One tile slickster pen

[Zarquan]

I like min-maxing, and I see eating eggs as a waste.  For example, why eat a slickster egg for 2800 kcal when you could wait a few cycles and eat what comes out of it for 4000 kcal?  And what if that 4000 kcal of crude oil producing meat decides to lay another 4000 kcal for self-sustaining food?  What if you just had 100 slicksters sitting around waiting to be eaten? 

But I know people are thinking performance.  Having 100 slicksters running around is expensive on the computer.  To which I say "Why let them run around?"

;

Spoiler

I build this in survival and it is has not been thoroughly tested yet.

I believe that the middle column might have to be one tile taller, so I will have to move the hallway with the hatch in it 1 tile up.  Keep in mind, the pen has to have a room size of at least 12 tiles to avoid Confined, which disables reproduction i believe.

The way this works is as follows:  I have slickster ranches on both sides, one for molten and one for regular.  You could do this with just molten, but why waste the regulars?

These ranches lay a lot of eggs.  Those that are to stay go in to the incubator (which is optional, but speeds things up).  If there are too many critters + eggs, then the eggs get swept up by the autosweeper and put in the middle pen. 

Since there is a gravity filter in place, it can sort out the petroleum from the crude oil, allowing both slicksters and molten slicksters to be there!

Note the open door separating where the little slicksters are and where the eggs are.  This prevents the "Cramped" debuff, allowing those slicksters to lay eggs.  When the slicksters hatch, they immediately start drowning and go straight up to where the other slicksters are.  Once they get there, they have no where to go.  But they still eat and excrete crude oil.

When the slicksters die of old age (or starvation if they are long hair), then their meat falls down the hole to be swept by the autosweeper.

Note the lips on the crude oil and petroleum "spouts" in to the main ranches.  These are to ensure that the tiles of crude oil and petroleum are enough for the slicksters to float over.  Without the lips, they will drown.

A single gas vent provide enough CO2 for around 150 slicksters without anyone starving (except longhairs). 

Note that the area under the pen has to be filled before the pen will work.

Also, both side ranches are at 96 tiles, supporting 8 slicksters.

Spoiler

Original picture:  This version failed for a few reasons.  The pen was too small, needed to be at least 12 to prevent "Confined," and it was built in debug.  The new one was build in survival and works.s

EDIT:  I just noticed that one of my last minute changes blocked the sweeper.  Remove the tile to the bottom right of the sweeper in the crude oil.

Minor detail, I thought the door under the incubator stops the dupes from putting an egg in, but I appear to be wrong on that point.  Adding a critter sensor at 7 appears to prevent them from doing it though.  It significantly slows down getting the 8th slickster, but at least they don't become cramped.  Also, there is an autosweeper at the bottom to catch any eggs.

Now I just have to experiment with starving them and see how little CO2 I have to feed them to keep them alive.

Report:  And it was going so well.  For some reason, after a few cycles in the pen without being able to move, and they just dropped dead.  They didn't lay their eggs before it happened so this experiment is a bust . 

Second report:  I did build the middle room in debug and accidentally made the petroleum -35C, which killed the slicksters.

 

[TLW]

52 minutes ago, Zarquan said:

For some reason, after a few cycles in the pen without being able to move, and they just dropped dead.

Temperature?

[RonEmpire]

Was going to say the same. Temp. Usually causes them to die. 

[Xenologist]

Look at their kcal count

[Zarquan]

34 minutes ago, TLW said:

Temperature?

That's it!  I didn't realize the default temperature for petroleum was -35 C

30 minutes ago, Xenologist said:

Look at their kcal count

Nah, they were just eating

[Lifegrow]

My favourite part is the hatch prison guard. Keeping those little floaty boys in check...

Also, light above grooming station doesn't seem to do anything last time I tested - might've been fixed now mind you.

[Zarquan]

2 minutes ago, Lifegrow said:

My favourite part is the hatch prison guard. Keeping those little floaty boys in check...

Also, light above grooming station doesn't seem to do anything last time I tested - might've been fixed now mind you.

Good to know about the light.  Not that having it is a problem, the room needs to be a bit hotter anyway.

I am experiencing a new problem though. 

I build the thing in survival (with a few changes) and for some reason they don't have base reproduction.

[Lifegrow]

I could be wrong here, but did you alt + Q those slicksters in the first picture ? They don't seem "grounded" as can often happen when moving critters with debug.

