how dangerous is an insect hive cave system?

[meow]

Is it safe enough to sort of just ignore them and/or put a simple wall up to keep them in the cave if it starts out with a natural entrance?

Do they leave the cave? Do they hunt? Will they starve eventually?

[Steelfleece]

They multiply.

[Grinch]

Wall it off ASAP, but be extremely careful while doing it as they will start attacking people that get too close.
Why? because they DO wander outside of the cave occasionally. As for starvation? yes, and it's one of the biggest reasons to kill them off when you get the chance:

if they spawned with the map they will have a nest thing that drops Insect Jelly every few days or so (enough to feed the bugs), this can be harmed and destroyed by very hot or very cold weather.
if the nest is damaged, they go into manhunter mode and will calm down after a little while, but if the nest is gone then they will go hungry.. that's when they actively go hunting colonists and wildlife.

[Grinch]

Originally posted by Steelfleece:

They multiply.

that too

[VoiD]

yeah, if they are capable of threatening you, then you probably should deal with them ASAP

[chaosbringer42]

You absolutely need to deal with them as soon as you safely can. Best case scenario when they are ignored is something happens to the hive and they go manhunter. Worst case is they keep expanding until they have 3/4 of the mountain they are in under their control and there are 200+ of them and 70+ hives, causing ungodly lag.

[Cheet4h]

If you start on a tile with a cave system that has insectoids in them, they're mostly harmless. They don't roam much, they don't hunt, they don't multiply.
Their hive regularly spawns insect jelly, which is why they don't starve.

Early on you have two options for dealing with them: Either just disallow your pawns from going into their vicinity vai the allow zone tool, or wall them off.
First option has the drawback that a pawn on a mental break might decide to grab some of the insect jelly, which usually ends up with them downed in the hive. If you can't deal with the hive yet, but are lucky, they can crawl far enough away for your pawns to grab them without angering the rest of the hive.

As a bonus if you don't wall it off: If the hive is on a route toward the map's edges, raids or visitors might occasionally walk through them. Lessens raid strength and might drop some visitors for you to patch up.

[meow]

so can't I just wall off the cave and set up a cooler on the wall with the hot end pointing in and just cook them alive in the summer?

[Steelfleece]

You'd need a lot more heat than that. Generally, a bunch of flammables set on fire. And that may well get them angry, too, so you'd best be ready to throw a molotov on the flammables, fall back and seal the multi-layer wall behind you.

[Cheet4h]

You could use heat to kill them - or you could just ignore them for a while until you have 5 or 6 pawns with decent weapons and kill them directly. It's only going to be 4 or 5 insects per hive.

In my latest game I ignored them for four years before one of my pawns with Gourmand decided they had to have some insect jelly and I had to kill the first hive to rescue that pawn. The second hive survived two more years before I exterminated them to get at the steel scrap cluster in their cave.

[PewSquare]

Originally posted by Steelfleece:

They multiply.

They only multiply if they spawned in as an infestation, if they are present on map gen they stay dormant infinitely.

[Sticks]

Insect hives that spawn with the map at the start are basically a free money maker as long as you don't kill the insects that maintain them. They remain dormant so they'll never multiply out of control or spawn more insects, yet they still spawn insect jelly regularly. This is different from hives that spawn later on as an infestation as they aren't dormant and will create more hives and spawn more insects constantly until they become a real problem to deal with.

With the dormant hives though you can just wait until night time when the insects that spawned with it go to sleep and harvest the jelly so long as they aren't sleeping on top of it or blocking a path to it. Just make sure you restrict your colonists from eating it because they prefer to eat it over almost anything else. I just disallow insect jelly from the lavish meal food restriction so by default nobody will eat it.

If you stockpile insect jelly like this regularly you can get a few hundred silver a day just off a couple hives and a little micromanagement which is great early on when you have nothing else to sell to traders yet. Just keep in mind that stockpiling it will increase your colonies wealth which means raids won't be just one guy with a club for very long.

[Collect - FDR's Wheelchair]

You can only kill them with heat if they haven't breached the edge of the map.
Because you can't build on the edge of the map.
But if you can just build double walls and put down some wood floor or something and cook them.
Also don't put doors in the wall because when your colonists loose the plot they will open doors even if they are banned doors, they will walk into the hive and die.

If I can I leave them awhile so they do free mining and you get a lot of free resources from them.

If its a open ended cave I put a lot of double walls throughout it to make future cooking possible.

Insects are pretty dumb and you can bait them into attacking your main base and they generally just follow in a straight line, eventually they will just roam randomly and starve.