Are Sage (green) Hatches worthless?

[Daikataro]

So title pretty much sums it up, open for debate, but I have been playing around with hatches, and find the green dudes pretty underwhelming. Supposedly, every hatch has its place, and green ones are supposed to be the source of food/eggs. Wiki even states they're a reliable source of eggs and meat, but ingame, their reproductive cycle is exactly the same as the much more useful Stone or Smooth hatches, the former eat a crapton of overly abundant rock, and the later yield effortless refining of metal, while also contributing eggs and sometimes meat to the mix.

 

So are the green fellas just a failed mutation in the evolutive process? Everything they eat is better used elsewhere, and they don't give eggs often enough to justify the effort of ranching them.

[lunazone]

They're super useful in conjunction with an ethanol distillery, they eat up all of the polluted dirt and convert it into coal at a 1:1 ratio. Their gimmick is that they convert all eaten food perfectly, with no lost mass.

[0xFADE]

There was a time when they were the best.  Making fertilizer used to make enough natural gas from only polluted water that you did it for the natural gas and needed to get rid of all that fertilizer.

[thorstein92]

Early game more coal with less grooming can be helpful. Even paying in dirt instead rock

[zOldBulldog]

Since the official releas they are supposed to be good at organic garbage cleanup.  Maybe not much more, but my gut tells me that there is something lurking in the shadows if you use wild plants (planted by pips) and wild Sage hatches.   Have not tried it, but I suspect it could be a good way to generate coal.   Of course I have a million things to do in my current map before getting to the point where I can start experimenting.

[beowulf2010]

10 minutes ago, zOldBulldog said:

Since the official releas they are supposed to be good at organic garbage cleanup.  Maybe not much more, but my gut tells me that there is something lurking in the shadows if you use wild plants (planted by pips) and wild Sage hatches.   Have not tried it, but I suspect it could be a good way to generate coal.   Of course I have a million things to do in my current map before getting to the point where I can start experimenting.

Sadly, eating actual edibles is near worthless for hatches as they get the kcals directly as opposed to by weight like non-edibles. 

A sage hatch that eats a full 1kg piece of meat would gain 1,600kcals but only poop out 1kg of coal whereas if a sage hatch eats a full amount of dirt (140kg) they'll poop out the same 140kg.

If sage hatches start eating lumber, you may be on to something. 

[thejohn1567]

3 hours ago, beowulf2010 said:

Sadly, eating actual edibles is near worthless for hatches as they get the kcals directly as opposed to by weight like non-edibles. 

A sage hatch that eats a full 1kg piece of meat would gain 1,600kcals but only poop out 1kg of coal whereas if a sage hatch eats a full amount of dirt (140kg) they'll poop out the same 140kg.

If sage hatches start eating lumber, you may be on to something. 

The consumption for each food type is rounded to be roughly equal to the food you would get from making a ton of omelettes from those eggs, you might increase the food amount by a bit if you're hatching them and killing for meat when they reach adulthood. They're fine if you want to increase the morale bonus from lower tier food.

[Xaekai]

I lock away some sage hatches with some morbs and some pufts (all wild) and just forget about it for a while and whenever I bother to check up on it there is like 12T of free coal. not bad for a room tucked away in the abandoned sector of my base.

[Promethien]

Ethanol distilling produces more polluted dirt than you can reasonably use. It requires absurd amounts of composting to make into dirt as well. Sage Hatches are the best solution and you get loads of coal in the process.

[Steve Raptor]

The selling point of Sage hatches is that they output 95% of consumed mass, compared to 50% of stone hatches and normal hatches..

The easiest way to feed them and utilize this boon for coal production is with dirt.

They are extremely useful on maps with forest biomes since those have enormous amount of dirt but no coal, this is where sage hatches truly shine.

[DemainaNyx]

Sage hatches and Pokeshells will eat polluted dirt, which can be useful depending on what you need.  Early game you probably need coal for power, so put some sage hatches around your water sieve and they'll take care of that.  Mid game you need the lime, so swap out to pokeshell and now you have more lime production.