[Zarquan]

42 minutes ago, Lifegrow said:

I could be wrong here, but did you alt + Q those slicksters in the first picture ? They don't seem "grounded" as can often happen when moving critters with debug.

I did not move them with alt-Q.  This is pure survival now.  The petroleum has enough mass that they can float on it.

I made the room bigger and they regained their base reproduction.  Apparently, if the space they are in is too small, they don't get their base reproduction, and 6 squares is too small.  They need 12 squares in the room to reproduce.  And that's not 12 per slickster, that's 12 total.

I feel that that should be in the "Confined" tooltip, or in some tooltip related to happiness.  I'll submit a bug report.

I fixed it.  Now they will start laying eggs.

[Lafara]

slickster quickly lose its internal temperature by eating cold carbon dioxide.

it'll die when internal temperature drop to 34.9 C

warming carbon dioxide to 110 C won't help any slickster eating it losing its inner temperature.

space heater do.

 

 

PS. i won't proof that slickster losing inner temp by eating. i blame room temp/ insulate tile doing da kill.

[Soulwind]

I'm having trouble seeing this well enough with just the screen shots. Any chance you could upload a save?

[peachkillu]

10 hours ago, Lifegrow said:

My favourite part is the hatch prison guard. Keeping those little floaty boys in check...

Kinda off topic but this gave me an idea. Could we now make a killing room with poke shells

[Lifegrow]

13 minutes ago, peachkillu said:

Kinda off topic but this gave me an idea. Could we now make a killing room with poke shells

Tried it - sadly a lot of critters fight back, and your pokeshells often end up dieing out. 

[Lafara]

 

Spoiler

yah average pokeshells stand no chance against mah Hatch , dat robotic Hatch (400 HP)

[Zarquan]

Update:  My ranch has filled out nicely.   I have 134 slicksters (excluding longhairs), and they are eating up my CO2 faster than I can pump it in!

There is no upper limit on this ranch!  I can just keep piling on more and more slicksters!  They don't have pathing, so they don't add that much lag to the game.

I should note I used the crude oil at the bottom as coolant for a metal refinery to bring the ranch up to temperature.  Also, I had a food crisis and killed all the longhairs (except for that new one) because they don't do anything here.  

On 8/21/2019 at 7:16 AM, Soulwind said:

I'm having trouble seeing this well enough with just the screen shots. Any chance you could upload a save?

Here it is!  Inescapable Antfarm.sav

[SamuraiJones]

Has anyone ever compared how much fps increase there is by reducing a critter's pathing? Logically, one would expect that a slickster with no room to move takes less processing time than one with a big area, but are we sure that's the case?

I had like 80 wild slicksters on my last base, and it was pretty slow so I got to the tear and abandoned the file. No idea how much lag was from slicksters and how much was from other stuff though, nor if time would be saved by moving them into a pen like that.

 

Side note: Dupes for the Ethical Treatment of Critters (DETC) is furious about your slicksters living conditions.

[0xFADE]

Hmm. Are the tamed ungroomed slicksters in the pit still making eggs?

maybe they changed some numbers. I remember sad tamed critters used to not raise their egg timer. 

[Zarquan]

17 minutes ago, 0xFADE said:

Hmm. Are the tamed ungroomed slicksters in the pit still making eggs?

maybe they changed some numbers. I remember sad tamed critters used to not raise their egg timer. 

Tamed ungroomed overcrowded slicksters still make eggs, but the existing eggs have to be outside the room.  That's why I have the open pneumatic door at the bottom of the pen.  They even lay eggs when starving.  The only thing you have to make sure of is that the room is at least 12 tiles, otherwise they will get "Confined," which does disable reproduction.

[0xFADE]

Yeah tamed groomed starving hatches still drop eggs. Used to do that when you could use a grooming station in an open area. 

[Zarquan]

I should note that you do have to feed slicksters to get eggs, but you don't have to keep them well fed. They could spend a lot of time starving and it would be fine.

[Mathgeekburch]

On 8/21/2019 at 12:30 PM, Lifegrow said:

Tried it - sadly a lot of critters fight back, and your pokeshells often end up dieing out. 

Isn't that just case of not having enough pokeshells?  When running a pokeshell stable fed by an ethanol industry, you get a lot of spare pokeshell and pokeshell eggs.  Just drop them in an overflow room, and you should have enough in there that any other critter you drop in gets teamed up by all the pokeshells.

The more pokeshells I believe the faster the critter dies; the less damage it does to the pokeshells. 

