Have you ever wanted to utterly confuse your enemies? Chew through any obstacle in your path? Introducing the Drugstore beetle! This beetle in nature is able to multiply extremely quickly to take over food sources and chew through both food and non-food items.

⚠️ Suggestions are normally not implemented exactly as suggested. Instead devs pull from multiple suggestions of the same beetle as well as their own ideas to make it fun. This is just the highest voted suggestion for the beetle.

Off Ball Ability: Chew Through

Creates a tunnel between two sides of an object. This is represented on both sides by a chew hole and touching one moves you through the object pretty much immediately to the other side. (6s cooldown, can store up to 3 charges)

Anything can go through this including beetles, balls, projectiles (e.g. bomba projectile). A tunnel lasts for 12 seconds. Some examples of things that can be chewed through: ebb wall, picnic cake, stumps on crater, the side of the picnic table (to go to the other side of the table), pyramids on egypt, etc. Holes are placed where you are facing. It detects where you are looking and if the first place of terrain is open and there is a second piece of terrain open on the other side it places it

Can be used to create a path through walls constructed by wallers to let itself or teammates score on the net.

On Ball Ability: Infestation

Drugstore beetle eats the ball and lays eggs into the ground (takes a second to eat). After 2 seconds a fake drugstore beetle is spawned for every tick of dung that was eaten. (10s cooldown)

A fake beetle has one of the following movement patterns

1. If closer to a dung ball than an enemy with a dung ball, move towards and pick up the nearest dung. If it gets it it eats it and lays an egg
2. Else if closer to an enemy with a dung ball, move towards the nearest enemy with a dung and try to grab the ball (and then eat)
3. If touched by another fake then it follows that other fake (with slightly random differences to make it seem more like flocking rather than robotic movement. e.g. the boids algorithm). If what its following the behaviour of dies then reverts back to normal behaviours.
4. If touched by drugstore beetle then it starts doing what drugstore beetle is doing similar to step 3 with the other fake. But these ones in this flock can also do things like headbutt, etc. (headbutts for example wouldnt all happen at the same time but would have a bit of randomness in the delay of them to make identification of the main beetle possible and to make it seem more polished)

Fake beetles die and drop 1 dung when cc is used on them or they are headbutted. They use A* pathing and will use tunnels when available. They look exactly like the drugstore beetle.

Fakes are good for causing confusion in enemies. You can disguise as a fake to sneak up on them or distract them with fakes as you and teammates do things elsewhere on the map with the Mouse in a cage strategy.

Passive: Spore Clouds

Drugstore beetle getting affected by any cc or being headbutt will release a small spore cloud for 3 seconds to block vision. Anything that goes through the cloud will also release a spore cloud if cced or headbutted within the next 10 seconds. Fakes also release this as they die.