I honestly only play with the normal hatches and the stone hatches.  The other two just aren't worth it in my opinion.

[kerosene]

Sage hatches good on maps with a lot of dirt. Like Oasisse, which also has little sedimentary rock for stone hatches.

 

 

 

 

[DarkMoge]

10 hours ago, Daikataro said:

So title pretty much sums it up, open for debate,

sage hatches are pretty much the only hatches that one should consider imo... first of all, other hatches have 50% conversion rate, when sage hatches have close to 100%... Also, they can be feed things which you would actually want to feed them-> dirt, polluted dirt, slime, food. As abundant building materials are, they are still non renewable and limited. When I tried making stone hatch ranches, I would easily run out of the building materials on cycle 200-300. Which would force me to dig more in places that I did not want to dig... and digging would waste a lot of dupes time. Smooth hatches are even worse, raw metals are even more limited, I run out of those metals without feeding them to hatches, I cant imagine myself having enough extra to feed it to hatches... On top of that, the conversion rate for smooth hatches is only 75% compared to proper smelting for 100%.


So... I repeat my personal opinion, sage hatches are the only hatches worth considering. You could make your pips plant several food plants and let your hatches feed on them for meat... Though, drecko are pretty much strictly better for it.

[Steve Raptor]

38 minutes ago, DarkMoge said:

sage hatches are pretty much the only hatches that one should consider imo... first of all, other hatches have 50% conversion rate, when sage hatches have close to 100%... Also, they can be feed things which you would actually want to feed them-> dirt, polluted dirt, slime, food. As abundant building materials are, they are still non renewable and limited. When I tried making stone hatch ranches, I would easily run out of the building materials on cycle 200-300. Which would force me to dig more in places that I did not want to dig... and digging would waste a lot of dupes time. Smooth hatches are even worse, raw metals are even more limited, I run out of those metals without feeding them to hatches, I cant imagine myself having enough extra to feed it to hatches... On top of that, the conversion rate for smooth hatches is only 75% compared to proper smelting for 100%.


So... I repeat my personal opinion, sage hatches are the only hatches worth considering. You could make your pips plant several food plants and let your hatches feed on them for meat... Though, drecko are pretty much strictly better for it.

 

Gonna have to disagree here.

Sage hatches can only be properly maintained in the early game, at least, by feeding them dirt and utilizing their 95% consumed mass into coal.

Polluted dirt from water sieve is nowhere near to even keep a single sage hatch fed. So dirt remains the most reliable way to keep a full ranch fed.

Later on, you can feed them with Pdirt if you choose to use Ethanol distillers, but I personally prefer feeding that Pdirt to pokeshells.

Generally I don't bother with ethanol production anyway.

On maps without forest biomes its not a good idea to farm sage hatches since dirt is limited in fairly small amount.

In forest biomes, however, there are enormous amounts of dirt and no coal, so its a great idea to ranch them.

 

Stone hatches are "Default" choice for coal production. Igneous rock is just everywhere, most of the map is composed of it and if you still manage by some miracle to run out of it (Even after insulating everything with it) you can get an infinite supply from a volcano.

Dirt, however is not.

Smooth hatches are my favorite way to produce refined metal and I make a smooth ranch as soon as possible and in every game.

They are far easier to maintain and set up, require no power to run and also provides meat. Compared to the god awful metal refinery which is just a headache to set up and operate, if not for the need of steel production I would have never used it.

A ranch of 4 smooth hatch strikes a good balance between refined metal production and normal metal stock.

[bobucles]

3 hours ago, Promethien said:

Sage Hatches are the best solution and you get loads of coal in the process.

Or the dirt can be left to decay into polluted oxygen. Problem resolved.

Sage hatch food is the most expensive critter feed in the game. Dirt is worth precious food, the exchange rates for food are completely awful, and if your food is rotting that's a problem with the food supply, not the hatches. It's simply not worth feeding sage hatches in the vast majority of situations.

