Mellifera

Mellifera 0.4.0

⚠️ Still early and still buggy. This is a work-in-progress release: expect rough edges, unbalanced numbers and things that break. Do not use it on a world you care about, and please report anything you hit.

The release where the bees stop telling you everything. Three genes arrived that were only ever frames before, a bee no longer reads out its own genome the moment you pick it up, and a wild hive will not come apart for anything but the right tool. There is also the power and plumbing half: somewhere to keep what the Engine makes, a way to move liquid honey, and a bench that answers redstone.

⚠️ Two things will change a world you already have

• A hive with no sky over stops working. Cave dwelling is a gene now, and it is the only answer to being shut in - there is no frame for it. An apiary in a cellar or under a roof will sit idle until the queen's line carries the gene. Nothing in vanilla stops a beehive under a roof, so this is the mod asserting something new.
• Wild hives now drop nothing unless you break them with a Scoop, and they take thirty seconds to break with anything else. If you were relying on punching them, craft a Scoop first: sticks and string, and the recipe is in your book from the start.

Three genes that used to be frames

A hive stops for the dark, for the rain, and - new in this release - for having no sky over it. Until now the first two had exactly one answer each, a Luminous or a Canopy frame, which meant the problem was solved outside the bee by something bought at the Carpenter that wears out. Forestry's whole middle game is solving it inside the bee, and that is what these are for.

• Nocturnal, Tolerant flyer and Cave dwelling join the genome, which is now eleven chromosomes rather than eight. A frame lifts a stop while it is installed and wearing out; a gene lifts it for good, in every hive that queen's line ever sits in. Neither is better - a frame moves between hives, a gene is bred once and then never thought about again.
• All three are recessive, so crossing one into a line buries it and getting it back out is the work. The Recessive frame finally has something worth pointing at.
• Where to find them. Tolerant flyer is on the Marshy, Tropical and Wintry roots, so it can be found in the world and bred inward from your first day. Nocturnal belongs to the Infernal, Vengeful and Monastic lines. Cave dwelling belongs to Monastic and to the whole ore tree, which is a long way in - an underground apiary is something you earn.
• The Isolator and the Infuser grew with the genome: both bottle and write all eleven, and their windows are now four cells across by three down.

You have to identify a bee before you know what it is

A bee's tooltip used to print its whole genome, recessive alleles included, from the moment you picked it up. The one thing you would otherwise have to work out was simply handed to you, and the hidden half of the genome - the entire point of a breeding mod - was on show.

• An unidentified bee names its species and nothing else. That includes the recessive species allele, which is the most valuable line on the tooltip, and a queen's mate. Bees out of a wild hive and out of a queen's brood both arrive unread.
• The species is never hidden, which departs from Forestry deliberately: this mod paints every bee its species' colour, on the model, in your hand and lying on the floor. Refusing to name what you can see would be coy rather than mysterious.
• The Beealyzer reads them. It is a book in the machines' own leather with a brass inlay, and it reads every bee in your inventory in one press rather than making you feed them in one at a time. Good for 32 readings, then you write out another. It cannot be enchanted: filling up is the price, not an inconvenience to engineer around.
• It costs a honey drop to make, and a drop comes out of a Centrifuge, so your first few hives are worked blind. That is on purpose.

The Scoop

• A wild hive broken with anything else is a wild hive destroyed. No bees, no combs, nothing.
• And it takes thirty seconds, which is the actual point. A block that shatters instantly and yields nothing teaches you that hives are worthless; one that will not come apart teaches you that you are holding the wrong thing. With the Scoop it comes apart in a single tick.
• Sixteen hives to a Scoop. Breaking anything else with it costs nothing.

Advancements

Nineteen of them, where there used to be one. The root fires the moment you get your first bee out of a hive, and it branches four ways: the combs (Centrifuge, Royal Jelly, Squeezer, Carpenter, frames), the power (Engine, Capacitor, both pipes), the breeding, and the genetics bench. The two that matter are the breeding pair - one for a species neither parent was, one for a species at the top of its branch - because they are the only things in the tree you cannot simply craft your way to.

