reason why Alvearies will never replace IApiaries as production power houses, long term, is the sheer scalability of IApiaries. Alvearies cap out at 15.79 production multiplier and zero possibility for any kind of acceleration. IApiaries don’t stop scaling until UV, when their best acceleration upgrade becomes available, and long before then you should reach a point where you’d really like to spend some of these excess tens, hundreds of thousands or millions of EU/t you’re producing on something productive. Like, say, boosting the production speed of bees to generate more useful resources, faster
The next major improvement, as mentioned before, is using Shortest lifespan bees. I’m not 100% on the exact mechanics and/or what I’m doing wrong to see different results in different situations, but because IApiaries simulate a bee’s entire lifecycle and yield all of the produce created during said lifecycle, at once, there can be issues with the nine output slots that an IApiary is limited to (two of which will be taken up by the princess and drone(s)). If a bee produces more than fits within those seven remaining open slots, the excess will be voided. In some cases I have noticed output stacking above 64, presumably to avoid this voiding issue, but than in other situations I’m staring at an IApiary wondering how I managed to roll a ~6.4% chance 40+ times in a row if nothing else weird is going on. TL;DR: Use Shortest Lifespan bees in IApiaries. That should solve those problems
“But than automation needs to cycle the bee more often, isn’t that why Alvearies produce significantly less stuff over time with shorter lived bees?” you ask? Well, IApiary has a solution: The Automation Upgrade. Normally combining a princess and a drone into a queen takes five seconds, plus however long your automation takes to extract the princess and re-insert it (plus the drone, if it’s a 1x fertility bee). The Automation upgrade will not only automatically take the princess and drones from the output slot and place them into the input slot (if they all stack), but also reduce the time required to combine them into a new queen down to a single tick. Based on testing this automatic re-insertion will take place before the IApiary tries to auto-output whatever else is has to auto-output, so you don’t need to worry about your princess or drones getting send into an output chest
Speaking of, Item Auto-output. It’s a minor thing, of course, but IApiaries can be set to auto-output items like any other GT machine. If you wish to use the top of the IApiary for this note that non-extra large chests and flat AE2 Interfaces will not count as obstructing view of the sky
Which is better to use for production at any given point? I’ve mentioned Alvearies are cheap, but how cheap? IApiaries are long term power houses, but how long term? The answer to the initial question, simply, is the answer to the question “how much power are you willing to throw at IApiaries?”
To start with Alvearies, their trio of Electrical Stimulators to get up to maximum (safe) production multiplier boils down to an average power cost of 4 RF per tick. Exactly how much EU/t this is isn’t easy to calculate, because weird GTNH ratios and power losses everywhere, but suffice to say that so long as you’re not trying to power Alvearies with fully calcified HP solar boilers or 1 EU/t solar panels, you’ll be good. As for production, optimal Alvearies will give a 15.79 production bonus and produce things every 550 ticks flat, since it cannot be world accelerated
IApiaries will run you 37 EU/t base - comfortably over a dozen Alvearies worth of power for less than one Alveary worth of work. IApiaries need upgrades in order to be worth anything, and as mentioned previously, Acceleration upgrades are significantly better to focus on than production upgrades Broadly speaking, the effectiveness of IApiaries vs. Alvearies also depends on the base production chance of a given comb. Basically, the higher the base chance is to produce something, the more accelerated IApiaries will outproduce Alvearies over a given span of time for that particular item
An LV Acceleration+Automation upgraded IApiary will cost 113 EU/t to run, and produces ~1.3-2 (depending on base production chance, as mentioned above) times as much as a stimmed Alveary will. MV+Automation will cost 290 EU/t, and produce ~2-4 times as much as an Alveary. HV costs 837 EU/t and produces 5.5-7.5 times as much, and IV costs 9494 EU/t and produces ~27.5-30 times as much. Note that these numbers were tested (somewhat briefly, so take them as a broad guideline) with 1% production chance combs and 75% production chance combs to get both extremes
Is it worth spending 290 EU/t to get ~2-4x faster produce from a given bee? Depends on if you feel it’s worth throwing that amount of power at it. Alvearies are cheap - at least in terms of power cost - and have a much easier time accommodating poorly bred bees than an IApiary will. But Alvearies are also slow, and no amount of power will allow you to speed them up any more than their electrical stimulators already have. Unless you want to risk killing off bees permanently, at least. You’ll have to judge whether it’s worth spending how much more power on faster bee products, if any at all
So one odd thing you probably saw a few times seaching through NEI is D-O-B Combs, and their sheer table breaking number of different outputs. Exactly what do D-O-B Combs produce, and in what amounts? Well, based on limited testing, here’s the best answer I can (care to) find:
0.07 0.05 0.012 0.01 0.007 0.006 Lead dust, Alu dust, Uranium 235 dust, Red Alloy dust, Manganese dust, Certus Quartz dust, Lapis dust, Redstone Alloy ingot, Titanium dust, Redstone, Ruby dust 0.004
No I don’t know why Conductive Iron, Redstone Alloy and Energetic Alloy are produced as ingots instead of dust. I also don’t know why Naquadah dust has a higher yield than the giant kitchen sink of everything or why carbon dust is more rare than said kitchen sink. GTNH Reasons, I guess
Note that since I can’t read the percentage outputs from NEI, the whole “UI overrated” bit and all, I centrifuged 10 million D-O-B combs and guessed the most probable percentage based on how much was produced. It should be reasonably accurate, but RNG is RNG, so don’t take it as gospel
“I’ve caught them all before. It wasn’t worth”, or: What bees to put to work?
