Simple, set-and-forget Ranching

[QuQuasar]

Thought I'd share my ranching solution for meat and animal produce. Works well for hatches, pufts and drecko's. Maybe not the most modern design (doesn't use critter sensors, and requires wrangling the animals back and forth), but it's easy to set up and the automation is minimal. You'll need a small amount of refined metal for the automation and conveyor equipment, as well as a mechatronics engineer.

You only need one nursery and one slaughterhouse to support any number of production ranches, which I normally build in the area to reduce travel time. The way it works is simple: eggs are delivered to the nursery, either by duplicant or conveyor belt. They hatch in the tile on the far right and grow to adulthood in the nursery area.

Once they reach adulthood, they are wrangled either to one of the Production Ranches if there's room, or the Slaughterhouse if there's not. Note that the priority on the Production Ranch critter drop-offs must be higher than the priority on the Slaughterhouse.

Once per cycle, the slaughterhouse drowns any critters within it's walls.

The automation behind this is nice and simple: two buffer gates and a clock:

And that's that: your ranches are now hands-free operation!

For the player, anyway. Not for your dupes: they still have to manually collect the eggs (though that can be automated with sweepers in the production ranches), meat (put a sweeper on top of the slaughterhouse), eggshells (already being swept), and throw innocent animals into the murder machine (... okay, that one might be more difficult to automate).

[smithdl]

I like it.  I think having the eggs drop in a one square tile with easy wrangle ability.  Do you ever struggle to wrangle the dreckos?

[CannedSmeef]

This brings me back to automated cooked chicken farms in minecraft and how terrible I felt abusing redstone just so I could have a meal.

I'm gonna try it.

[QuQuasar]

8 hours ago, smithdl said:

I like it.  I think having the eggs drop in a one square tile with easy wrangle ability.  Do you ever struggle to wrangle the dreckos?

Not in my experience. It takes them a second or two to react to the rancher and make their way over to the critter dropoff, but they always respond.

I assume they're just relieved to finally be allowed out of the baby-cage.