Colossal Apiary

A giant late-game apiary for Productive Bees. Build a hollow cube of Apiary Casing, put your caged bees and their flowers inside, and it turns them straight into raw ore. No bees flying around your base, no hives to empty and no centrifuges to feed: the apiary holds the bees itself and runs Productive Bees' own centrifuge recipes inside.

Three shell sizes, up to 2,048 bees, upgrades up to ×32 ore, and an optional Byproduct Incinerator that deletes the wax and honey. It needs no power, only bees, flowers and an expensive build.

Features

• A real multiblock. A hollow cube of Apiary Casing with one Apiary Controller in the middle of a face. It forms by itself when it's complete (you hear a beehive sound). If something's wrong, right-click the Controller: chat tells you what and where ("missing casing at …", "edge needs a Reinforced Apiary Frame", "inside isn't empty") and red particles mark the spot.
• The bees live inside. Put caged bees (Bee Cage or Sturdy Bee Cage) into a Bee Port by hand or by pipe. Bees with the same type and genes stack into one entry, so 2,000 bees cost the server about as much as a handful.
• No bee entities. The bees you see flying behind the see-through honeycomb casing are drawn by your game only (up to 32 per apiary, and you can turn them off).
• The Garden. 27 flower slots in the Controller, never used up. Each kind of bee only works while its flower is in the Garden: the same flowers Productive Bees asks for (an Iron Block for iron bees, and so on). A bee without its flower waits, and the screen tells you what it wants.
• A built-in centrifuge. Every cycle, each bee makes its combs with Productive Bees' own recipe (the Productivity gene counts) and every comb goes straight through Productive Bees' own centrifuge recipe. Out comes raw ore, gems and scrap: the same items a centrifuge gives. Nothing is smelted.
• Almost every Productive Bees bee works, including bees a modpack adds, with no extra compat (the one exception is in the FAQ).
• Big storage, nothing lost. 54 output slots of 4,096 items each and a 256-bucket honey tank. When storage or the tank is full, the apiary pauses until there's room. Nothing is deleted unless you install the Incinerator.
• Take it with you. Break the Controller and everything stays in the item: bees, flowers, upgrades, stored items and honey. Place it in a new shell and it carries on.
• Light on the server. One timer per apiary, the maths done per kind of bee, output in bulk. Tested with 2,048 bees of 40 kinds and every upgrade: about 0.4 ms per cycle and next to nothing between cycles. No chunk loading.

Three sizes

The inside must be empty. With no Capacity upgrade an apiary holds 32 bees; Capacity upgrades unlock more, up to the shell's limit.

How it works

Every cycle (4 minutes, like a Productive Bees hive, or 30 seconds with Speed III), for each kind of bee:

1. Combs: the bees make their combs, as in a Productive Bees hive.
2. Centrifuge: each comb runs through Productive Bees' centrifuge recipe for it. A comb with no centrifuge recipe comes out as a comb.
3. Chances: each output keeps its recipe's chance (for example 40% for raw iron), or 100% with Precision.
4. Yield: multiplies the ore, gems and scrap. Wax, pollen and honey are never multiplied.
5. Byproducts: wax and pollen go to storage, honey to the honey tank, unless the Incinerator is on.

What that means for iron bees (default settings):

The top row is meant to be absurd. Pack makers can tone any of it down in the config.

Upgrades

Five upgrade slots (one of each kind; a higher level replaces a lower one), plus a slot of its own for the Byproduct Incinerator.

Each upgrade level is crafted from the one before it, so a Yield V costs every Productive Bees Productivity upgrade on the way. Productive Bees' own upgrades don't go in the Controller; they are crafting ingredients instead.

The Byproduct Incinerator

• It goes in its own slot. While it's installed, the screen shows a Void: ON / OFF switch (ON when you first put it in): one switch for wax, honey and pollen together. Ore is never deleted.
• With the switch ON, a full honey tank no longer pauses the apiary.
• Pack makers can turn it off: set incineratorEnabled = false in config/colossalapiary-common.toml. Then it can't be crafted (the recipe is gone, also from JEI and EMI), an existing Incinerator does nothing, and its slot and switch disappear from the screen. An Incinerator already in a Controller stays there, so nothing is lost if you turn it back on.

