meat Who'll Live to be Meat?

[Xenologist]

I honestly want to know how long a tame creature will live before it becomes meat and when it'll lay an egg. If someone's done some tests to reveal more than "pacu, shines, and voles live to lay an egg without food. also tame", I'd like to see it.

[Yoma_Nosme]

Here you go.

https://oni-db.com/details/hatch

Search the page for other critters. They're all there

[Xenologist]

8 hours ago, Yoma_Nosme said:

Here you go.

https://oni-db.com/details/hatch

Search the page for other critters. They're all there

Where does it say how many calories a critter has when it hatches? How long does it take for a tame glum hatch to die from starvation after being born? 

[DepravityCat]

I'm not sure how long they take to starve, but I can say that they won't lay an egg if they're not being fed. If you want them to reproduce, you're going to have to feed them, and if you want meat, there are quicker (and more humane!) methods than starving them. 

The way I ranch is to have a couple of rooms full, fed, and groomed, with all eggs autosweepered to a kill room. If the breeding rooms ever drop below a population of 8 then one lucky critter is automatically saved and delivered from the kill room. 

[thewreckedangle]

an easy way to ranch is to have something like this

A= conveyor chute (literally everything that doesn't off-gas gets dropped here. prior to rails i used a dispenser, and prior to that, a regular storage container) hatches eat whatever they want

B= dispenser with whatever eggs you want kept, set to priority 9

C= door with no left (<-) access. (can drop eggs off but cant re-collect them)

babies cannot jump across gaps, so every now and then, you can just drag the attack order across the over-water section

(sorry, they moved before i got the correct shot)

 

anyone outside of that zone (and all babies) will survive to create more, and you get a bunch of meat

 

 

[psusi]

What is the point of the grooming station in the kill room?

 

[Gus Smedstad]

"Live fast and leave a good looking corpse?"

[SackMaggie]

2 hours ago, psusi said:

What is the point of the grooming station in the kill room?

They don't get cramped but still got groom buff??? IDK, Normally I go for 96 tiles room.

[psusi]

1 minute ago, SackMaggie said:

They don't get cramped but still got groom buff??? IDK, Normally I go for 96 tiles room.

Even with a 96 tile room you can only hold 6 or 7 before they get cramped, and it looks like there's more than that in that little room.

 

[SamLogan]

15 hours ago, Xenologist said:

I honestly want to know how long a tame creature will live before it becomes meat and when it'll lay an egg. If someone's done some tests to reveal more than "pacu, shines, and voles live to lay an egg without food. also tame", I'd like to see it.

You don't need all those informations. The only thing you need to know is :

Shoves voles are the best way to have huge meat amount (10 Kg).

To obtain in 10 cycles, their meat, you just need to ranch them without feeding them. They will starve to die quickly but they will have enough time to lay a egg. See that :

If you want more meat, associate a pool of wild Pacu with no doors.

Then do this recipe : https://oni-db.com/details/surfandturf

You will have millions of Kcal without any ressources, you only need a lot of ranchers (one per 8 creatures)

[Zarquan]

I don't think anyone's mentioned this, but tamed hatches do need to be fed to lay an egg before they starve.  But they only need to be fed once at the age of 5 cycles.  This leads to them starving to death about a cycle after they lay their egg.  If they are fed barbecue, the food is net positive and you get about 3000 kcal for each hatch in its lifespan.  I built a totally ethical machine to take advantage of this.

 

[thewreckedangle]

5 hours ago, psusi said:

What is the point of the grooming station in the kill room?

did you mean me? if so, i'm confused about what you mean, if not, then uhh.. ^{*sneaks away*}

[BlackAeronaut]

Here's the cool thing.

You only need to keep a critter long enough to lay an egg.  Once they do, turn 'em into meat.  You got what you need already, so why bother waiting any longer?  Unless you're ranching for eggs to make omelets, there's not much point in keeping them alive any longer than that.  And as long as you're keeping them groomed and well fed, you're guaranteed to get an egg, on time every time.  Considering that a hatch drops enough meat to make 1 barbecue, this is very much a worthwhile effort.

If you're fine with using QOL mods, a nice one to use for ranching is the Butcher and Fishing Stations Mod.  These add the eponymous stations into the "Stations" portion of your build menu.  What they do is that they permit Duplicants to kill critters safely without the critter being able to hurt the Duplicant in the process.

