I always wondered why halfway through the genetic modification of the shine bugs, the duplicants just create a totally dark one. Do you think they were like “oh god we’ve done it now!”? I like to imagine that they started panicking, giving the bugs better and better food, like frost burgers. One duplicant one day accidentally drops a chunk of barbecue on the ground, and the abyss bug chomps it down. The then creates an egg with the most beautiful shine bug they’ve ever seen. That duplicant is then venerated and gets the best item in the world that no other duplicant gets the luxury of… a shower.

Shine bug is a light source that does not produce heat like lamp does, so it is definitely a better light source for farming.

I have found the best use for shinebugs is disinfecting. I put a few eggs into a slime biome, and it clears the germs out so much better than anything else, including chlorine

Remember when your old shine bug reactor used to only output only 100 rads? Ah, the good old days.

If the theoretical use of the abyss bugs was to use them for decor in bedrooms, then it would only make sense to do so when there is no room for any decor items in the barracks. But the amount of infrastructure required to get to breeding abyss bugs could be used to increase the space for those barracks, allowing for some decor items, defeating the reason for abyss bugs. Also important to note that the game has pixel packs now, so the whole idea with these critters makes less sense! They are cute though.

And here I thought the purpose of Shine Bugs was to annoy the Dupes when it's time for bed.

What a sassy looking shine bug at the beginning. 🥰 Great video!

If you only want the rads, you can use airflow tiles on your waterlock design. They let the rads thru so it lets you add extra radbolt generator locations. Also, since the shinebugs inside the reactor won't be confined, they get their 17%/cycle reproduction rate, so they replace themselves. Therefore, once you set the reactor, you don't need to keep ranching them. Moreover, this allows you to transport large number of eggs to other asteroids where you need the rad source and set the reactor without needing a localized shinebug stable, allowing you to get rads wherever you want. The bad thing is that even when restricted to a single tile they take a toll on the performance of the game.

"It's the decor where the shine bugs thrive" - missed Dad joke right there.

Amazing tutorial. Well done sir 👍

I couldn't agree more with Matt Smith. Good stuff! Tyfs, Echo. Best of wishes.

Exactly what I needed Thank you

You can already get max decor on great halls and bedrooms with paintings and marble statues (and more of course) The amount of effort to get a abyss/royal is incredible and good for... showing off really. Or having 2 tall, really tight rooms like the minibase mod where you cannot put any decor items, but having to use the space for the shine farm brings the idea down... A possible solution to the large amount of calories the later ones eat, could be like the starving paku machine where you feed it only enough to lay eggs and not starve. Also, there's a mod that adds better/harder diseases, and one of the late, LATE game vaccines (grants immunity to that disease) uses ABYSS EGGS in the recipe, which is NUTS!! And finally gives a purpose to ranching them.

You can set up a good breeding stable with only 4x4 pathable tiles, which should dramatically cut down on the lag. Simply use a single tile liquid lock to connect the room to a full 96 tile stable. You can even use the otherwise empty tiles on the other side for some other buildings since Stables don't really have a limitation on what can be in there, just be aware of the heat (from those extra buildings) and radiation from the bugs. A dedicated radbolt shinebug reactor can produce waay more. One stable produces a theoretical 133.3 bugs over a 25 cycle lifespan, which minus the 8 bugs needed to sustain the stable is 125*60 rads on the center tile (after 25 days, new bugs should theoretically be replacing ones dying of old age). That's 7500 rads on center tile per stable. Where the dedicated Radbolt reactor gets its advantage though is the ability to run multiple Radbolt Generators on the "optimal" tiles in each direction. That is in theory though. In practice I never got 7500 rads per stable, and instead of peaking after 25 cycles it slowly continued to increase over several hundred cycles. I think currently I'm averaging around 5000 rads per stable on the center tile after a couple hundred cycles. But that's still TONS of radiation and my radbolt generators are getting around 1000 radBOLTS/cycle each from 3 stables.

Thank you very much, I started to play the game this month (I couldn't buy it until recently) and everyone says and thinks it's a waste, it's good to know that I can speed up my base design

18:00 This is very true, I have a few hatches that I've been keeping wild for a while and eventually, I got a smooth hatch egg without having to ranch them.

