Dealing with Wasps

Wasps are the most realistic enemy in the game. They build huge nests on your neighbor's house and will spend most of their time stinging the shit out of anything they see for no real reason. They're just assholes and enjoy human suffering. In Summer they get huge and even angrier, and there is very little you can do about all of this.

Something to pay attention to is that there are two size categories for wasps. Regular, and Giant. "Regular" wasps are a little bit bigger than a cat and are as a rule much dodgier. Giant wasps are man-sized or bigger, have a lot more armor, can move faster and hit harder, but have less dodging ability thanks to their bulk. The first generation of wasps is always regular, but can evolve into giant wasps after about a month. The second generation of wasps and on are always giant.

Stats

Your standard wasp or wasp guard has 100 speed, the same as a survivor walking across flat ground. Giant wasps and giant wasp guards have 150 speed, which is as fast as you can probably run. The little guys only have 20 HP and a couple points of armor, but they're very hard to hit thanks to their EIGHT DODGE and tiny size. Giant wasps are much easier to hit, but have 100 armor and 12 ballistic/stab resistance. Their only "weakness" is bash, which they have 5 armor against.

If you read that and thought, "that's fucking insane, what were they smoking, this game sucks i hate the devs", you're right. Those are really high stats. Your average day one survivor is no match for a wasp of any kind.

Bee-havior

Wasps can fly around, but usually prefer to stay on one Z-level. They are hostile to everything that isn't a wasp, and will most often be seen having massive battles with the local zombie population. This creates tantalizing loot/smash piles, but just like that scene in Full Metal Jacket, this is a trap to lure you out.

When they're not engaged in all-out urban warfare, they will usually be content to hang around their nest. If you enable auto-notes, the game should flag these on your map as soon as it spots them. Make it a priority to avoid them! Very little is worth risking an encounter with an angry hive.

Wasps can't open doors, and except for the giant wasp guard and queen, they can't break windows. If you're in town and one zeroes in on you, your safest bet is probably to sprint to a house and get inside, doing anything possible to block off the path behind you.

Wasps will avoid fire, but not traps. Unfortunately, most traps don't affect flying enemies. Not all wasps fly, though! If a wasp's wing is disabled, it will have to crawl along the ground. The Giant Wasp Queen is also incapable of flight, though the regular wasp queen can fly just fine.

Stings and Bites

All wasps can sting and bite. They'll usually bite more often - these can cause infections as the wasps eat some pretty nasty stuff. Their stings are even worse. The little guys have poison that will debuff your stats and rapidly make you lose tempo in a fight. The big ones lose their venom, and instead their stingers are basically tempered steel lances. A giant wasp guard stings with 8 melee skill for 10 damage with an attack that has 25 armor penetration! The AP is slated to be downtweaked, it's a holdover from when player armor worked differently, but there's still likely to be some even when that's done. This is stab damage, too, which means more bleeding than you may be used to from zombie punches.

The upshot of all this is that meleeing wasps is an absolutely terrible idea for just about anyone. Unless you are extremely well-equipped and have good skills, you're going up against an ultra-fast enemy that is better than your character in almost every way. It's my firm belief that the little wasps are actually way more dangerous than the big ones. Not only are they harder to notice in most tilesets, they tend to wander farther from the nest and will dodge everything you throw at them long enough to get a lucky sting or three in and tank your stats.

this fucking sucks

That's the point. It's the gosh damn apocalypse, baby! You are not on the top of the food chain anymore. Remember in your favorite zombie movie when the hero gets got out of nowhere to remind the audience that the world is dangerous? That's what these guys are for. Without them, you'd be able to pretty easily clear early-game towns in many cases. This is supposed to be a horror survival game.

The best thing to do is to treat wasps like you'd treat a police speed trap on the highway. Keep a sharp eye out, and if you spot one, mark that area off as forbidden in your mind. Slow down, go around.

Counterplay

But dangerous doesn't mean invincible, and human ingenuity can defeat anything.

Visibility Range: Wasps, like most insects, have an atrocious visual range. Most of them can only see 15 tiles by day and 5 by night (17/7 for giant wasp guards and both kinds of wasp queen). The easiest way to deal with them is just to watch your compass on the sidebar. If you see a wasp, stay 15 tiles away from it, and it probably won't bother you. They're attracted to sounds and can smell you, but your stink cloud doesn't extend for 15 tiles, so just avoid.

Insecticide: Raid kills bugs dead. Insecticide can be found at hardware stores, gardening places, megastores, farms, orchards, and many other locations. With 4 applied science, you can craft it into a sprayable form or make insecticidal gas grenades. These recipes aren't autolearned, you'll need a chemistry textbook, Advanced Physical Chemistry, or chemical reference (classified). It's pretty easy to cop a textbook from a home, bookstore, or zombie child. A single insecticidal gas grenade will create about a 5x5 cloud of gas that will kill even a giant wasp queen (400 hp!) in about 20 seconds. This gas is bad for you and will make you cough, and if you're an insect mutant it will really mess you up, so bring a mask or be careful.

Guns: Wasps are really, really hard to hit with most guns. Other than the giant wasp queen, they all have the HARDTOSHOOT flag, which makes them count as if they're smaller than they are for determining accuracy - this means the little guys are practically impossible to hit. Even the giant wasps are pretty hard to hit at 9 tiles away, and grazing hits or handguns won't do much thanks to their armor. This even extends to grenades. Shrapnel is less likely to hit them, and their ballistic armor resists it. Still, if you have a very accurate rifle and can use it from a long way away (so, something better than an m4 or ar15), you can hit them from outside their sight radius, making it difficult for them to retaliate. Shotguns can also work here, as 00 shot is a great way to deal with HARDTOSHOOT, and the high number of attacks per shot means you're likely to hit a weakpoint, which can disable their wings and stingers.

Zombies: Zombies are your best friend and your worst enemy here. They will tirelessly fight wasps, but most of them won't do a very good job, and they have a habit of leading them away from their nests which can make them hard to avoid. Use noise to bait the two into fighting each other, but keep in mind the wasps will usually win.

Avoid: As stated before, your best bet is to avoid wasps. There's very little to be gained from fighting them. Remember that you can sprint and that they have low visual range. There is however an issue to be aware of with autotravel - it won't register wasps as hostile until they actually flip hostile, which means they've seen you. If you're on foot in a field, it may already be too late. This is a bug and will get fixed at some point, just don't autotravel without a car unless you know there are no wasps in the area.