Slime puft. Irrelevant?

[pacovf]

This topic keeps coming up, but I felt it was time to make a new one (mostly to procrastinate on things I don't want to do). The slime pufts right now don't fit anywhere in the game balance. Let's look first at what they do, then we will look at how they could fit in the game, and why the niche isn't there. I won't touch on the pufts variants for now.

 

The concept

Slime pufts convert polluted oxygen into slime. They also make eggs and can be killed for meat, but that's true of basically all other critters, so we can safely ignore this. Slime has two uses: fertilizing dusk caps, or being distilled in an algae distiller, producing algae and quite a bit of polluted water. Algae, in turn, can be used to make clean oxygen (via terrariums or diffusers), or to feed pacus to get polluted dirt. You can also feed slime or algae to sage hatches to get coal.

Right off the bat, considering the difficulty of ranching pufts, let's exclude feeding sage hatches as a reason to have a puft ranch: there's so many alternatives to what you can feed hatches, it's likely there's something better you can do to get coal. Feeding pacus is also not a great proposition: there's easier ways to get dirt (pips, composting), and even if the devs change pacus so that you *have* to feed them, there are many alternatives for food.

This leaves dusk caps and running the distillery mainly for the polluted water. One thing to note about the dusk caps is that they are the *only* edible crop that don't require water to grow (EDIT: actually, you can grow mealwood without water, and then eat it raw). So we could imagine an asteroid where water is really rare, then fried mushrooms might be your only realistic source of food, and you can use the water from the distillery for those tasks that absolutely need water. A problem with this is that fried mushrooms are very low quality food.

Of note, breeding slime pufts for algae for oxygen makes no sense. You could set up a complicated ranch, then the distillers, and finally oxygen diffusers, requiring power, plumbing, and dupe labour... or you could plop down a few deodorizers. There is just no point of comparison. Short of the devs nerfing the deodorizers so that they can't be used for more than spot cleaning or something (e.g., severely reducing their storage capacity so that dupes have to clean them a lot more often: right now they can clean 150 kg per load), this is a non-starter.

Finally, we have no way to produce polluted oxygen, outside of degassing polluted water. But if the main advantage of ranching slime pufts is the production or saving of water, then getting polluted oxygen this way defeats the purpose. So realistically, you will only ranch slime pufts if you have a polluted oxygen vent (side note, even the "cool" ones output oxygen that is too hot for the pufts). Or maybe if you really want to grow dusk caps for some strange reason, or because you think they look cute or something. There's technically also morbs, but morbs are so weird in so many ways, I don't know whether I should count them.

 

The numbers

Next part of the problem are the numbers involved in polluted oxygen vents and slime pufts metabolism. Both polluted oxygen vent output 15 to 180 g/s. Compare this to a cool steam vent, which outputs 200 g/s to 2.5 kg/s. Polluted water vents and cool slush geysers output double that. The only way the polluted oxygen geyser processed by pufts is going to make a noticeable difference in the amount of water you have, is if literally none of those vents are in your game, or if the pufts multiply the mass of oxygen they get when they convert it to slime, only...

Pufts actually halve the mass when they output slime. This is particularly baffling when you look at how many you need to run an algae distillery: twenty-four of them. If you wanted to match the amount of water you get from an average cool steam vent with distilleries, you would need three distilleries, for a total of 72 (!) pufts. It seems dusk caps are balanced around pufts (4 pufts can maintain around 15 dusk caps), but pufts aren't balanced at all around distilleries. Quite honestly, you could bump their conversion efficiency to 95%, like their variants, and double their metabolism, and you would have much saner numbers for the latter: around 6 pufts per distillery.

This still doesn't solve the issue of where you get enough polluted oxygen from though. Either those vents are buffed by a factor of almost ten, and we get an increase in the odds of finding one in slime biomes, or we get some way to create polluted oxygen that doesn't involve consuming water.

 

Conclusion

Slime pufts don't fill any niche right now. The niche they could most reliably fill is in producing/saving water in water-poor asteroids, but that would require both new sources of polluted oxygen, and buffing the metabolism of pufts and their mass conversion. It would also help to have a high quality meal with dusk caps (e.g. scrambled eggs with mushrooms?).

Two sources of food (dusk caps and potentially-nerfed pacus) depend indirectly on pufts, but if there are alternatives for food, those alternatives will almost always be more convenient.

Finally, pufts can be part of a very involved process to "clean" polluted oxygen into regular oxygen (via algae), but so long as deodorizers are as powerful and available as they are, this is not a reasonable proposition at all. It could be an interesting challenge to play without sand, but the rock crusher all but guarantees you will never run out of filtration medium anyway. EDIT: and with the current mass conversion of slime pufts, you still destroy over 75% (!) of the mass of oxygen you clean this way. If slime pufts converted 95% of the oxygen into slime instead (like their variants), you would only destroy about 15%.

