Pacu Surf 'n' Vole Turf

[Olleus]

It seems to me that there is one food source for late-ish end game that is so clearly superior to all the others that I can't think of a reason not to use it apart maybe role playing.

First, some basic stats. A groomed Vole that is never fed will lay 1 egg before it dies, and then drop 16,000 kCal meat. Voles also never suffer from overcrowding or crampness. The limit to the number of happy+starving+reproducing Voles that can fit in a stable is therefore given only by grooming time: for all intents and purposes this is not a limiting factor. The stable can also be small it just needs a grooming station, automation for extracting the meat (and also egg shells, because why not?), and a layout that keeps voles and their eggs on a "floating" floor so they dont tunnel out.

A Pacu (and all variants) that is glum and never fed will lay 1 egg before it dies, and then drop 1,000 kCal fillet. Pacus use the volume of the water tank to decide if they're overcrowded (making them glum), but the volume of their entire room to determine if they are cramped (ie. if they keep laying eggs). So a one tile puddle of water in a room that is open to space can hold a virtually endless number of glum+starving+reproducing Pacus. The size of this aquarium can also be tiny, it just needs: a puddle, automation to extract the fish fillet (and also egg shells, because why not?) and an opening to the wider world.

Using such basic stables and nothing fancy like a drowning chamber, egg incubators or the like, you need around 1.5 Voles and 5 Pacus to produce enough meat and fish fillet to feed one dupe 1000kCal Surf 'n' Turf every cycle from now until the heat death of the universe. For any reasonable sized colony this is more Voles and Pacus that you'll find in the wild, so you will need to have some nursery stables where you tame and feed them in order to grow the population. Without doing anything clever than having a happy and continuously fed Pacu/Vole, you can increase your population of Pacu by +1 for perpetuity for 220kg Algae and your population of Voles by +1 for perpetuity for 14T of regolith (both amortized). I know that by controlled feeding and some clever designs you can do WAY better than those figures, but they're good enough for me.

 

So for a one-off investment of 1T Alge and 20T regolith, what do you get?

1) Second-highest quality food for one dupe for the rest of the game

2) An average of ~0.8 Voles that needs grooming

3) Tiny amount of space required

4) Minimal temperature control

5) Decent source of Lime (~350g/Cycle)

6) Only energy expenditure is shipping for meat/fish fillet/egg shells

 

To be fair, I should perhaps count the natural gas, electricity, and time for cooking. That ends up being the biggest cost to this source of food by a long way, but all other decent meals have this too. Am I missing something? This takes NO resources once set up AND less dupe time, space, temperature control and energy than the alternatives I can think while providing the 2nd highest morale of any food source. Unless you are absolutely desperate for an extra +4 morale, is there any competitive alternative to this at all?

[beowulf2010]

Considering I usually don't go surf N turf and instead run most of my bases on the less efficient BBQ from hatches/voles and cooked Pacu meat, I would agree with you that Pacu/Vole farms as you presented are pretty much the best way to go. 

I included hatches as well purely because I like converting sedimentary and igneous rock to coal while making food for my dupes. 

[Dracian]

I played on Rime in my latest game and I can only agree with the efficiency of the Shove Vole and Pacu farming. Given how tedious it can be to grow stuff on this asteroid it's a really easy way to have quality food (not to mention that you can also count on other crits to give you meat). So yes, definitely a good method.

however, past a certain point, if you really want to both have omnipotent Dupes and high chances to trigger Overjoyed reactions, you'll need to have even more superior food (Pepper Bread or Spicy Tofu), so, well, it's not that overpowered, especially thanks to Pip planting which allow to grow stuff without even need for any resources in most of the cases.

[Olleus]

The coal from hatches is good, but do you really need it past a certain point? Specially when you take into account all the extra space hatches need.

As for needing higher quality food, I accept that, but is it ever that necessary? While Pip wild planting is also resource free, it takes up a lot more space. That means dupe walking time. Not to mention harvesting time. I'm confident that this is considerably more time than the fractional vole that needs grooming every cycle. Perhaps even enough time is saved to use another entertainment building and make up for that +4 morale or more.

