Judging for Strawberry Jam 8 has ended, so I can finally post this GIANT UPDATE I’ve been sitting on for Goblin Hive!

Let’s take a look at what’s new:

Monarchy

The goblins will now crown a queen, and the queen will claim a consort. The queen and her consort will refuse to do any useful work unless there are no other goblins around. The queen only cares about eating and mating all day, and the consort only cares about getting the queen pregnant.

Any goblin in the hive is honored to be bred by the queen, and will always consent. No one other than the consort is allowed to breed the queen, and the queen will always consent to being bred by her. The queen is picky about choosing a consort, and might not pick one if she thinks all the goblins on the island are ugly.

Other goblins will always make sure that there’s a spare food available for the queen and the consort.

Succession to the throne is matrilinear; only offspring birthed by the queen are in line, not those she sires.

UI Improvements

The list of goblins in the GoblinDex can now be sorted, and a heart icon shows which goblins you’ve marked as favorites. Also, the message log and the GoblinDex are now fully hyperlinked – click on any goblin’s name to immediately jump to their description. Note that descriptions are not saved for dead goblins.

More descriptive information has been added to the GoblinDex.

The event log can be filtered to only show messages related to your favorite goblins.

The “try to get pregnant” and “try to impregnate others” options have been merged into a single option called “encourage breeding.” It works like this:

• When this goblin is choosing someone to top during sex, she will try goblins that aren’t already pregnant first.
• When other goblins are choosing someone to top, they will prioritize her unless she’s already pregnant.
• She will refuse to be topped if she’s already pregnant, so that she can save her libido for impregnating others.
• She might still refuse to be topped if she thinks her partner is ugly and she’s not submissive and/or horny enough.
• Two goblins both marked with “encourage breeding” will prioritize each other before anyone else.

Gameplay Improvements

An option for “safe sex” has been added. With this turned on, goblins who aren’t marked with “encourage breeding” will only have sex with goblins who are already pregnant. Be careful; if you leave this on and forget about it the hive will eventually go extinct.

The map size is now customizable. The default map size of 15x8 regions fits perfectly in a maximized window when fully zoomed out on a 1080p monitor. You can go bigger or smaller, but keep in mind that large maps can hurt performance. The map layout has also been updated so that there are many small pockets of land.

Goblins now consider “bring material to a construction site” jobs to be a high priority, and will complete them before any simple jobs like digging, building, or chopping.

Hunger now scales more realistically with pregnancy progress, pregnancy size, and lactation rate. This rate also scales with the brand new “digestion efficiency” gene, which affects how fast the goblin’s stomach empties.

The “hunger tolerance” gene has been renamed to “stomach capacity” to make it more obvious that it unlocks vore.

A goblin who is pregnant and/or lactating is now worth extra nutrition when vored. They also require a larger stomach capacity to vore.

Optimizations

Goblins are now a bit less picky about picking the closest possible job. They’re also much smarter about detecting whether work sites and food are unreachable, and won’t waste time trying to calculate pathfinding routes to each possible job. The navmesh is now broken into small chunks so that the entire thing isn’t recalculated each time a tile is mined out.

A few performance options have been added as well. You can disable “shoving” so that goblins will no longer push each other apart when they get too close. You can also specify the max population; no goblins will get pregnant when the total current population plus existing pregnancies are greater than this limit (a single large litter can push it over the limit though). The goblins can also be split into processing batches, so that not all goblins will update their AI every frame. I find I can handle 200 goblins in 5 processing batches with no obvious framerate hiccups.

Bug fixes

Goblins should no longer get confused and wander off halfway through digging a tunnel. They might still wander off if they get hungry, horny, or tired, but they shouldn’t decide to just go idle anymore.

Fruit and trees will no longer grow while the game is paused.

Fixed a bug where two goblins could decide to top each other simultaneously, causing a deadlock where each got stuck waiting for the other to get ready.

Goblins should be smarter about sharing access to barrels now, and are less likely to starve because all the food barrels are occupied by goblins depositing stuff.

Goblins now avoid picking tiny regions when choosing a favorite region to idle in.

All goblins will have unique first names. It was extremely unlikely to have duplicates before, but now it should be completely impossible. If they run out of 2 syllable names they’ll start using 3 syllable names, and so on.

Goblins should no longer die of exhaustion while there are beds available.

Fixed a bug that made it impossible for genes to spontaneously mutate into the submissiveness gene.

Goblins can no longer have sex immediately after giving birth, because it was letting them get around the “safe sex” rule.