[Grimgaw]

They're in the same position as regular hatches, slicksters, shine bugs and to lesser degree regular dreckos- you breed more useful variant out of them.

[pacovf]

I see what you mean, but I disagree. Regular, sage and stone hatches all produce coal, so you will only breed the one that is more convenient. Shinebugs all give decor and light, so the variants become progressively better as you breed them. Similarly, regular and molten slicksters have the same output (crude oil is mostly only useful after you convert it to petroleum), so we can say that molten ones are better.

Pufts are like dreckos, in the sense that their variants aren't interchangeable, so each must be able to stand on their own. It's particularly noteworthy that regular pufts are the only renewable source of slime, and by extension of algae. If pufts are useless, then so is anything that depends on either of those resources.

[KittenIsAGeek]

In small batches, Stay Pufts... er, um.. Pufts.  Just Pufts. Sorry.  Long day.  Anyway.  In small batches, Pufts of various flavors are rather useful.  They're a PITA to actually ranch due to the weird Prince rules, but hey.. They convert polluted oxygen to slime which you can feed to mushrooms.

Everyone has some excess polluted oxygen floating around.  Sometimes its from polluted water, or polluted dirt, or Frankie over there and his darn allergies keeping him from using the latrine.. again..  Or perhaps you've got chlorine floating around in little batches because you took a shortcut and used a simple mechanical door to wall off a caustic biome instead of a full airlock.   Anyway, pufts are a way to turn that gas into a solid that your dupes can carry off and use somewhere else.

But, unfortunately, these guys don't scale well.  The conversion ratios mean that you're losing a lot of material, so the end result has a fraction of the material you need.  Want to feed mushrooms to 4 dupes? No problem.  Want to feed 40?  ... Yeah.  On the one side, they can definitely be useful if you have a map with lots of polluted water.  Say you've got a slush geyser or a polluted water vent.  Polluted water converts to polluted oxygen 1:1, so with the right setup you can have a prolific amount of polluted oxygen.  On the other side, that leads to the ranching problem.  It can be tedious and frustrating to get the pufts you want.

 

One of these days I'm going to see how organic I can make my base. Use gulp fishes to purify water, pufts to clean up polluted oxygen, slicksters to clean up CO2.

[pacovf]

8 minutes ago, KittenIsAGeek said:

Everyone has some excess polluted oxygen floating around.  Sometimes its from polluted water, or polluted dirt, or Frankie over there and his darn allergies keeping him from using the latrine.. again..  Or perhaps you've got chlorine floating around in little batches because you took a shortcut and used a simple mechanical door to wall off a caustic biome instead of a full airlock.   Anyway, pufts are a way to turn that gas into a solid that your dupes can carry off and use somewhere else.

Are you saying you just leave pufts roam freely in your base to capture that polluted oxygen or chlorine? That sounds cute, but since their uh "poop" offgases, it's kinda pointless, no?

 

10 minutes ago, KittenIsAGeek said:

On the one side, they can definitely be useful if you have a map with lots of polluted water.  Say you've got a slush geyser or a polluted water vent.  Polluted water converts to polluted oxygen 1:1, so with the right setup you can have a prolific amount of polluted oxygen.

But my question is, what do you do with that slime afterwards? Farm dusk caps? Why bother at all? Just sieve the water and grow bristle blossoms, or whatever. Fried mushrooms are pretty low quality food.

[Lurve]

If they'd get rid of the slimelung, I'd use them in place of deodorizers in sand-limited maps.  As it is I'd rather have a few extra rock crushing tasks than infect all my dupes.

2 minutes ago, pacovf said:

Are you saying you just leave pufts roam freely in your base to capture that polluted oxygen or chlorine? That sounds cute, but since their uh "poop" offgases, it's kinda pointless, no?

You'd have a storage bin in a puddle somewhere for the slime/bleachstone/oxy.

[Sasza22]

1 minute ago, Lurve said:

If they'd get rid of the slimelung, I'd use them in place of deodorizers in sand-limited maps.

Iirc they don`t produce slimelung anymore. They just still got the icon on them.

[Lurve]

Just now, Sasza22 said:

Iirc they don`t produce slimelung anymore. They just still got the icon on them.

Well, hot damn.  Gonna try it tonight then.

[pacovf]

6 minutes ago, Lurve said:

You'd have a storage bin in a puddle somewhere for the slime/bleachstone/oxy.

Well, if they are roaming around freely, how do you get your dupes to pick up their poop before it offgases (without you having to manually select it), was my actual question. It's easy to do if they are contained, I agree with that much.

