Insects only butcher into meat

[Rosario]

Why is that? I feel like giant insect exoskeleton plates would make an excellent alternative to the other materials that can be used for armor, not to mention their appendages they use to attack you would make about as much sense to be wielded as melee weapons as elephant tusks.

[Doomdrvk]

Insects are meant to be a downside to living under a mountain. They are usually a downside until you're very late game and can handle them with ease. The jelly is nice but causes food poisoning, the insect meat is only useful for chemfuel, kibble or feeding ghouls (Anomaly).

[Astasia]

Originally posted by Rosario:

Why is that? I feel like giant insect exoskeleton plates would make an excellent alternative to the other materials that can be used for armor, not to mention their appendages they use to attack you would make about as much sense to be wielded as melee weapons as elephant tusks.

Insects are already a pretty beneficial event, they are a replacement for center drop raids if you have a mountain base but are much easier to deal with (all you need is a door to stand behind and they queue up to die) and provide you with a lot of meat that you don't need a specific trait or ideology precept to consume, since lavish insect meat meals are still a huge net mood bonus, and the jelly sells for a lot. Adding even more rewards on top of that is probably a bit unbalancing, but Vanilla Factions Expanded Insects makes insects less of a "free meal" and also gives chitin when you butcher them which is a decent material for making bladed weapons with.

[endymionologist]

If you'd ever taken an insect apart for cooking IRL you would know that chitin isn't really a material that can be harvested and worked with that way. Fully aquatic chitin that's full of suspended calcium compounds might be worked into something only slightly less dangerous than a broken glass bottle, but terrestrial exoskeletons have to use other proteins as the suspended hardeners. Hardened chitin is still fully biodegradable, edible in fact, and not workable in the way that metals or wood are. Sci-fi chitin, as from a cow-sized bug, might get you some pieces that could be carved into scales for scale-mail, but those would wear out super quickly as they dried; smaller sci-fi bugs might get bits you can use for ornamentation.
Chitin is about as good a building material as demineralized bone, which is to say collagen, which is to say glue or gelatin...and because Rimworld completely abstracts out glue, just think of part of each lump of insect meat as being Jello.

[WildStargazer]

Originally posted by Doomdrvk:

Insects are meant to be a downside to living under a mountain. They are usually a downside until you're very late game and can handle them with ease. The jelly is nice but causes food poisoning, the insect meat is only useful for chemfuel, kibble or feeding ghouls (Anomaly).

When I got a big infestation in late game I tried to farm a bit of jelly, but honestly it was too much micromanagement for little profit, at least my colonists with tunneler meme loved insect meat.

[Radiosity]

> edible in fact,

Toxic, too, so I wouldn't exactly recommend eating it. Quite apart from any other concerns, the toxicity of chitin is one of the major reasons I will not eat ze boogs.

[Khan Boyzitbig of Mercia]

Originally posted by Radiosity:

> edible in fact,

Toxic, too, so I wouldn't exactly recommend eating it. Quite apart from any other concerns, the toxicity of chitin is one of the major reasons I will not eat ze boogs.

And some of the proteins are closely related to those found in shellfish that are the main type of shellfish allergy to the extent that they can be considered the same for that allergy. Which may be what you were already referring to, or you are talking about another issue, either way bug chitin is problematic to a lot of people.

[LordChaos]

It would be a neat mod idea though, where it gives good defense against early stage weapons like bows and low tier melee weapons.

[WildStargazer]

Originally posted by LordChaos:

It would be a neat mod idea though, where it gives good defense against early stage weapons like bows and low tier melee weapons.

I think it will be useless if it worked like you described, but more variants of usable armor is always nice. I like very much different marine helmet styles from Ideology, I hope new DLC will bring more marine/cataphract grade armors and helmets.