Dense Puft ranching for meat. [Fully Automated]

[ChickenMadness]

(Edit: I've come up with a fully automated design now. First attempt, it's posted further down)
(Edit 2: I've got a second improved design now. Ticked off everything on my bullet point list. Can be left unsupervised forever without breaking.)

Looking for automated Dense Puft ranch designs/ideas.

• Needs an automated hatchery. (Doesn't need to be powered. Egg dropper and letting the eggs hatch on their own would be fine)
• Automated kill room.
• No dupe interaction other than grooming stations.
• Preferably no open ranch exploit
• Preferably no oxylite recycling, I use this else where in my colony (oxygen for duplicants and also rocket fuel)
• And a way to replace the original 6 pufts in the main ranch when they die of old age without duplicant interaction. This is probably the hardest thing to design as well as being the least important since they won't die that often so it doesn't matter that much.

Post your designs even if they're not perfect. I'm looking for inspiration so I can come up with something myself. (can be Puft and Squeaky puft ranches too)


Example of what I usually build

 

What I've done in the past is have a small box using the open ranch exploit, fed by 4 spoms. And every few cycles I just kill off half of them manually. And conveyor rail sends eggs of the other variants (squeaky, prince, normal puft), as well as the meat, egg shells and oxylite to my base. I use the oxylite to provide my base with oxygen, replacing gas pipe ventillation, so I would prefer a design that doesn't recycle the oxygen / oxylite to feed the pufts.

I want a legitimate design with no open ranching exploits or other 'cheaty' shenanigans.

Also just an FYI if anyone does want to use my exploity ranch. I've fed a colony of 20 dupes with only the meat and eggs from this thing before. Requires a lot of duplicant time for grooming though. And it's obviously very cheaty which takes the fun out of the game...

edit: lol the post was much longer but it got cut in half when I posted it for some reason. Gonna edit the important stuff back in now.

Example of a Puft kill room.
@Mullematsch

Useful info
All Puft Variants:
Eggs = 250g raw egg + 250g egg shells
Puft = 1000g meat (+250g egg shells from hatching)
Puft requires 12 tiles of space
Max number per Ranch = 6 (assuming 96 tile ranch)

Dense Puft
-30kg/ oxygen per cycle (or -50g/s oxygen)
95% conversion rate to oxylite
+28.5kg oxylite per cycle (or +47.5g/s oxylite)

Recycling the oxylite to feed the pufts...
-1.5kg oxygen per cycle (or -2.5g/s oxygen)

Egg chance

[Coolthulhu]

Hard part is maintaining population, because of the terribly thought out puft egg chance mechanics. You can't ensure that the dupes will maintain prince count above 0 without also causing them to over-deliver princes to the ranch.

You could try having a separate egg-producing ranch, where you use automation to disable (with doors) one of the two critter delivery points (based on even/odd number of critters), with one delivery point allowing princes and other denses.

If not delivery points, it would have to be incubators, meaning the stored eggs would count against critter limit in ranch.

This pretty much kills all weird puft ranches, since you can't just fire and forget them and they're not worth microing.

[abhiraz]

can you show the automation

 

[ChickenMadness]

1 hour ago, Coolthulhu said:

Hard part is maintaining population, because of the terribly thought out puft egg chance mechanics. You can't ensure that the dupes will maintain prince count above 0 without also causing them to over-deliver princes to the ranch.

You could try having a separate egg-producing ranch, where you use automation to disable (with doors) one of the two critter delivery points (based on even/odd number of critters), with one delivery point allowing princes and other denses.

If not delivery points, it would have to be incubators, meaning the stored eggs would count against critter limit in ranch.

This pretty much kills all weird puft ranches, since you can't just fire and forget them and they're not worth microing.

Do you know exactly all the different egg chances? I'll edit it into the OP once I found out.

I didn't pay attention to the dense puft egg chances but I've never put Puft princes in the same ranch with them and they always produce more Dense puft eggs. (in my open ranches with 40+ dense pufts etc.)

