The end-all-be-all of chemical recreation in this game is a substance called Insect Jelly. It's extremely rare, hella-expensive, and highly sought. You get this from - you guessed it - insectoids. Which are usually pretty dangerous. I've lost a lot of colonies to insectoid infestations that killed everybody and ate them.
But a window of opportunity opened for me when I broke into an ancient cryptosleep casket chamber on my colony's map, and after dispatching the mechanoids guarding it, I opened the caskets to find a half dozen megascarabs that were not hostile. Not friendly, but not immediately trying to eat my colonists and suck out their guts.
And by this time, I had a pretty hefty bank of animal specialists - so I took a risk, and it paid off. My colony successfully tamed the insectoids.
But here's the thing - insectoids only produce jelly when they breed. They can breed one of two ways -
1) the hive way, which was off the table because these guys didn't come from an infestation that generated hives, they were free agents.
or
2) the way that the "mod that shall not be named" introduces, which is they can use humans as incubators, in which they oviposit, then fertilize, eggs into... handy orifices... and a by-product of all this is that when the eggs come out, Insect Jelly comes out too. The human being used is wrapped in a cocoon that keeps them immobile, heals their wounds, protects them from temperatures (minimum -50 C and maximum +50 C) and even feeds them nutrition to keep them alive. In an earlier colony, I learned this because a pirate fleeing from a raid-gone-bad ran into an insectoid cave, and I got to watch as he was hacked down, then cocooned up, and then kept by the insectoids for the next few years until some mechanoids showed up and inferno-cannoned everything, human, insectoid, and other. Kill it with fire, right?
Anyway, back to my current playthrough - There's been a tribe, called the Blue Mesa Clan, that has been raiding me often and refusing all overtures to peace. The game says they are a "blood and honor" type culture with whom diplomacy is impossible. They have a settlement within 2 days travel of my colony.
I was getting pretty tired of them anyway, so why not kill two birds with one stone - wipe out a source of raids, and maybe snag a few living incubators for my nascent Insect Jelly factory?
I sent my best equipped soldiers on a raid to the Blue Mesa settlement, and... well, to summarize, it was so one sided that it kind of felt like a war crime. The worst injury my soldiers got was a bruised shoulder, whereas I mowed down upwards of 20 tribals with space-age pulse guns, sniper rifles, and of course, made sure to use psychic shock lances to get myself 3 or 4 living captives because at this stage of the game, you pretty much never give anybody a survivable wound who isn't wearing power armor - tribals in cloth and rudimentary metal plates die like small mammals fed into a thresher. So we gunned everybody down, kicked in the doors to the buildings, took everything of worth and put the rest to the torch, leaving the dead for the vultures and hauling the survivors home in chains.
And if that sounds bad, you won't like what comes next.
Returning to my colony, I had my tamed megascarabs already set up in a fortified room with industrial rollers and pullers going through the walls (Industrial Rollers is a very handy mod that lets you set up Factorio-like conveyor belt systems to move things from one area to another, I highly recommend it, saves SO much hauling time, and can automate your kitchen so you never have to open your walk-in-freezer).
So I just chucked the captives in and locked the door.
It's a horrific nightmare, what goes on in there, but as far as my colonists are concerned, they now have a stone box that they feed kibble in one end, and insect jelly comes out the other.
But if anybody ever opens that door, hoo boy.... my last count I was up to 34 megascarabs, 20 spelopedes, and one megaspider. I actually did let the spelopedes and megaspider out of the box because they're actually intelligent and large enough to be trained to haul, rescue, and fight for the colony.
But yeah, if any hostile force breaches that box, they're going to get a face full of angry, chittering, scuttling death and psychological horror.
I used to use captured raiders as diplomatic bargaining chips, or recruit them, or sometimes even selling them to allied factions as slaves. Not any more. Now they go in the box.