So, as you may notice when looking at my den, I love beetle battling. And I mean, love, beetle battling. For those who don’t know: The most common drop from winning (and sometimes losing) a battle is an herb of some sort, both those used for thirst in August and those used for shaman quests in November. This is because these are used as food for larvae, but anyone who does even a handful of battles a day quickly starts to build up a stockpile of the items.

For me especially, as someone who treats beetle battling as as much of an integral part of my gameplay as exploring, I have quite a lot on hand at any given moment and often share with others who need them since it’s no big detriment to me at all and makes someone else’s gameplay a little better. Hell, yesterday I just sent someone 500 herbs for their Vredefort Crater quest completely for free because it really doesn’t have a significant impact on my stores and doesn’t bother me! I’ll be able to get it all back in like 1-2 weeks at MOST if I’m being lazy, and that’s only because I’m still building up my beetle slots! (Was on hiatus for a bit, haha.)

This brings me to my idea for a fun new encounter for both August and November respectively: You encounter some beetle battlers while out exploring who happily share some of their herb stores with you when they notice you seem to be looking for something!

For August, I have two different ideas on how it could go.

1. You get your thirst refilled as they give you something to drink and then give you something for later/to take back to your pride. Either 1 water root OR 2 aloe leaf OR 2 stripped cacti OR 2 african cucumber. (Or some variant of those amounts!)

2. You just get the herbs, but get a bit more than with idea one. Maybe 2 water roots OR 3-4 of the others?

And as a funny bit: Maybe they’re shocked to see how thirsty you are since they have so many water-holding herbs they didn’t even realize that others might be having trouble with the drought! They’ve just been passing out stuff to animals, they didn’t know other lions might be in trouble too!

If you wanted to add karma and good/evil point options, maybe you either accept their help or just attack them to take their stuff?

For November, since you’re looking for specific herbs for quests, I have a couple different ideas for how it could play it out.

1. You only encounter them when actively on an herb gathering quest and they finish it for you similar to the Ahihia encounter. Since the Ahihia encounter has a fee of 100sb maybe they ask for 50sb in exchange? Both because they can only complete half of the available quest options (herb-gathering ones; they’re beetle battling nerds, fighting enemies/going on long journeys isn’t really their forte!) AND because that’s the fee for building new beetle mounds. They could ask for the sb so that they can build a new mound for their beetles in exchange for helping you!

2. You can encounter them whenever and they give you a couple of herbs at random. Essentially just a new variant of the already increased drop rate for herbs during November!

3. You can encounter them whenever and they give you some herbs scaled to the quest pool. I can’t think of a better way to word that so let me explain haha.

- Since the umganu and honey bush quests both ask for 10 each whereas the dream root quest only asks for 4, you would get more umganu/honey bush than you would dream root depending on what herb they end up giving you. It would be random what they give you, same as the second option, but scaled to help with different quests! Maybe the scaling for quests that require two different herbs is that you’d get one of each?

Another idea would be a combination of options 1 and either 2 or 3, in that you can encounter them whenever for random herbs, but if you’re actively on a quest they can help you finish it for a fee!

Those are all the different ideas I have for these encounters for the moment, I’ll come back and add in an edit if I have more later on! I just think that these would be some fun monthly encounters that would call on a lesser used aspect of the gameplay. There’s so many different ways they could go; I just think they’d be fun and hey, they’re reflective of some actual player’s experiences!

Edit note: Not adding anything, just trying to make the formatting a bit easier to read lol. I’m on my phone, sorry!