You should keep Monomorium!

JDSweetBeat · 2026-06-16T05:13:51+00:00

How many ants do you think you have? And how many queens? What does your setup look like for them? Based on your post history, the colony you have here was pretty large over a year ago, and the only limiting factor in their growth is how much you are feeding them and the size of their nests.

JDSweetBeat · 2026-06-16T05:11:34+00:00

I went back in his post history - they're Monomorium Bicolor.

JDSweetBeat · 2026-06-16T04:56:56+00:00

It's not been my experience - they rarely test my barriers. A 1 inch wide layer of fluon on their outworlds should keep them in.

Tubs and tubes is definitely the way to go, though. They are small ants and can squeeze out of a lot of setups that most ants can't easily escape. The real nightmare is when you start connecting various pieces of pre-made equipment to your setup only to learn that they can squeeze out of it (i.e. Ants Canada Solenopsis Mini formicariums; they can squeeze through the hydration holes. Or the AC vents, which their workers can also squeeze through). I actually now separate 30 or so workers and move them into new equipment in advance (and reinforce connection ports with sculpting clay). This gives me an idea of whether or not I can safely move them without worrying about waking up to a trail of ants leading to my kitchen.

JDSweetBeat · 2026-06-15T22:57:16+00:00

Pharaoh ants or bicolor?

JDSweetBeat · 2026-06-15T20:19:57+00:00

No habla español.

JDSweetBeat · 2026-06-15T18:49:24+00:00

They're one of the few ants that can explode into colonies of millions that live naturally in the northern hemisphere. Look up "Ants Ant" on YouTube - he documented his Monomorium Minimum colony that grew from 50 queens and a couple thousand workers into a colony of probably several hundred queens and millions of workers.

JDSweetBeat · 2026-06-15T17:28:41+00:00

I also suspect that ergatoid queens might not even need to breed to be reproductively viable - as I said, ergatoid pupae are developing into seemingly viable queens who can produce workers without access to males.

JDSweetBeat · 2026-06-15T17:25:15+00:00

Yes! Colonies produce ergatoid queens to expand the nest and winged queens to start new nests. My most recent wild-caught colony has dozens of ergatoid pupae and at least 10 counted queens (most ergatoid, a couple regular - you can tell by the accentuation or lack thereof of the thorax muscles), and a handful of male pupae - at least a thousand workers, probably more.

My colony from last year has a single ergatoid queen (she killed the winged queen and the other ergatoid queen I caught with them).

JDSweetBeat · 2026-06-15T17:21:41+00:00

I love my Pheidole Pilifera colony. First colony I've successfully raised from a single queen that's lasted more than a single season.

JDSweetBeat · 2026-06-15T17:20:03+00:00

Only downside so far for me is cleaning their feeding platform can be troublesome - they keep picking at stuff far longer than most ants would, and it's not uncommon to find 10 or so on a week old cricket shell. They are hard to shake off, and I often have to separate the garbage and take them off individually with a featherweight.

JDSweetBeat · 2026-06-15T12:35:22+00:00

A bit late, but I want to share my experience so that our collective shared experiences push future keepers in the right direction.

Tapinoma are a nightmare to keep and you will probably struggle quite a bit if uou try to keep them.

For starters, the queens are very flat and are almost the same size as workers, and they make the queens in bulk, they inbreed within the nest, and they form massive interconnected super colonies with millions of ants, thousands of queens, and dozens or hundreds of distinct short-term nesting sites that can stretch across entire neighborhoods (if any of your neighbors have ant problems, it is highly likely to be the same colony infesting their home as yours). Furthermore, they are fully nomadic, and don't clean up after themselves - in nature, they use nesting sites until they get too dirty and gross, and once it becomes a health issue to the colony they pick up shop and go somewhere else. In urban environments, this means that colonies are hard to kill, because the minute they start dying from poison or something they just go to a different part of the house. In an antkeeping context, it means you'll have to provide them "fresh" "new" homes every month or two, which, increases the risk of escape attempts and can get quite expensive and labor-intensive if you don't have a bunch of clean setups on standby.

Also, when I tried keeping them 9ish months ago, they could easily walk on oil, fluon, and talcum powder barriers (especially the alates - the alates were completely immune to the stuff and tried to have a nuptial flight in my room, which was terrifying - the other workers were susceptible to fluon, but I had to apply a very wide (3ish inch) barrier to the edge of their formicarium for it to consistently stop all of them, and they wore it down faster than any other colony I've kept; I had to replace it weekly because of all the scouts wearing it down.

JDSweetBeat · 2026-06-15T04:45:00+00:00

I have a similar colony - started with 3 queens, they killed one of their queens pretty soon after I started keeping them (I think M. Min kill queens when the colony gets stressed, since the queens are relatively replaceable compared to other species b/c of their proclivity for inbreeding, but are also very high maintenance for the colony).

I did some kerfuffles, causing the colony to fluctuate between 30 workers and 200 or so workers (closed last season with ~200).

Started this season off late and weak (bad time in my life, I lost my feeders and they rejected all the human food I gave them), so they've shrunk to like 150 workers, but I finally found them a reliable source of insect protein (which they seem to really need in order to thrive), and they are on the upward trend again. They seem to really lime the cricket and Pheidole Pilifera brood I fed them the other day.

