How do I automate the transfer of eggs to an incubator and critters back to the ranch?

[kerosene]

I've got a ranch with room for 8 hatches. Eggs are immediately transfered into a drowning chamber through a conveyor belt. Occasionally an hatch dies and needs to be replaced. I also have a small room with an incubator, a critter sensor, a critter drop off set to auto wrangle any critters. I'm trying to automate the incubator so that it is only used when the ranch has less than 8 hatches and there isn't any baby hatch waiting to be transfered to the ranch or on the way to the ranch. Once the baby hatch is born, a dupe will wrangle it and then drop it off at the ranch. What happens is that while the baby hatch is being carried to the farm, the automation thinks that the incubator should be enabler and so one of my other dupes will come and put an egg in it. I'm looking for something simple and reliable.

 

 

[Steve8]

I feel like for hatches you don't need incubators. They produce many eggs and they grow up reasonably fast once you got a bit of a population going. Personally I use incubators for my glossy dreckos instead because I want the plastic sooner.

I've tried this and love it so far:

https://forums.kleientertainment.com/forums/topic/110984-dont-kill-poor-baby-critters-adult-only-kill-chambers/

It's not what you're asking for, but it's a combined hatchery / kill chamber. Unlike other kill chamber designs it only kills adult hatches. This allows babies to grow up and if you have room in your stables the kill chamber stays closed. Then a rancher can come and collect adults until they're full. After that they get turned into meat.

This is my own take on it (minus a chute to drop in the eggs on the right!):

Simplified automation in sandbox mode:

Instead of the hydro sensor (used just to have a toggle that doesn't need a dupe. Though in sandbox I could have used a switch now that I think about it) you'd have a signal from critter sensors when your stables are full. The same signal can be inverted with a NOT gate to control the door to the room. So the rancher can come in and wrangle an adult, but won't go there otherwise.

Maybe it's possible to stick an incubator in there to speed things up...Should work. Egg gets dropped by chute. Door is open because stables need hatches. So the rancher fills the incubator. Though you still have the time between the hatching of the egg and growing into an adult where another eggs is incubated.

[gigamoi]

I got just what you need. I got into the same problem and deviced a reliable solution to it.

 

I'm at work right now so I can't give you detailed screenshots or talk extensively about it right now but I will do this evening.

I found it convenient to store eggs to be hatched into an incubator (disabled or not acording to your needs) but the main issue with that is that dupes will fill it up if they can. So my solution to that problem was to put the incubator in a room locked by automation if there is no critter in it and to have the eggs transfered to the incubator by a conveniently placed auto-sweeper. The autosweeper is then activated by automation only if there is not enough critters in the stable. The details of how to properly detect such a state are more complex that it seems as detectors may enter weird states as eggs and critters are moved. I will show you my designs later.

[BLACKBERREST3]

I don't think that's what @kerosene is asking about. The system I use is Incubator to ranch (higher priority on dropoff), if ranch is full then take them to critter crowder or in your case critter muncher (lower priority dropoff). No automation needed, just a holding spot for your critter. You could even have 3 rooms, 1 for ranching, 1 for waiting for a ranched critter to die so it can be ranched instead, and 1 for killing your critters. You only need two rooms if you're crowding your critters and are able to access and wrangle them, the third killing room would only then be necessary if you are hurting for food. TLDR; All you have to do is mess with the priority of the critter dropoffs.

 

[gigamoi]

Ok, so, here is my proof of concepty design :

 

- the overall picture

 

- automation

 

So, what is going on here.

The two auto-sweepers in the main room collect the eggs and deliver them to a conveyor that goes to the receptacle shown above. Nothing fancy here. (I used a receptacle instead of a drowning chamber because pips produce more food with omelets than meat but a chamber works just as well. I used one for my dreckos.)

You can see three critter sensors, two in the main room, one in the hatchery. One in the main room is here to speed up incubation if the critter count is way too low. You can ignore it. The other in the main room is here to activate when there is not enough critters in the main room. The sensor in the hatchery is here to activate when there is no critter in the room. These last two are connected to an AND gate so it sends a green signal when no critters are being incubated and there is not enough critters in the main room. The doors are set so that Dupes can only enter the hatchery when there is a critter in it and can leave at any time.

I initially just connected the and gate to the hatchery's auto-sweeper for it to load eggs when needed. There are two recursive snags with this design. Let me explain.

The first issue was that, in the time it takes a dupe to carry the newborn critter to the main room, there often was a brief moment during which there was no critter in the hatchery and not enough critters in the main room resulting in an additional egg to be incubated. The filter gate was introduced to circumvent this issue, allowing the system to ignore this false positive.

The second issue was that, sometimes, the autoseeper would cause its own activation signal to be turned off by picking up the egg, effectively moving it inside the hatchery, before it had enough time to deliver it. The buffer gate was therefor introduced to maintain the signal long enough for it to finish delivering the egg. In addition to this, it allows, if you desire, the auto-sweeper to be activated for long enough to perform any other delivery you might find useful, such as delivering the eggshells to a reachable container.

 

Note that I didn't stick the incubator close to any door. That's because, even closed, it is within duplicant reach. You may use airlocks to save some space on that.

[gigamoi]

On an other note, since a standard egg takes 20 cycles in an unpowered incubator to mature and a standard critter lives for a 100 cycles, if you never power a single incubator, you will, at best only get five critters out of it at a time.

[DemainaNyx]

Made in sandbox for the image, but this is the way I handle things.  This is designed so only adult hatches are delivered, hence the jump in the dropper room.  If you want babies to be delivered, you need to automate the door at ground level in the dropper room so the babies can walk in.