I think Squeeky and Dense pufts have a higher chance to create more of their own kind than the normal puft and puft prince.

53 minutes ago, abhiraz said:

can you show the automation

 

No automation other than the conveyor rail system. It's pretty basic and poorly optimized, it's just abusing the open ranch exploit. These screenshots are from a base I made a few months ago before the recent QOL update
 

 

 

Bottom loader = oxylite
Middle loader = egg shells
Top loader = meat and eggs.
Dense puft eggs are left in the ranch to hatch on their own.
They either die of old age or I manually kill them and meat goes to kitchen.




Entire base...


 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[abhiraz]

the way your doors are kept they will delete the water

 

[ChickenMadness]

13 minutes ago, abhiraz said:

the way your doors are kept they will delete the water

 

Oh the kill room isn't mine so I can't show the automation for it. Just posted it to give people ideas.

@Mullematsch posted it in another thread.

[Coolthulhu]

2 hours ago, ChickenMadness said:

Do you know exactly all the different egg chances? I'll edit it into the OP once I found out.

The egg chances are based on time spent with or without the prince in same room. The chance never goes to pure 0 because it's a lottery roll.

[Xyer]

16 hours ago, ChickenMadness said:

Do you know exactly all the different egg chances? I'll edit it into the OP once I found out

 

[ChickenMadness]

6 hours ago, Xyer said:

 

ye Dense puft has 67% chance of laying another dense puft egg by default. So no need for puft princes.
(added it to OP)


Gonna have a go at building something in sandbox today. Think I have an idea.

 

[Sasza22]

13 hours ago, ChickenMadness said:

ye Dense puft has 67% chance of laying another dense puft egg by default. So no need for puft princes.

Doesn`t it fall down with no prince around? Last time i tried ranching squeaky pufts they went down to 0% and 100% prince after a while.

[biopon]

1 hour ago, Sasza22 said:

Doesn`t it fall down with no prince around? Last time i tried ranching squeaky pufts they went down to 0% and 100% prince after a while.

It does fall off, by 5% per cycle. By the time they're ready to lay eggs it's at a very low percentage.

 

The way I see it, you need the following:

1 ranch for puft princes, these produce nothing but puft eggs.

1 ranch for pufts, these produce nothing but puft prince eggs.

1 ranch for mixed puft princes and pufts, the puft prince(s) will produce puft eggs, the pufts will produce 50/50 dense and squeaky eggs.

finally X ranches for the dense pufts themselves

You could of course use the open room trick for the 3rd (and also possibly the 4th), the 3rd would then give you huge amounts of slime and eggs with no labor.

You may be able to omit the 1st and rely on the princes in the 3rd to produce enough eggs to maintain the puft population in the room, but it'd be risky I think.

In the end it'd require constant checking by you to make sure there's only 1 prince in the 3rd  room, to keep the egg production by the pufts in line.

[ChickenMadness]

On 28/12/2018 at 10:18 PM, Sasza22 said:

Doesn`t it fall down with no prince around? Last time i tried ranching squeaky pufts they went down to 0% and 100% prince after a while.

Ye just seen this happen in game. I designed a ranch with the assumption that this wouldn't happen so I've left out the seperate hatchery that I will inevitably need to replace the dense puft eggs in the long term. At the moment it's pumping out almost 100% puft prince eggs. I think it will be easy to make the dense puft hatchery and still keep everything fully automated though. The way I've designed the current ranch it will be easy to implement.

Anyway....

This is my first attempt at building a fully automated dense puft ranch... (feel free to improve it or give constructive criticism)
 

 

 

Everything is fully automated, only grooming is needed.  However the egg chance on the pufts is too random for it to be left completely unsupervised for 100+ cycles.

It needs a seperate hatchery room with a puft prince to supply 'spare dense puft eggs' to the main ranches. But other than that though it's working perfectly.