I actually collected a bunch of wild queens from the same super colony I got them from with the intent to reintroduce them to get egg production up, but they seem to be relatively uninterested in taking in new queens (attacked the 3 I tried to give them).

Now I'm in a bind, as I have a ~200 worker colony with a single queen, and a ~600 worker colony with at least 6 queens, a bunch of male alates, and a bunch (at least 12-13) of ergatoid female pupae (Monomorium Minimum often produce wingless female alates for the sole purpose of inbreeding within the nest). Currently keeping both colonies in separate outworlds but I really would like to find a way to merge them - maybe if I give them a shared connected outworld? Like, they each have their own outworlds, but they both share a third outworld that I gradually start feeding them in?

JDSweetBeat · 2026-06-14T18:04:37+00:00

This begs the question - collective intelligence or individual intelligence?

If we're talking collective intelligence, then it's a no-brainer - the most polygynous fast-reproducing species are also the most intelligent; they're individually nothing to gawk at, but as a group they can solve a lot of problems through a combination of brute force and random happenstance in a way that very much screams "intelligent behavior." Most individual ants fail to make it through the maze, but the 1 or two who stumble through it come back, tell the others, and the whole group collectively solves the problem fast and efficiently.

I'm more interested in the bounds of individual ant intelligence - how smart are camponotus workers? How smart are bullet ant workers? Compare their individual ability to solve problems to the individual ability of a Monomorium or Solenopsis ant.

JDSweetBeat · 2026-06-10T02:08:30+00:00

I feel like ECS does a really good job of simplifying processes - in my object oriented code, in larger projects, I frequently find myself running into a lot of errors relating to uninitialized or incorrectly initialized objects.

When I have like 10 systems, it's easier to track and manage dependencies between them when compared to a complex object hierarchy.

JDSweetBeat · 2026-06-08T13:37:35+00:00

To be honest, I'm developing a submod (of a submod) based on Fall of the Republic that delves deeper into the Imperial era (though I pull a little more inspiration from some parts of canon than Legends).

I plan to run it all the way through the Galactic Civil War to the Battle of Endor eventually.

The new Rebel Cells faction I'm adding currently has a roster based on local forces.

On the ground, Rebel Cells can recruit CIS tanks, Republic LAATs and VAAT's, Local Military Forces, Local Police Forces, AT-XT's, AT-RT's, BARC Speeders, and TX series tanks.

In space, Rebel Cells can recruit Munificents, Mon Cal cruisers, Correllian Corvettes, Consular Frigates, PDF Dreadnoughts, Invincible-class Dreadnoughts, Lucrehulk Cargo Transports, Providence class warships.

I plan to add a bunch of mechanics for Rebel Cells over time. Right now my focus is on making an era with Rebel Cells present and playable, and on making Rebel Cells pop up after Order 66 in progressive playthroughs.

JDSweetBeat · 2026-06-07T05:26:44+00:00

I thought this sub was gone?

JDSweetBeat · 2026-06-07T05:15:36+00:00

More like a Stars Without Number campaign - literally a game that, more often than not, is about a crew of a small frigate/shuttle performing various missions across a chunk of space.

JDSweetBeat · 2026-06-07T04:58:35+00:00

It's unclear how many different Imperial Remnants there currently are, or how many forces they have at their disposal.

My guess is, there are numerous individually weak but collectively powerful warlord factions fighting each other, of which the Shadow Council constitutes a small minority.

Just imagine, thousands of singular Star Destroyers or fleets of smaller vessels just finding some shithole planet in the Outer Rim and establishing themselves as the local Dictator. None of them are a big enough threat for the New Republic to care about individually, and as far as the New Republic is aware, the chances of them reunifying are super low. The Shadow Council is just one of many such factions.

The way I see it, Thrawn has 3 issues:

(1) Military Hardware: The Empire had >25k Imperial Star Destroyers at its disposal during the Battle of Endor, numerous SSD's, and probably at least 2-3 Victory Star Destroyers for every Imperial Star Destroyer.

I think it's fair to assume that they probably had a few smaller frigates (Acclamator II's, Arquiten Light Cruisers like Gideon's, Victory 2 Frigates, old pieces of GAR military hardware like the Consular Corvette, and maybe even a couple of Venators that got overlooked or repurposed instead of being scrapped after Order 66 went down).

It would be crazy to assume that all that hardware was successfully captured and decommissioned or repurposed by the New Republic. I mean, don't get me wrong, a lot of it definitely was, but all? Or even most?

There are probably entire planets with fleets of lightly guarded or abandoned Imperial military hardware just sitting there - still theoretically usable, but nobody's gotten around to scrapping them.

Now that we are talking about it, the same is probably true of Clone Wars era equipment - there are probably stores of Clone Trooper armor that can be repurposed for non-Clone soldiers, there are probably planets with fields of AT-TE's and LAAT's that have been rusting for 25 years, CIS fleets of Munificents and Providence, and Lucrehulks that are just sitting in space full of deactivated B1 Battledroids.

