Ideas on making puft ranching less frustrating

[Nebbie]

I just want to say first off, that I love pufts. They're little floating cute things that make squeaky farting noises while producing useful stuff, in what appears to be a self-sustaining cycle in the wild. They are incredibly satisfying to watch and when I was a new player, they were the thing that made me want to do something with critters; a few years ago in an early base, I actually set up a little room in a slime biome where I gathered all the pufts I found with a lure in the hopes of being able to run my algae terraria off of distilled slime...and then gave up on the base when it seemed to not work.

However, they are much less satisfying to try to do anything with. Let's go over the reasons why:

1. That lure I used has since been deprecated, with its replacement a single-use item. What the hell, Klei? It was hard enough to gather them up with the lures, and now you want me to be unable to bring in a dozen pufts all at once? That takes away a lot of the fun and makes it way more tedious.
2. No manual wrangling. You're telling me my rancher can lasso a drecko on the ceiling above the printer pod with ease, but can't grab a puft that's right in front of his face unless it's breaking critter number requirements? That's just nonsensical, at least provide easy to find information about autowrangling.
3. Puft Princes. Maybe the information I'm reading is wrong, but it says they convert at only a 10% rate. These would be fine if they were just a weird part of the random and slow breeding process, but this makes them screw with output rates too.
4. Higher space requirements per critter. Okay, why do pufts need more room to roam than dreckos? They look smaller and have normally way more actual area available (in a 4-high room, about double!) If anything, they should require fewer tiles each than other critters.
5. All their output products offgas. This wouldn't be a problem if the conversion rates weren't below (and greatly so for princes) 100%, but as-is, it means that using them before you've got good sweeping capability is a bad idea, as you slowly just lose gas mass to nothing.
6. Polluted oxygen, their main food, is normally considered an annoyance, and while there certainly are ways to produce it, they aren't very straightforward.

In short, pufts are an absolute trap, they have pretty much every quality possible in a critter to create headaches for all but the most well-engineered ranching solution (and even once you've got that, is it really worth it? Bleach stone and slime can just be mined easily, and oxylite is pretty lategame to want and normally you can just make it using some of the incredibly abundant gold you find the same places as pufts), and yet at a glance from a new player perspective, they look like the way to go with ranching.

Here's what I suggest to fix them (not fixing every reason, the trouble is the compound result of all reasons):

1. Let us manually wrangle airborne critters.
2. Make princes convert at a 100% rate, so they're a slight nicety rather than an annoyance.
3. Buff morbs a bit to provide a critter-only option to feed them.

[bobucles]

I think you underestimate the power of the new puft. Most of its dietary ingredients are very renewable and 50kg/cycle is a very respectable conversion rate. The slime production is particularly valuable, as 47kg of slime is enough to grow 10 mushrooms with plenty of room for waste. A 5% conversion tax is a very small price to pay to feed 3 or 4 dupes.

Give pufts a try before hating on them.

[Pat4yczek]

Yeach, about lures...

You don't need them, critter drop off can use on big areas, so you have tip

[alexkuzmov]

9 hours ago, bobucles said:

I think you underestimate the power of the new puft. Most of its dietary ingredients are very renewable and 50kg/cycle is a very respectable conversion rate. The slime production is particularly valuable, as 47kg of slime is enough to grow 10 mushrooms with plenty of room for waste. A 5% conversion tax is a very small price to pay to feed 3 or 4 dupes.

Give pufts a try before hating on them.

Pufts consume 50 g/s P02, which is at max 30kg per cycle. Which makes 15 kg slime per cycle IF you have a high enough gas preassure.
I`m not sure where you are getting these numbers.

[bobucles]

8 minutes ago, alexkuzmov said:

Pufts consume 50 g/s P02, which is at max 30kg per cycle.

Quote

This article may contain outdated information that is inaccurate for the current version (Launch Update).

The wiki is going to suck for the next few days/weeks as all the info gets caught up with new launch changes. For now, rely on the data given in game:

 

50kg/cycle is 83g/s. That's 66% more puft per puft, and with the 95% efficiency buff if multiplies into over 300% production compared to the old puft. Pufts got mega buffed, try them before calling them weak.

[Nebbie]

9 hours ago, Pat4yczek said:

Yeach, about lures...

You don't need them, critter drop off can use on big areas, so you have tip

The problem is they can't be wrangled; lures don't even exist anymore and so now it's single-use bait or egg sweeping.

5 hours ago, alexkuzmov said:

Pufts consume 50 g/s P02, which is at max 30kg per cycle. Which makes 15 kg slime per cycle IF you have a high enough gas preassure.
I`m not sure where you are getting these numbers.

Only the squeaky and prince variants consume 50g/s, which I suspect to be an oversight; regular and dense are 83.33g/s -> 79.17g/s.

5 hours ago, bobucles said:

...

50kg/cycle is 83g/s. That's 66% more puft per puft, and with the 95% efficiency buff if multiplies into over 300% production compared to the old puft. Pufts got mega buffed, try them before calling them weak.

None of the problems I listed are pufts being weak, and I believe their current regular/dense output rates don't need to be changed. The problem is that pufts are very, very annoying to actually set up due to unwranglability and princes being terrible, with other, minor problems compounding reasons to avoid bothering.

[Pat4yczek]

1 hour ago, Nebbie said:

The problem is they can't be wrangled; lures don't even exist anymore and so now it's single-use bait or egg sweeping.

7 hours ago, alexkuzmov said:

Yeah, then why I can wrangle them, using critter drop-off?

[Nebbie]

17 minutes ago, Pat4yczek said:

Yeah, then why I can wrangle them, using critter drop-off?

With autowrangling and multiple drop-offs? Good to know, though know I am incredibly frustrated with the game design choices where you are able to automatically do something but not manually do it, with 0 indication of the former.

[Pat4yczek]

No problem, didn't check, but I think critter drop-off must be reasenoable close to call them and wrangle....