So you’ve invested immeasurable time and effort into setting up bees to produce materials for you passively, and you’ve probably invested even more effort into actually setting up infrastructure to support this passive resource income. Now…what to actually have those bees produce?
Ultimately it’s a very open ended question as to what the best uses for bees are. There are a few cases that are obvious - Indium bees, Sunnarium bees, Xenon bees once you get to the Mega Apiary, among several others no doubt - but it’s hard to judge what bees are worth going for in a given situation. Perhaps you found yourself perpetually low on some resource circa HV, and breeding a bee to produce it made perfect sense. Perhaps you’re rushing through the entirety of bees circa UHV because you really need just one or two bees, and breeding anything else seems meaningless.
Here I’ll try to list bees that are, in some way, noteworthy or otherwise particularly worth going for…at least as far as I can figure out. Don’t be afraid to experiment and try stuff out. The odds that I’ll catch every single interesting and useful bee is somewhere south of 0%
Alu Bee Cryolite Bee Draconic Bee Endshard Bee Explosive Bee Indium Bee Also as of 2.7 the other way to mutate Indium bees - that being the Bedrock dimension accessed through an Awakened Ichorium Pickaxe, rather a T4 rocket to reach Venus - was changed to need an IV ABS instead of ZPM. So you can (albeit not easily) get IV Indium bees in IV Lutetium Bee Krypton Bee takes an IV fluid extractor and a fair bit of power per comb, but still noticeably less power than it takes to produce an EBF smelt worth of Radon. Not to mention the speed boost. Despite the lengthy journey it is to get these bees I do recommend grabbing them: Xenon bees won’t be useful until early UV at the earliest, and require Krypton bees to breed anyhow, so getting some early use out of Krypton bees to speed up the journey to UV seems a worthwhile investment. For the record: ~15 stimmed Alvearies should keep a single IV fluid extractor fully fed, and one IV fluid extractor running full time can keep at least two LuV/HSS-S Volcani running constantly on HSS-E. Slower recipes - which is to say, the vast majority of them - will be able to support more Volcani running flat out, and even more only running intermittently Lapotron bee Nickel Bee Pyrotheum Bee counting the direct pyrotheum dust produced by the bees. The same comb also produces blaze powder at a slightly higher rate, which is one of the ingredients for pyrotheum dust, and the other ingredients - or blaze powder itself - can also be sourced from various bees Rare Earth Bee Rare Earth bees also produce Neodymium Combs as a specialty produce, but if you’re interested in those there’s also a newly introduced Neodymium bee that produces the same combs as a specialty at a higher rate (and Rare Earth as a regular produce, at a lower rate) Salis Mundus Salt Bee Sunnarium Bee Tungsten Bee Wither bee
Once you get to the higher tier of bee combs you’ll find yourself needing acids to process them - phosphoric, hydrochloric, hydrofluoric, and everyone’s favorite, Phthalic Acid. As well as about seven different misspelled variants thereof. The others are straightforward, but what about Phthalic?
