Insect lair
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The insect lair is a cave network located underneath a colony, accessed by entering a cave entrance.
Summary[edit]
Similar to the undercave, the insect lair is a cave-like map obscured by attack-destructable walls. Scattered around the lair are clusters of corpses, egg sacs containing larvae, insect hives, and insect ambush spots. Completely enclosed in burrow walls is a hive queen and more hives, guarding some kind of loot. If the hive queen get injured, all other insects in the lair will rush in to protect her.
A map will be created once the first colonist is sent inside to explore. Exploration begins at the cave exit spawned randomly on the map. To progress farther within the cave, burrow walls must be damaged to reveal more sections. It isn't necessary to mine any rock to fully explore the cave. A "Muffled chittering" letter will alert the player when a colonist is near a burrow wall directly obscuring the hive queen. The cavern is not destroyed after defeating the queen.
Some mushrooms also grow in the cave: groups of boomshroom and groups of agarilux and psilocap.
Analysis[edit]
The 2 types of mushroom clusters in the lair gives away the 2 efficient ways of dealing with the hive queen
Cook her with fire[edit]
Since queens will spawn pre-enclosed in a room, it's possible to raise the temperature inside and down her with heatstroke. Once you get the hive queen alert, spread wood logs to 15-20 cells near the queen's hive entrance and put an IED incendiary trap in the middle. Then pre-build walls from non-flamable material so that you can quickly close off the room. Finally destroy the burrow wall and close it off. The insects will rush forward, trigger the trap, and set all the wood on fire
Sometimes the destroyed burrow wall doesn't reveal the hive queen and you may have to set up everything at a different location. It is important that there is wood on all cells adjacent to the walls you build, so that the resulting fire prevents the insects from attacking that wall. Sometimes the insects manage to put out some of the fire and attack the wall anyway. In that case, you have to repair the wall or even build additional layers while waiting for the flame to re-spread.
When the fire start, the temperature will quickly rise well above heatstroke level. Because the insect sludge floor and burrow walls are all flamable, it will not stop untill extinguished by the player. The hermetic crate and the loot inside will not be affected though. The hive queen will be downed from heatstroke after a few hours
Tame her with an inspiration[edit]
Psilocap is a powerful yet safe recreational drug. The worst thing it can cause is a catatonic state, yet the exact chance of this doesn't appear anywhere in the game, and testing has revealed it to be very low. Further, wealth of the surface colony doesn't count toward the expectation of colonists in the lair. With low expectation and psilocap hallucinations, it's possible to set up a pleasure complex here and keep colonists' mood near 100% all the time. This will quickly produce inspirations for everyone, and possibly taming inspiration.
Even with an inspiration, colonists need to have at least animal skill level 14 to even attempt to tame the queen; this limits the pool of potential tamers. But once tamed, the hive queen is a highly productive animal, both in terms of insect meat and combat power.