Insect Guide

Guide to Insects by Blueshift

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 Golden Asps, 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.

Tree Dwelling Insects

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 gathering it in ATITD.

Water Dwelling Insects

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 watermine, though these methods are not the ones to pursue if you are spefically trying to find the rarest insects.

Ground Dwelling Insects

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).

Livestock Dwelling Insects

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.

Herb Dwelling Insects

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 obviously increase the speed of your foraging and therefore your yield of the rarest insects in this class.

Crop Dwelling Insects

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.