Genera with KubeJS

Genera is the plural form of genus. But what is a genus?

What is a genus?

The genus, a taxonomic rank, denotes a group of closely-related species. It is used as the left half of a species's scientific name. In Forestry, a genus can also define default alleles for its members, overriding the defaults for the species.

Bee genera often correspond to what you might call "bee lines." For example, the Diligent/Unweary/Industrious line of bees are all members of the genus ForestryTaxa.GENUS_INDUSTRIOUS, which stands for industrapis.

For Forestry's trees and butterflies, their genera correspond directly to their real-life counterparts. For example, the Yellow Ipe tree species, which corresponds to Handroanthus serratifolius in real life, belongs to the ForestryTaxa.GENUS_HANDROANTHUS.

Although many of the names in ForestryTaxa are written in English, you'll see in game that they're actually in Latin. This is a convention from real-life taxonomy.

You can view all of Forestry's default genera in the source code on GitHub. (Taxa, the plural of taxon, are taxonomic groups.)

Creating a new genus

A genus may be defined using GenericEvent.defineTaxon. Here's an example of how you might recreate the Infernal genus used by the Sinister/Fiendish/Demonic bees in KubeJS:

// startup_scripts/my_first_genus.js

const GENUS_INFERNAL = 'diapis'

ForestryEvents.genetics(genetics => {
  genetics.defineTaxon(ForestryTaxa.FAMILY_BEES, GENUS_INFERNAL, genus => {
    genus.setDefaultChromosome(BeeChromosomes.TEMPERATURE_TOLERANCE, ForestryAlleles.TOLERANCE_DOWN_2);
    genus.setDefaultChromosome(BeeChromosomes.ACTIVITY, ForestryAlleles.ACTIVITY_METATURNAL);
    genus.setDefaultChromosome(BeeChromosomes.FLOWER_TYPE, ForestryAlleles.FLOWER_TYPE_NETHER);
    genus.setDefaultChromosome(BeeChromosomes.POLLINATION, ForestryAlleles.POLLINATION_AVERAGE);
  });
});

The first argument of defineTaxon is the parent taxon, which in the case of genera, is a family taxon. For all bees, the parent family should be ForestryTaxa.FAMILY_BEES. For trees and butterflies, the family may vary, so I recommend checking the real-life taxonomy of those species on Wikipedia or another reliable source. I'll explain later how to define other taxa such as families, orders, phyla, etc.

The second argument of defineTaxon is the taxon name, which is the Latin name of the genus. You should make const variables for your taxon names, like I did in the above example with GENUS_INFERNAL and like Forestry does with its ForestryTaxa class. Bee genera often end with the -apis suffix, which comes from the genus of the real-life Western Honey bee, Apis mellifera.

The third, optional argument of defineTaxon is a function that customizes the default alleles for members in that taxon. For example, the Infernal genus sets four default alleles, including the Metaturnal allele. Any species registered to this genus will now have Metaturnal as its default activity type instead of Diurnal. Look at this snippet from the code for registering the Sinister species:

ForestryEvents.apiculture(apiculture => {
  apiculture.registerSpecies(ForestryBeeSpecies.SINISTER, GENUS_INFERNAL, SPECIES_SINISTER, false, Color.of('#b3d5e4'))
    // ...
    .setGenome(genome => {
      genome.set(BeeChromosomes.SPEED, ForestryAlleles.SPEED_SLOWER);
      genome.set(BeeChromosomes.LIFESPAN, ForestryAlleles.LIFESPAN_NORMAL);
      genome.set(BeeChromosomes.EFFECT, ForestryAlleles.EFFECT_AGGRESSIVE);
    })
    // ...
});

Even though its genome doesn't specify Metaturnal as its activity type, it shows in game as being Metaturnal, since it's a member of the Infernal Genus.

Creating other taxa

The defineTaxon function can create other types of taxa that aren't necessarily genera. Let's see an example with trees, defining the taxonomy for a new species, the sweet orange tree. Although technically a hybrid, we'll treat it as a species for the sake of this example. Wikipedia says its taxonomy is:

Kingdom: Plantae
Clade: Tracheophytes
Clade: Angiosperms
Clade: Eudicots
Clade: Rosids
Order: Sapindales
Family: Rutaceae
Genus: Citrus
Species: C. sinensis

In Botany, classification is done through cladistics (hence the clades) rather than taxonomy. However, some of the clades are actually taxa that are already used by trees in Forestry, and appear in ForestryTaxa. Here's the taxonomy I came up with:

ForestryTaxa.KINGDOM_PLANTAE - The plant kingdom
ForestryTaxa.PHYLUM_FLOWERING_PLANT - The English name of the angiosperms phylum/clade
ForestryTaxa.CLASS_ROSIDS - The rosids class, a large group of flowering plants
ForestryTaxa.ORDER_SAPINDALES - An order of flowering plants including citrus trees, among others
ForestryTaxa.FAMILY_RUTACEAE - The citrus family
ForestryTaxa.GENUS_CITRUS - The genus of citrus trees
sinensis - The species name, derived from the right side of the binomial (scientific name)

Although this entire taxonomy is already defined by base Forestry (used by Lemon trees) we'll recreate it in KubeJS:

ForestryEvents.genetics(genetics => {
  genetics.defineTaxon(ForestryTaxa.KINGDOM_PLANT, ForestryTaxa.PHYLUM_FLOWERING_PLANT, phylum => {
    phylum.defineSubTaxon(ForestryTaxa.CLASS_ROSIDS, klass => {
      klass.defineSubTaxon(ForestryTaxa.ORDER_SAPINDALES, order => {
        order.defineSubTaxon(ForestryTaxa.FAMILY_RUTACEAE, family => {
          family.defineSubTaxon(ForestryTaxa.GENUS_CITRUS);
        });
      });
    });
  });
});

Just as we did before, we used defineTaxon to create a new taxon. However, we also use defineSubTaxon, an elegant way to define entire taxonomies that clearly illustrates the hierarchy of the taxonomic rankings. We do this instead of repeatedly calling defineTaxon, although you could still do that if you wanted to.

The reason we write klass instead of class is because class is a reserved word with a special meaning in JavaScript, so we can't use it for variable names.