Ranching is someway broken and buggy

[Oozinator]

Open ranch, only feeding sedimentary rocks.
Fishes die out quick and open ranches beat closed ranches (whole system).
Enclosed ranching / critters makes not really sense (not fully implemented), so many bugs..
How do you see the ranching aspect in ONI?

[Lurve]

Open ranches are by far superior.  I like having the choice, but there's just no contest.  I think a couple of small changes could give each their own niche:

• Wild critters get a small reproduction boost when fed.  Enough to slowly grow their numbers.
• Eggs of tamed critters are wild.
• Grooming stations/shearing stations only work in a stable.
• 'Crowded' debuff is computed by sampling the local area and counting other eggs and critters, not by room.

So open ranches become more like free range habitats, where you leave food out for the wild critters who otherwise can fend for themselves and eventually gather their by/end-products.  While stables exist to tame critters, boosting their metabolism and actively harvesting them and their eggs. 

The last point is so we can have stable designs that aren't just giant boxes of 96 mostly-empty tiles.

[Sasza22]

20 hours ago, Lurve said:

Crowded' debuff is computed by sampling the local area and counting other eggs and critters, not by room.

IMO it should be calcualted based on the critter navigation and amount of critters navigationg through the same tiles. This way you won`t be able to keep 10+ hatches on 2 tiles ina really high room. Obviously different requirements for walkers, fliers and climbers.

[Coolthulhu]

-1 for any idea that depends on critter's current position. Creature AI is in a sorry state and mechanical effects must not depend on it. If critters got debuffs based on current position, the effect would be very game-speed-dependent, which is already a major plague on ranching.

Not to mention the extra CPU load, worsening the problems above.

Option 0:

• Open ranches become the default option
• "Stable" room stops existing
• Grooming station loses the "not in stable" tooltip
• Nothing changes mechanically

Option 1:

• Open ranches are killed
• Grooming stations only work in stables

Option 2:

• Open ranches are nerfed
• Being in a stable provides some buffs that grooming alone does not (hunger rate, egg rate, grooming effect length)

Option 3:

• Grooming station can only groom x critters per cycle
• Each critter "links" self to a grooming station and will refuse grooming from other stations, unless it spends at least a cycle un-groomed by any station