Additionally, you can set filters for the critters.  Example: you want sage hatches but not regular hatches.  (And really, you do!  100% conversion rate to coal instead of 50% - and they'll eat polluted dirt and rot pile, too!  Coal is critical to your colony because you need coal for important things like refined carbon and ceramics.)  Set the filter on the Butcher Station to only Sage Hatches and everything else will be killed off.

Other great filters it has is that you can set the max number of critters to a room, as well as a maximum age threshold (as in, if a critter manages to reach 20% of its lifespan, it will be killed, but other filter settings can overrule this and kill a critter before they reach that max age threshold).

You can find the mod here: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1907824546

[Xenologist]

I'm asking if tame glum/happy critters will live to lay an egg, or if they'll die before laying an egg.

[6Havok9]

22 minutes ago, BlackAeronaut said:

You only need to keep a critter long enough to lay an egg.  Once they do, turn 'em into meat.  You got what you need already, so why bother waiting any longer?  Unless you're ranching for eggs to make omelets, there's not much point in keeping them alive any longer than that.  And as long as you're keeping them groomed and well fed, you're guaranteed to get an egg, on time every time.  Considering that a hatch drops enough meat to make 1 barbecue, this is very much a worthwhile effort.

I disagree. Let's say I wait for my well fed and groomed hatch to lay an egg, then I butcher it for meat. I end up with one BBQ and an egg. Then I have to wait for the egg to hatch on its own, or dump power and dupe time to make it hatch faster (a minimal amount with automation, but still not zero).

Then I end up with a baby hatch, which is like having nothing for 5 cycles. They don't reproduce and have limited metabolism, so they aren't even good for poopin coal. This applies to dreckos and slicksters too, killing off your breeder critters ends up limiting both your food and industrial production.

Since babies give the same amount of meat as adults, it's better to butcher them as soon as the eggs hatch, wicked as it may seem, while the adults keep producing eggs (hence, meat) non stop, only introducing a new breeder critter when one dies of old age. For dreckos it's better to have them grow up in an hydrogen room and shear them until they starve instead, vastly increasing the plastic/fiber production you get from one stable.

[beowulf2010]

I agree with @6Havok9. It's better to have a full stable of breeding stock for critters like Hatches or Pokeshells that produce useful secondary products.

My 32 Stone Hatches produce so many eggs and a good amount of coal. I have a stacked ranch design that auto refills as many stables as I want to run and automatically drowns extra hatches. Way better to get the full 15 or 16 eggs from a hatch that dies naturally in 100 cycles than to continually "waste" the 5 cycles of being a baby. 

[BlackAeronaut]

The ONI database does not indicate any difference for glum or happy in regards to egg laying.  The only thing that seems to effect this is whether they're wild or tame.

https://oni-db.com/details/hatch

Taming your hatches is definitely worth it because you get an egg 10x sooner while their food needs are merely quadrupled.  35kg/cycle of dirt for an egg every 60 cycles versus 140kg/cycle of dirt for an egg every 6 cycles?  That's a no-brainer, but here's the math anyhow.

Wild: 60 cycles * 35/kg dirt/cycle = 2,100kg of dirt to get 1 egg

Tame: 6 cycles * 140kg dirt/cycle = 840kg of dirt to get 1 egg

Quite a difference, isn't it?

Granted, you can just decide not to feed your wild hatches, but even wild critters can starve to death.  Depending on how many calories your wild hatches are starting out with, that can actually happen well before they have a chance to lay an egg - even if they're glum.  You just don't notice it happening half the time because they can die while burrowed (Yes, even in this state they're burning calories!) and they also happen to gobble up anything within reach that you dug when you dug the hatch out.  Watch for it - it's actually kinda funny to see.

2 minutes ago, 6Havok9 said:

I disagree.

It's not really any different.  You say it requires more resources?  Nope.  Because while they don't produce as much, that also means that they don't eat as much, either!

Additionally, so long as a critter has the "Tiny Baby!" condition, they have max happiness and do not require grooming.  So the first five cycles are actually freebies, more or less, where you feed them only a smaller amount of food in exchange for the proportionately smaller production.

