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When it comes to relaxing simulation games, not many come close to the cozy, soothing atmosphere of Apico, the premier apiarist and beekeeping simulator around. Inspired by the Forestry Minecraft mod, Apico lets you live your bee-related dreams.

RELATED: Apico Is A Sweet Farming Sim Full Of Bees

While the job does a good job of teaching you the basics, the slew of bee puns and the sheer amount that you have to learn might feel a tad overwhelming to newbie beekeepers. While there are no time-pressure elements to Apico, it can be reassuring to go in with a few handy tips in your pocket and some strategies to employ.

Seriously, Read The Guidebooks

Apico Menus and interfaces

Apico does an incredible job of teaching you everything you need to know about the game, and it does this through the guidebooks that you'll acquire during the first hour or so of play. Grandpa's Guidebook is the most important - it'll teach you how to be a beekeeper through a series of short quests. You learn by doing in Apico.

And there's a lot to learn.

Remember always to claim your rewards whenever you complete a quest!

The other three guidebooks consist of handbooks and a map. Beelia's Almanac will teach you everything you need to know about the various species of bee - but only once you've acquired one at least once. You'll have info on their temperament, their produce, their conservation status, and even what hybrid species they can make.

Abbee's Folio is your guide to flowers. In Apico, flowers can affect the bees that visit them, sometimes altering their behavior. The Folio will tell you how to cross-breed flowers to create new hybrids with new effects.

The final guidebook is Skipper's Map. Unfortunately, you'll have to fill it in yourself as you explore the world, but it's a handy reference book that also shows you the locations of the NPCs in the game.

Apiaries Vs. Hives

Apico Apiary interface

An easy mistake to make in the first hour of gameplay is to find out that you can breed bees inside beehives and then assume that you can start filling out your Almanac with hybrids made inside hives. This is not true.

Only bees that breed inside apiaries will have a chance of producing a hybrid. To create a basic apiary, you'll need to use ten honeycomb, ten wood planks, and ten logs at your Workbench.

If you use infused wood planks instead, you'll create an advanced apiary. This has more slots than a regular apiary - three slots vs. seven slots.

To get infused wood planks, combine wood planks and resin in an Infuser.

You can also breed bees inside a swarmer. Swarmers have more slots for bees - nine output slots in total - but they do not have any frame slots, nor do they produce items. In Apiaries, bees will also produce items when they breed.

While you cannot produce hybrid bees in a Beehive, bees that breed here will produce honeycomb gradually - which is required to make frames that you'll use in your Apiaries. Having both Apiaries and a few Beehvies active at all times is a great way to run your bee farming facility.

Skip Time And Teleport

Apico Sitting on a bench in the forest

There are two pieces of furniture you can use in Apico to speed up time - the bench and the bed. You can build a bench pretty early on in the game, but beds will come later.

When sitting on a bench, time will speed up a little. It speeds up a lot more when you're in bed.

You can also use benches to move around quickly. You have a very generous range for interacting with objects and tools, and this includes benches. When you use a bench, you'll be transported instantly to its location - you can take advantage of this by building chains of benches around your farm and using them to zip around in the blink of an eye.

Use Beeboxes To Store Unwanted Bees

Apico Beebox

You will very quickly end up with far too many bees. It takes only a few sessions of bee breeding before your pockets are overflowing with the creatures, and beeboxes are the solution to that problem.

You can create beeboxes at the Workbench by combining a basic apiary, a large crate, and some honeycomb. When you place a bee into an empty beebox you will set the beebox to only accept bees of that variety - and this includes hybrids.

The rule for putting hybrids into a beebox depends on the dominant half of the hybrid. Let's say you have a Forest Beebox and a Verdant Beebox and created some hybrids in your apiary. You will be able to place Forest-Verdant bees inside the Forest Beebox, and Verdant-Forest bees in the Verdant Beebox.

Utilize Flowers Early And Often

Apico Flower Folio

Flowers are used in Apico to affect your bees. Higher-tier flowers will provide buffs to any bees that they're planted near and can be strategically used to improve your production and the quality of life for your bees.

You can check which flowers will be in range of your apiaries by checking out the white circle that surrounds them when you open the interface.

To get new flowers, you'll need to do some cross-breeding - luckily, it's a simpler process than with bees:

  • First, find out the flowers that you'll need to cross-breed. In this example, we'll use the Honeyrose and Beekeeper's Delight, two flowers you can find at the start of the game. When bred together, these flowers can produce Goldenrod seeds.
  • Plant both of these flowers near an apiary - note that it must be an apiary for this to work, not a beehive.
  • Breed some bees in that apiary and place a frame inside it. The frame will eventually become full of produce.
  • Use an uncapper to uncap the frame, and then process the uncapped frame in a centrifuge as per usual.
  • The produce from the frame should contain Goldenrod seeds.

Some flowers are necessary to calm certain grumpy bees, as they will only respond to certain scents. Get your Folio filled out as early as you can so that you have access to everything.

Remember to pick the flowers that you harvest to register them in your Folio! Planting the seeds is only half the task.

How To Make Enough Money To Buy The Boat

Apico Skipper Shop Boat

Eventually, you'll complete enough tasks that Skipper will let you purchase a boat from him. This will cost you 200 Rubees, which is quite a lot when most things you obtain at the beginning of the game sell for only one Rubee or sometimes less.

By far the best way to make money in the early game is to make Apicola and sell it. Every bottle of Apicola sells for 15 Rubees, so you only need to make 14 bottles of it to afford the boat - and you can also sell the special produce obtained from filled frames in the centrifuge to augment this income.

Apicola is made by fermenting honey with water. Here's how to do that:

  • Craft a rain tank and place it outside. It will collect water when it rains.
  • Obtain honey from the centrifuge whenever you process an uncapped frame.
  • Craft a fermenter and some wooden canisters.
  • Use the canisters to transfer water and honey to the fermenter. This will create Apicola!
  • Purchase bottles from Skipper - they cost only one Rubee each. Also, buy a bottler, this costs 100 Rubees.
    • This is a lot of money to raise - you should be able to get there with the products made by higher-tier bees, though! Keep breeding and crafting frames.
  • Transfer the Apicola to the bottler with filled canisters and place your bottles there too. They will gradually fill up and become salable bottles of Apicola.

Remember, you fill framed by placing them inside an apiary while bees are breeding and uncap them with an uncapper.

Consider Forced Mutations

Apico Accessibility Options

Tucked away in the Accessibility menu within the Setting menu is the option to force mutations. The "Hybrid offspring always mutate" option will do exactly what it says - when breeding bees, hybrids will always have some sort of mutation, and you can use this to decrease the time it takes to get the mutations you're looking for.

Without this, mutations and new hybrids will sometimes (and likely) take an age to produce.

This will make it especially quick to breed out unwanted traits, such as grumpiness.

Experiment with the other options available to you in this menu: being able to walk through trees saves a ton of time when you have more than enough wood for your needs, and there are even options for visual accessibility and skipping the minigame that some tools require.

NEXT: Stardew Valley: Guide To Bee Houses