I normally just use an unpowered incubator and just deal with extra critters now and then.  You could add a door under the incubator that only closes if the ranch needs a critter, thus only allowing dupes to add an egg to the incubator when the door is closed.  Just Not the output from the critter sensor to a wire and then Not the result to the door (see below).  You may get one extra incubated critter depending on how quick your dupes are, but that's about it.

If you wanted to be clever you could fill the bottom room with water so that extra critters are automatically drowned if all above ranches are full.  I normally don't bother because I don't want my poor critters drowning, so instead I just opt for omelettes instead.  To each their own.

Automation:

Spoiler

Automation is fairly simple.  Not gate and critter sensors mostly.  I keep my ranches at 7 critters max because they become cramped at 8 IIRC.  At 7 they will keep producing eggs which I can use for more ranches or for food.  Gif has extra sensor that's not needed.  I don't remember why it was in my blueprint.

 

 

 

Door Automation for Incubator

When you put two outputs on the same wire, it acts like an OR gate.  With OR gates, if any output is true, the result is true.  Thus, the top critter sensor says False since it doesn't need any more, but the bottom ranch needs more critters so it says True, so the whole wire says True which closes the door under the incubator.

 

 

[beowulf2010]

1 hour ago, DemainaNyx said:

 You could add a door under the incubator that only closes if the ranch needs a critter, thus only allowing dupes to add an egg to the incubator when the door is closed.  Just Not the output from the critter sensor to a wire and then Not the result to the door (see below).  You may get one extra incubated critter depending on how quick your dupes are, but that's about it.

If you wanted to be clever you could fill the bottom room with water so that extra critters are automatically drowned if all above ranches are full. 

That's a clever way of filling multiple ranches out of the same hatching room...  I currently use a Pez dispenser style ranch but I just might have to play around with a new hatch ranch design... Thanks! 

[fishoutofwater]

I don't know how to automate eggs deliveries, but I do know a little how to automate critters deliveries.

here is my current build:

there are 3 rooms; breed, meat and ranch (stones and glossies)

1. breed room, this where I drop off all eggs, incubator and 2 drop off, 1 for removing baby the other for auto wrangle adult

2. meat room, a drowning pool and a critter drop off, this drop off priority always lower than ranch drop off

3. ranch, set critter drop off to 8 max

don't mind the incubator above

and sorry for poor editing

[DemainaNyx]

9 hours ago, beowulf2010 said:

That's a clever way of filling multiple ranches out of the same hatching room...  I currently use a Pez dispenser style ranch but I just might have to play around with a new hatch ranch design... Thanks! 

Glad I could inspire.  I literally got tired of dupes constantly dropping critters around my map that I wanted a truly automated delivery system.

Works with other land based critters as well.  Slicksters and morbs work the same as hatches.  Pips and dreckos require an extra pneumatic door under the airlock to keep each ranch separate, unless you don't mind having 30 critter in one ranch and 2 in every other one.  Never ranched pokeshells but might need to have 2 doors automated so they can walk into the dropper since I think they are 2 tiles tall.

[Promethien]

This is how I do it. The chute near the incubator is where all my eggs are dropped. The incubator is in use because I am increasing my glossy population, its not necessary. The tiny room to the right is set to take every critter type at lowest priority. The open door lets them out into the room with the pool of water where they get killed by the door trap.  Critters hatch and become adults in the room with the chute. They get wrangled and either delivered to a Ranch if they are needed or go into the kill room if they aren't.

[beowulf2010]

5 hours ago, DemainaNyx said:

Glad I could inspire.  I literally got tired of dupes constantly dropping critters around my map that I wanted a truly automated delivery system.

Yeah. I can't stand wasting time wrangling critters so I build automated ranches myself. (If the ranchers got experience for doing it? Maybe...)

Here's what I was using 2 bases ago.  Extending the storage to the sides instead of above/below will allow me to stack them and use the pez dispenser to fill whichever floor I need instead of depending on the stupid hatches to distribute themselves to each side evenly.  And if I'm lucky the resulting unit will be close to the same width as my drecko ranching room.

Spoiler

 

[biopon]

I'm doing this currently:

The layout could use some work and I have too many incubators, but in general the concept is fine.There's no automation involved, except for the swimming pool. Shipping drops every critter egg into the hatchery via the chute. The sweeper there moves eggs into an incubator if there's one available - if not, the egg goes into the lower priority loader, which transports it right into the water. The sweeper there picks up shells and meat. The doors above form the lowest priority dropoff for hatches where they are working on learning to swim.

I used to have a 1-tile wide crowding room between the water and the incubators (and two for shearing dreckos, and one for fish...) but critter lag made it tough, so now I only have the fish.

Oh, the ceiling lights do absolutely nothing for grooming. It was a test, I just forgot to remove them.

[Mullematsch]

[Grimgaw]

@Mullematsch I like how compact it is and how it will clog up when shells build up.

[Mullematsch]

2 minutes ago, Grimgaw said:

@Mullematsch I like how compact it is and how it will clog up when shells build up.

[BLACKBERREST3]

On 9/27/2019 at 11:14 AM, Grimgaw said:

I like how compact it is and how it will clog up when shells build up.

I was kinda wondering the same thing too.

[Mullematsch]

It was the first draft of the design.

Here it is with sweepers included:

[BLACKBERREST3]

@Mullematsch If you are tired of ranchers not successfully delivering to your ranch, just get rid of them 

Spoiler

 

Try to improve the idea if you want.

[Mullematsch]

27 minutes ago, BLACKBERREST3 said:

@Mullematsch If you are tired of ranchers not successfully delivering to your ranch, just get rid of them 

  Hide contents

 

Try to improve the idea if you want.

You underestimate how much time I spend on here. Already saw that and bookmarked it.

Will have to play around with it eventually!  

[BLACKBERREST3]