Bees and wax
Three wild hives, and beeswax is not wax.
Six of the seven shot modifiers want wax, and the first thing to know is which wax.
Beeswax is not Wax. They are different materials with different pages. The recipes want beeswax. A stack of wax will not do, and hunting for the wrong one is a long way to go for nothing.
You will need
- A wild hive, or a hive you built
- Somewhere to put what comes out
Steps
- Find a wild hive. Worldgen places three, one per third of the map, each in a carved bowl. They exist so that the supply is there before you have made anything — building a hive is not something you can do before you have any wax to want.
- Take the beeswax. A hive extrudes it.
- Use it at the bench. The modifier recipes are on the station pages, and Beeswax lists every one of them under "What it is for".
When it works
You have beeswax, and the modifier recipes stop being greyed out.
When it does not
You have wax and the recipe still will not light up. Check which wax. This is the one mistake this page exists to prevent — the first attempt at this whole feature used the wrong material, and six recipes went from asking for something you cannot keep to asking for something that does not exist.
You soured the colony with coal. Coal near a hive gives Coal Wax and Coal Honey instead. This is recoverable: both render back into coal at the bench, so a soured hive is a detour rather than a loss.
You wanted to catch a bee. You cannot, and that is deliberate rather than missing. Right-click capture was built and removed: right-click is also the dig verb, so every swing near a hive pocketed a bee. The items still exist and still release a bee if you somehow have one.
You are looking for web for a recipe. Nothing in the crafting table asks for web any more. It decays with a mean life of about 255 frames — roughly four seconds — which made collecting it a minigame nobody asked for. Silk is a pure hazard now, and the modifiers are made of beeswax instead.
Next
Circuits and Item logistics — the two systems, rather than tasks. Then Leaving, which is the end of the game.