Eggs being delivered despite incubator being disabled

[idkthatcool]

I've been trying to improve my Hatch ranch design, in the past I've manually restocked the pens as the excess eggs I have go off to a drowning chamber within my kitchen off of which eggs are siphoned(also manually) to keep the population of hatches from dwindling. This I have found incredibly tedious as the number of ranches increases with my population of dupes. My goal is maximum food, minimum labor(specifically my labor) and I've hoped to tackle this problem with the use of automation via the critter sensors.

Don't mind the confined hatch, this shot was taken in the midst of some renovations. As you can see the incubators are filled with eggs despite the automation signals, in the two lower ranches, I have coming from the critter sensors, initially it appeared as though dupes were coming to fill the incubators which led me to believe the incubator requested eggs from dupes specifically, I then played with some door permissions in order to allow only dupes disallowed from either supplying or farming to enter, but once I did this the auto-sweepers started filling them indiscriminately as well.

Am I missing something here, how can I keep eggs from being removed from the ranches when there are insufficient critters within?

 

[beowulf2010]

The automation signal only turns off the power to incubators preventing power usage and ranchers from lullabying.

The only way I know of to prevent eggs from being delivered to incubators is to lock the room. You might be able to do the open an airlock door underneath the building thing as well, but I've never tried that. 

[idkthatcool]

Ooooooh... Thank you my friend. I will return with my findings. 

 

For the record I think the automation signal to the incubators should behave in the ideal way I've described above specifically because it allows for what I feel to be a more elegant solution to the issue I'm tackling at this momeent.

Yes, what you described is working almost ideally.

The only problematic issues with this setup seem to be so only upon initial startup. Eggs that are already in the incubators are not dropped when the building is "missing tile" or deactivated by the airlock below. This is only an issue when you are playing around with the automation signals and is easily solvable with very little manual intervention. Looking in the errands tab for the incubators while it is "missing tile" shows the dupes errands as "not functioning" I assume this also means the auto-sweepers will not stock it and it appears that this is the case but I have not conclusively tested.

What is a silver(perhaps gold) lining is that the tile below the lowest incubator that I have furnished with floor underneath will catch any eggs dropped from itself or any of the above incubators when you are intervening manually and the auto sweeper can just barely reach that tile decreasing significantly the amount of player intervention necessary to keep things running smoothly.

I must say I am very satisfied with the design as it stands now, before this I was playing around with conveyor shutoffs and it was proving very messy and resource intensive. If anyone can provide any further improvements upon this general design I welcome any and all constructive criticism.

[Zarquan]

15 hours ago, beowulf2010 said:

The automation signal only turns off the power to incubators preventing power usage and ranchers from lullabying.

The only way I know of to prevent eggs from being delivered to incubators is to lock the room. You might be able to do the open an airlock door underneath the building thing as well, but I've never tried that. 

 

1 hour ago, idkthatcool said:

Ooooooh... Thank you my friend. I will return with my findings. 

 

For the record I think the automation signal to the incubators should behave in the ideal way I've described above specifically because it allows for what I feel to be a more elegant solution to the issue I'm tackling at this momeent.

Yes, what you described is working almost ideally.

The only problematic issues with this setup seem to be so only upon initial startup. Eggs that are already in the incubators are not dropped when the building is "missing tile" or deactivated by the airlock below. This is only an issue when you are playing around with the automation signals and is easily solvable with very little manual intervention. Looking in the errands tab for the incubators while it is "missing tile" shows the dupes errands as "not functioning" I assume this also means the auto-sweepers will not stock it and it appears that this is the case but I have not conclusively tested.

What is a silver(perhaps gold) lining is that the tile below the lowest incubator that I have furnished with floor underneath will catch any eggs dropped from itself or any of the above incubators when you are intervening manually and the auto sweeper can just barely reach that tile decreasing significantly the amount of player intervention necessary to keep things running smoothly.

I must say I am very satisfied with the design as it stands now, before this I was playing around with conveyor shutoffs and it was proving very messy and resource intensive. If anyone can provide any further improvements upon this general design I welcome any and all constructive criticism.

This does not work 100% of the time.  The issue is that if an egg is being delivered before the door opens, it will still be delivered.  A better way to handle this is to put your incubators in another room, as then you can have a constant 8 critters/room and wrangle them in to the main room or, if you are a monster, a kill room. 

One nice thing about incubators is that the baby critters are treated as already wrangled, so they can just be scooped out of the incubators and taken to the ranches.

