Farming Shove Voles/26000kcal per cycle/no feeding at all

[kolyapedal]

 

[blash365]

Excellent video, excellent build, excellent music, excellent cutting/direction.

But i got one big question:

How do you get the shove voles into your pens? It seems to me that you need to either wrangle them manually or to have one breeding room which is constantly overcrowded with autowrangling, which would result in alot of unnecessary wrangling.

[Khullag]

2 minutes ago, blash365 said:

Excellent video, excellent build, excellent music, excellent cutting/direction.

But i got one big question:

How do you get the shove voles into your pens? It seems to me that you need to either wrangle them manually or to have one breeding room which is constantly overcrowded with autowrangling, which would result in alot of unnecessary wrangling.

i think it's based on the egg incubators behavior - you grow eggs and when they are ready, critters still sit inside the incubator for quite a long time giving duplicant time to come and pick it without need of wrangle

[blash365]

Just now, Khullag said:

i think it's based on the egg incubators behavior - you grow eggs and when they are ready, critters still sit inside the incubator for quite a long time giving duplicant time to come and pick it without need of wrangle

Oh, you can pick critters from incubators without wrangling? I wasnt aware of that.:D

[Khullag]

10 minutes ago, blash365 said:

Oh, you can pick critters from incubators without wrangling? I wasnt aware of that.:D

yep, for 1-2 cycles (i don't know exact time) baby critter stays inside incubator, and if dupe does not pick it - critter drops on the ground and starts running around - then you need to wrangle it

[BLACKBERREST3]

There are much easier 0 energy ways to overcrowd a shovevole, I'll post a pic later. Are you absolutely sure that tame shove voles don't die before laying eggs, I had done the math before and it never added up for me. someone said that reproduction is at 1.66% not 2%/cycle when they are glum. I forget the starting/max calories of the critters which makes this calculation possible. It takes an additional 10 cycles for them to starve as well which will be another 16.67%/cycle because they still reproduce while starving. These are for most critters, shine bugs and pacu are the exception. I can only assume you are using wild critters which do lay eggs before dying. If anyone can help clarify, I would like to know if all of this information is correct.

[Tobruk]

No. They sit inside for the whole baby period.

14 minutes ago, Khullag said:

yep, for 1-2 cycles (i don't know exact time) baby critter stays inside incubator, and if dupe does not pick it - critter drops on the ground and starts running around - then you need to wrangle it

 

But why aren't the shove voles burying through the obsidian?

[biopon]

5 minutes ago, BLACKBERREST3 said:

Are you absolutely sure that tame shove voles don't die before laying eggs

Yes. The key is to not let them cramped. Glum is -80% metabolism, that will save enough calories. Overcrowded doesn't matter, it just affects happiness, but as long as they're not cramped and they are glum, every critter you have will reproduce before calling it a day. This also works for fish, and as far as I know, nothing else.

[BLACKBERREST3]

23 minutes ago, biopon said:

Overcrowded doesn't matter, it just affects happiness, but as long as they're not cramped and they are glum, every critter you have will reproduce before calling it a day.

I was told that critters do not reproduce when they are not fed except for pacu and shine bugs. That was the whole point of this build.

Unlimited food can be had with any critter then without feeding them?

Edit. forgot to mention that ranching with no food nets a different result than from not ranching and no food.

Why do my critters starve to death then?

32 minutes ago, Tobruk said:

But why aren't the shove voles burying through the obsidian?

 

[BLACKBERREST3]

Here are some threads that say the exact same thing. I don't think that tame glum overcrowded critters can reproduce without food except for shine bugs and pacu. Can someone clarify this for me? Testing is hard enough as it takes 100-150 cycles and my critters have always died by then with my testing.

Spoiler

7:16

 

 

I feel like Cunningham's Law has been invoked here.

[biopon]

15 minutes ago, BLACKBERREST3 said:

critters do not reproduce when they are not fed

This is my understanding of how the whole critter reproduction thing works. Note that this is mostly based on my pre-February knowledge, but I've been using it to successfully "ranch" fish, dreckos and hatches in the past few weeks, so I doubt any of it changed.

First, the important factors:

Reproduction: goes up a certain base % per cycle, different based on the species. This was chosen by Klei so a wild critter (which doesn't get modifiers to this number) will lay one egg near the end of its life.

Happiness: when positive, applies a massive bonus to the daily reproduction gain. When negative, it does nothing.

Tame: applies a negative modifier to happiness (so critters need grooming to reproduce faster than 1/life), a big boost to metabolism (so more food needed, more resources produced).