I guess it's possible that if you want every skill and the +20 extra moral for maximum overjoyed likelihood you'll need every entertainment building and the highest quality food (as well as all the other standard bonuses), but how common is that? And this isn't taking into account the natural downside of pip-farming requiring far more space than pacu 'n' vole and, what's for me the biggest factor, the absolute hassle of temperature and gas control for farming, Killing your Pacu/Vole ranching by messing up environmental controls would be genuinely difficult to do.

[beowulf2010]

2 hours ago, Olleus said:

The coal from hatches is good, but do you really need it past a certain point? Specially when you take into account all the extra space hatches need. 

Considering I can usually run my base's power system off coal, 1-2 natural gas geysers, and steam from metal volcanoes and my metal refineries for 100's of cycles, I don't mind the space (ignoring a kill room, my design only takes up around 26x20 for 4 ranches and a distribution/breeding room and the hatches only have 5 tiles they can travel in) that the Hatch ranches taken up. 

[r4tch3t]

Definitely a god way to go, I prefer to setup a wild farm for sleet wheat and lettuce for the Frost burgers. Sweepers bring the wheat and lettuce to the kitchen, he meat comes from my hatch ranches. I do plan on setting up a vole farm at some point but at the moment I don't have my sour gas boiler built (need a little more supercoolant) and am skipping petroleum generators so I still need my hatch farms for the coal right now

[suxkar]

Pepper bread gives higher morale bonus (4 more compared to surf 'n' turf) and is completely free as well if wild planting. The initial setup is indeed a hassle (though that can be simplified with mods that modify pips planting rule while maintaining the same plant density). The only effective downside is the huge amount of space that wild farms occupy, though space isn't really a scarce resource. Frost burgers are much more space efficient, but the extra food quality gives a better morale bonus only to Gourmet dupes (for the others, the morale gain is the same). They have the advantage of stress reduction, which is totally useless imo, and the significant downside of -2 athletics, which is why I've never chose them. 

[Olleus]

1 hour ago, suxkar said:

Pepper bread gives higher morale bonus (4 more compared to surf 'n' turf) and is completely free as well if wild planting. The initial setup is indeed a hassle (though that can be simplified with mods that modify pips planting rule while maintaining the same plant density). The only effective downside is the huge amount of space that wild farms occupy, though space isn't really a scarce resource. Frost burgers are much more space efficient, but the extra food quality gives a better morale bonus only to Gourmet dupes (for the others, the morale gain is the same). They have the advantage of stress reduction, which is totally useless imo, and the significant downside of -2 athletics, which is why I've never chose them. 

Wild farming isn't completely free. Not only is there the space requirement you mention, there's also the dupe time for harvesting (not negligible when you consider the large space requirement) and the need to main the correct atmosphere and temperature (and possibly lighting level). The temperature in particular is a major point, especially for sleet wheat.

[suxkar]

16 minutes ago, Olleus said:

Wild farming isn't completely free. Not only is there the space requirement you mention, there's also the dupe time for harvesting (not negligible when you consider the large space requirement) and the need to main the correct atmosphere and temperature (and possibly lighting level). The temperature in particular is a major point, especially for sleet wheat.

I guess you know it already, but you can skip dupe harvesting all together. Plants that aren't harvested while ready become stiffled, but drop their normal product after 1 (i think) cycle and reset their growth (they basically harvest themselves). Since for wildplants the time to grow is already high, 1 cycle doesn't make much of a difference. For sleet wheat it takes like less than 5% more plants to compensate for the "increased" harvest times.

Everything can be 100% automated.

Yes, it is pretty much necessary to build cooling, but that is just a "una tantum" effort to build piping and a steam turbine setup that is gonna work pretty much never with proper insulation (you only have to counteract the sweepers/loaders activity, which is EXTREMELY scarse). In the long run a one time dupe cost is gonna be less than a small but consistent dupe time cost, and my choice offers +4 morale. You could argue that a power cost, even if small, is still consistent as well, and I would say that I always overproduce power. In the end is just personal preference, I can see my preference can be not ideal for someone that doesn't share my choices powerwise. In the end, imo, dupe time is the most inefficient and yet most needed resource (unless one goes for extremes), so I will always prefer a constant cost to a "linear" cost (with a good bonus of 4 extra morale).