Personally, i believe they should be reworked to give light producing bugs a bonus to plant growth and provide dupe work speed bonus that scales with tier.

Yeah I've always considered Shine Bugs useless and usually a sleep-disturbing, lag-inducing nuisance to be exterminated. Your definitive guide decisively showed me why. You forgot to mention the Airborne Critter Bait building.

I made mine with the rocket modules in spaced out. More space efficient and looks cooler building a "Tower of Power". Check it out sometime! A quick tip is you must also include a rocket battery module on each column with a transformer to harvest the power.

Necro-ing this but the shinebug evolution is my favorite easter egg in the game. It's a Chocobo Breeding system from Final Fantasy 7.

lol whenever I start a new game one of the first things I always do is blast all the shine bugs so they dont annoy my sleeping dupes....

the sunbug nymph is used for the tier 3 medical device, so if you have a problem with zombie spores, then that will serve you as well. also, i use airflow doors for my shinebug tile instead of standard tiles, due to the rads not being obstructed.

I suppose I could find a use for a half-ranch in which I'd keep four Sun Bugs. They could effectively feed themselves on Bristle Berries grown within said ranch, and I could spread any extra eggs around the base for decor, light and disinfection, and maybe create a half-dozen serum vials in case of sporechid shenanigans. Not a huge investment for a moderate bonus. And if I happen to roll a natural twenty and get a Royal Bug, I might as well feed it on the phosphorite that I get for free from my Drecko farm anyway, all the way up to Abyss Bug.... who I can then feed on the abbysallite that's usually just clogging up my storage anyway. And with all these bugs, I've probably set up a rad generator or two, and I could use all those radbolts to run a diamond press to feed any radiant bugs that might end up happening. Goddangit, I just talked myself into this, haven't I?

You should tell Nathans sandbox about this video he has a 1 duplicate challenge and his biggest problem decore

The shinebug reactor used to be so laggy. Theres a shinebug reactor mod that's nice

They have an animation and a rangled sprite so they clearly intended it

I grow sporechids in diamond window tiles for decor and ranch sunbugs just in case something goes wrong. XD

Snorts the weird white cold fluffy stuff outside

16:22 as a 40k fan of chaos... I cannot unsee it...

Tried farming with them. Early game it was kind of nice to not generate heat which would slowly overheat my bristle blossoms. Initially had it in a farm with a fertilizer but that eventually felt like a waste of fertilizer (after running out of first biome fertilizer). Then once you're not fertilizing them you can get past the problem of their random movement and blossoms not getting light by having a series of like 4x4 rooms with one shine bug in each which lays one egg in its unhappy life perpetuating the system of that room. Then it kind of takes a lot of room putting doors between every 4 or 5 farm tiles to keep the bristle blossoms lit. But then once you get mushrooms, slime/mushrooms feels free vs burning water to make bristle blossoms.

Great

I have at least 3 shine bugs in each room except barracks, just to increase decor before cleaning up debris.

Not just 7, but 8 variants in Spaced Out! The DLC added Ionising Bugs, which eat depleted uranium. I think they produce extra rads?

Finally a modern guide so I can build my base powered by "shine bug sun"

Comparing shine bugs to the other decor mechanic, carpet, the shine bugs are so clearly outmatched tho! 😢

I really want abyss bugs in rooms but that seems like a lot of effort :)

I'm now using a critter drop off set on sun bugs in every room, and a shine bug reactor

This solidified for me never ever ranching shine bugs, all the morphs you have to get through to get to the best ones and the best ones still only produce as much decor and power and light as you can get much easier elsewhere. Nothing special + have to evolve through 7 morphs + lag creator = lose lose lose.

16:53 aww, sleepy echo!

Great vid! The only thing I would have wanted is a tutorial on how to get from a shine bug to a reactor... I'll start looking for a video that explains how to get those little guys into that small space. And do they reproduce at least one of themselves in that one reactor-center tile, or do I have to sweep out the eggs and somehow deposit more in there? I suspect no, but it's not explicit in the video.

Auto-wrangle not an exploit. First because of the trussed animation/sprites but also because it's nonsensical that there's no way to transport flying critters. Lures are not a good solution... it's possible you don't even have the materials for creating the correct lure (which is an even bigger issue in Spaced Out). There has to be a way to remove errant flying critters from places you don't want them other than killing them. The fact that auto-wrangle is the ONLY practical method to move around flying critters makes it more of a fundamental game feature than anything else.