[DarkMaster13]

2 hours ago, pacovf said:

One thing to note about the dusk caps is that they are the *only* edible crop that don't require water to grow

Mealwood is perfectly edible without using water, only dirt is needed to grow it.  You don't need to turn it into liceloaf.

[pacovf]

Oh, you are correct, I will edit my post!

[Nebbie]

So basically, these are the issues:

• Puft throughput is laughable, and might be fixable if they didn't halve mass
• The sources to feed them that aren't derived from their own waste are laughable
• The apparent intended purpose of the cycle (to clean oxygen) is basically pointless cause dupes don't care that much about pollution and there's a build-it-and-forget-it solution that also makes clay to add insult to injury
• The puft variants aren't that impressive either
• Pufts also come with unusual breeding conditions on top of all that

Oh, and about puft variants, you're wrong: dense pufts are 95%, but squeaky pufts also halve mass, which is especially stupid because squeaky pufts actually have the exact same issues as regular pufts, but with their only apparent purpose being waterweed fertilization (not worth it).

[Giltirn]

This is the reason I don't do ranching - none of the creatures seem worthwhile keeping apart from hatches. Slicksters - good luck getting enough CO2 to keep even one fed, and the oil output is laughably low. Pufts, see above. Dreckos take way too long to mature. Shinebugs - why? Pacus - say goodbye to your algae. Morbs - far too low pOx output to be useful unless you exploit the toilet reload bug to get a large number of them.

I'd love for critters to be a useful means of material conversion and production, but as it is I just don't see the point in wasting all that investment of dupe time in something so inconsequential.

[DarkMaster13]

It's worth noting at the moment if you're on Aborea or The Badlands, you'll have to farm dense pufts if you want to do rocketry.  There's no natural gold on the map, so the only source of Oxylite is to get pufts from care packages.

[Nebbie]

17 minutes ago, Giltirn said:

This is the reason I don't do ranching - none of the creatures seem worthwhile keeping apart from hatches. Slicksters - good luck getting enough CO2 to keep even one fed, and the oil output is laughably low. Pufts, see above. Dreckos take way too long to mature. Shinebugs - why? Pacus - say goodbye to your algae. Morbs - far too low pOx output to be useful unless you exploit the toilet reload bug to get a large number of them.

I'd love for critters to be a useful means of material conversion and production, but as it is I just don't see the point in wasting all that investment of dupe time in something so inconsequential.

Dreckos are really good, just realize that they're meant for making fiber for clothes, phosphorite for wheezewort or trees, and eventually plastic, not meat. Wrangle an initial 4 or so from the wild to speed things up. The annoying bit is that you need hydrogen pumped in, but you also need mealwood (other plants won't increase the chance of glossy, and won't feed glossy) in the same space, so you end up with this really sensitive gas mixture, and you want a second farm to be able to raise the glossy ones without overcrowding the normal ones. Ends up being a lot of dupe labor, though, so there's not much reason to ranch other things too.

On every other critter, absolutely. Just leave them wild for some eggshells (and pacu fillets) and enjoy the occasional gulp fish cleaning your trash water pool.

As for hatches, I actually don't bother, as coal is really more of a backup power source. I'd much rather spend the massive amount of effort on ranching to get free plastic.

13 minutes ago, DarkMaster13 said:

It's worth noting at the moment if you're on Aborea or The Badlands, you'll have to farm dense pufts if you want to do rocketry.  There's no natural gold on the map, so the only source of Oxylite is to get pufts from care packages.

Yuck. Granted, dense pufts I think are actually useful due to their near-100% conversion and using a resource that you'll already have a big production system for, but having to first farm pufts is an annoyance.

[PhailRaptor]

Chiming in my 2 cents here.

Pufts as a group are just a colossal pain to do anything with.  Their innate flight makes it ridiculous to actually capture and contain them.  Their feeding requirements are absurd, and so is their breeding type change mechanic.

The only one that makes sense, as it's numbers are currently set, are Dense Pufts.  The 95% conversion of O2 to Oxylite makes them low maintenance, and they still produce Eggs and (when they die) Meat.  But you still have to deal with the breeding issue.
 

The concept of the Puft is cool, but it needs to be taken back to the roots and rebuilt from scratch.  Define a list of goals, and work from a blank slate to get there.  And ditch the Puft Prince entirely.  I don't know of anyone who thinks it's a valuable mechanic.  Just...  make it go away.

Secondary, make Bleach Stone useful.  All it does now is fill Hand Sanitizers and (mistakenly) fertilize Waterweed.  This will, in turn, present creative hooks for making Squeaky Pufts useful, as they are currently not.

