Hive Queen Brood [1.6]

Hive Queen Brood

Tame the hive queen. Start your own brood.

Hive Queen Brood is a vanilla-friendly RimWorld - Odyssey mod that makes tamed hive queens feel like a real colony reward. Once a hive queen belongs to your faction, she can birth live larva over time. Those queen-born larva can later evolve into vanilla hive insects, letting you slowly grow and rebuild your own insect brood.

This is not meant to be a huge insectoid overhaul. It is a focused tweak for players who looked at the Odyssey hive queen and wanted the fantasy to go one step further: tame the queen, raise the larva, and build a living swarm that still has limits.

Core loop

• Find or tame a hive queen in Odyssey.
• Once she is player-owned, she begins producing live larva over time.
• Queen-born larva can evolve into vanilla hive insects.
• Your brood can recover after combat losses, but it is capped and configurable.

What the mod changes

• Tamed hive queens periodically birth live Larva pawns.
• Queen-born larva can evolve into megascarabs, spelopedes, megaspiders, or locusts.
• Evolution uses the vanilla hive spawn list style, with equal random selection from the enabled outcomes.
• The queen's old egg-sac command is cleaned up into Acid Spit, keeping the sludge spray effect without launching eggs.
• Queen births do not create insect sludge.
• New larva copy the queen's current allowed area when they are born.

Balance philosophy

The default settings are intended to make the hive queen feel powerful and worth taming without turning every map into an uncontrolled bug factory.

• Player-owned queens only by default. Wild and hostile queens do not spawn brood or charge brood timers unless you choose to enable that.
• Birth interval: 12 hours per larva.
• Evolution interval: 3 days per queen-born larva.
• Active brood cap: 6 per queen.
• Evolved insects still count against the queen's active brood cap.
• The brood can recover from losses over time, but it does not instantly replace a wiped swarm.

If you want a slower, safer brood mother, you can tune it down. If you want a full bug cult fantasy, you can tune it up.

Mod settings

Hive Queen Brood is intentionally configurable so you can make the queen fit your colony and storyteller difficulty.

• Enable or disable automatic larva births.
• Choose whether only player-owned queens can birth larva.
• Set birth and evolution intervals: Never, 2 hours, 6 hours, 12 hours, 1 day, 2 days, 3 days, 5 days, or 10 days.
• Set the active brood cap, including an unlimited option.
• Enable or disable each evolution outcome individually.
• Restore all settings to defaults from the mod settings menu.

Why player-owned only by default?

Because discovering a hive queen should not mean the lair has quietly generated a private army before you even get a chance to tame her. By default, wild and hostile queens stay under control. The brood system starts when the queen becomes yours.

Players who want hostile or wild queens to use the same system can enable that in settings.

Compatibility

• Requires RimWorld - Odyssey.
• No Harmony dependency.
• Patches Odyssey's hive queen ability, trainable, hive queen comps, and larva comps.
• Likely overlaps with other mods that overhaul hive queen egg spew, hive queen reproduction, or larva metamorphosis.

Add and remove safety

Hive Queen Brood uses vanilla pawns and vanilla insect kinds. It does not add custom animals, items, buildings, factions, or hediffs.

• Adding: You can add it to an Odyssey save. Existing hive queens can start using the brood system once the mod is active.
• Removing: You can disable the mod without a cleanup step. Existing tamed hive queens, larva, and evolved insects remain as vanilla pawns.
• Future automatic births and queen-born evolution stop while the mod is disabled.
• Queen-born brood is remembered with vanilla pawn quest tags, so re-adding the mod can resume behavior.

As always, back up important saves before changing gameplay mods.

Credits

Created by MasterCheph.

RimWorld is owned by Ludeon Studios.