28 minutes ago, DarkMoge said:

first of all, other hatches have 50% conversion rate, when sage hatches have close to 100%.

100% of 5kg of meal lice is 5kg of coal. 100% of 150kg of dirt is a quarter cycle of coal at the cost of 3 days of meal lice. None of the exchange rates for a sage hatch are good.

[thorstein92]

1 hour ago, bobucles said:

 Dirt is worth precious food

You mean Sedimentary rock is worth precious food. But wait, sed rock is worthless.

 

After few games i do not see any reason to get the food another than hatches meet, fish or omlettes until the point you want to maximize food morale.

2 full time skilled ranchers 1 chief, 90 hatches and you end with kilotons of coal and nearly infinite food supply for 30 dupes colony.

And you don't need to bother by cooling until your main base gains oil biome temperatures.

 

You really forgot in your calculation that hatches=coal+food. Not just coal.

[beowulf2010]

7 hours ago, thejohn1567 said:

The consumption for each food type is rounded to be roughly equal to the food you would get from making a ton of omelettes from those eggs, you might increase the food amount by a bit if you're hatching them and killing for meat when they reach adulthood. They're fine if you want to increase the morale bonus from lower tier food.

You missed the entire point of my post. I didn't say anything about sage hatches being useless. I said that feeding hatches edibles is useless for generating coal. 

And the entire reason one would do sage hatches over stone or regular would be to generate more coal since the meat/egg output is identical across all 4 hatch types. 

[bobucles]

2 hours ago, thorstein92 said:

You really forgot in your calculation that hatches=coal+food. Not just coal

I'm pretty sure that spending food (dirt,etc.) on sage hatches results in a net negative on the food supply, both short term and long term. That's even more reason to stick with regular or stone hatches, since they transform rock into food.

Sage hatches are very very hungry and their value only makes sense if your colony is already too rich to care about the expense. That doesn't make them good, but it does make them a wealth dump.

[thorstein92]

Still sedimentary rock and igneous rock are more important for food production than dirt. Using food for feeding sages is probably joke.

Sage are valuabe until your rancher get 20 skillpoints via hugging eggs.

[DarkMaster13]

I think hatches eating food is to encourage players to put their food away somewhere safe where the wild hatches won't get to them.  At least until you isolate all of them in a ranch somewhere.

I agree with the sentiment that sage hatches are terrible on the sandstone start, but excellent on the forest start.  If on any of the sandstone start maps (except maybe Rime, due to forest biomes spawning around the map) you should just skip sage hatches entirely, never get them.  On a forest start though, sage hatches are probably preferable to stone ones just because you get more coal per sage hatch and there's stupidly large amounts of dirt to work with.

[DarkMoge]

6 hours ago, Steve Raptor said:

Sage hatches can only be properly maintained in the early game, at least, by feeding them dirt and utilizing their 95% consumed mass into coal.

Polluted dirt from water sieve is nowhere near to even keep a single sage hatch fed. So dirt remains the most reliable way to keep a full ranch fed.

Later on, you can feed them with Pdirt if you choose to use Ethanol distillers, but I personally prefer feeding that Pdirt to pokeshells.

my question is why would you use hatches outside of early game... drecko are just simply better for food and getting power from coal is just an irrelevant amount of power outside of early game.

 

6 hours ago, Steve Raptor said:

Stone hatches are "Default" choice for coal production. Igneous rock is just everywhere, most of the map is composed of it and if you still manage by some miracle to run out of it (Even after insulating everything with it) you can get an infinite supply from a volcano.

you should take a note that volcano produce around 1kg of igneous rock per s on average. I do run out of igneous rock quite often when I play, even without feeding it to hatches. I mean, there is plenty of igneous rock to dig, but I usually do not keep digging out the entire map as my priority. Quite often, when expanding my base, I end up digging through swamp biome, ice biome, etc, which are pretty lacking in igneous rock. Playing on Oassise especially, feels like I am never going to dig any igneous rock outside my starting biome, because I will expand in all the sand around me and will get enough building space from it.


