Wrangle-Free Auto-Morph Hatch Ranch V1.0

[tjart]

EDIT: This ranch no longer works after certain bug fixes with doors. For the next version using Quality of Life III check out 
https://forums.kleientertainment.com/forums/topic/105338-wrangle-free-auto-morph-hatch-ranch-v20/

 

First, Like a pair of lungs, the ranch is mirrored left and right, so for this post, the left side of the center column can be ignored. Also, the bottom part is just storage used to bring the ranch size up to 96, so it can also be ignored

The general idea is that hatches get queued up like a pez dispenser and dropped out when the ranch below the dispenser falls under 8 (or greater than 7 since the critter sensor is weird like that)   

All critter dispensers are at their default 0 except the one in the center ranch which is set to 7 (or greater than 7 to be accurate). So, when 8 critters are present, various pieces of the automation get activated or deactivated.







The Shipping is pretty basic, but this is where the Auto-Morphing happens. Set the eggs you want to keep in the outer left and right loaders and set the center loaders to reject all eggs you don't want. They get immediately dumped into the water pool.

Dropping is not done with a Not/Buffer or Not/Filter clock. Instead, the critter sensor paired with an Auto-Sweeper the 2 are located in different rooms. In the critter Sensor room is a Conveyor Receptacle that receives the eggs. The egg causes the critter count to become greater than 0, this in turn activates the Auto -Sweeper that tries to put the egg into a nearby Loader. But, as soon as the egg leaves the room with the Critter Sensor in it, the Auto-Sweeper looses it's automation signal causing the egg to drop either to the kill-pool if unwanted, or to a hatching area if wanted.

An important note: The Conveyor Loader that the Auto-Sweeper is trying to load the egg into never gets the egg so it doesn't need a partner receptacle. You do need to give it a single tile of railing to activate it though, If you're having problems, just go ahead and give it a useless loader partner.

I didn't add meat, coal, and eggshell sweeping here because the automation is already pretty intimidating. you can add that as you see fit after it's built.



It looks intimidating, but it's pretty simple. we only use AND and NOT, with a single XOR (well, two of them if you count both sides)

It's divided into 3 parts that are also divided by the floors they sit on. The top part is the last part and you can build this long after the ranch is up and running. you'll have several weeks before it is needed. it handles egg overflow after the ranch is fully functional. we'll address it last.

The middle part is just 4 NOT gates (again, 8 if you count both sides, but it's easier to talk about just one side). This is the Pez dispenser. When a baby hatch is born in the egg area (middle, middle area on top of the mechanical airlock) it will almost immediately walk left or right. When the Critter Sensor becomes greater than 0, the door behind the hatch closes and locks creating a one-way dispenser that only opens up when there is room below is 7 or less.

The bottom segment is the dropper. it uses a single AND, XOR and NOT. A hatch won't normally drop through doors. The exception is when they are already trapped in a door. So the final room invites the hatch to go stand in a doorway that has no room on the other side. The critter sensor behind the hatch is set back to 0 closing the door on the hatch, trapping it in the doorway while the mechanical airlock below the door opens, but only if the ranch below has 7 or less critters. This part is the only part that can't be mirrored left to right because the AND and XOR gates don't flip, so you have slightly different automation configurations, but they do the same thing.

Back to the top again, this Automation is nothing but ANDs. It checks if there are critters in each of the 3 queue slots and if the ranch also has more than 7 critters, meaning it is full. it checks that this is true for both sides (8 total booleans that all have to be true) if all conditions are met, the center Mechanical Airlock will open up dropping any excess eggs into the kill-pool below, eventually turning them into meat. The hatch will stay open as long as the ranch is full, but will close and begin hatching a new hatch once one of the queue slots becomes available.

Conclusion

The result is a fully automated (still needs a groomer) hatch ranch that

• Lets you choose what morph variants you want to breed
• Eliminates the need for any wrangling (beyond set-up)
• Doesn't have the constant beeping of a NOT clock
• Produces enough BBQ for around 8 dupes
• Uses 2 new Critter-Sensor concepts that can be adapted to other ranches (the critter dispenser and the egg dropper)
• Is fully automated so you can go focus on other colony things and while producing the best food and a good chunk of coal power (or refined metal)

I added v1.0 in the title because I'm excited to see and possibly use your improvements. be sure to post any you come up with!

Enjoy!

[Lancar]

That egg dropper is brilliant. It's basically my own smart storage-trigger solution, but while mine only worked with eggs weighing 1kg or more (due to compactor limitations) this one works with ANY egg type due to the critter sensor sending the signal instead.

I'm definitely using this for my own designs.

[SamLogan]

A new master piece, thanks for the share.