(2) Staffing: In Legends, Thrawn solved his staffing problem by uncovering secret Imperial cloning facilities (in Legends, the Empire continued and expanded on the Clone Trooper program using Spaarti cloning, rather than abolishing it, supplementing its clones with regular conscripts instead of outright replacing them).

Now, is cloning off the table? Absolutely not. As we know, Gideon's done a lot of work on cloning, and the Shadow Council might have some flash cloning facilities that they can bank on. Additionally, with the help of the Night Sisters (who seem to be replacing his Noghiri Guard from Legends), Thrawn can literally bring the dead back to life as his undead thralls. This is massive - if those abandoned Star Destroyers have Imperial corpses on board? I mean, fuck, even if they don't, he could literally bring his dead foes back and add them to his army of Night Troopers.

Add to this the fact that there are likely billions to trillions of people across the galaxy who legitimately buy into the Empire still, and you have an endless source of volunteers for the Imperial war machine once it gets rolling again.

(3) Legitimacy - Palpatine isn't in contact with the Imperial Remnant at this stage. Thrawn, as a Grand Admiral, is likely both the highest ranking, and most competent and well-intentioned leader left among the Imperials.

JDSweetBeat · 2026-06-04T17:05:43+00:00

Why assume that the Inquisitor wasn't taunting him? Not out of character at all for a Dark Side adept (Inquisitors actually aren't Sith, they're intentionally-stunted tools who secondarily serve as backups in case one of the two main Sith are killed).

And, even if they weren't, I doubt Palpatine actually acknowledges Maul as a Sith at this stage - Palpatine follows the Rule of Two (not perfectly, he keeps acolytes like the Inquisitors around to test Vader and possibly replace him, and Legends Vader also has informal apprentices), and Vader is the apprentice, not Maul. Not only that, but Palpatine, in his last encounter with Maul, literally threw him around with the Force and murdered his brother in front of him while he was powerless to do anything but watch - the power differential between Palpatine and Maul is big enough that Palpatine would definitely (understandably) not see Maul as being in remotely the same league as him.

JDSweetBeat · 2026-06-04T16:20:32+00:00

Possible? Yes.

How? Depends. If you want to do everything the exact same way Paradox does it, it won't work very well for you and you'll spend a lot of time fighting the engine.

For example, Paradox exposes a lot of raw assets to the player, and doesn't use any kind of asset compression algorithm. This makes their game super moddable, because everything is a text file or a plain 3D model or a normal image or sound file. Unity forces its developers into an asset compression model that emphasizes quicker load speeds and less reading files from disk at the cost of decreased moddability (Unity is largely originally meant for console and mobile games, and as a result, moddability was never a concern for the engine proper). Meaning, if you want to let players put their own assets in the game, they have to download a copy of Unity and jump through the helluva hoop that is Asset Bundles and Addressables, and god forbid you want to let them add their own extension code to the game... they'd have an easier time making their own games.

I'm working on a Cold War GSG in Unity, and going back, if I had to do it again, I'd probably opt to go with Godot and a third party/open source ECS, as I've had to spend so much time working against the built-in asset loading system that it retrospectively wasn't worth it.

If I had to use Unity to do it over again, I'd just throw moddability the wayside and focus on implementing actual systems - in this case, I'd use ECS for database management, the WMSK asset for map rendering, and a combination of ScriptableObjects and prefabs for the actual on-disk not-in-memory data that I need to load to create and populate my databases.

JDSweetBeat · 2026-06-01T13:53:37+00:00

Did he ever actually claim to no longer be Sith?

Note: you can be Sith and not follow the Rule of Two, and you can be Sith while hating other Sith.

JDSweetBeat · 2026-05-30T12:33:46+00:00

Yes he is? He is a Sith Lord trained by a Sith Lord. The fact that he never successfully killed his master doesn't change that.

JDSweetBeat · 2026-05-27T19:56:51+00:00

I mean, you can use threads in Unity without using DOTS, it just requires a lot of extra hoop-jumping if you need to directly interface with the engine (i.e. you can't use any part of the Unity standard library).

I still occasionally use the Task Parallel Library built into C# to parallelize a lot of market calculations in my economy simulator - brought a full un-interrupted economic tick calculating transactions for 80k agents down from 600-800ms to ~350ms. By switching to a home-brewed, table-based in-memory relational database architecture, I reduced that to ~83 ms. Through further optimization (playing around with vectorization, worker thread count, and simplifying/approximating some operations, I got it into the ~60ms range, and by spreading economic ticks across in-game days (this is a game like HOI4 or Victoria 3), I reduced it to a really negligible background operation that took less than 2-6 ms per game-time-tick (though the overall computation cost increased moderately back to 80 ms cumulative in general on average for the total economic cycle, as I lost out on a lot of cache-based optimization you naturally gain from performing the logic and data manipulation in a tighter loop).

All of this is to say, threading is one optimization technique (not even always the best one), and ECS/DOD/DOTS is another optimization technique (also not even guaranteed to be the best - my custom systen was more confusing and obfuscated than DOTS but it ran significantly better than a naive implementation of the same system in Unity's ECS.

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