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Ant Colony

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Antcolony.jpg
Size 3x5
Where Compound



Overview

An ant colony is used to raise ants. After seeding the colony with a Queen Ant, the colony will grow and produce Mandibular Glue and eventually another Queen Ant.

Source

This building becomes available after the Myrmecology technology is learned at a University of Worship.

Cost

Built in a Compound. Uses 5x3 cells.

Use

Queen Ants

After being built, the colony must first be seeded with a Queen Ant. If the colony currently has a live queen, you will be able to see the ants moving.

Queen ants can be obtained either by examining plants or as a byproduct of another ant colony. The option to examine a plant will not appear on wood bearing trees, cacti, or thorn-giving plants. Using the hotkey 'E' will also work. However, be warned - queen ants will die in approximately 5 minutes if you do not have any fresh leaves (current week) in your inventory.

Care and Feeding

Ants eat up to 21 fresh leaves. Older leaves, even the previous week, are not suitable. As the week changes, if there are sufficient leaves provided, the colony's health will increase and the leaves will vanish.

There is a Leaf History available that shows the types of plants needed for fresh leaves each week.

A colony's health changes at the end of each week depending on how many fresh leaves are present:

  • If a colony has 21 leaves, its health increases by 3 to a maximum of 21.
  • If the colony has less than 21 leaves, its health generally drops by 4 due to lack of food. There is a small chance the health will remain the same as the prior week and this small chance *may* depend on the number of leaves in the colony. But even with 20 leaves, the colony usually loses four points of health.
  • If a colony has no leaves and its health is zero, the queen dies and the colony must be reseeded.
  • If the colony reaches 21 health then a second queen is produced and the colony health is reduced to 1.
  • Mandibular glue is produced based on the new health of the colony. The amount of glue depends on the new health of the colony with low health colonies producing no glue and 20 health colonies producing the most glue.
  • Finally, all leaves are removed from the colony.

Production

With placing 21 leaves in the colony weekly, and removing any glue accumulated:

Week Health of colony
(out of 21)
Glue produced
(that week only)
Notes
1 0 0 Newly seeded colony
2 3 0
3 6 0
4 9 2
5 12 4
6 15 7
7 18 14
8 1 0 Second queen produced
9 4 0
10 7 0
11 10 3
12 13 5
13 16 9
14 19 16
15 1 0 Second queen produced