Ports

Ports go in the middle of any face (not on an edge or a corner). They use the standard NeoForge item and fluid connections, so pipes, hoppers and storage mods connect with no special compat.

• Bee Port: caged bees go in (right-click, sneak + right-click for the whole stack, or by pipe). Sturdy Bee Cages come back out empty; plain Bee Cages are used up, as in Productive Bees.
• Item Port: output only. Right-click to switch between Pull (pipes take from it) and Push (it fills the block next to it, up to 1,024 items every half second).
• Fluid Port: honey (and any other fluid a centrifuge recipe makes) out, with the same Pull / Push switch.
• Redstone Port: run always, only with a signal, or only without one (set in the screen). A comparator next to it shows how full storage is.

To take a bee back out, click its entry in the Controller screen while holding an empty cage (shift-click: one bee for each empty cage you hold). It keeps its type and genes.

Recipes

Vanilla + Productive Bees only. Every recipe uses Minecraft and Productive Bees items, whatever else is installed: Mekanism, Create and other mods change nothing. JEI and EMI show every grid.

It's late game on purpose:

A Tier III shell alone needs 29 Nether Stars and 116 Diamond Blocks for its frames. Pack makers can change any recipe with a datapack or KubeJS.

Requirements

• Minecraft 1.21.1 with NeoForge (21.1.200 or newer).
• Productive Bees 13.13.0 or newer (required). Tested on 13.13.5 (the version in All the Mods 10) and 13.14.0.
• Optional: JEI or EMI: a "Colossal Apiary" page for every bee (comb → outputs, chances, how much per bee per cycle) and info pages for the blocks and upgrades.
• Optional: Jade: the Controller's tier, status, bees and cycle progress.
• Install it on both the client and the server.

NeoForge only. Productive Bees has no Forge or Fabric version for 1.21.1, so Colossal Apiary doesn't either.

Config

• serverconfig/colossalapiary-server.toml (in the world folder): bees per shell, bee slots without upgrades, cycle time, storage and tank size, port speeds and every upgrade's numbers (raise Yield V to ×64 if you like).
• config/colossalapiary-common.toml: incineratorEnabled.
• config/colossalapiary-client.toml: cosmeticBees and maxCosmeticBees (the bees you see inside).
• For pack makers: upgrade numbers can also be set per item in the colossalapiary:apiary_upgrade data map, and what counts as a byproduct is the colossalapiary:byproducts item and fluid tags.

FAQ

How do I go up a tier? You don't upgrade the cube in place: you build the bigger one and move the Controller into it. Nothing is lost.

1. Break the Controller. Your bees, flowers, upgrades and stored items stay inside the item.
2. Build a hollow 9×9×9 (Tier II) or 11×11×11 (Tier III) cube. All 12 edges and 8 corners must be Reinforced Apiary Frames (Tier II, 92 of them) or Colossal Apiary Frames (Tier III, 116). Everything else is Apiary Casing, so you can reuse the old cube's casing.
3. Put the Controller in the middle of a face (not on an edge) and add your ports. It forms by itself.
4. Add the next Capacity upgrade (Capacity II for Tier II, Capacity III for Tier III). A bigger shell alone doesn't add bee slots.

Why isn't it working? Look at the status line in the Controller screen: "Not formed", "No bees", "No flowers in the Garden", "Storage full: paused", "Honey tank full: paused" or "Stopped by redstone". A bee with a red dot is missing its flower; hover over it to see what it wants.

Does it need power? No. It runs on bees and flowers.

Do day, night or rain matter? No. It's a sealed apiary, so the bees work around the clock.

Does it smelt the ore? No. You get exactly what Productive Bees' centrifuge gives: raw iron, diamonds, netherite scrap and so on.

Does every bee work? Every Productive Bees bee that makes a comb, including bees a modpack adds. Bees whose product depends on a block (like the lumber and quarry bees) use the block in the Garden. The "wanna" bee doesn't work: it needs a real mob.

Can I use it in my modpack? Yes.

Forge or Fabric? No. Productive Bees is NeoForge only on 1.21.1.

Credits

Made by DecayPlay. All code and art are original. Colossal Apiary builds on Productive Bees by JDKDigital: it uses Productive Bees' own bee data and recipes, and it doesn't contain any of its code. Productive Bees is required to play.