The Manual

Options

The Options screen can be opened from the Game Shell, or from the in-game escape menu. It contains a number of different sections:

Graphics Options

  • Resolution: This dropdown lets you choose the screen resolution and refresh rate that matches your monitor. Selecting lower values for this can improve framerate if you have a less powerful machine.
  • Fullscreen: This toggle lets you run the game in full screen mode (borderless windowed mode) or windowed mode. Note that some extreme aspect ratios in windowed mode may not be supported.
  • Quality Setting: This dropdown lets you choose from 6 different predefined quality settings. Each enables more sophisticated graphics settings, such as better shadows, greater shadow distance, and more lights.

Hitting F1 in game toggles a framerate indicator which may be helpful in determining which graphics settings are best for your machine. The Nest and Combat have the highest resource demands.

Audio Options

  • Master Volume: This slider controls the overall game volume relative to your system volume.
  • Music Volume: This slider controls the volume of the randomly composed music tracks in the game, relative to the master volume.
  • UI Audio Volume: This slider controls the volume of UI effects, such as clicking, relative to the master volume.
  • FX Audio Volume: This slider controls the volume of the sound effects produced by objects in the 3d world (Nest and Combat).

Camera Controls

  • Mouse Zoom Sensitivity: This slider controls how responsive the game is to your mouse (wheel) or trackpad (side-touch, or pinch) zoom inputs.
  • Mouse Rotation Sensitivity: This slider controls how responsive the game is to your mouse (middle-click-drag) rotation inputs.
  • Mouse Panning Sensitivity: This slider controls how responsive the game is to your mouse (right-click-drag) or trackpad (right-click-trackpad-drag) pan inputs.

Autosaves

  • Use Autosaves. This toggle enables or disables the automatic periodic saves the game performs. The default is on.

Screenshots

  • Refresh Mugshots: This button exports an image of each beetle in your collection to your screenshot directory. They are png files on a transparent background.
  • Open Screenshots: This button opens a file explorer window in the screenshots directory, to make it easy to locate the beetle mugshots, or other save files for the game.

Game Play Options

  • Disable Auto-Pause: This toggle controls whether the game pauses simulation progress in the Nest when transitioning to other screens, such as the Map, or Breeding. The default is on.
  • Disable Tutorial: This toggle controls whether you see first-time-tooltips at points in the game when you first encounter something new. The default is on.
  • Reset Dialogs: This button resets all the first-time-tooltips for the tutorial, in case you missed something, and want to read them again.
  • Tool Tip Delay Time: This slider controls how long to delay before showing pop up tooltips. If you find tooltips are getting in the way as you move the mouse around the UI, try increasing this time.

Cheats

This button opens the cheat menu, which consists of:

  • Add Goop: Adds 1000 Goop to your balance.
  • Reset Map Task Counts: Resets all tasks on the map to their original count.
  • Reset Beetle Needs: Resets the Needs of all Beetles in the Nest to 100%. This will also cause young Beetles to become fully grown.