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Im going to shoot a bunch of questions at u thank u for the help. How do u set up a kill room that works for drecos? Are shine bugs worth farming, also do they stop producing light if conditions aren't meet? How many tiles do 2 pacu need to be happy and quickly produce eggs? Is it better to kill excess critters for meat or is it better to crack eggs and make omelettes? Which hatch is best? 

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  • How do u set up a kill room that works for drecos?

Flood the whole thing.

  • Are shine bugs worth farming,

If you like free teeny tiny eggshells everywhere

  • also do they stop producing light if conditions aren't meet?

When crowded.  If there's too many in one spot it will look like the sun but won't charge a solar panel

  • Is it better to kill excess critters for meat or is it better to crack eggs and make omelettes?

I do eggs because I'm too impatient to wait for the critters to hatch

  • Which hatch is best? 

Stone.  You can feed it your crap rock and it's freer food than the others

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You can set up a Drop Off point on Mesh Tiles and push the water up using doors, you need to make sure they can't climb the walls, and if you're farming hatches waiting for them to hatch produces more kcal from BBQ than eggs, this might not be true for all critters though

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My omni-critter kill room is a small, sealed off room filled with hydrogen kept to -160C, with a small amount of super coolant on the floor. It'll work with egg droppers, or auto wrangling. If you want to also handle adult shove-vols, make sure there's enough of a material gap to prevent escape.

Shine bugs are basically a fun mini-game getting all the morphs, but for now, they don't really produce anything worthwhile.

Like @Lurve mentioned, stone is the best, by a wide margin. The regular morph are good for early game coal generation, and emergency meat. Sage have terrible conversion ratios, and everything they consume would probably be better off converted to rot/pDirt for pO2. Smooth hatches are terrible (imho) because they are fairly intensive to get (requiring 2 stages), and they waste 25% of your metal ore. Basically they're too much hassle for mid game (especially considering lead has been added), and too wasteful for late game. Stone hatching on the other hand turn literal space garbage (regolith) into coal. With a regolith melter, and vacuum feeding for the hatches, you'll also be able to delete heat.

Just now, TheEvilMango said:

Thanks for the answers so far. How early can u set up a reliable hatch farm for food?

Basically as soon as a dupe has the ranching trait. It gets a lot easier once you have mechatronics working though.

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Keep 6 critters, move out enough eggs for the next stable, and then start eating new ones to clear "cramped" conditions.  Should feed about two dupes per stable.  One rancher per eight dupes can mostly keep everyone fed on omelettes.  I transition far more slowly than most of the heavy ranchers here do.  I build out stables for their stuff - coal, plastic, planting - and only start breaking down my farms once my food builds up.

The key to critter ranching is to half-ass it and let it happen at its own pace.

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Keep in mind this is all changing pretty quickly, so the math will likely need to get updated, but right now a hatch will feed a dupe for 4 cycles when turned into BBQ. Hatches that are constantly tame and happy, will produce a new egg every 6 days, so you'll need 1.5 hatches per duplicant. Keep in mind though you won't always have happy hatches, so your actual hatch replenish rate may be lower.

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Pacu are self sustaining even when cramped.  They only need one tile per all and will lay 1 egg per generation.  Use a breeding pool and ship excess to the food pool.

I ranch shine bugs using automation to fuel my solar generators.  I think they reproduce when glum, but I reached critical mass for my base size for a while and that prevented my power bugs from self sustaining.  I've got my great hall right above with glass tiles so my dupes get max decor just by eating there (its thousands of positive decor).

 

I'm going for the natural power achievement so my base is going along pretty slowly.

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Some of the fun is learning as you go, right? There's always good reading in the wiki.

I think the big thing to understand about ranching is that you are under no obligation to domesticate critters. Wild critters will perform their roles just fine, won't die of neglect, and will take minimal effort from the colony to maintain. Domestication is genetic and once a critter gets tagged it can not be removed. Tagged critters will require dedicated dupe labor, extra resource upkeep and more careful setups to be successful.

If it's your first time ranching, keep the critters wild. It's lower difficulty and you will have more freedom to experiment and learn all the tricks.

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31 minutes ago, Rhogar said:

 I think they reproduce when glum

Yes, all critters will reproduce once before dying if wild or tame+ungroomed (and not prevented by room size). The normal bugs will also do so before starving, just like pacu. (Abyss/radiant will starve).

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