[Olleus]

I think autodrop for plants takes 4 cycles? I've never relied on it myself.

 

But you are, of course, right. If you automate everything, and all the shipping, and enclose everything in good insulation, then you save dupe time. The trade off between Pacu 'n' Vole and wild Pepper bread is that the latter gives +4 morale but: requires vastly more space, has a much more complicated set up with Pip planting, requires larger initial material set up to build the larger volume of automation necessary (and the cooling), and needs a little extra power required to keep going.

I agree that it isn't entirely as 1 sided as I first thought. But the sheer simplicity of Pacu 'n' Vole shouldn't be underestimated. Do you want to increase your food capacity to house more dupes? No building or restructuring required, just turn your nurseries back on and after a couple of cycles max your set to feed another dupe. I also don't know how early it can be set up, but if you have a quick dig to space to catch some Vole eggs it out to be plausible to go straight from eating Meallice to Pacu 'n' Vole by cycle 150 or so. Can sufficient quantities of wild planted food be organised on that sort of time scale?

[suxkar]

There is no doubt that what you are proposing is far more practical.
Surf 'n' turf is very simple to set up and modify. I would have chosen it (or just stayed on barbeque) if I didn't use the simple pip rules mod.
As I said, as a personal preference, I prefer optimized late game, though, again, I wouldn't have EVEN DREAMT of going for pepperbread if I had to wild plant almost 600 plants with pips. WIthout the simplified rules it would take 1000 cycles alone, requiring constant micromanagement.

[psusi]

17 minutes ago, suxkar said:

WIthout the simplified rules it would take 1000 cycles alone, requiring constant micromanagement.

What simplified rules?

[suxkar]

I mean the mod, pip simplified rules. You can customize the rules, but by default they are simplified to "will plant only if there are no plants in a 1 tile radius". On average, the density is the same, unless you abuse height. The (immense) gain is that you can just build 1 ladder every 2 tiles, drop seeds and pips and let them go at it with no other interaction, as opposed to normal planting rules, in which you have to continually deconstruct ladders for every successful planting.

I've done 1 playthrough with normal planting and 1 with cooking tiles, I will never do that to myself again.

[Olleus]

To underlie the simplicity of pacu 'n' vole here are some sandboxed designs for the ranch and aquarium. These are not optimal, but they are very simple. Firstly the voles:

Left hand side is the nursery part, and the right hand side is the starvation ranch. No automation and the only shipping is to separate the egg shells from the meat and send it to the relevant part of the colony (abstracted as the receptacles on top). And, of course, making sure the eggs are always off the floor and (while I'm growing the pop) in the incubators. In practice I was too lazy to ship regolith all the way from the space biome and just have a dupe bringing a few tons down occasionally into a storage container. Note that, having played for a while with this, I've now got an improvement for the design for my next attempt. A second starvation ranch WITHOUT a grooming station for the wild vole I find in the space biome or that the printing pod gives me - this cuts down slightly on the grooming time required. 

The Pacu aquarium is even simpler. Nursery is on the left, and the critter counter opens the shipping shutoff if critters+egg > 2, Setting up the nursery with 1 egg insures that there will either be 2 pacu's on the left, or 1 pacu and 1 egg, they should never both die at the same time. The egg is placed on the top left to prevent it going round in circles on the shipping; when it hatches, it flops around until it gets back into the pool. When you've hit steady population, you can set this to 0 to empty out the nursery (bringing in a new egg manually later if you need a larger pacu pop).The starvation aquarium does nothing but collect egg shells and fillets separately. The critter counter is just there for manual reading. Note that, as this section must must be open to the general base to prevent cramping, it's actually super hard to count how many pacus there are. Simplest solution is to occasionally build a door, read off the critter counter, than destroy the door.