If you use the long chamber but separate them into single tile groups with water or maybe viscogel and the conveyor rails would that help fix the pathing problem?

There is a mod called "Shine bug reactor" that eliminate all the potential lag from using shine bugs in large numbers for power.

hey nice video, be carefull with that I forgot I had for a "few" cycles and I ended up with 600 shinebugs and my pc did NOT like it haha

The decor use is kind of dead though, since they'll now irradiate your dupes... I was thinking of breeding abyss bugs for bedrooms for the lolz, but that's too much rads.

Can you do a tutorial on how to have an infinite storage with or without glitches? I have tried to make one glitchless but fail every time.

Is it possible to upgrade Shine Bugs using Critter Fluxomatic?

7:13 I didn't know I liked to thwack eggs.

Just FYI, you don't have to select zero bugs. Even with 20 max critters, your ranchers will still wrangle them with auto-wrangle surplus on.

00:12 poor shine bug got trolled by Eric W :D

I need the reactor... lol

Shinebug reactor? nah thats the unmatched power of the sun

how do you trap bugs into that little square behind the water tho?!

i would call that solar panel setup an exploit just as much as the auto wrangle feature. I dolt have any issue with either but shoving dozens of bugs in a single square and tricking them into believing they're free seems exploitative to me. No shade, just giving an opinion. Great video!

The big problem with these reactors, even limiting their movement to a single tile, is CPU cycles. I had all my power met by upwards of 1000 bugs and had to cull the entire population just to make the game playable again

eats a kg of food.. yet gives a 100g of it back... what kind of metabolism do they have???? lol

lackluster!😂

QUESTION... Might have changed it but if you want to cure zombie spores you need a shine bug variant EGG, not a bug, at the apothecary???

Wait I thought the purpose of the shine bug was to stress your dupes out by blinding them all night?

for new players just dont ranch themunless you have done everything and want to use its rad or lightreactor they have only 1 use as i know and thats a medicine thats made with sun bugs egg and i didnt use it a single time just use dreckos for food if you have tons of rock use hatchs which i do use when i build a volca powercell or petrolium-natural gas boiler magma turns into igneus rock and you can make a dupe to crash that into sand and feed it to hatches which will remove the remaining heat which causes you to get coal thats not 125 ° which is most of this systems end up in the end dreckos can be fed with balm lily and it just doesnt need anything to grow just make it inside an insulated area because they need to be about 40° which is easyfor you

Man that Hidden Echo sure looks tired!

so if you can't eat em... join em?

What was your audio issue around 14:53? My ears hurt

Wasn't there a medical item that requires a shine bugs variant egg to make? I think the shot for zombie spore

Seriously... the auto-wrangle works? Why did I never try that

Decor bonus with added Radiation poisoning hazard. A win win scenario.

17:07 sleepy Echo in a comefy bed?

How do you get the abyss bugs into the bedrooms?

Use airflow tiles instead of glass/plastic to not block shinebug reactors light ?

I just saw ur profile description, rxt graphics for only oxygen not included, damn u must be making lots of money for making oni videos to get a rtx 😅

How do you feed shine bugs that are locked in bedroom?

Use carpet tiles

I comment to help statistics

Is the colonization series done?

4:50 - The asymmetry of 7 boxes is killing me :(

what about beach chair?

so basically, unless you want a shinebug reactor much later in the game, it's effectively useless.

So my game won't lag if I stack like 500 shine bugs in one tile?

Why decor is what i have to care about? I mean it is pretty minor, is not it?

I’m gonna have to pass on these bugs

My tip and trick is: don't use them. There are better ways to do everything they can do.

That "Auto-wrangle surplus" is absolutely NOT exploitative of ANYTHING. It is a dual-purpose function that, even if it isn't intended by the devs, has not been removed from the game either. It's called a "fluke"; the use of this mechanic isn't just acceptable, it's boarder-line stupid NOT to use it This is coming from someone who holds "the intended way of playing a game" in high regard, to the point where I hate glitched-speedruns.

Fuck yeah