• It's easily stackable. 
• no dupe interaction (except grooming)
• feeds 6-7 dupes with BBQ (if you have picha nuts)
• provides massive amounts of oxylite (way more than my 8 dupe colony can breath)
• it has a kill room where the excess eggs fall into. After the number of eggs in the kill room reaches 30-35 it's fully primed and you'll have a few pufts hatching every cycle.
• it looks a bit complicated but I just wanted to compact everything as tightly as possible and give a lot of options for sending the resources in different directions (oxylite, egg shells, meat, eggs, raw egg, etc.)
• 2 incubators in each room act as 'storage' for spare dense pufts to replace the Pufts in the main ranch as they die. One room opens when there are 5 pufts, the second room opens when there are 4 pufts.
• Even without an extra hatchery to ensure a reliable supply for dense puft eggs without any RNG, you can still leave it for a hundred cycles before having to do any micromanagement with the eggs.

Annoted the screenshot a bit so it's slightly clearer.
The 'dense eggs (spare) would have a couple eggs maximum in it at all times. It's got a 2 egg maximum because they just end up turning into raw egg when they're not used. Just there to feed the incubator as the pufts hatch.
When I add in the hatchery I'll probably just have a receptacle next to the sweeper at lowest priority... storage compacter and incubators are highest priority... once those are full the excess dense eggs will move along to the next ranch in line. Or straight to the kill room. Depending on how I layout the conveyor rails.

I'll probably have the second version with the Puft prince - Dense puft hatchery done tomorrow and post a new thread if it works.








 

Been running it for over 50 cycles now...
If I add in the Puft prince + dense puft hatchery I'll have to do some tweaking with the incubators because they hatch way faster than the original pufts die of old age. They're stuck in over crowded prisons lol.



 

[ChickenMadness]

I've added in a hatchery for puft princes so it's fully automated now.

Can definitely be optimized to reduce the amount of conveyor loaders leading all over the place. For example having a shared egg storage room in the middle wall that both sweeper arms have access to. But I wanted to keep the room at this size and it was difficult to arrange everything so that the main room would be 96 tiles.

Follows the same principles as the first design.

The puft prince eggs go into the first hatching room and this room opens when there are 5 critters in the room.
The second hatchery opens when there are 4 critters or less.
This ensures that there is always 1 puft prince atleast, so the dense pufts will continue to produce dense puft eggs.
Those eggs are then sent into the other ranches to hatch. You can stack however many of the dense puft rooms as you want but you need 1 spom per room (unless you off-gas the oxylite back into oxygen to save resources)

I'm going to build it in survival and test it for a few hundred cycles before I make a new topic with all the overlays. Not tested how much power and resources it takes and produces yet.

[Xyer]

On 1/7/2019 at 5:16 AM, ChickenMadness said:

-snip-

@ChickenMadness Can you explain the use of the critter sensor beside each incubator in the hachery? That is the only part of your build that I don't understand.

[avc15]

 

12 hours ago, Xyer said:

@ChickenMadness Can you explain the use of the critter sensor beside each incubator in the hachery? That is the only part of your build that I don't understand.

I have seen this used to save power. Normally the critter stays in an incubator for a while after hatching, and the incubator keeps running. If you sense 1 critter and shut off the incubator, you save power without having to micro and take all the puftlets out manually.

But, something about that seems subject to change.

[Craigjw]

A couple of observations with the hatch abatoir.

There only need 2 rows of doors to kill the hatches, as the hatches can't swim up, so what is the point of filling the entire room? unless you are putting other stuff in the room.  I like to leave a tile open to the rest of the base, so that the ranch is hundreds of tiles in area, so that it doesn't get crowded.

I like the disco effect, as a future improvement to increase the enjoyment that dupes and hatches may get from this disco would be to have 2 sets of lights on different timing circuits.  If only we were able to colour the lights, that would truly make the disco effect proper, it'd would feel like a proper meat factory, I mean disco...

I'm also aware that the abatoir was not the OP's build.

[ChickenMadness]

On 27/01/2019 at 3:35 AM, Xyer said:

@ChickenMadness Can you explain the use of the critter sensor beside each incubator in the hachery? That is the only part of your build that I don't understand.

