Natural Tiles for Hatch Stable: Problem or Awesome?

[KittenIsAGeek]

So I built a hatch stable a hundred cycles ago or so, with about 5 or six hatches.  It has several natural tiles, allowing the hatches to bury themselves during the day.  Now Gossmann has a problem.

Spoiler

No incubators or anything.  I simply put a grooming station in there and let things go wild.  And wow are they going wild!  57 hatches and counting.  Gossmann can't finish grooming by the end of the night.  Poor guy.  He looks happy, however.

 

So, I was wondering.  Have others built hatch ranches that take advantage of the hatches burying themselves during the day so they aren't overcrowded or cramped?  I've been ranching this way for a while and I'm simply curious what others think about it.  I don't have to worry about shuffling eggs around, or using incubators.  I'm getting a decent amount of meat, and all it requires is Gossmann spending his night polishing hatch exoskeletons.  All night. Every night. Buried in hatches.  Poor Gossmann!

[Siromatik]

Maybe you can try regulate the population by adding an another ranching station and/or disable some, counting the critters at night and add some free night ranchers... Hmm interesting thing, thanks for the post !

[KittenIsAGeek]

2 hours ago, Siromatik said:

Maybe you can try regulate the population by adding an another ranching station and/or disable some, counting the critters at night and add some free night ranchers... Hmm interesting thing, thanks for the post !

I might add another ranching station or two -- get more groomed before daylight!  It appears that with only one grooming station, my hatch population stabilizes around 50 to 60 hatches, depending on the timing of eggs.

[speckle21]

That's... something i never thought of. Amazing. 

Is Gossmann getting his sleep during the day? Like is he on a nocturnal cycle?

[Gurgel]

1 hour ago, speckle21 said:

That's... something i never thought of. Amazing. 

Is Gossmann getting his sleep during the day? Like is he on a nocturnal cycle?

Gossmann is female. Well, as much as Dupes can be. 

[speckle21]

11 minutes ago, Gurgel said:

Gossmann is female. Well, as much as Dupes can be. 

I just followed along since OP said gossman was he. 

Is Gossmann getting her sleep during the day? Like is she on a nocturnal cycle?

[KittenIsAGeek]

2 hours ago, speckle21 said:

Is Gossmann getting his sleep during the day? Like is he on a nocturnal cycle?

Yes, Gossmann is on a nocturnal cycle.

18 minutes ago, Gurgel said:

Gossmann is female. Well, as much as Dupes can be. 

I will apologize to Gossman for using male gender pronouns.. when they wake up for the night.

[speckle21]

Just now, KittenIsAGeek said:

Yes, Gossmann is on a nocturnal cycle.

Everything seems great then. To answer your title i would say AWESOME!

If you want to groom more then get some more dupes in there. Put more groom stations. Gossmann physically can't groom unlimited numbers of hatches by themselves. But if everything is working out. i don't really see a problem. 

 

 

[nakomaru]

Taken to the extreme: 

If you want maximum grooming efficiency, you can water lock the hatches to just the center tile of the station.

[psusi]

Dang!  How do you feed that many hatches?

 

[Coolthulhu]

25 minutes ago, psusi said:

Dang!  How do you feed that many hatches?

One hatch eats at most 140kg/cycle, so you only need 7 seconds of "conveying" per hatch, per cycle. 600/7=~87, so a single belt would suffice for the whole ranch.

[psusi]

1 hour ago, Coolthulhu said:

One hatch eats at most 140kg/cycle, so you only need 7 seconds of "conveying" per hatch, per cycle. 600/7=~87, so a single belt would suffice for the whole ranch.

I didn't mean how do you deliver it, I meant how do you have that much material to sustain them?  I once ranched two normal ranches worth of stone hatches ( so 14? ) for too many cycles and found myself without enough stone when I wanted to start building insulated pipes all over.  With 50 hatches that's 7 tons per cycle.  It won't take very many cycles to eat through all of the material on the map.  Also how are you going to burn 3.5 tons of coal per cycle?

 

[nakomaru]

You don't really need to feed them. Just wait and they turn into meat at the cost of dupe labor. Or wild ones without the cost.

[KittenIsAGeek]

That's a lot of hatches!  Hmmmmmmmmmmmm.

