poll Preserving wild plants

[yoakenashi]

I have seen several posts where players say they maintain a population of duplicants using wild sleet wheat. I'm curious how many people do this and if it's only limited to sleet wheat.

I have maintained my sleet wheat and pincha pepperplants, and find that I have extra pincha pepper. However, it is challenging to build around all the plants.

For those who do not know, wild plants do not consume any resources and essentially provide free produce for those willing to wait (4 times as long as domestic plants). Also, if you did not know, farmers touch can also be applied to wild plants. So it is possible to cut wild growth rates in half (or equivalently, double wild production) if one has the fertilizer and builds a greenhouse around the wild plants.

[fishoutofwater]

yes in the early game, but later I dug out all of the plants because my brain think it might improve my fps.

 

but imho, sure the wild plants don't need resources but they do need dupe's travel times, I mean one dupe to harvest then other dupe to haul.

[Lawnmower Man]

16 minutes ago, fishoutofwater said:

yes in the early game, but later I dug out all of the plants because my brain think it might improve my fps.

 

but imho, sure the wild plants don't need resources but they do need dupe's travel times, I mean one dupe to harvest then other dupe to haul.

@Saturnus observes that you can completely automate wild farms by waiting for "natural harvest" (which costs 4 cycles) and using sweepers/loaders to bring it to the kitchen.  Obviously, you can't rely on Farmer's Touch if you want it 100% automated.

The poll was not multiple-choice for me.  Or rather, the multiple-choice was backwards.

[Stressed Dupe]

How do I vote again?

 

[yoakenashi]

8 minutes ago, Lawnmower Man said:

The poll was not multiple-choice for me.  Or rather, the multiple-choice was backwards.

I edited the topic and fixed this. Thanks for pointing that out!

[fishoutofwater]

7 minutes ago, Lawnmower Man said:

@Saturnus observes that you can completely automate wild farms by waiting for "natural harvest" (which costs 4 cycles) and using sweepers/loaders to bring it to the kitchen.  Obviously, you can't rely on Farmer's Touch if you want it 100% automated.

The poll was not multiple-choice for me.  Or rather, the multiple-choice was backwards.

but then you have to choose which area is worth.

[PhailRaptor]

Yes, I do preserve plants, but it's one of those "if I'm reasonably able" situations.  I'm not going to rework a planned build just because I found a couple of food crops growing wild.

[Gurgel]

I used to go for 12 dupes and these can be fully sustained food-wise on wildly grown ingredient pepper-bread on most maps. With 8 dupes it is basically always possible. And for my last experiment with 1 dupe, it is possible to do early (well, everything is much slower with one dupe, so not cycle-wise early, but base-development wise early).

[Ozcuraz]

Can we place crop seed on natural tile and let it grows as wild plant? I saw a Wort Seed on natural tile became Wheezewort after several cycles so I tried to build a wild sleet wheat farm but it never grew up.

[Soulwind]

Worts are the only seed that does that. 

I try to leave wild plants alone when I can,  but if it's in my way too much then it gets dug up. 

[Sasza22]

I keep wild plants if they don`t block anything i want to build. Generally i keep them at low priority so dupes only pick up the food when they grow fully and drop it on the ground. Sleet wheat is the exception as i tend to save one ice biome for free sleet.

[KittenIsAGeek]

18 hours ago, Lawnmower Man said:

@Saturnus observes that you can completely automate wild farms by waiting for "natural harvest" (which costs 4 cycles) and using sweepers/loaders to bring it to the kitchen.  Obviously, you can't rely on Farmer's Touch if you want it 100% automated.

The poll was not multiple-choice for me.  Or rather, the multiple-choice was backwards.

I'm not black or white either on the subject.   During my early base, I'll leave wild mealwood to grow.  If there are a lot of shine bugs near wild bristlebloom, I let them be as well and generally only build a door so the shine bugs stay near the BB.  Also, if a cold biome is clean, I'll let the wild sleetwheat grow while I work in other areas.  However, as my dupe population grows, there's a point where wild production just doesn't keep up.

For example, this is a relatively dense wild plant region that won't sustain even one dupe.  

Spoiler

Since I'm not using the area yet, I've left it alone, but it doesn't come anywhere near sustaining my base.  So the question comes down to: How much area are the wild plants going to take up (density) compared to their reduced production rate.  Wild plants are almost always widely dispersed.  In the picture above, there are 13 plants (counting the muckroot, which only produce ONCE) in 23 tiles of space.  Roughly every other tile has a plant. 

Lets assume that all the wild plants above are mealwood, and that the plant density is uniform at 1 plant per 2 tiles.  Lets also assume that you have only 3 dupes and none of them are weird about food (no binge eating, no bottomless stomach) meaning that you'll need to provide 3000kcal per cycle to feed them.  A wild mealwood provides 600kcal every 12 cycles, provided it is harvested immediately.  This means that to feed your base on wild mealwood, you would need 60 wild mealwood plants occupying 120 tiles of space.   

Granted, there are better wild plants than mealwood, but this gives a good example of the problem.  Yes, wild plants are free food, but there will come a point in your colony development where wild sources just can't keep up.  In the above example, only 15 domesticated mealwood, in 15 farm tiles would be needed to maintain the same number of dupes.  That's 1/8th the space and 1/4th the dupe activity.

A long while back, it was easier to farm wild plants.  All you had to do was drop a seed on a natural tile.  This not only improved their density (1 plant per tile, so only 4 times less space efficient than domesticated), but reduced dupe travel times: all in one place, no climbing up/down steps, etc. 

So, my rule of thumb has been lately: "If the plant isn't in the way, let it grow naturally and I'll get the food at some point when I need the space."  This works well for pincha and sleetwheet, that are often growing in sterile environments.  But I haven't tried to use wild food sources as a primary food supply for my colony in a very long time.