Sorry for the late reply. Explanation below. @Xyer

On 27/01/2019 at 4:01 PM, avc15 said:

 

I have seen this used to save power. Normally the critter stays in an incubator for a while after hatching, and the incubator keeps running. If you sense 1 critter and shut off the incubator, you save power without having to micro and take all the puftlets out manually.

But, something about that seems subject to change.

Ye this is one of the reasons, to save power... But it isn't the main reason.

The main reason is that without shutting off the incubators I end up hatching pufts faster than the original pufts are dying. Eventually there will be multiple Pufts flying around the incubator rooms. If that happens there is a chance that 2 Pufts will fly into the main chamber at the same time, bringing the total number of critters in the main chamber past the maximum. That breaks the build. Egg production stops until one of the main pufts dies, which takes a long time.
The critter sensor next to the incubator shuts off the incubator if there is a Puft already hatched and flying around. Also note there are eggs inside the cointainers next to the incubators and they need to be included when picking a number for the critter sensor. I have max 1 egg in each container and the critter sensors are set to 2. Once the egg goes inside the incubator it isn't counted by the critter sensor.

But ye, this was the only problem with the first build (other than the lack of puft princes).

The final design is 100% automated and can be left forever without supervision. The only way you can break it is by cutting off the oxygen supply and letting them all die. The Puft prince eggs hatch at the same rate that the adult Puft princes die of starvation, so no need to feed them polluted oxygen. 
There is a small window of time where the main puft prince dies (from starvation) and there is a baby puft inside the incubator, and you have to wait for the baby puft to be 5 cycles old before it is automatically ejected.
But this isn't a problem because the time window is so small it doesn't change the egg chance of the adult dense pufts by a significant amount.

Also important to note: The Puft prince hatchery door needs to open before the dense puft hatchery door... So the puft prince door opens when there are 5 critters in the main room... dense puft door opens when there are 4 critters... (it's the same in the second ranch too so that you don't get 2 pufts flying into the main room at the same time.)


I'll post overlay screenshots of the final build...

The conveyor rails and containers are a bit messy because there wasn't enough room to fit everything neatly.
The last screenshot I have labeled the containers inside the hatcheries with how many eggs are inside them....
And I have labeled the critter sensors, with the number they're set to.
 

 

 

 

 

Hopefully someone else can optimise it to save power or include a chamber for normal pufts. I'm done with it now, it gave me a headache lol.

@Craigjw I redesigned the abaitor in the OP to be much smaller. It's in the above screenshots.


Also on a seperate note. If you build a bunch of these late game you'll be able to feed a massive number of dupes. Once you're at the stage of the game where you're spamming electrolysers for hydrogen and ejecting the excess oxygen into space.
You can just feed all that oxygen to the dense pufts instead. And recycle the excess oxylite back into oxygen, then back to the pufts.

[Xyer]

@ChickenMadness Thank you for your detailed explanation.

I was somehow deluded into thinking that incubating eggs still counted towards the critter sensor count which messed up my understanding. Your explanation will help me in my attempts in coming up with a design for regular pufts based on your build.

[Craigjw]

1 hour ago, ChickenMadness said:

@Craigjw I redesigned the abaitor in the OP to be much smaller. It's in the above screenshots.
 

@ChickenMadness You do know that OP is referring to you, the Original Poster right?

This is a very nice build, I have added this to my list of useful build constructs.

 

[ChickenMadness]

2 minutes ago, Craigjw said:

@ChickenMadness You do know that OP is referring to you, the Original Poster right?

This is a very nice build, I have added this to my list of useful build constructs.

 

I do, but I mean as in 'original post', so the first post in the thread.

[Craigjw]

Corrected on my correction, lol.

[beowulf2010]

2 hours ago, ChickenMadness said:

I do, but I mean as in 'original post', so the first post in the thread.

Gotta love TLIs. Then again, I keep forgetting, is TLI Two Letter Initializations or Three Letter Initializations?