Although to be more sure on numbers of pokeshells needed, I might need to check how much damage you can expect each pokeshell to do, how reliably you can expect a pokeshell to attack, how fast are the pokeshell attack rates, how fast are the other critter attack rates, and how much damage do other critters do.  Also would be good to check whether the size of the overflow room affects the effectiveness of the combat.  I don't know whether pokeshells are able to attack well when they only have 1-2 tiles to move, or how it compares to having 3 or 4 tiles, and how that compares to 5-6 tiles, etc, etc.  

 

[Aelfled]

The other problem is that they don't seem to heal, ever, so you'd need to have a birth rate that accounted for the attrition

[Mathgeekburch]

10 minutes ago, Aelfled said:

The other problem is that they don't seem to heal, ever, so you'd need to have a birth rate that accounted for the attrition

What they really need is a bloodlust buff that increases their happiness and thus egg laying rate.  Although I think even glum pokeshells will continue to lay eggs if they aren't overcrowded, although designing their overflow room such that pips and drekos won't escape makes it a bit more complicated.  

[Zarquan]

On 8/23/2019 at 6:59 AM, SamuraiJones said:

Has anyone ever compared how much fps increase there is by reducing a critter's pathing? Logically, one would expect that a slickster with no room to move takes less processing time than one with a big area, but are we sure that's the case?

Update:  After a while, I checked up on my slickster pit.  There are 182 molten slicksters, 158 normal slicksters, and 2 longhair slicksters.  I am feeding them through 3 high pressure vents (two of which are running constantly and one intermittently) and the room is not pressurized.  My framerates when I am not looking at the pen is around 45 on a i7-9750H on my laptop.  I don't think that is significantly worse than before.  When I mouse over them, I get a lag spike for some reason /s. 

Critters appear to think slower.  It is possible that some of the slicksters are dying as larvae because they don't think to swim up until too late.

For those who want to know, each slickster goes from being laid as an egg to laying an egg in 85 cycles.  That results in 1 barbecue per slickster in the pen every 85 cycles on average, as once a slickster lays its egg (as that egg will be food in 120 cycles).  If only CO2 slicksters are laid, that results in 47.0588 kcal/slickster/cycle.  For my 340 slicksters, that is 16,000 kcal/cycle barbecue even.  And this will just keep growing.

EDIT:  I made a bad assumption in the math above.  I assumed that my food per cycle would be determined by the number of slicksters.  However, once a slickster lays an egg, it is no longer part of this equation, as its 4000 kcal worth of meat has already been accounted for.  I would redo the math, but I don't want to count how many of my slicksters have laid an egg because now I have around 400 of them.

[Zarquan]

Uh oh, something happened.  I had my slickster pen with over 550 slicksters and was generating enough petroleum to run 2 petroleum generators most of the time, but then they all died at once.  I don't know what happened.  At least I have over a million kcal in meat now, but I think I want to go back to find out what went wrong.  My bet is on drowning in petroleum or a bug, as not even cold temperatures can kill that effectively (plus the room was hot).  I know that they weren't starving, as I am feeding in more CO2 than they can eat.

Attempt 2 on food math:

If you have tamed groomed 1 slickster, they will lay 1 egg every 6 cycles, or more accurately 1 every 7 cycles because they spend around 5 cycles as an egg and 5 cycles as a larva, resulting in 15 eggs over the course of their life (assuming they are never cramped for long periods).  If you take 14 of these eggs (keep one to replace the slickster when it dies) and put them in the pen, they act under the math I have above, where every 85 cycles they produce an egg that will give 4000 kcal. 

So, with 1 happy tamed slickster in a ranch, on average, produces 1/7th of a slickster egg every cycle on average.  That slickster provides an acceleration of food production (which I always like to see), where a single slickster egg is worth 4000/85 kcal per cycle.  Since, on average, they lay an egg every 1/7th of a cycle, a single tamed slickster produces 6.723 (kcal/cycle)/cycle in food production  With 16 tamed happy slicksters, that acceleration is 107.56 (kcal/cycle)/cycle.  On normal hunger settings, that is enough to feed one new dupe every 10 cycles with some to spare!  Plus, they eat all that pesky CO2 and convert it to crude oil/petroleum, which then can be burned to produce water.

If you want to support 1 new dupe every time the pod activates, then you will want around 50 groomed slicksters. 

I should note that I am assuming that there are no longhair slicksters laid, which can be almost assured if you keep the room at around 110 C.