[Grimgaw]

9 hours ago, tjart said:

Doesn't have the constant beeping of a NOT clock

You can disable this (limit the sounds to only automation overlay) in the options.

[tjart]

I did eventually get a clog in the system so I had to give the two unpaired loaders a loop back receptacle. I also moved the top receptacle into it's own room since I think having it in the same room as the loader is what caused the clog initially.

 

[hackcasual]

Here's a trick you can use to git rid of those big AND gate chains, with a little boolean algebra. Automation wire in ONI acts like a big OR bus. 

Boolean algebra has this identity: NOT (A AND B) is equivalent to NOT A OR NOT B. Add in a final NOT and we have NOT(NOT A OR NOT B) = A AND B. So if we NOT all the sensors, and connect the output of each NOT together, then NOT the output, and you've got one big AND bus.

 

Spoiler

 

[tjart]

Very nice and very convenient since each of the sensors already use a NOT. I'll give it a go, thanks for the tip!

[Xyer]

Thank you for sharing your ranch build.

This is what I got for the refined automation using NOT gates instead of AND gates. 

Note that I did not include the XOR gate portion as I do not find it necessary, my pneumatic doors in the middle are arranged slightly differently, and eggs of other hatch types are sent elsewhere.

[hackcasual]

You'll probably need a second NOT, since the existing NOTs are feeding the doors. That's the one trick with using wire as an OR gate, is everything connected to that wire will be the same state.

[Xyer]

Where do I need the second NOT gate?

I actually started this with 4 hatches on the left and 0 on the right and it has been working fine for many cycles to what I have now (8 hatches each side).

[hackcasual]

25 minutes ago, Xyer said:

Where do I need the second NOT gate?

I actually started this with 4 hatches on the left and 0 on the right and it has been working fine for many cycles to what I have now (8 hatches each side).

Sorry, meant to reply to OP, not you. Basically telling @tjart they might need to do what you did.

[Xuhybrid]

I've been daunted to try one of these for a while but if i ever get to it, i'll use this as a guide

[Xyer]

I was wondering if this design could also be applied to farming Pufts. Having a type filter would be really helpful in maintaining Puft Prince count.

[Miravlix]

Low power requirement automation, always a good thing.

 

But you don't automate the one item that is the most awful dupe power drain in the entire game, the *critter feeder*.

 

That thing is pure evil, as every time a critter eat a little food, a dupe get told to go fill it up right away. I always build a container to store the item they eat and let the automation move it into the feeder.

 

The feeder will move items from container to feeder many times before a dupe get sent on the job of feeding the container, so he travel with more of the resource and travel less times.

 

You could even consider only giving access to the storage container on a schedule, to reduce the times they try to fill it during a day.

[tjart]

On 1/9/2019 at 11:25 PM, Miravlix said:

That thing is pure evil, as every time a critter eat a little food, a dupe get told to go fill it up right away. I always build a container to store the item they eat and let the automation move it into the feeder.

This sounds like a solution you could possibly solve with a smart storage connected to a sweeper. But, proprieties would get in the way since the smart storage would have to be a lower priority than the critter feeder.

Personally, I just use the storage under the ranch to store igneous (for stone hatches) and let them do it manually.. I have 2 dupes that are set to janitorial duties/hauling and they are often idle, so it works fine for me for now.

But, I get your point. it's not exactly 'Fully Automated" w/o that part

[Yunru]

On 10/01/2019 at 2:57 AM, hackcasual said:

Here's a trick you can use to git rid of those big AND gate chains, with a little boolean algebra. Automation wire in ONI acts like a big OR bus. 

Boolean algebra has this identity: NOT (A AND B) is equivalent to NOT A OR NOT B. Add in a final NOT and we have NOT(NOT A OR NOT B) = A AND B. So if we NOT all the sensors, and connect the output of each NOT together, then NOT the output, and you've got one big AND bus.

 

  Hide contents

 

Was just about to suggest the same.

[tjart]

On 1/9/2019 at 11:00 PM, Xyer said:

I was wondering if this design could also be applied to farming Pufts. Having a type filter would be really helpful in maintaining Puft Prince count.

The ranch itself probably won't since it's gravity based, but it's component concepts should work. the critter dispenser just relies on the critter moving left or right, and the egg dropper doesn't have any critter specific limitations that I am aware of,

The main issue would be the layout. There is a chance that a puft would float back up into the critter dispenser with this setup. for pufts, there would need to be an additional mechanic besides gravity that ensures the critters stay in the ranching area after they have been dispensed.

On 1/9/2019 at 10:35 PM, hackcasual said:

Sorry, meant to reply to OP, not you. Basically telling @tjart they might need to do what you did.

I was able to confirm that, yes you would. using the existing NOTs just turned all of the doors into one big AND bus like you expected. So, I guess it's just a matter of personal preference. 7 ANDs or 9 NOTs. I like to put paintings over the ANDs, so I think I'll keep them, but it's still a great trick to know.