Honestly, I am surprised how many people use hatches in their base builds... I mean, they are okay if you are okay with feeding them resources that are hard to renew(600 kg/cycle from volcano just results in a few tiles). But they are just more expensive than other critters for food. 

 

6 hours ago, Steve Raptor said:

Gonna have to disagree here.

Though, it is my opinion. They are not too terrible, but when someone says that sage hatches are worthless while they look to me as the most likely hatch type I would use, I feel like I have to reply. 

[0xFADE]

Hatches have the least design requirement. This very thread is being asked from the standpoint of someone who is likely newer.  The type of person who would use a smooth hatch because a metal refinery is hard to set up. The type of person hatches were designed to help most. 

[Steve Raptor]

1 hour ago, DarkMoge said:

my question is why would you use hatches outside of early game... drecko are just simply better for food and getting power from coal is just an irrelevant amount of power outside of early game.

 

you should take a note that volcano produce around 1kg of igneous rock per s on average. I do run out of igneous rock quite often when I play, even without feeding it to hatches. I mean, there is plenty of igneous rock to dig, but I usually do not keep digging out the entire map as my priority. Quite often, when expanding my base, I end up digging through swamp biome, ice biome, etc, which are pretty lacking in igneous rock. Playing on Oassise especially, feels like I am never going to dig any igneous rock outside my starting biome, because I will expand in all the sand around me and will get enough building space from it.


Honestly, I am surprised how many people use hatches in their base builds... I mean, they are okay if you are okay with feeding them resources that are hard to renew(600 kg/cycle from volcano just results in a few tiles). But they are just more expensive than other critters for food. 

 

Though, it is my opinion. They are not too terrible, but when someone says that sage hatches are worthless while they look to me as the most likely hatch type I would use, I feel like I have to reply. 

I always set up a hatch farm in all my games. They are great for early coal production and provide a decent meat source.

In the mid-late game coal generators become last on the generator priority chain, usually by this time I dug out the vast majority of caustic biomes in the game, and as such coal. Hatches provide passive coal production and since coal generators don't operate 100% of the time, you usually end up with a decent stockpile.

I ranch both Dreckos and hatches.

Sages hatches were kinda useless until Klei introduced the forest biome where you have enormous amount of dirt, back in EA before QOL it was just impossible to ranch them efficiently.

Matter of fact in my current game on Arboria I have a full ranch of sages and i'm very happy with the large coal production they yield.

[Promethien]

11 hours ago, bobucles said:

Or the dirt can be left to decay into polluted oxygen. Problem resolved.

Sage hatch food is the most expensive critter feed in the game. Dirt is worth precious food, the exchange rates for food are completely awful, and if your food is rotting that's a problem with the food supply, not the hatches. It's simply not worth feeding sage hatches in the vast majority of situations.

100% of 5kg of meal lice is 5kg of coal. 100% of 150kg of dirt is a quarter cycle of coal at the cost of 3 days of meal lice. None of the exchange rates for a sage hatch are good.

Water is easier than dirt with the way geysers work now. I have trouble finding maps that don't have 3+ water (not steam) geysers. Also you didn't read my entire post or didn't understand just how much pdirt ethanol distillers produce. I'll spell it out. A full time generator running on ethanol produces enough pdirt to feed 7.5 sage hatches. And not the exploity, give them a small bit each day so the starvation timer resets. Full feed. Also you can get quality 5 food from ethanol as well. So just siphon off a bit and grow beans with it and you are feeding a full stable of sage hatches. Dirt is absurdly plentiful when you make ethanol. Converting some of it to coal in your meat farm is simply a great choice that gives you that much more easy power.

[xenoborg]

Do sage's still lay eggs faster than the other 3? I thought that was their crowning achievement an omelette farm.