Feedlot ranching

[avc15]

 

Good morning friends,

I've made a similar post before but it was poorly written. Also with the game being multithreaded now this concept is actually a viable idea for survival mode.

So first, this ranch is designed to get the maximum possible materials production per grooming errand. There are other ranch designs that have other goals. This design gets 3-4 times more materials per grooming, and over time produces the same amount of meat.

In economics, the concept I'm using here is called leverage. Basically I'm investing eggs for extra materials production, instead of using them for immediate meat production. I get my meat later, and actually the same amount of it.

1: Build a basic 96 tile ranch

Start with your basic 96 tile ranch for breeding whatever critter you want. Feed them as much as they'll eat. Optimize the layout to reduce run distance. Ship the eggs off.

Left hand room is for storing oxylite, I'm pressing the room to 5k to keep the oxylite from evaporating, transit tubes to reduce run times & atmo suits to prevent popped eardrums, none of the above are required.

There are 5 dense pufts and 1 prince in there. (the prince dies of suffocation about 20 cycles after being put in the dense puft ranch, so part of the overall build is supplying replacement princes)

2a / normal approach: Ship off the eggs to a kill room

Now normally you'd drop your eggs in a pool of water and wait for them to hatch, collect the meat when the hatchlings drown. Something like this but way more compact... (others have better designs for this, it's not what my build is about)

2b / instead: put those critters to work

Instead what I'll do is drop the eggs in a feeding room and let them incubate naturally. When the critters begin to hatch, they quickly become overcrowded and glum, so their metabolism will drop to 20%. But that doesn't matter, because you'll have so many of them.

And you get your meat back after 75 cycles: once one critter lifecycle passes, this ranch produces meat at the same rate as your standard drowning chamber. My baby critters just live out a normal lifespan and do work first.

I still have just 5 dense pufts being groomed, but now I also get the production from these 55 in the feed lot. My ranch uses the same amount of labor as a normal ranch with the kill room, but I get three times more oxylite. (maximum sustainable pop should be about 65 in the feeding room but it's challenging to reach)

(edit: sorry, spoilers are buggy for me, must be using them wrong)

Does it actually work / why does it work

First I have to show you the actual whole setup. I'm certain there's a way to automate this whole thing but it's non-trivial, so I'm filling gaps in my breeding rooms by wrangling. I keep 1 prince groomed, and 2 pufts groomed, and happy, in their own separate rooms. The main breeding room has 5 dense and 1 prince. Puft & prince eggs get pulled out to the rooms in the bottom left -- here the puftlets just gradually suffocate over 20 cycles, but I have them available to wrangle back in whenever I need replacements.

I need pufts on their own to lay prince eggs. Like I mentioned, princes I put in with the dense pufts suffocate and die after about 20 cycles. That's why we have a room with 2 groomed pufts on their own, and a room with 1 groomed prince on its own.

Use transit tubes to reduce travel distances if you wish.

Does it work

Well let's see: I benchmarked my setup vs. how it'd perform sending eggs to the drowning room instead. We're grooming 9 critters either way.

The feed lot ranch produces almost 3 times more oxylite per grooming, and the same amount of meat per grooming.

Why does it work

Glum/cramped critters only convert resources at 20% of their normal speed.

But, each groomed critter in the breeding room can sustain up to 13 in the feeding room.

The feeding room doesn't need a dupe to attend to it at all so any production you get out of it is extra.

With 5 dense pufts breeding, I can maintain a population as high as 65 in the feeding room. (more realistically, 55)

Those 55 glum dense pufts only work at 20% speed, so, they're producing as much as another 11 dense pufts in 3 additional ranches, but my dupes don't have to groom them.

Performance?

The game handles it without any complaint now. I don't really notice any difference in game performance, except when I'm looking right at the ranch. Even then it only costs 2-3 fps.