[avc15]

the danger to wild farming sleet wheat is walk distances. You should be willing to build some transit tubes if you want to recover some of that dupe labor - they're running to the far corners of your asteroid to gather food.

 

But yes, collecting sleet wheat wild is much easier than making a domestic farm. 

[Lawnmower Man]

1 hour ago, KittenIsAGeek said:

I'm not black or white either on the subject.   During my early base, I'll leave wild mealwood to grow.  If there are a lot of shine bugs near wild bristlebloom, I let them be as well and generally only build a door so the shine bugs stay near the BB.  Also, if a cold biome is clean, I'll let the wild sleetwheat grow while I work in other areas.  However, as my dupe population grows, there's a point where wild production just doesn't keep up.

[...]

 

I actually laughed when I saw Mealwood on the survey.  But then I did a double-take when folks voted for it!  Obviously, the high-value plants are the ones to preserve: Pincha and Sleet.  I'm actually surprised people are excited about wild mushrooms.  I'd like to get excited, but more than 50% of the time, they are in PO instead of CO2, which is pretty useless.  Since Bristles also don't grow outside of the starting biome, I think they and mealwood are kinda irrelevant to the wild harvest question.  Who would build around wild plants in the starting biome when that is the most valuable space (due to its centrality)?

However, I think anyone not trying to protect Pinchas is just trying to make life hard for themselves.  There are some inconveniently located pinchas, but they are so valuable that I will give up some building space to keep them around.  You only need to 2 wild pinchas per dupe to maintain BBQ or Pepper Bread full time.  I have 40+ wild pinchas with a bunch not even accessible yet, and only 12 dupes.  Sleet is a bit more work because you need a lot more plants for bread, and I didn't protect my sleet as well as I should have.  But making enough meat for BBQ is pretty easy too.  Just 1.5 hatches per dupe or some nice balance of hatch, drecko, puft, wild pacu, etc.

I actually shut down my mushroom and bristle farms because I had too many calories in the fridge, mostly from meat and wild pinchas, with the occasional pepper bread and omelettes.  I cut the irrigation to the bristles and actually built lights to suppress the shrooms.

[yoakenashi]

On 1/23/2019 at 11:16 PM, fishoutofwater said:

they do need dupe's travel times

 

On 1/24/2019 at 6:56 PM, avc15 said:

the danger to wild farming sleet wheat is walk distances

I have been playing my last few worlds on miserable, fatalistic, high moral requirements, and ravaging hunger (4x difficulty), and find that the travel times make having a non-central farm unreasonable. The duplicants are always between farming, eating, cooking due to the ravaging hunger. Add in travel time and that's a 33% increase in time (roughly), something I do not have.

I need to train my duplicants to cook in their sleep, and eat on the job!

[fishoutofwater]

11 minutes ago, yoakenashi said:

 

I have been playing my last few worlds on miserable, fatalistic, high moral requirements, and ravaging hunger (4x difficulty), and find that the travel times make having a non-central farm unreasonable. The duplicants are always between farming, eating, cooking due to the ravaging hunger. Add in travel time and that's a 33% increase in time (roughly), something I do not have.

I need to train my duplicants to cook in their sleep, and eat on the job!

rush research cryosleep a.k.a command capsule, lel.

[6Havok9]

5 hours ago, yoakenashi said:

I have been playing my last few worlds on miserable, fatalistic, high moral requirements, and ravaging hunger (4x difficulty), and find that the travel times make having a non-central farm unreasonable. The duplicants are always between farming, eating, cooking due to the ravaging hunger. Add in travel time and that's a 33% increase in time (roughly), something I do not have.

You can however use sweepers, it's particularly handy with pincha peppers. Just find a place where there are many not overlapping pinchas in a 9 wide vertical row, slap in a liquid lock, do some terraforming to allow as many peppernuts as possible to fall down to the sweeper level, place your lines, lock the door and voila. No more travel time 

[Lilalaunekuh]

13 minutes ago, 6Havok9 said:

You can however use sweepers, it's particularly handy with pincha peppers.

I like the fully automated farming, but you have to keep in mind that it adds 4 cycles to the "growth time".

And 2 duplicant interactions every ~32 cycles isn´t that bad for a wild growing pincha pepper plant.

(Playing on the same difficulty since some time, last base with the addition that all duplicants are mouth breathers^^)

[MorsDux]

Obviously pincha and sleet is useful as its late game food ingredient and one trip can harvest large amount of kcal worth material. If you go rampant on dupe numbers its necessary to preserve wildlife in almost all forms. But normal gameplay with 10-20 dupes its much more efficient to use available resources and farm the stuff with automation aid. 

Of course ppl can preseve plants as some kind of preservationist roleplay game or simple laziness too

[6Havok9]

On 31/1/2019 at 5:47 PM, MorsDux said:

Of course ppl can preseve plants as some kind of preservationist roleplay game or simple laziness too

I went the preservationist way once in a particular map where the starting biome was literally surrounded by drecko habitats, complete with balm lilies and pinchas. It's fun, and you can easily support 35 dupes, but definitely not lazy, if you take into account all the effort you put into building around the habitats, preserving temperatures and automating procedures. More like just reward =)

[MorsDux]

4 minutes ago, 6Havok9 said:

I went the preservationist way once in a particular map where the starting biome was literally surrounded by drecko habitats, complete with balm lilies and pinchas. It's fun, and you can easily support 35 dupes, but definitely not lazy, if you take into account all the effort you put into building around the habitats, preserving temperatures and automating procedures. More like just reward =)

Yes i said “or”