How do I actually start getting food out of shove voles?

[Lilscratchy]

Okay so, recently I found that my main source of food, bristle berries, along with domesticated arbor trees are kind of a strain on my water supply and I actually can do without them. 

Easy, I decided to switch over to shove vole farming. I've got an 8 by 8 square room of refined metals, with insulated tiles along the outside since I'm keeping them in my base. 

In it is two conveyor receptacles, and autosweeper, auto miner, a grooming station and some critter feeders. 

I'm good on regolith, the voles are happy. I've managed to find some eggs and also got 3 from the printing pod. Easy so far. 

I've been breeding them up, there's 20 at the moment with 8 eggs in the pen. 

Now here is my issue:

I have yet to gain a single calorie from them. Do I just keep breeding them until the first ones start dying off? Or is there another way? I could use a drowning chamber...matter of fact I have one ready, but no voles ready to be put in yet.  

I feel like I'm missing something obvious. Maybe I'm dumb, never had a huge knack for farming critters for food in this game anyway. 

 

 

[psusi]

I'm not sure what you are looking for.  Of course you don't get any food out of them until they die, so obviously you either need to wait until they die of old age, or kill some.  Kill 4 of the oldest ones now and you'll have enough BBQ to feed 8 dupes for 8 cycles.  By then you should have some more eggs laid and the 8 eggs you have now hatched, and you can kill 4 more of them.  If you have a pacu farm you can make surf and turf and feed even more dupes.

[beowulf2010]

The key with critter ranching is to either be patient and wait for them to die of old age (150 cycles is a long time though) or set up a kill room for all extra critters past your breeding stock. 

Some people set up automated drowning rooms for hatched critters. I personally just dump extra eggs in an escape proof water filled room and just let them hatch and drown in their own time. 

[Lilscratchy]

Well I have seen people use do things like automatically having them drowned after they lay an egg. 

I'm kind of clueless as to how to do such things. 

It was more of a worry that I have invested a lot of time and resources into automating regolith collection and all that good stuff to find out my build is lacking. I have plenty of food reserves to last me quite some time. 

Gues I'll have to do some remodeling and separate the eggs from my voles. And incubate them. I was hoping to do it without incubators but that's just going to take a lot of time I suppose, time I might not have. 

Thanks for your input though, things actually clicked now and I know what to do! 

[Baer]

I usual make a tiny box out of refined metal and store all eggs in it, what i found, and then forgot about it. same with pacus out of the printer. there drop in my massive emergency water tank right under my base with little automation. besides last time, i had the idea to mix pacus with pokeshells to safe space. Not my greatest moment, and for the pacus too. 

[Nedix]

My setup looks like this and I didn't bother with a kill room. As previously said, it will take some time for them to "produce" meat but in time it will build up nicely. I've built multiple incubators because I missed the comb rooms on the right where you deliver whatever is on top of the initial ranch - if you already have 20 critters in the ranch then no more will be delivered. The incubators inside the ranch ignore that and release the voles in the ranch as soon as they reach maturity.

[SamLogan]

1 hour ago, Lilscratchy said:

Now here is my issue:

I have yet to gain a single calorie from them. Do I just keep breeding them until the first ones start dying off? Or is there another way? I could use a drowning chamber...matter of fact I have one ready, but no voles ready to be put in yet.  

I feel like I'm missing something obvious. Maybe I'm dumb, never had a huge knack for farming critters for food in this game anyway.

Here's how to generate millions of Kcalories with shove vole :

1. Feed and ranch them until to have around 20-40 creatures.

2. Create a room with many ranch station (1 for 8 shove vole) without feeder. You need 1 Duplicant / 8 creatures.

The concept is to groom them as well they die quickly but not too much as well they have enough time to lay an egg.

You will have a meat every 10-15 cycles / creatures.

See this :