There’s a grand total of two ways to craft Phthalic acid - the Lithium way, and the 1,2-Dimethylbenzen way. The former is viable if you’re producing rocket fuel for power, basically as a byproduct, otherwise I would not recommend it at all. The 1,2-D method is the default way to produce Phthalic acid
| Process Step | Input/Output | Amount | Additional Info |
|---|---|---|---|
| Phthacid Acid Production | |||
| EV LCRs | Processing Rate | 10/t | EU/t cost: 1932.121212 |
| 1,2-Dimethylbenzen | 10 mb/t | ||
| Potassium Dichromate | |||
| HV LCRs | Production Rate | 0.001111111111/t | |
| Output Rate | 0.0101010101/t | ||
| Chromium Trioxide | |||
| MV LCRs | CrO3 dust Rate | 0.0008080808081/t | |
| O₂ Consumed | 0.202020202 mb/t | ||
| Chromium Dioxide | |||
| LV LCRs | CrO₂ dust Rate | 0.0006060606061/t | |
| O₂ Consumed | 0.404040404 mb/t | ||
| Chrome Production | |||
| LV LCRs | Chrome dust Rate | 0.000202020202/t | |
| O₂ Consumed | 0.03232323232 mb/t | ||
| Nitric Acid Process | |||
| HV LCRs (NO + O → NO₂) | O₂ Consumed | 0.001795735129 mb/t | |
| LV LCRs (NO₂ + O + H₂O → HNO₃) | Process Rate | 0.0202020202/t | |
| NO Production | 0.202020202 mb/t | ||
| Potassium Nitrate | |||
| LV LCR (K + HNO₃ → KNO₃) | Saltpeter Rate | 0.00101010101/t | |
| Process Totals | |||
| Oxygen Balance | Total Deficit | 60.60606061 mb/t | |
| Nitric Loop Deficit | 60.3030303 mb/t | ||
| Nitric Loop | Total Cost | 1.62962963 |
So the above mess is mostly straightforward, bar one point: Potassium Nitrate and Saltpeter. Saltpeter, essentially, is a combination of Potassium dust and Nitric Acid. You can use Potassium Nitrate as a way to produce Phthalic Acid while keeping the Nitric Acid in a closed loop, only actually consuming Potassium dust, or you can use this production line as a sideways method of extracting the nitric acid from saltpeter in the form of Nitric Oxide. Is it worth doing? Maybe, maybe not. The more relevant point for beekeepers is that Salt bees can produce Saltpeter. No bee can produce Potassium dust directly, the most direct method is honestly the Salt bee’s saltpeter dust again. So as far as producing Phthalic acid for comb processing is concerned, given that if you’re producing it you’re probably neck-deep in bees anyhow, saltpeter is probably the way to go
Tips and tricks: Magic Bees Botania integration adds the Hibeescus functional flower. At the cost of an ungodly amount of mana and two full ingame days (or thereabouts) it’ll convert an ignoble princess into a pristine one. Crafting this flower requires a Gaia Spirit, however, so not an option until late-IV or so
Witchery brews of Shifting Seasons allows you to (relatively) easily place down whatever biomes your bees need. For Nether specific bees note that you cannot place down Hell biome, but another Nether-style biome (I.E. Phantasmagoric Inferno) will work for bees that need “a Nether biome”. Note that Alvearies don’t (necessarily?) only check their centre block for which biome they’re in. Shifting Seasons III brews work best for individual Alvearies - they will covert a 5x5 in a + shape, or a 5x5 minus the four corner blocks, which is enough to fully cover an Aveary placed in the center Word of warning: Witchery brews of Shifting Seasons don’t work as drinkable potions, and can be finnicky with how they’re thrown. For optimal results throw a splash potion of Shifting Seasons directly on your feet
The Witchery tab has more info on Witchery brews, but if you want the short, best yield version: Nether Wart, Tear of the Goddess, Nether Star, Glowstone Dust, Blaze Rod, Biome Page (see Book of Biomes Extended Edition), Gunpowder, in that exact order, into a Witch’s Cauldron This recipe will require a Witchery Altar within range of the Witch’s Cauldron, and at least ~5500-6000 altar power. That is a lot, but not insurmountable. A (filled) Chalice helps, a player head even more so. If you’ve got a spare Dragon Egg that will also contribute a ton of power to your Witch’s altar
When using an Acclimatizer to add humidity tolerance to bees you can use wax capsules filled with water instead of buckets of water. You won’t get the wax or the empty capsules back, but it does let you stack humidity boosters up to 64. And you’re doing bees, so you’ve got beeswax, right?
Scented Panelling taking a million years to craft in a GT Assembling Machine? The same recipe in a Carpenter takes like 3 seconds per set of panelling. Unfortunately you cannot speed up the carpenter with a circuit board like you can the squeezer Speaking of, remember that whole “Industrious bees” bit to produce pollen clusters? Wintry bees from Wintry hives, found in the exact kind of biomes those names imply, produce Frozen Combs, which can produce Crystalline Pollen Clusters. Which can also be used to produce Scented Panelling