Make Smooth Hatches eat refined metal and poop metal ores

[Iloveoxygen]

I feel like smooth hatches are the most useless creatures in the entire game. They are useful in early game, but the time it takes to actually get smooth hatches up and running is the same amount of time it takes to get your metal refinery, the more efficient version of the hatch. I feel like that instead of it eating metal ores and pooping refined metal, it should be flipped. I don't know how much of consumed mass they should poop, but 50-80% seems reasonable to me. In addition. not only does it make it a source of food, but a renewable method of metal ores, which is only currently renewable from rockets (which most people don't use for metal ores). This would make it very useful in late game, where metal ores become more scarce. Also, since it would seem kind of overpowered, maybe when it dies, it doesn't drop meat but drops 100kg of a random metal ore.

 

Smooth hatches really need a rework, every other hatch is much more useful than the smooth hatch.

[fruvy]

Super brilliant idea IMO.  I never would have thought of it, but when I see it this makes perfect sense.  I'd personally pass on the meat being replaced by ore at death (seems crazy OP to me), but the rest justifies itself on a lot of levels.

Only catch I see would be what to do with metals that don't have ores, but that's probably easy.  Steel could just become iron ore (coal/carbon and lime just go to waste) and maybe the hatches just wouldn't like the taste of lead.  Problem solved.

[Yetinotincluded]

I dont know. It would be better that meteors bring a random metal ore instead of refined metal. And I thought those smooth hatches only come from space. I ve placed a lot and never seen one in my asteroid.

[Meltdown]

1 hour ago, Yetinotincluded said:

And I thought those smooth hatches only come from space. I ve placed a lot and never seen one in my asteroid.

Smooth hatches are breed from stone hatches by feeding them metal ore. Maybe having a morph chain from regular hatch to smooth is too unlikely for a wild critters, but getting smooth hatch egg is not impossible if you use a lot of domesticated stone hatches.