Simple, set-and-forget Ranching (Mk II)

[QuQuasar]

I found I had a problem with my previous ranching system: if a duplicant was interrupted while carting a critter from the nursery to the slaughterhouse, the critter would end up wandering my base. Also, it bothered me a bit that I wasn't shearing the drecko's for their plastic/reed fiber before murdering them.

 

So I decided to optimize and compact my Slaughterhouse and Nursery into a one-stop animal-abuse shop. This is what I ended up with:

Similar to the other system, eggs are deposited into the nursery at the bottom, where duplicants can't reach them. There they hatch into babies, and mature into adults, at which point the drecko's are sheared (priority 9) and the rest are wrangled (priority 8) by the first available rancher.

The Critter Drop-Offs in your production ranches must be set to priority 8 or 9. If there is room in any of your production ranches, the wrangled critter will be delivered there to live out the rest of their life in groomed happiness.

If there is no room for them in any available ranch, the rancher will take them out back behind the shed to be murdered humanely.

Wait, did I say humanely? Sorry, I meant horribly. Yes, that's the word. Horribly.

Notable: Despite appearances, it's actually safe for dupes: unlike critters they can breathe in the drowning chamber, and the worst they'll suffer is hypothermia. I guess dupes are just smart enough to push their face up against the airflow tiles and suck oxygen through it like a giant humanoid Sucker Fish.

Also Notable: It's important to get at slightly more than 7 tiles of water in the drowning chamber: too little and drecko's, pufts and slicksters will still be able to breath in the topmost tile.

The automation is nice and simple: a clock, a filter and two buffers.

And the shipping is trivial: eggs go in; eggshells, meat, plastic and reed fiber come out.

A single one of these will service as many production ranches as it needs to, and works for hatches, drecko's and pufts. I'd recommend centralizing your ranching operations around it to reduce the ranchers commute times.

Do not spill any liquid in the drowning chamber: it must remain homogenous or it won't flow correctly and liquid will be crushed in the doors.

The design also technically works for slicksters, but only if you fill the drowning chamber with crude oil (for normal slicksters) or petroleum (for molten slicksters). If you do use it for slicksters, you may want to use mesh tiles for the nursery section to avoid drowning the larva in oily excrement.

Cheers!

[Dextrome]

Why don't you just transport the eggs where you want em (the same way you ship them into this room) and let em hatch there? I think I'm missing the point of this chamber

[QuQuasar]

2 minutes ago, Dextrome said:

Why don't you just transport the eggs where you want em (the same way you ship them into this room) and let em hatch there? I think I'm missing the point of this chamber

Probably the most important thing is that it keeps the production ranches at 8 adult critters at all times, without needing to wait for a new egg to hatch and the baby to grow to adulthood. It also allows for the shearing of adolescent drecko's, but that's a new feature of this design.

[Dextrome]

Oh I see, so it's sort of like a ready-to-go backup critters room?

I usually just have a breeding/grooming room and a single tile in an open area where I drop all the eggs (for hatches anyway) and I let them die naturarally there, they'll drop a new egg before they die too (unless I don't feed them at all)

[DepravityCat]

Does this mean that every critter has to be manually wrangled and delivered to the kill chamber? That's a lot of dupe time, especially if you're having to coax drecks down from the ceiling. 

I posted this yesterday. Designs for auto-slaughtering only adult hatches and dreckos. 

 

[Sturm58]

now try to set the temperature of the water to >100C so that Pokeshells are boiled and killed too

[DepravityCat]

I like the idea of ranching pokeshells for the lime, but I'm not sure where I'd get enough polluted dirt to keep them fed. 

[suxkar]

This is supremely useful!! I've always struggled with optimal automation of ranches. Your design wastes a bit of man power as every critter will have to be autowrangled, even the ones destined to the kill room, but has the gigantic advantage of dealing with ALL critters at once. The alternative is birthing rooms for all kinds of critters.

I only have one question: slicksters drown only in what they produce? I thought the only way to kill them was cold.. so it is not possible to use this design for both kinds of slickster types at the same time?

[DraycosGoldaryn]

37 minutes ago, suxkar said:

I only have one question: slicksters drown only in what they produce? I thought the only way to kill them was cold.. so it is not possible to use this design for both kinds of slickster types at the same time?

 

3 hours ago, QuQuasar said:

Do not spill any liquid in the drowning chamber: it must remain homogenous or it won't flow correctly and liquid will be crushed in the doors.

The design also technically works for slicksters, but only if you fill the drowning chamber with crude oil (for normal slicksters) or petroleum (for molten slicksters). If you do use it for slicksters, you may want to use mesh tiles for the nursery section to avoid drowning the larva in oily excrement.

All liquid in the drowning chamber must be of a single element.

[bzgzd]

But everyone who builds killing machines is killing for fun.
Be humane and let critters starve to death.

You get same amount of meat and fresh meat buffer as bonus.

[Zarquan]

What is this drown or starve?  What about old age?  Then they will lay another egg to be eaten later with no dupe labor .  I believe I currently have 400 slicksters in one tile.  They are well fed and have...a good social life. 

I am currently working on an automated 1 tile pip pen.

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