As it stands, gregtech has completely nullified the production rate of some bees, namely any bee whose comb produces a "tiny pile of dust" instead of a dust or an ore. To test, I ran an automated 100% up-time apiary containing a rusty queen, with the fast working trait, that is nocturnal, works in caves, and has the ability to work in rain. The apiary has three proven frames, costing an emerald each from the apiarist NPC. The bee itself has taken be at least 40 hours of breeding to get a serum for. Each queen I want to make from this point on would take about 30 minutes to an hour to genetically modify with all the correct stats depending on my luck. Each queen requires a princess and a drone; which serves as the limiting factor on the hard number of queens you can ever have in production due to the limited number of princesses in the wild. I have spent about 30 hours hunting hives and therefore have a little over 200 princesses. This doesn't take into account the the high cost of energy to run a Synthesizer, Inoculator, Genepool, and Isolator. When we update to the new version of Extra Bees we will also need to run our Purifier, which consumes DNA and energy incredibly fast; and will increase the required time to convert princesses big time. My rusty bees apiary has produced a miniscule 38 combs in 8 hours. This equates to roughly 9.5 Iron, or a little over 1 iron ingot an hour. If I was mining by hand, I'd get closer to 500+ iron ingots per hour. Simply put, it's not worth it in the least bit. I propose that an NPC be created who sells the ingots and such for the specific comb. For example, my Iron Combs would be worth 1-3 Iron Dusts or Iron Ingots from the NPC. The exact ratio can be determined by SK, I would definitely suggest 1-3. When you think about it, if I somehow put all 200 of my princesses into production for say, Iron Combs; I would be generating at most a total of 220 iron per hour using the current system. It would take hundreds of millions of EU, if not billions, and probably close to 200 hours of solid playtime to convert them all. Not to mention I would then only be producing Iron Combs, rather than taking advantage of the many varieties of bees there are. With my system, even at 3 per comb, I would generate a maximum of 720 iron per hour. More in line with mining by hand, and still requiring hundreds of hours of work. Keep in mind also that as it stands, the process for automating the insertion of frames is mind numbingly expensive and difficult; the and the upkeep for keeping that rate of production on 200 hives would be roughly 100 Emeralds per 10 hours, and the apiarist villagers have a limit on the number of trades you can do before they get annoyed that you're spamming that option to get the proven frames. Does it have scary potential? Yes, but so do most things on this type of server. Is anyone likely to reach that potential in the next 6 months? No, and once the new update for Extra Bees hits you'll be hard pressed to find many people trying their hand at advanced bee breeding due to the cost of the purifier and the low outputs of the bees.
Because SK doesn't understand and doesn't seem to want to understand bees. Not to mention if we go around poking and prodding we're likely to break more than what is currently broken. And what exactly makes it a "bullshit" workaround? I find it rather simple and easy to implement, while solving an issue almost perfectly.
Why not make a reasonable suggestion and not a ragepost? I looked at the configs for both Gregtech and Extrabees, saw nothing configurable as regards tiny dusts from combs. Perhaps there's something, somewhere...
I can't really say much to add to what tiffy said, she has got it down to a T. I'm sad to say that I know that all too well about how little the bees produce. I spent a good chunk of my about a week ago, trying to get diamond bees and austere bees (diamond dust and gunpowder), and succeeded eventually. But the sad thing is that you only get 1 diamond comb ever 2.5 HOURS, and even with fast speed it's still not enough. I was mostly doing the bees for the fact that we needed diamonds at the time, and the mining world wasn't up yet. But then i found out that TnT wasn't enabled so i couldn't use the implosion compressor. So eventually the mining world opened up and we got an excess of 500+ diamonds in the first 2 days. I would say that tiffys idea is really a good idea, because with all the effort it takes, it's really sad to see how nurfed bees are.
Did you read anything in the thread, or even have a basic understanding of bees? He said one diamond COMB every 2.5 hours. Which equals 1 Tiny Pile of Diamond Dust. Which equals 1/4 of a diamond. The Diamond Bee likely took him several dozen hours of hard work to breed, and hundreds of millions of EU. 1/4 of a Diamond every 2.5 Hours, that means each Diamond you get is going to cost you 3 vanilla Emeralds.
I don't understand bees as much as you do, but a constant source of diamonds sounds pretty cool to me.
I thought it was implied from all that tiffy and I have said, but i guess not. -1 to faith in humanity.
Update: 24 Hours of continuous running resulting in the use of 12 vanilla Emeralds has netted a total of 82 Combs, or 3.4 combs an hour. This results in LESS THAN 1 Iron Dust per hour. In total I netted 20.5 Iron Dust for the entire days worth of running an apiary. The amount of resources and time required to scale this thing is so enormous. The amount of resources and time it takes just to get ONE is an undertaking in and of itself. People need to realize these aren't like solar panels or mass fabs. You can't just pump them out if you have the resources in a matter of 5 minutes. Regardless of how many resources you have, setting up one of these farms will always have enough steps and time-based aspects that require a minimum of 2 hours when all is said and done.
We have a mining world, a much better constant source of diamonds. The bees are underproducing relative to the amount of work and time required. Underproducing by a LOT.
Agreed, and supported by me! I think that for the work needed to breed the special bees in the first place the yield is terrible. Although I love bees this would totally put me off bothering to breed any of them as mining for a short period of time or even running a borer for 5 mins (requiring no skill) would bring back more materials than this. Definitely something that needs dealing with, and the NPC idea is great Tiffy!