[Soulwind]

30 minutes ago, nakomaru said:

You don't really need to feed them. Just wait and they turn into meat at the cost of dupe labor. Or wild ones without the cost.

Well, wild ones won't ever get you to that massive population expansion. Unless you print a lot of them from the portal.

[psusi]

1 hour ago, nakomaru said:

You don't really need to feed them. Just wait and they turn into meat at the cost of dupe labor. Or wild ones without the cost.

Then they will starve to death and you will quickly have none instead of 50.

[nakomaru]

1 hour ago, Soulwind said:

Unless you print a lot of them from the portal.

You got it. Space too.

1 hour ago, psusi said:

Then they will starve to death and you will quickly have none instead of 50.

Not before laying one egg while groomed.

[psusi]

1 minute ago, nakomaru said:

You got it. Space too.

Are you really going to waste a rocket mission on getting a few kg of meat?

2 minutes ago, nakomaru said:

Not before laying one egg while groomed.

I'm pretty sure that only works with pacu.

[nakomaru]

5 minutes ago, psusi said:

Are you really going to waste a rocket mission on getting a few kg of meat?

No, I already get millions of kcals of meat from printing wild voles for double the meat.

5 minutes ago, psusi said:

I'm pretty sure that only works with pacu.

Tamed pacu do not need to be groomed (fed) at all.

Tamed hatches will maintain population with grooming.

[psusi]

6 minutes ago, nakomaru said:

Tamed hatches will maintain population with grooming.

I swear I've killed off the population before by letting them run out of food.  As a result I always disable grooming if I'm not planning on feeding them to grow more.  Maybe it was because I ate the egg and then they starved to death later... hrm...

 

Still, it's a waste of labor to groom them.  They will still lay an egg and turn into the same amount of meat without being groomed.

[nakomaru]

You can replay the test I just did to check.

[Coolthulhu]

2 hours ago, psusi said:

With 50 hatches that's 7 tons per cycle.  It won't take very many cycles to eat through all of the material on the map.  Also how are you going to burn 3.5 tons of coal per cycle?

I tend to have like 2000t of spare rock around cycle 300 despite farming stone hatches for carnivore. Anything beyond cycle 1k is "death from boredom" (and lag) kind of a game.

Later you can switch to sage hatches fed tree ethanol pdirt byproduct - one tame tree produces over 150kg of pdirt/cycle this way, so it's just one tree per hatch (or 4 wild trees if you roll that way). Or build a regolith melter with cooling.

[nakomaru]

54 minutes ago, psusi said:

They will still lay an egg and turn into the same amount of meat without being groomed.

Ungroomed unfed tamed hatches starve to death at 57.5 cycles of age.

They take 65 cycles to lay an egg.

Testing this math again in the same map now. Testing confirms this with some imprecision.

If you keep them in a vacuum, the hatches will be happy to eat 1300C igneous rock with no adverse reactions.

[psusi]

6 minutes ago, nakomaru said:

Ungroomed unfed tamed hatches starve to death at 57.5 cycles of age.

They take 65 cycles to lay an egg.

Testing this math again in the same map now.

So 47.5 cycles is what they take to get to 0 calories, which means if groomed, they would get there in 9.5 cycles, then die at cycle 19.5.  It looks like they take 6 cycles to lay an egg when happy, so another 3.5 cycles would get about 55% to a second egg,  Once they start starving they revert to the wild egg rate of 60 cycles, so they only gain another 16.6% before dieing, which doesn't quite get a second egg.

 

It's funny, I thought that critters were set so that they could lay one egg when wild before starving to death, and that remained the same when tame but not groomed.  Then grooming multiplies the calorie needs by 5 but the breeding by less than that so you had to feed them.  It's weird that a groomed hatch will lay an egg before starving but an ungroomed one will live longer but not lay an egg.

[nakomaru]

22 minutes ago, psusi said:

It's funny, I thought that critters were set so that they could lay one egg when wild before starving to death, and that remained the same when tame but not groomed.

That's mostly right: wilds reproduce at the same speed as glum+tame, and in fact consume calories slightly faster, but the difference is wild status prevents starvation.

Test update: the hatch began to starve at 49/100 age and had about 72% reproduction. Dies at 90%.