Queen’s Offering – Dryad Enhancements
Queen’s Offering enhances and refines the existing Gauranlen tree and dryad mechanics, giving you more power and control while staying close to vanilla design. It builds on the systems already present, also available for 简体中文 and DE.
Level Your Tree and Dryads: Perform the Queen’s Offering ritual to sacrifice seeds for permanent dryad upgrades, faster morphing cycles and to gain access to the Gaumaker. Send your colonists to work within powerful auras near the tree to boost their productivity.
Release the Clawers: Turn your grove into a living defense thicket. Dryads can automatically engage intruders within the tree’s reach.
Hide Your Dryads: Order your dryads to retreat into the tree’s heart, shielding them from raids and other sudden threats.
Front Row Seeds: Enjoy faster pacing, earlier seeds, and a new intro-quest to kick off your grove.
Kickstart Healing Pods: Save wounded dryads when they need it most by carrying them into healing pods for rapid recovery.
Gauranlen trees progress independently through three tiers: Basic, Glimmering, and Radiant.
Performing the Queen’s Offering ritual with a single Gauranlen seed upgrades the tree by one level. Each level-up increases connection strength and moss growth, while providing the following benefits:
Tree bonuses
• Fewer days needed to spawn, morph, and heal dryads. Basic values are vanilla for reference.
• Trees project an aura that enhances nearby pawns granting Pruning Speed (+15% / +25%) and Plant Work Speed (+20% / +40%). The effect gradually builds up and fades when out of range.
• Upgraded trees emit a soft glow and, at highest level, spawn tiny glowspores to light the night.
• Colonists who linger near Radiant trees with enough moss, gain a short-lived +2 mood bonus.
• Reaching the Radiant level allows creating Gaumaker dryads regardless of required memes.
• Offer leftover seeds at a Radiant tree to increase connection strength, moss count and spawn up to two dryads.
Dryad bonuses
Note:
Melee hit chance works like increasing melee skill.
Production bonus scales with tree level and nearby Gauranlen moss count.
• Dryads automatically engage enemies near their tree, similar to animal release.
• Controllable via a responsive toggle on each tree.
• Dryads require line of sight to engage, and all castes can be sent to attack.
• Strategic tree placement allows more dynamic defense tactics.
Note:
Being assigned to and following a master has priority over tree-based release.
• Dryads can retreat into the tree on command and remain safe for several hours.
• Dryads reemerge automatically and do not produce resources while sheltered.
• The tree itself remains vulnerable; if the tree is destroyed, the sheltered dryads die.
• This allows for viable tree placement outside your walls, as dryads no longer stand helpless during raids.
• An introduction quest offers multiple paths to acquire one or more additional seeds early on.
• Additional opportunities to recruit pawns with the tree connection meme arise during quests and raids.
• The first natural gauranlen pod spawn now occurs earlier and should arrive before the first winter.
• The tree connection ritual now spawns one free dryad.
• Proximity to any Gauranlen tree empowers dryads to enter healing pods even while downed.
• Colonists can carry dryads and drop them near the tree to initiate recovery.
• Dryads can overcome pain and low consciousness, but cannot enter pods if missing a spine or too many limbs.
• Dryads now rest in moss beds that spawn naturally around the tree.
• Healing pods and morph pods restore rest.
• Dryads wake up when a healing pod command is issued.
• Dryads wake up when their caste is changed.
• Reverts an unintended vanilla change to dryad spawn duration, restoring it from 8 to 6 days (Patch 1.3.3101 alignment).
• Dryads now spawn with an appropriate rest level instead of 21%, preventing immediate sleep after spawning.
• Dryads no longer show false bleeding warnings or leave blood filth, as they cannot actually bleed.
• Tree connection ritual moss spawn now scales correctly with ritual quality, providing up to 50 moss at maximum (vanilla could spawn up to 192 due to double pawn-count scaling).
• Dryad cocoons and pods no longer destroy Gauranlen moss on spawn; they now grow it instead.
• Fixed a vanilla issue where dropping a carried dryad would reset their resource production timer.
Vanilla Expanded Dryads – compatible and with extra support for their dryads
Partially compatible – works technically, but not recommended to be used together:
Dryads & Gauranlen Reworked – will override and disable some features of Queen’s Offering
Alpha Memes / Alpha Animals – corrupted dryads will have no potency boni, thematic mismatch
I recommend to use Nudge Me – Melee Pathfinding Fix for better melee fighting pathfinding.
Credits
Anthitei for the dryad bed art, feedback and patience
楠左 for help with the Simplified Chinese translation.
Thanks to Teabag86 for feedback
Thanks to Maduyn, LonelyGViper and other redditors for insights.
Shoutout to Cleansweeper 4 cleaning approximately 594 liter of dryad blood while Rimworld ran in the background.
