Hive Time

World Bee Day 2026 & v1.2-163 changelog

Happy belated World Bee Day! (I was swamped yesterday, on the 20th)

Here's a quick little patch with a couple of new settings and a mostly-fix for a known issue.

In response to some recent feedback (thanks to fellow Linux-based bee game developer fiehra!), I've added a new setting for "grab panning," which moves the pan cursor as you pan. I also added a setting for speeding up menu transitions. Both of these can be found in the Interface Settings menu.

I also addressed some issues that could occur when the bee_move_mode setting is changed while the game is running. There was already a tooltip explaining that that could lead to unexpected behaviour, but that's easy to miss, and since it can have a big impact on the game, there's not a popup warning telling you to save and load if you have trouble.

In addition to that, I addressed the primary issue that would occur, which is that existing bees would no longer move, and would get stuck. After those bees died and were returned to the pool, the next time a new bee spawned using the same bee instance, that would be stuck in place too. Since Hive Time is driven by bee labour, not having bees perform labour kinda breaks stuff! In the end, I tracked it down to some unexpected behaviour where the is_active() state of a Godot Tween would not get reset when stopping/removing all transitions if the process mode was changed while a tween was running. There might be some other odd edge cases, so I've left the warning in there, but it's a lot better now than it was before.

Note that typically, this setting shouldn't be changed unless you're experiencing very poor performance on a lower end machine.

I also want to acknowledge that I missed last year's World Bee Day. In an ideal world, I'd love to do a little patch for World Bee Day every year, but things have been a little bumpy for me, and I've needed to prioritise other things. As Hive Time gets older, as it becomes harder to identify slop from actual papers when researching for Beepedia facts, and so on, it becomes harder to justify spending time on Hive Time when my attention is being dragged elsewhere. I'll do what I can when it makes sense to do so, but I don't want it to be something that players are expecting consistently moving forward. I'll still do my best to do a little patch for the game's anniversary in Beecember for the time being, though!

Enjoy!

- Cheese

Full changelog

  • * Added grab_scrolling setting
  • * Added fast_menu_transition setting
  • * Added CameraHandler::panDistance
  • * Added Game::transitionTime
  • * Added warning changing bee_move_mode setting while a game is paused
  • * Updated CameraHandler::_input() to accumulate pan movement and update pan cursor position if grab_scrolling is enabled
  • * Updated CameraHandler::_input() to warp mouse cursor to appropriate location if grab_scrolling is enabled
  • * Updated MainMenu to use Game::transitionTime for camera movement, zooming, and music fading
  • * Updated prepare_setup_menu() and close_menu() in Game to use transitionTime
  • * Refactored transitionTime into hiveTransitionTime in handle_hive_transition_end(), transition_new_hive(), and prepare_new_hive() in Game
  • * Fixed bees getting stuck when changing bee_move_mode setting while a game is paused