[tjart]

 

On 1/9/2019 at 10:01 PM, Xyer said:

Thank you for sharing your ranch build.

This is what I got for the refined automation using NOT gates instead of AND gates. 

Note that I did not include the XOR gate portion as I do not find it necessary, my pneumatic doors in the middle are arranged slightly differently, and eggs of other hatch types are sent elsewhere.

Nice streamlining. I'll definitely give this version a go on the next one I build.

[6Havok9]

I just tried building something inspired by this and oh man, it works like a charm. This is a stone hatch only ranch.

 

I am using NOT gates after the critter sensors, with the sensor set to 0. This will shut down the sweeper as soon as an egg enters the room, i.e. it grabs an egg. This ensures that the autosweeper will always drop the egg/s it's holding. I have conveyor rails running through the autosweeper room, and a passing egg will give that damned machine enough time to deliver the egg to the loader, if directly connected to a critter sensor. It also ensures that the eggs will be dropped even in the unfortunate case that two arrive at the same time, and prevents the sweeper from trying to catch falling eggs. Those contraptions seem to love catching falling things, you can shoot something at escape velocity, but they will catch it if it goes into their operating range for a split second.

 

I've included a loopback receptacle, never had to use it, but better safe than sorry.

 

Room overlay. There's a door on the left of the mid center autosweeper, so the NOT gate after the critter sensor can do its job.

 

Many thanks to @tjart for coming up with this and also @Xyer for the AND bus idea. This was one of the most fun and useful builds I did in a while.

I've tried to adapt it to dreckos, but they are too unpredictable. They fall like hatches, and if they are on the ceiling and that ceiling happens to be a door, they will fall if you open it. However if they decided to crawl on the walls, then problems start to happen. Maybe they can be tricked to go around corners and get stuck inside a double airlock, they seem to love doing that. Once they get in, they'll never path out as far as I can tell.

There is also THAT drecko that likes to get out of the stable as soon as the door opens. Maybe it can be done from below by flooding the space the drecko is in, forcing it upwards and preventing other dreckos from going in. Meh... Better have an hatchery nearby and wrangle 'em.

Btw, yes, the lights are unpowered. And staying that way until I setup proper cooling ><

 

 

[Kaabaal]

For the critter feeder and the priority problem, I resolved the issue by not allowing dupes access to the feeder. That way the sweeper will still fill up the critter feeder while dupes only fill up the container. For hatches I did that by giving a one tile access to the feeder to hatches, dupes can't go in there cause it's too low but hatches can, problem solved!

For the other critters it's even easier, you just put the feeder high in the air or against walls up for dreckos/puft. You can even use this with only a couple storage containers and a single sweeper if your rooms are set up nicely, hatches don't eat 20t or clay so fast :p.

[Xyer]

I built a second one of these in my new base and made some alterations. First I added a second sweeper arm at the top so I can have 2 different hatch ranches (smooth hatch on the left stone hatch on the right). I also linked most of the automation to the sweeper arms themselves so they will only drop eggs when I need to top up the ranches. Excess eggs are all sent (by the vertical sweepers near the top) to my central critter killbox where I drop and kill all excess eggs from my other ranches as well.

 

And here is the automation spaghetti:

[ChickenMadness]

On 10/01/2019 at 7:00 AM, Xyer said:

I was wondering if this design could also be applied to farming Pufts. Having a type filter would be really helpful in maintaining Puft Prince count.

I posted a Dense puft ranch that maintains 1 puft prince + 5 dense pufts at all times in a seperate room from the main ranch, and seperates the egg types. Can be used for all puft variants.

EDIT: lol I just realised you already posted in my thread. Nevermind.
 

On 28/01/2019 at 3:34 AM, 6Havok9 said:

I just tried building something inspired by this and oh man, it works like a charm. This is a stone hatch only ranch.

This one looks very pretty. It's like a luxury hatch mansion lol.

[NoOneCare]

On 28/01/2019 at 4:34 AM, 6Havok9 said:

I just tried building something inspired by this and oh man, it works like a charm. This is a stone hatch only ranch.

 

Yeah I've also got inspired. It also punched me to create an account on the forum

Spoiler

 

 

 

 

 

 

[beowulf2010]

So, it looks like this style of hatch ranching is now dead. The hatches no longer fall through the Mechanized Airlocks when they open... 

[tjart]

On 2/14/2019 at 11:29 AM, beowulf2010 said:

So, it looks like this style of hatch ranching is now dead. The hatches no longer fall through the Mechanized Airlocks when they open... 

They do, it just takes time, which is why they get trapped above the final door, so they can't walk away before they fall.