So, you say you want resources, too?  Good for you.  Let them live for a few cycles - enough to make some production happen - and then kill them.  It's all a numbers game - you just have to balance out how much you want out of them versus how long you let them live for in order to get the meat.  Fortunately, we know that all critters no matter what species spends 5 cycles as babies, so that's easy to account for.  It's just the other factors (time to lay an egg, time for egg to hatch) that vary from one species to another.

The thing is that space is finite in this game.  This is why John Francis's Mini-Bases are such a big hit.  If you can get away with it, you want a ranch to be fulfilling as many purposes as possible.  For example, my drecko ranches have three levels with an open pneumatic door between each one - bottom level is chlorine and balm lilies, middle has O2 and serves as an area for the duplicants to work in (grooming and shearing), and the top level has hydrogen to grow their scales...  and is a pincha pepper farm, as well.

With that one area, I get pincha peppers, balm lilies, reed fibers, and meat.  Do the math - it's a lot more economical than running a farm/ranch for each of those items individually.  The stupid part is that the people that argue against dreckos don't even consider the fact that you're not just cashing in on one crop, but four!  And this is especially so when you put a farm station in with the balm lilies and pincha peppers.  (Double the growth for just a bit of fertilizer?  Hells yes, please.)

As for Dupe-hours spent?  This is why assigning priorities to your dupes is of critical importance.  By doing this, you can make sure a dupe stays in an area (say, your ranch and farm area), and then time spent lullabying an egg becomes negligible.  I use automation to move eggs and I keep the hatcheries as close to the ranches as possible.  Eggs and meat get dropped by a conveyor chute, and an autosweeper sends off the meat to the galley and the egg shells to the factory floor.  I even have the priorities on the buildings set up so that if there isn't an incubator available, the egg gets shipped off to the galley to be cracked and cooked into an omelet.  Not even moving the newly hatched critter is really extra work because that's going to happen anyways!

Really, what this all boils down to is the psychology behind how you like to play your game, and what you get out of it.

[psusi]

16 hours ago, thewreckedangle said:

did you mean me? if so, i'm confused about what you mean, if not, then uhh.. ^{*sneaks away*}

Yes.

13 hours ago, BlackAeronaut said:

It's not really any different.

5 cycles of a baby not being productive vs. 5 cycles of an adult being productive isn't really any different?

[BlackAeronaut]

5 hours ago, psusi said:

Yes.

5 cycles of a baby not being productive vs. 5 cycles of an adult being productive isn't really any different?

Well, if you're looking at it strictly from a standpoint of production, then yes, there is a difference.  But what I'm saying is that it doesn't cost you anything, either.  As I said, no need for grooming in the first five cycles, which is a pretty good trade-off if you ask me.  Especially if you're doing a hybrid-purpose stable like I usually do.

Besides, if you're honestly so hard-up for resources that one Tiny Baby! for five cycles throws a spanner in your works, then you're doing something seriously wrong in your colony.

[Smiling Demon]

11 hours ago, BlackAeronaut said:

Granted, you can just decide not to feed your wild hatches, but even wild critters can starve to death.  Depending on how many calories your wild hatches are starting out with, that can actually happen well before they have a chance to lay an egg - even if they're glum.  You just don't notice it happening half the time because they can die while burrowed (Yes, even in this state they're burning calories!) and they also happen to gobble up anything within reach that you dug when you dug the hatch out.  Watch for it - it's actually kinda funny to see.

It's not really any different.  You say it requires more resources?  Nope.  Because while they don't produce as much, that also means that they don't eat as much, either!

Additionally, so long as a critter has the "Tiny Baby!" condition, they have max happiness and do not require grooming.  So the first five cycles are actually freebies, more or less, where you feed them only a smaller amount of food in exchange for the proportionately smaller production.

You are incorrect about wild hatches starving to death. They do have a calorie count and do eat, but when they reach 0 calories nothing happens. If a hatch is trapped while burrowing they won't get to lay an egg and will die without replacement, but this has nothing to do with starving to death.

To answer the original question: tame pacu and shine bugs will not starve if kept glum and unfed and live to lay an egg. All other tame critters will starve before laying an egg in the same situation. I'm not sure about all groomed but unfed critters. Wild critters will not starve. Critters that get the confined or cramped status for sufficient time will also fail to lay an egg.