[beowulf2010]

1 hour ago, Zarquan said:

This does not work 100% of the time.  The issue is that if an egg is being delivered before the door opens, it will still be delivered.  A better way to handle this is to put your incubators in another room, as then you can have a constant 8 critters/room and wrangle them in to the main room or, if you are a monster, a kill room. 

One nice thing about incubators is that the baby critters are treated as already wrangled, so they can just be scooped out of the incubators and taken to the ranches.

Cool, thanks. Wasn't 100% sure the door thing would work as the way I do my hatch ranches (stacked horizontal levels (hatches are limited to 5 tiles wide, the rest is storage) with a dispenser) eliminates the need to keep eggs out of disabled incubators. 

[SamLogan]

19 hours ago, idkthatcool said:

Am I missing something here, how can I keep eggs from being removed from the ranches when there are insufficient critters within?

You can't block the incubation, egg incubate at a 5% per cycle rythm wether it on the ground or in an incubator (on or off, it's same). The point to use incubator is to have the Duplicant grooming bonus.

If you want block the incubation, you have to store eggs in doors, it's a glitch, but it's the only way.

So wether you do a waiting room for your hatch, wether you kill the excess hatch by lay the eggs in a pool.

[idkthatcool]

4 hours ago, SamLogan said:

You can't block the incubation, egg incubate at a 5% per cycle rythm wether it on the ground or in an incubator (on or off, it's same). The point to use incubator is to have the Duplicant grooming bonus.

If you want block the incubation, you have to store eggs in doors, it's a glitch, but it's the only way.

So wether you do a waiting room for your hatch, wether you kill the excess hatch by lay the eggs in a pool.

I’m not interested in the lullabied bonus on the eggs at all, the incubators do more than just that, the incubators are very valuable as storage for an egg that won’t kill it and subsequently give you just the ingredient for an omelette, as any of our other storage options will(storage bin, conveyer loader/receptacle)

 

[wachunga]

If you are using incubators just as a place to store an egg, I'd say don't use incubators at all. You just need to figure out an alternate way of putting eggs somewhere safe. This is my take on it:

That bit of water is for storing eggs that are needed to replenish the ranch. It is at 400kg and hatches won't jump in so they can't lay eggs there. The sweeper in the ranch transfers eggs one at a time to the storage bin (the bin is limited capacity).The one at a time thing is to slow down the eggs on the conveyor since the sensor and/or shutoff seem to lag a bit and that can cause problems. The other sweeper moves eggs onto a conveyor. If more hatches are needed in the ranch, the egg gets sent to the pool where it is out of reach. Otherwise it goes to the kitchen. The pool isn't deep enough to drown babies and once they reach adulthood they jump out by themselves.

It doesn't produce as much food/coal as possible since you have eggs and babies in the ranch. But it needs zero oversight from the player, minimal dupe interaction (only grooming, no wrangling), and no nurseries or kill rooms. Simple and effective, if you need more food/coal build another.

[idkthatcool]

Well I’m definitely ranching these for food, by the time I’ve unlocked all the necessary shipping buildings for the setup above the coal is a useful but still very ancillary benefit. Hatches are a source of truly an enormous amount of food that you get by trading rocks, duplicant labor, and effort so in my eyes any egg that doesn’t hatch into a hatchling is a wasted 1200 calories and a wasted +1 morale and any time that a hatch is eating but not at maximum reproductive rate is a waste as well. 

[yoakenashi]

Hi all, first I’m sorry I cannot post screenshots as I am out of town on business.

I recently had similar issues with trying to fully automate a slickster ranch. The problem I had using the doors to disable the incubator was that eggs laid on the door would fall below the incubator and be lost. They were still part of the room/ranch but couldn’t reach the grooming station. My ranch rooms are only 5 wide, but very tall.

While I could have added more autosweepers to pick up those lost eggs, I decided to do this:

My incubators are not set continuous. I have 3 critter sensors in each ranch:

1) Indicates if critter+egg is above ideal. This opens the mechanized airlock between the autosweeper and the conveyor loader that sweeps excess eggs (currently all eggs, since I am using a non-adjustable conveyor loader).

2) Indicates if critter+egg is below ideal. This requests an egg from the overflow room (several dozen slicksters, unknown number of eggs, cramped: yes)

3) Indicates if egg is present (greater than 0). This is just for my own indication. If this is set, I’ll manually add 1 non-continuous egg to the incubator.

This allowed me to power incubate (lullaby) on demand, but otherwise the eggs just remained on the ground by default.

Another issue I ran into was that my ranches were all connected, so if a duplicant or an egg on conveyor passed through alone ranch, it would impact the counts for that room. I was starting to add filters everywhere, but decided on the above build to make things a little easier to manage.