Hive Commander — a Factorio 2.0 mod where you leave your engineer life behind and become the director of a biter hive.

What this mod adds

• Play as a hive director with no body — command your swarm from a god view.
• Pollution economy — absorb wild biters at nests, spend the pool on buildings and science. Engineer pollution also slowly feeds your hive.
• Full RTS-style unit control (integrated Unit Control): selection, movement, attack, patrol, hold position, follow, and 9 hotkey groups (Ctrl+1..9 to assign, Alt+1..9 to select).
• 4 biter tiers (tanky melee) · 4 spitter tiers (fragile ranged) · 3 pentapod classes (wriggler / strafer / stomper).
• Barracks produces only base units — small biter, small spitter, wriggler.
• Mutation Altar upgrades units in bulk: 5x small → 5x medium → 5x big → 3x behemoth. Pentapods upgrade 5 wrigglers → 1 strafer, 3 strafers → 1 stomper.
• Production queue at Barracks and Mutation Altar: pause, cancel, ×1..×5 speed with fair refund. Production time shown on every button.
• Toxic Growth — a hive building that continuously vents pollution back into the world at its own location. The pollution feeds back into your pool via the engineer-pollution conversion and lures wild biters to your creep. Has its own GUI with a progress bar for the emission cycle and a live summary of every Toxic Growth on the map.
• Creep-only building rule — labs, chemical hives, barracks, the altar, and the Toxic Growth can only be placed on creep spread by the Hive and Hive Nodes. The Hive itself and Nodes are exceptions. Toggleable in startup mod settings.
• Hive Supremacy — anything on your creep that isn't hive withers and dies.
• Fog of war that remembers only what your units actually saw, with a hard camera boundary (128 tiles from the nearest hive presence).
• Demolish hive buildings from a button in their GUI, or send a biter to tear them down with Alt+Right-Click. Vanilla biter spawners, spitter spawners, and worm turrets are also demolishable.
• Hive bonuses panel (F7) — a dedicated window showing all current effects of researched hive technologies (damage, speed, regen, acid DoT, reach, supremacy).
• Cheats menu (F8) — for testing: add pollution or science to the hive chest, add/remove world pollution in an area around the cursor, set the surface time of day, unlock or lock any hive technology, spawn test units. Off by default; enable it in startup settings.
• Custom technology icons and a full hive-only research tree.

How to play

1. Press Join the Hive (or Reject the Hive to opt out). Both are permanent, two-step confirmation.
2. Place your Hive seed somewhere with plenty of wild nests in range — the hive feeds on their young.
3. Biters drift in, walk onto the hive, and fill your pollution pool. Engineer pollution also slowly feeds it.
4. Build Hive Nodes to expand, Hive Labs to research, Barracks to recruit base units, the Mutation Altar to upgrade them, and Toxic Growths to lure more wild biters to your territory.
5. Take the fight to the engineer with Hive Supremacy and full swarm control.

/hm-help prints a full in-game summary at any time.

Save compatibility

1.7.0 is a small breaking release for saves made on 1.5.0 or earlier, because Pheromones and their associated technologies were removed in 1.6.0 and 1.7.0. Loading such a save will:
- Delete all Pheromone Vents on the map.
- Remove the Pheromone Vent and Attack Group Size technologies from the tree.
- Clear the production queue (no pollution refund for unfinished tasks).
- The "Release Pheromones" recipe will no longer function.

Saves created on 1.6.0 or later load cleanly. Back up your save or start fresh if you want to preserve progression.

Requirements

• Factorio 2.0
• Space Age expansion (for pentapod units)

Credits

Built on top of Hive Mind Reworked by Stalin, with full Unit Control by Klonan integrated, and pentapod assets from Space Age by Wube.

Licensed under MIT.