Hive (Sevastopol)

"Ricardo. They're all here."
"Who?"
"Everyone that's missing. Everyone. They're trapped in some kind of nest. There are eggs. It's... It's like a farm..."

―Amanda Ripley and Ricardo, regarding the Hive (from Alien: Isolation)

The Hive on Sevastopol Station was established in the station's engineering section in 2137 by the Xenomorph birthed from Catherine Foster. The Hive consisted of many Drones, Facehuggers, and Ovomorphs.

Creation[]

Shortly after the birthing of a Chestburster by Catherine Foster, a hive was soon established inside the Reactor under APOLLO. It was here that residents of the station were abducted and cocooned to be harvested. The Hive was considerably large, taking up most if not all of the lower reactor level; by the time Amanda Ripley had discovered it, several corpses were cocooned to the walls and Ovomorphs were present.

Destruction[]

"There are emergency overflow circuits that feed excess power into the local capacitor banks on each tower. If I decouple them and discharge the system, the purge will be external. The nest is right in harm's way."

―Amanda Ripley to Ricardo, regarding her plan to destroy the Hive (from Alien: Isolation)

Most of the Hive was eventually destroyed by Amanda Ripley when she initiated a reactor purge by powering up the reactor cores and overloading them, although multiple Drones managed to escape. Ripley later discovered another small Hive that was recently created with Ovomorphs and Facehuggers in another part of the station. Due to how recent the nest is, it lacks any hosts with the exception of one or two victims but most of the eggs are open, indicating that the Facehuggers that are freely roaming the station, came from this nest.

Trauma[]

In the DLC Trauma a hive is also encountered by Dr. Lingard.

Behind the scenes[]

Bradley Wright created concept art for the Hive. One piece of concept art by Wright appears to indicate that the bottom of the reactor was originally going to be covered with Eggs and a blue mist like the one covering the Eggs in the derelict in Alien, as well as being visible from the catwalks. More concept art seems to show that it was originally going to be much bigger and the player was to be in a space suit when exploring it.^[1]

Unused script files in the game reveal that Ripley was originally supposed to return to the Hive a second time later in the story, at which point she was to find that it had grown considerably larger from when she first discovered it.^[2]

The exact origin of the Eggs found in the Hive was left deliberately vague by the developers, with both Eggmorphing and an unseen Queen being possibilities. The development team later confirmed that a Queen was responsible, but stated that showing her would not have fit with the game's focus on the first film in the series, and would also have led players to expect a boss-type battle with her, which went against the game's less action-oriented style.^[3] As a result, they decided it was better to leave the issue a mystery. As writer Will Porter later said, "She's down there somewhere, in amongst the cacophony, but Ripley was lucky enough not to bump into her."^[4]