When you are carrying a candy bar, ants are attracted to you, even if peaceful. Candy bars should also be a treat for pet ants.

New artifact Apiarist’s Veil, a cloth hat, perhaps an elven helm or fedora, that gives warning of all insects and pacifies nearby bees.

Revamp Gehennom by making its main branch substantially shorter, a “hub” branch containing stairs or portals to a bunch of sub-branches containing demon lords’ lairs. Most of the lairs are optional, but at least some of them are required in order to enter the Sanctum. Each demon lord that you don’t kill, however, incurs a unique, harsh effect or debuff on you once you have the Amulet. Suggested ones include:

• The mysterious force, as it exists in vanilla.
• When you try to ascend the stairs, they vanish and several illusory copies of stairs appear across the level, along with one real one which you have to find.
• Walls extrude from existing walls around the hero in random directions, never entirely closing off, via a cellular automaton that looks for walls with a 3x2 area of walkable spaces in front of them, with the space directly in front a regular floor space - the effect of this given enough iterations turns the terrain around you into a maze.
• Generic damage over time, not severe but enough to provide a headwind. Or partial or total disabling of natural regeneration.
• Asmodeus: Some damaging cold effect that happens periodically, or your cold resistance is nullified and replaced with a vulnerability to cold effects.
• Baalzebub: Something to do with insects, either periodic summon insects from nowhere or stronger/more frequent insects
• Juiblex: You may randomly become ill, or have your regeneration dampened or something
• Geryon: Hordes of buffed q generate and rampage periodically.

Termite, a monster that eats wooden items it finds on the ground, and see them as treats if they are a pet.

Anthill: a dungeon feature found exclusively in antholes that acts as a monster spawner for ants. The ants produced will all be the same type as the anthole is, and ants will not spawn out of it when there are already a certain number of ants in the area. Eventually it stops spawning ants (perhaps with a system where it rolls every time it creates a new ant and if it fails the roll it increments an internal counter; the higher the counter gets the lower the chance of spawning more ants), or the player can prematurely destroy it by digging it.

To compensate for the extra ants spawned, antholes could no longer be packed full of ants.

Potion of bug repellent; is poisonous or otherwise harmful to drink, but if you smash it over yourself, all insects (classes a, s, and x) will flee from you.

When you cause a Yendorian Army monster to flee, nearby lower-ranking monsters may also flee. Possibly extend this to other ‘pack animals’ such as orcs or ants.

Firefly, an a monster that is a light source, but a variable one. It ranges from being totally unlit to emitting light in a radius of 3 for a brief time. Is poisonous to eat, and with very low nutrition; has a mild bite attack. Tends to spawn in dark areas.

Internally, the deciding factor when a firefly should light up should probably use its mspec_used variable, which enables them to light up again when it hits 0. Also, cancelling a firefly should prevent it from lighting.

Breaking an amber stone (e.g. when fired from a sling and hitting a monster) has a chance of releasing a random a.

Ants can dig and tunnel out corridors when there is an anthole on the level, eventually turning the whole level into an anthole-like network of corridors. The tunneling AI prioritizes connecting up existing corridors rather than just destroying rock indiscriminately.

Ants (or locusts, if implemented) can eat food off the ground, and they create more of themselves when they do, proportional to the nutrition consumed. They can also eat food out of the inventory of something they are attacking, and if the target is carrying food in a bag, they can reach into the bag and either eat the food there or spill it out on the ground. Locusts that can’t find any food to eat could inflict illness with their bite instead. They could also eat grass terrain, if implemented (turning it into normal floor) and multiply that way.

Maybe, to avoid the problem of how unchecked gremlin multiplication creates a bunch of low-HP, one-shottable gremlins, locusts will increase their maximum HP by eating if their own maxHP is below some threshold. (Then they’ll split again by eating more after getting over the threshold.)

Ants can dig tunnels in rock (slowly).

New monster behavior flag M2_CLIMB or M3_CLIMB: added to monsters that are natural climbers (spiders, ants, most Y) and with effects like being able to get out of a pit in one turn, or who can climb up ladders without having hands.

Carpenter ant, which eats wooden items on the floor and can tunnel, but only on wooden terrain (doors, trees).

Bumblebee, very like a killer bee, but its poison sting is worse. However, when it stings you, it becomes cancelled and can’t sting you again; a cancelled bumblebee additionally loses 1 HP per turn.

Mosquitoes, an a-class monster which uses an AD_DRHP attack, which replenishes the mosquito’s health by some fraction of the damage it dealt you.

Stomping boots. While wearing these, you may instakill and move into the square of all small monsters in the a, s, and x classes.

Worker ant that restores walls that have been dug out.

Flesh-eating scarab beetles: they may reproduce every time they bite you.

Untrapping a lavender trap gets you potions of lavender essential oil. Ants naturally dislike lavender oil, so ants will flee from a player that has been sprayed by a lavender trap or used a potion of lavender oil.