Insect Guide

Guide to Finding Insects by Blueshift

Basics

Warning! This guide is a work in progress and there may be errors present. I have kept extensive spreadsheets on my insect finds so I am hoping that this is mostly all correct, but I cannot be certain and it would take many people to verify this information for it to be truly correct. Please chat me ingame if you are certain something is wrong or if you have any input of your own on this subject.

Excluding beetles and queen ants, there are 49 different species of insects in ATITD. These insects are used primarily for fishing lures, and also to cover the tuition costs of the increasingly expensive levels of the Fly Tying skill. They are split up into six classes, each class covering a different type of activity you can perform to find insects. These classes are:

• Tree Dwelling
• Herb Dwelling
• Water Dwelling
• Livestock Dwelling
• Ground Dwelling
• Crop Dwelling

Each of the above classes, with the exception of Crop Dwelling, contains 7 different insects (Crop Dwelling has 14). Some of the insects are more common than other ones. For example, among the Tree Dwelling insects, approximately half of all the clutches you find will be Ringed Wasps, approximately one quarter will be Woolly Aphids, one eighth will be Red Crickets, and so on such that only about 1% of the clutches you find will be Desert Millipedes, the rarest insect within the Tree Dwelling class. More detail on the rarities of the insects can be seen below, where each class of insect is covered.

The insects you receive are only defined by the class of insect (which covers the activity you are performing, for example Crop Dwelling in the case of harvesting carrots) and the rarity of that particular insect in question. This means that it doesn't matter whether you are growing carrots, leeks, or barley; any of the crop dwelling insects can be found on any of the crops, and the crop dwelling insects do not seem to prefer any type of crop over any other.

To maximize your collection, obviously you will want your Arthropodology skill to be as high as possible (The highest level currently attainable is 6, with 7 a possibility in the future). I wouldn't personally recommend pushing your Arthropodology skill to the limit unless you have at least one permanent point of Strength and Dexterity, due to the burden the extra insects will place on your limited inventory space.

Tree Dwelling Insects

How to obtain:

• Gather wood

This is the simplest class of insects to cover; even players not looking for them will easily acquire even the rarest insects in this class over time due to extreme necessity of wood and frequency of having to gather it in ATITD.

Insect Name	Rarity Level
Ringed Wasp	1 (Most common)
Woolly Aphid	2
Red Cricket	3
Ash Centipede	4
Horned Hookworm	5
Golden Asp	6
Desert Millipede	7 (Least common)

Water Dwelling Insects

How to obtain:

• Pick papyrus plants
• Gather Water
• Collect a gem from a Water Mine
• Diving

The best way to obtain the rarest insects here is by growing papyrus along the Nile. Picking a papyrus plant gives a good chance of finding a clutch, and it is rather easy to harvest hundreds of plants per hour if you are efficient. You will also gather many insects by collecting water in jugs and using the Water Mine, though these methods are not the ones to pursue if you are specifically trying to find the rarest insects.

Insect Name	Rarity Level
Glass Worm	1 (Most common)
Nippleworm	2
Footworm	3
Needleworm	4
Bristleworm	5
Oyster Mite	6
Bloodworm	7 (Least common)

Ground Dwelling Insects

How to obtain:

• Digging
• Collecting Slate
• Collecting Limestone
• Collecting Clay
• Collecting Dirt
• Collecting Sand or Mud

By far the quickest way to gather these is attending a dig; you will have Mud Asps overflowing your pockets, and with some luck the rarer insects too. Unfortunately, this late in the tale digs are few and far between due to the presence of Steam Shovels. Therefore those looking for Queen Maggots and Corkscrew Asps are advised to collect a lot of slate, the second quickest method of obtaining Ground Dwelling Insects. Limestone is not bad either, but avoid collecting dirt and clay as methods of obtaining insects (you'll be lucky to obtain even 1 mud asp from collecting clay).

Insect Name	Rarity Level
Mud Asp	1 (Most common)
Pickel Slug	2
Clay Slug	3
White Mealybug	4
Blister Beetle	5
Corkscrew Asp	6
Queen Maggot	7 (Least common)

Livestock Dwelling Insects

How to obtain:

• Slaughtering Camels, Sheep, Hens, or Rabbits

This would seem to be a very hard class of insects to find, and indeed a lot of people have trouble here, but there is a simple solution: Rabbits! These breed so quickly and carrots are so easy to grow nowadays that with a couple of rabbit hutches under your command you will soon be overflowing with Livestock Dwelling Insects. Having a Modern Sheep Farm or two will definitely speed things up also and give you leather to boot. Hens are a good supplement, however camels are likely to be the slowest method of obtaining these insects.

Insect Name	Rarity Level
Bat Mite	1 (Most common)
Rose Mite	2
Skinlicker	3
White Sawfly	4
Hairy Slug	5
Toad Sawfly	6
Stone Fly	7 (Least common)

Herb Dwelling Insects

How to obtain:

• Forage an herb, whether successful or not

Sadly, this is a hard class of insects to deal with, as there isn't much you can do to speed up your harvesting of herbs. The best solution is to forage often, and forage every single herb you see, even if it pains you to add to your overflowing pile of Discorea and Fool's Agar. Eating food that raises your speed and dexterity before heading out will increase the speed of your foraging and therefore your yield of the rarest insects in this class.

Insect Name	Rarity Level
Sand Mite	1 (Most common)
Slime Moth	2
Honey Fly	3
Grass Slug	4
Salt Mite	5
Camel Weevel	6
Feather Midge	7 (Least common)

Crop Dwelling Insects

This is where most of my uncertainty lies. Since we don't know the last two insects in this class, and because of the extreme rarity of many of these insects, I'm not entirely certain this class behaves the same as the others. I personally have yet to find any dew flies or corn maggots, though I do know that at least Dew Flies do actually exist.

How to obtain:

• Harvest a bed of flax, barley, or wheat
• Harvest any vegetable
• Collect Thorns

The nightmare class; even after obtaining the "Harvested 77777 Flax" achievement it is highly unlikely you will have found all of these bugs; I do not know of single person who has the Crop Dwelling achievement (having found all 14 bugs in the class). Two insects here are not even known at this point. Grow everything you can and often too; your best bet is to use a flax seed that produces a lot of seeds, little flax (to keep you from having to stop and unload flax too often), no watering required, and a good flax macro as well.

Insect Name	Rarity Level
Spittlebug	1 (Most common)
Orchid Hopper	2
Fruit Maggot	3
Leafhopper	4
Woodmoth	5
Snowberry Butterfly	6
Ruby Hornborrer	7
Rose Swallowtail	8
Nightwing	9
Leaf Snapper	10
Dew Fly	11?
Corn Maggot	12?
Clearwing	13?
Unknown Bug #2	14 (Least common, good luck)

Research is ongoing.... after harvesting approximately 10,000 flax beds over a day or two I received a clutch of Nightwing and two of Rose Swallowtail. No Snappers yet... we'll see if I can get one by 20k or 30k harvests. Extrapolating this data out would suggest on average you might receive insect #14 every 320,000 harvests or so, hardly encouraging. Given this extreme, I am ever more inclined to say there are other factors at play besides sheer randomness, at least with this class. - Blueshift