Pips - Useful or Nuisance?

[CrutchPunk]

While I don't know if Pips planting seeds and allowing us to have wild, natural, farms is an intended feature (that won't get patched in a future update), I am curious if anyone has found a proper way to utilize these lil guys to establish sustainable "wild" farms?

I know that domesticated plants yield quicker.. but with the addition of Parks, I feel like this method of farms could serve a decent purpose.

[nivodeus]

in some situation it could be a nuisance, esp early game without rancher when they just keep planting things, but once you get park or natural reserve, it could be a good way to farm Lumber. I gathered all of them in one spot and they breed endlessly while maintaining a good amount of lumber for me. I havent tried with other types of plant though. They do occasionally found an oxyfern in the wild and allowed me to replant it at my Co2 basin. 

Im still not really sure what they really do, do they dig and found seed randomly and plant them or they just found any seed they found that already in the wild and plant them? 

[PhailRaptor]

23 minutes ago, nivodeus said:

Im still not really sure what they really do, do they dig and found seed randomly and plant them or they just found any seed they found that already in the wild and plant them? 

My understanding is that they do not create Seeds, they merely pick up those that are accessible, whether on the ground or in a Storage Compactor.

[Promethien]

It takes something like 10 sleet wheats per dupe when wild. There are some plants its worth leaving wild because they are very productive, like peppernuts, but the raw amount of space needed to wild grow everything is a little nuts. Though, yes, it is possible to farm and feed all the dupes space will allow without consuming resources. For comparison you can feed a single dupe on 1.25 fertilized domestic sleet wheat. 

Also someone confirmed, pips will plant peppernuts. 

Continuing on the value of pips. They eat trees and poop dirt. So they are low effort ranching with a valuable byproduct. Use that dirt to make fertilizer and grow sleet wheat. Or feed sage hatches if you want to co2 heavy power source for your slicksters. 

[CrutchPunk]

1 hour ago, nivodeus said:

I gathered all of them in one spot and they breed endlessly while maintaining a good amount of lumber for me.

I haven't gotten deep enough in the tech tree, in my current game, to test our ranching on them... are they trappable? Tameable? Do the critter dropoffs work with them? Do they excrete anything useful while consuming lumber?

Scrolling through comments on various threads I've found little, or conflicting, information on this kind of stuff.. and I refuse to use cheats to find out such simple things.

[Lurve]

I love the infuriating little ceiling huggers.  They're farmer pets.  The forest biome doesn't have muckroot, so you have to start farming mealwood.  Any extra seeds that come along will be pounced on by pips and replanted elsewhere.  Pretty soon you'll have enough wild mealwood to start removing your farms.  Same thing works with any crop that drops seeds, including the trees they eat.  Mid-late game, trapping a pip in an enclosed room with enough seeds for every natural tile will get you a completely free wild farm, much faster than building and deconstructing farm tiles, then waiting for the seed to plant itself.

Ranching: wrangleable, life cycle similar to hatches, drop 1 kg of meat, poop dirt.  Three or so trees with enough room to grow will be enough to feed them and still drop lumber/seeds, I've never had problems.  Extra pips can be set free to wander.

 

[nakomaru]

Seeds replanting as wild is intentional. It is in the patch notes and two new mechanisms Klei developed for this purpose. Leave a seed on natural tiles for some time, or let a pip have access to seeds and natural tiles. Pips don't generate seeds.

Pips planting is only useful for upside plants, or if you don't care at all where your plants go. If you do, just place wild plants yourself (1kg storage→deconstruct). Converting lumber to dirt is quite nice, but also almost unnecessary now that wild sleet can be domesticated.

Mechanically they are the same as dreckos, with the addition of removing lumber and seeds from storage and planting randomly.

[Lurve]

I haven't seen them eat lumber (the item), just the trees themselves, like dreckos do.  Will they eat lumber if no trees are available?

Nor have I seen them take seeds out of storage.

[natanstarke]

Both like hatches.

[beowulf2010]

12 minutes ago, Lurve said:

Nor have I seen them take seeds out of storage.

It's actually quite adorable. They walk up to the storage container and do their digging animation and poof, some seeds pop out of storage. 

[nakomaru]

20 minutes ago, Lurve said:

I haven't seen them eat lumber (the item), just the trees themselves, like dreckos do.  Will they eat lumber if no trees are available?

Nor have I seen them take seeds out of storage.

They don't eat lumber debris. But they do take 3 lumber out of storage compactors at a time and drop them to the ground.

[Nightinggale]

2 hours ago, nakomaru said:

Pips planting is only useful for upside plants, or if you don't care at all where your plants go.

Pips can be useful even if you care where the plants grow. I bet there will be guides on how to get pips to plant according to your wishes, or even just by wanting them to plant on every single available space.

[Sasza22]

Well if pips weren`t a thing people would have to manually construct storage and drop single seeds in every tile then deconstruct. That`s way too annoying to deal with. Controlling where they plant is pretty easy just requires to lock them in a room with a bunch of seeds and eventually all tiles will be filled with plants.

[nakomaru]

Constructing large rows of 1kg storage containers, applying/copying settings, then deconstructing is essentially three steps. It is one of the simplest things you could do in Oni.

[Coolthulhu]

Cage or murder.

Their only non-replaceable use is planting pinchas. If they aren't doing that, they're better off dead instead of spilling contents of random compactors and polluting the place with unwanted plants.

[Promethien]

1 hour ago, Coolthulhu said:

Cage or murder.

Their only non-replaceable use is planting pinchas. If they aren't doing that, they're better off dead instead of spilling contents of random compactors and polluting the place with unwanted plants.

So while I agree with this it kind of implies its not trivial to keep them away from your storage. It very much is trivial to do so.

Also I have found ranching to be a supremely valuable source of early food. After I tried it once I have always set up a dupe to rush ranching with his first two skill points.