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Ant Colony
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
- 4 Sheet Glass
- 4 Iron Bars
- 1 Thermometer
- 75 Nontoxic, Termite Resistant Boards
- 100 Red Sand
- 100 White Sand
- 100 Sand
- 100 Dirt
- 100 Clay
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.
Calendar for the leaf and thistle voids change and the current week number: http://sharpnetwork.net/atitd/calendar.asp
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. On rare occasions, the health might not drop.
- 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. Colonies with high health produce more glue than colonies with low health.
If you want to max out glue production, only feed your colony if the health is less than 18. This will keep the health as high as possible without producing a new queen and resetting the colony to 1 health.
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 |
