Every hive as it begins, ages and dies has its own unique Reserve system. When players first enter hive territory, they may notice a bar on their screen.

For example, Hive_0_0 - 24/24. This is the hive identification, but also its present hive member count.

The 24 stands for the maximum allowed and present hive members that will exist at any given time, however a hives true number of allowed hive members is much higher instead. When a hive has more members than they can actually keep up with, those units go into the reserves. These reserves act as a secondary storage for hive members in which can be pulled out of at any time to replace lost members or when performing special actions.

To give a rough explanation of this system. Imagine you have three xenomorphs, your hive can only support two being active at once, so instead of culling that third xenomorph you instead send it into reserves, which can also be recognised as a sort of metabolic hibernation. Through this, you keep all three whilst still keeping that support of the original two.

For example of a special action, when a hive requires a defence response due to an intruder near a vent. They’ll send out reserved hive members before active ones. Once the threat is dealt with, they return to the reserve storage where they remain.

NOTE - A hive will never tell you what's in its reserves when not in creative, and because of that it may end up difficult to properly assess the danger of a hive and what measures to take place to counter it. Players should always prepare for worst case scenario rather than a minor setback due to this.

A hives reserves will grow quickly overtime, and is where the bulk of a hives force typically will be. Entering a hive is an incredibly dangerous task due to this as if its a larger hive, they may have a large portion of members in their reserves.

Trivia! - Originally, the bar that is displayed when entering hive territory displayed the FULL count of allowed hive members both active and reserved. However, as of recent changes it has instead been changed to only display the allowed active hive members. As a result, this may actually make determining the threat of a hive harder.