Wild: mutually exclusive with Tame, applies a minor boost to metabolism (which is smaller than the one applied by Tame, so this can be considered the baseline)

Metabolism: How quickly calories are burned, how quickly resources are produced. Much greater for tame critters. Affected by Glum and Tiny Baby.

Calories: critters are born with a certain number. This decreases based on the metabolism rate. Replenished by eating food. When it reaches 0, a 10-cycle starvation timer starts. Note that wild critters are a permanent fixture (except for environmental hazards) and self-sustain, so every critter is born with enough calories to lay an egg before it runs out at wild metabolism rates.

Starvation: massive malus to happiness, death after 10 cycles. Note that this 10-cycle timer can be continuously reset by providing a minimum amount of food. I haven't found this useful in how I ranch critters but it's a possibility.

Tiny Baby: not too important for us but it's here for the sake of completeness. A 5-cycle childhood period. 90% reduction in metabolism, no reproduction gain, but happiness boost (which is meaningless).

Glum: only applies to Tame. An effect of not being groomed. Happiness malus, -80% metabolism modifier(this is very important).

Overcrowded: not enough living area. Very negatively affects happiness, nothing else. 

Cramped: not enough living area AND egg present. -100% reproduction rate, avoid this or your critters will die out.

Okay. So if the critter you're attempting to free-ranch is born with enough calories and has a low enough metabolism to live long enough to produce 1 egg before death (assuming permanent unhappiness due to Tame, Glum, Starving and Overcrowded) then you can get something for nothing. Pacu and Voles are like this, I don't think you can pull this off with any other species.

Glum makes all of them live really long, but not long enough, except for these two. You need 1 or more breeders that are fed and groomed to keep them producing eggs. These eggs are used to grow your free-ranch population that self-sustains itself on nothing but air. The only thing you must pay attention is to make sure nobody gets Cramped. I do this for my fish by keeping a pathway to open space above their 1-tile pool, but you can also remove eggs.

Note that egg removal *might* be problematic after a while since it does take time - with 200 fish you're looking at 8 eggs a cycle, each taking a few seconds while all your fish are cramped and not increasing their reproduction %. These seconds all add up, I am not sure when they eat into reproduction time enough to cause your critters to die before laying eggs. Then you have the issue of re-introducing the newly hatched critters to your general population, which is tricky for fish as they can't be wrangled. 

Voles on the other hand, while they come much later, are easy to handle and very lucrative.  2 dead/cycle can sustain 50+ dupes on burgers. Since they live 100 cycles, you'd need a self-sustaining population of 200 to achieve this, so 4 per dupe. 

[OxCD]

2 hours ago, Khullag said:

yep, for 1-2 cycles (i don't know exact time) baby critter stays inside incubator, and if dupe does not pick it - critter drops on the ground and starts running around - then you need to wrangle it

As far as I noticed they stay inside the machine until they reach adult size. Which is a bit disappointing as you gain incubation time with the incubator, but then you loose 5 cycles over the full efficiency if not taken out by a dup.

[Mullematsch]

I believe it works because shove voles are born with full stomachs if they are tame. So a tame shove vole will give you one egg before dying even if unfed. Just need to worry about cramped and confined status effect. 

[BLACKBERREST3]

Nicely put, this answers a lot of uncertainties I had.

On 9/28/2019 at 7:58 AM, BLACKBERREST3 said:

every critter

ah, by every critter you meant every shove vole, I thought that's what you meant but I wasn't sure. hoorah, my hatch build is still relevant.

On 9/28/2019 at 9:19 AM, biopon said:

Note that this 10-cycle timer can be continuously reset by providing a minimum amount of food. I haven't found this useful in how I ranch critters but it's a possibility.

A little bit of an exploit, but I've decided to make crowding modules in my base for the critters I don't want thousands of, but still want a hundred or so. Here's one for pips and dreckos

Spoiler

This exploit also works for pips according to mathmanican

 

On 9/28/2019 at 9:33 AM, OxCD said:

As far as I noticed they stay inside the machine until they reach adult size. Which is a bit disappointing as you gain incubation time with the incubator, but then you loose 5 cycles over the full efficiency if not taken out by a dup.

For me, this is a feature. I would rather have a critter buffer; in case one of my breeders die, then I don't have to wait that long. I wouldn't mind if they stayed in the incubator indefinitely until you need them. If you are not actively ranching the critters that come out of the incubator, this seems like a waste of power to me because they can hatch without power later. There are a couple of egg handling techniques I have seen, some good for early game and some for late.

[BLACKBERREST3]

Edit. just found out another technique from another thread that thinking with doors will give you. You can put a door under an incubator to control critter placements.