A data pack can add its own. Naming an item is vanilla's minecraft:inventory_changed; naming a bee is this mod's new mellifera:bee predicate, which takes a list of species, a min_tier, or nothing at all.

Fluid Pipe

• Moves liquid between machines. The Squeezer makes honey, the Tank holds it, the Carpenter and the Engine spend it - and until now they were connected by standing the blocks face to face or by carrying buckets.
• It holds nothing. A hop is handed straight from the machine it draws out of to every tank the run reaches, in one transaction, so there is no charge in a wire to lose and no delay down its length.
• Every joint has a direction, and you choose it. A joint with a machine either draws out of it or feeds into it, and right-clicking that joint turns it round. It starts wherever the machine allows: the Squeezer draws, the Carpenter and Engine feed, and a Tank - which is both - starts as feeding and is the one you will most often turn. Brass collars draw, steel collars feed, so a run reads without clicking anything.
• You can see what is in it. The casing has a window, and what shows through it is the fluid's own texture - the same honey that is in the tank at the end of the run, ripples and all. A fluid from another mod looks like that mod drew it.

Capacitor

• Banks 200,000 FE. An Engine stops burning when its own 20,000 buffer is full and a cable holds nothing, so a hive working overnight was making power nobody was asking for.
• Takes at both ends and hands power on to whatever is beside it, except another Capacitor - which is the one rule that stops a bank of them passing the same charge back and forth forever.
• No window: the charge is four lit cells on its own face, a comparator reading, and a number in the action bar when you click it.

Redstone

• Comparators read the machines. What comes out is what that machine has made and not yet given away: combs in a hive's bay, the Centrifuge's output grid, the Isolator's rack of serums, honey in the Squeezer's tank, the frame waiting in the Carpenter, the power banked in the Engine or the Capacitor.
• A redstone signal switches a machine off, the way it does a hopper. Off means the simulation does not advance, not that anything is lost: a half-finished job keeps its progress, a lit Engine keeps what is in its firebox, and a queen in a switched-off hive stops working rather than starts dying. The Apiary window says when redstone is why it has stopped.

Power, rebalanced

• The Engine now puts out 80 FE a tick, up from 40. A bucket of honey is 80,000 FE and a peat is 32,000.
• A machine at full speed now draws 40, down from 80. So one Engine keeps two machines running flat out, where before it could not keep up with one.

Renamed

• Cable is now Energy Pipe and the new one is the Fluid Pipe, and the two sit together in the creative tab. They are one idea with two contents, and "Cable" and "Pipe" named the same object twice without saying which carried what. Block ids are unchanged, so nothing already placed moves.

Also

• Machine tanks now face a direction from outside. The Squeezer's is an output, the Carpenter's and the Engine's are inputs that take honey and nothing else, and the Tank is storage. Before this a pipe laid against a Carpenter would have drained the honey it was about to spend, and anything at all could be pushed into the Squeezer.
• Squeezer and Infuser joined the pickaxe tag, which they had been left out of since they were added.
• With JEI installed, clicking the drive track in the middle of a machine's window opens that machine's page. It matters most on the ones whose recipes JEI could never have found by itself: the Carpenter's frames, its repair, and both genetics machines.
• Recipe pages no longer run their text off the edge. Every line is wrapped to the room it has, and the Isolator, Infuser, Carpenter and mutation pages were given more of it.
• A bee lying on the floor as an item is centred, turns on the spot instead of orbiting a point, and has its nose up rather than down.
• The Debug Stick reads a Fluid Pipe: its joints, what is flowing, and one live attempt at drawing, reported in the action bar.

For pack makers

• mellifera:bee is a new data component predicate, usable anywhere an item predicate is: { "predicates": { "mellifera:bee": { "min_tier": 1 } } }. It takes a species list, a min_tier (how deep into the mutation tree a species sits, so 1 reads as "came out of a cross"), or neither, which is "any bee" and covers all three castes.
• mellifera:hives is a new block tag. The Scoop is fast on anything in it, so a pack that adds a hive gets a working Scoop by being in the tag.
• Custom bees can set the three new genes in their traits block: "nocturnal": "yes", "tolerant_flyer": "yes", "cave_dwelling": "yes".