Chapter 16: beetles, mud and new resources
Before a chapter can be played, its pieces show up in the code as definitions: name, id, image and description. Chapter 16 has registered 11 new items — four beetles, their four feeds and three resources — and the change is merged, not under review. Nothing playable yet, but we already know exactly what is coming.
The eleven items, one by one
| Item | Id | What it is | The game's description |
|---|---|---|---|
| Brown Beetle | 3084 | Beetle | A common beetle |
| Blue Beetle | 3085 | Beetle | An uncommon beetle |
| Pink Beetle | 3086 | Beetle | A rare beetle |
| Amber Beetle | 3087 | Beetle | The rarest beetle |
| Mud | 3088 | Commodity | Rich, sticky mud |
| Rawhide | 3089 | Animal resource | A tough animal hide |
| Truffle | 3090 | Animal resource | A prized truffle |
| Brown Beetle Feed | 3091 | Feed | Beetle-assisted animal feed |
| Blue Beetle Feed | 3092 | Feed | Beetle-assisted animal feed |
| Pink Beetle Feed | 3093 | Feed | Beetle-assisted animal feed |
| Amber Beetle Feed | 3094 | Feed | Beetle-assisted animal feed |
The four beetles
They arrive in four rarities, common to rare: Brown Beetle, Blue Beetle, Pink Beetle and Amber Beetle. The rarest is called Amber, not QGold BeetleQ, because that name is already taken by the long-standing mining collectible — the Stone/Iron/Gold Beetle family, id 2131. In the code they are tagged as a resource (Purpose: Resource), not boost collectibles: for now they grant no bonus and have no defined cost.
So what is a beetle?
Let us clear this up, because it is not obvious: a beetle is not an animal or a pet. It is not an AnimalType like the Cow, Sheep or Chicken — those live in a building and produce resources, just like the pig. The beetle is a resource: an inventory item, with four rarities, that sits in your basket and divides into decimals like wood or iron. How you get one is not in the code yet; its rarities hint at some luck-based system, but that is a hint, not a confirmed fact.
Why none of them can be traded
All eleven read QTradable: NoQ, and the reason is more interesting than a switch left off. Resources skip the release-date gate: the check that stops an item being listed early does not apply to them. Had the team added these items to the trade-limits table, they would have been on sale in the marketplace from merge day, months before the chapter.
The fix was to exclude them at the type level: Mud is left out of the tradable-commodity list, Rawhide and Truffle are removed by an explicit exclusion, and the beetles simply never join the union. When the time comes a later PR switches them on — and it is already settled that they will trade instantly, like a resource, not like an NFT with an on-chain listing.
The beetle feeds
Each beetle brings its own feed, described as Qbeetle-assisted animal feedQ: alternatives to the feeds that already exist. But they are still not animal food as far as the code is concerned, and there is a concrete reason: joining the official list forces a recipe for each one and an XP row per animal per level. With the pig joining the yard, that is four animals by fifteen levels by four feeds. They move in once they have their real values; the ids will not change.
What is missing before they are playable
- How you get them. There is no recipe, no drop table and no cost: nothing yet says where a beetle or a handful of Mud comes from.
- The art. All eleven images are placeholders reusing existing sprites, marked in the code as pending replacement.
- The Cave. Mud has no producer: it arrives with the Cave, which has not shipped. Without it you cannot even upgrade the Pigpen.
- Trading. Stays off until a later PR turns it on.
- And mind the confusion: the QGold/Iron BeetleQ already in the game are a different thing — the mining collectible, unrelated to these.
And the pigs?
Rawhide and Truffle are exactly what the chapter's new animal produces: a max-level pig yields 4 Rawhide and 3 Truffle per harvest. We gave it its own article with the full Pigpen detail — real costs, the drop table level by level, favourite food and how it compares with the cow and the sheep.