[Giltirn]

31 minutes ago, Nebbie said:

Dreckos are really good, just realize that they're meant for making fiber for clothes, phosphorite for wheezewort or trees, and eventually plastic, not meat. Wrangle an initial 4 or so from the wild to speed things up. The annoying bit is that you need hydrogen pumped in, but you also need mealwood (other plants won't increase the chance of glossy, and won't feed glossy) in the same space, so you end up with this really sensitive gas mixture, and you want a second farm to be able to raise the glossy ones without overcrowding the normal ones. Ends up being a lot of dupe labor, though, so there's not much reason to ranch other things too.

On every other critter, absolutely. Just leave them wild for some eggshells (and pacu fillets) and enjoy the occasional gulp fish cleaning your trash water pool.

As for hatches, I actually don't bother, as coal is really more of a backup power source. I'd much rather spend the massive amount of effort on ranching to get free plastic.

You need 4 dreckos to maintain just one wheezewort (20kg/cycle phosporite). Not worth the effort. Mealwood requires dirt which is hard to renew in any quantity and takes loads of dupe time. One mealwood needs 10kg dirt/cycle and the only way to make it in any sustainable quantity is using the sieve. A sieve can make 120kg/cycle but you will need to source a boat load of pwater (3000 kg/cycle). To support one mealwood you need 250kg/cycle of pwater, which is the amount produced by 38 dupes using the lavatory, or 50 uses of a sink. You need a pwater geyser to make this worthwhile.

Edit: A carbon skimmer running with 100% uptime will support about 2 mealwood, but you need to find 180kg/cycle of CO2 which is the output of 15 coal gens running continuously.

Edit 2: A pwater geyser makes about 2.7kg/s when active, or 1620 kg/cycle. This will support about 6 mealwood.

[KittenIsAGeek]

6 hours ago, pacovf said:

Well, if they are roaming around freely, how do you get your dupes to pick up their poop before it offgases (without you having to manually select it), was my actual question. It's easy to do if they are contained, I agree with that much.

If your base is over 1600 or 1800g of oxygen per tile, stuff won't offgas.

[PhailRaptor]

14 minutes ago, KittenIsAGeek said:

If your base is over 1600 or 1800g of oxygen per tile, stuff won't offgas.

It is definitely 1.8 kg/tile to prevent off-gassing.  You kind of want to be more like 1.9 kg/tile just in case.

[RonEmpire]

you're going to want to eventually get a dense puft farm  to create oxylites for space fuel.    especially those maps with 0 gold.

 

depending on how far u can go with a steam rocket.  u might be able to bring back gold.  or figure out how to get liquid oxygen

[KittenIsAGeek]

6 minutes ago, PhailRaptor said:

It is definitely 1.8 kg/tile to prevent off-gassing.  You kind of want to be more like 1.9 kg/tile just in case.

My base usually sits just shy of the 2kg mark, as I pipe my oxygen in using vents.

[Technoincubus]

Yeah, pufts are not viable now, even with morb swarm thye produce about 2 kg per cycle at best. And morb swarm reduce FPS A LOT. I run puft ranch but mainly to get dense and squeaky pufts and some slime for change.

As a sustainable source of slime they are horrible, given slime evaporates on its way to storage,

[Grimgaw]

7 hours ago, PhailRaptor said:

Their innate flight makes it ridiculous to actually capture and contain them. 

I pick up eggs or use auto-wrangle mechanic.

7 hours ago, PhailRaptor said:

The only one that makes sense, as it's numbers are currently set, are Dense Pufts. 

I farm squeeky ones on maps with Chlorine vent just because Chlorine is otherwise useless.

7 hours ago, PhailRaptor said:

But you still have to deal with the breeding issue.

Setting up an automated ranch isn't difficult. 

[avc15]

16 hours ago, pacovf said:

Are you saying you just leave pufts roam freely in your base to capture that polluted oxygen or chlorine?

Something nobody mentioned yet. Half the mass a puffed consumes gets destroyed. Then the puffed will poop, and like you said it will gas off, but then the puffed consumes it again and cuts it in half again.

Puffs are a bit like living deodorizer that you never spend any duplicant Aaron's on. But, they destroy Mass instead of converting straight to oxygen.

Leave a puffed alone in a room full of po2 and you will come back to a room at vacuum. But I still prefer deodorizers.

[Sasza22]

14 hours ago, Giltirn said:

Slicksters - good luck getting enough CO2 to keep even one fed,

That`s not an issue anymore (actually never was). The wood burner produces tons of CO2 wich is a good way to convert lumber into oil. Someone needs to do the math on this vs ethanol distillers. Either way in the end you feed it to the petroleum generator and this baby creates tons of CO2.

One can argue that you are better off using natural spawned oil but using slickters you basically recycle some of the mass back into fuel.