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How to think about ranching inefficiency


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2 hours ago, Soulwind said:

I started with 3 normal hatches, and now on cycle 125 there are 17 stone hatches + 13 stone hatch eggs in the room.

And that's because during the day they go burrow into the two dirt tiles and ignore the cramped debuff?  Doesn't that mean that you can only groom them at night?

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14 hours ago, nakomaru said:

Personally, I think they are the best. You can rapidly spawn more in a breeding chamber and drop the rest into a 1x1 cell, where they cycle fast and drop big shells, and have no maintenance. Make 50 if you want, or 100. You won't be short on lime for long.

Those pokeshells in the 1x1 room won't reproduce right ? If so, isn't better to keep a small population of groomed unfed pokeshells if polluted dirt is an issue ?

Trying to understand this as I'm in the process of setting this up and lost my first wave of pokeshells that were unfed and ungroomed but tamed.

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2 hours ago, Edoc_ said:

Those pokeshells in the 1x1 room won't reproduce right ? If so, isn't better to keep a small population of groomed unfed pokeshells if polluted dirt is an issue ?

Trying to understand this as I'm in the process of setting this up and lost my first wave of pokeshells that were unfed and ungroomed but tamed.

@nakomaru is referring to pacus here.

Groomed unfed pokeshells still drop 2 molds during their lifetime, If I understand what happens correctly, they stay happy for a while consuming calories at high rate (400%) and having a high reproduction rate (16.67%). When their initial calories expire, they become starving/glum. The reproduction rate is down to 1.67%. They lay an egg and die. It seems to me the life cycle should be about 20c from birth? That's less than 6c for  groomed fed pokeshells. I have to try to see how effective they are.

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10 hours ago, psusi said:

And that's because during the day they go burrow into the two dirt tiles and ignore the cramped debuff?  Doesn't that mean that you can only groom them at night?

Yes, they can only be groomed at night.  That's why I have 2 grooming stations in there.  I have my hatch ranchers on night shift.  I have another rancher in the day shift to take care of the dreckos.

They never keep all of them groomed at all times, but so far it's not made a huge difference in population growth and there's so many of them that there's plenty of coal being made.  Or at least that's the way it seems to me.

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The thing with ranching is you need to think about what you are getting over what you are giving up.  Most critter diets use something you'll have an infinite amount of in exchange for something that's limited, so you trade dupe time for that limited resource.

 

Hatches are a simple, early game food source that cost some of the millions of rocks on your asteroid to provide power, food, and early access to lime and aren't affected by atmosphere or temperature as much as plants are.  If you are playing on an asteroid where temperature control is difficult, here's an easy fix for that.

Dreckos cost dirt/nothing to get plastic/reed fiber vs using oil/polluted water.  Plus I believe it's the only method to get phosphorite which is needed for fertilizer/wheezeworts/pincha peppers.

Pips are great if you can trap them in a room with naturally growing trees, as they then become a free dirt, meat, and lime source which helps with keeping your drecko population going.

Voles are amazing food source.  Stuff hundreds in a room and just run a rail from your surface to their cage to feed them the infinite regolith from the sky.  If you are low on food, kill 1 and get 16Kcals of food vs the 3.2Kcal most critters give.

Slicksters are just a powerless Co2 scrubber that produces oil/petrol, food, and lime vs polluted water.  If you run Coal, Nat gas, or Petrol generators, it's a way to convert some of that waste into usable stuff.

Pufts are fairly worthless, but they do work as a powerless bleach stone/oxylite maker.

Pokeshells require so much polluted dirt to function that you need a huge system working to keep up with them, so it's often better to just keep them wild.  They do provide a free way to get rid of polluted dirt though so instead of investing dupe time into flipping compost, you can just dump it here and get sand instead.

Pacu are tricky.  I don't tame all of them as it's just a ton of algae for little returns.  What I do is tame one and let it lay eggs and move all those eggs into a secondary tank.  That secondary tank is not fed and, luckily, will continue to produce fish fillets for me forever as Pacu lay an egg before starving, thus keeping the population of this tank stable.  Once you figure out how many pacu you need, you feed your breeder fish to meet that number and then never need to feed them again, so while I don't really "ranch" them in the traditional sense, I do get them to the number I need and then go back to ignoring them forever.

 

Most of this game is about seeing what you have vs what you need and figuring out how to get there. 

If you have tons of power, then just scrubbing Co2 is a simple system to set up that costs no dupe time after you set up the scrubber, sieve, and sweeper.  Or you train a dupe to pet a few slicksters and convert the Co2 instead.  Is the dupe time worth the food, lime, and oil you'd get?  That's what you have to decide on.  Normally I have so much Co2 from power production that I would rather get a little back from it rather than just scrub it or vent it to space and I need the lime for steel anyway so why not.

 

It's mostly just personal preference though.  Nothing is required of you in this game.  If you'd rather not ranch, don't.  It shouldn't hurt your gameplay.

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11 hours ago, TheMule said:

@nakomaru is referring to pacus here.

Groomed unfed pokeshells still drop 2 molds during their lifetime, If I understand what happens correctly, they stay happy for a while consuming calories at high rate (400%) and having a high reproduction rate (16.67%). When their initial calories expire, they become starving/glum. The reproduction rate is down to 1.67%. They lay an egg and die. It seems to me the life cycle should be about 20c from birth? That's less than 6c for  groomed fed pokeshells. I have to try to see how effective they are.

Oh right !

Yes that's it, i just had my 2nd attempt with groomed unfed pokeshells and it's as you described.

At 11 cycles they lay their egg, at 24 cycles they die. So they hang around in the pen beeing groomed for 13 cycles for nothing, i'm thinking about a way to move them after that to let them starve somewhere else but i'm still unsure how to do it in a rather simple way without making a ranch per pokeshell and counting the cycles which would also be less efficient for the rancher in terms of movement.

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11 hours ago, Edoc_ said:

Oh right !

Yes that's it, i just had my 2nd attempt with groomed unfed pokeshells and it's as you described.

At 11 cycles they lay their egg, at 24 cycles they die. So they hang around in the pen beeing groomed for 13 cycles for nothing, i'm thinking about a way to move them after that to let them starve somewhere else but i'm still unsure how to do it in a rather simple way without making a ranch per pokeshell and counting the cycles which would also be less efficient for the rancher in terms of movement.

I have thought of that in the past (for shove voles). I think you can do that with single critter stables, you can have a door open and let the pokeshell out when there's an egg inside. Then you can drop the pokeshell in an evolution chamber or a big common room or even just leave it there. The thing is you don't need to groom it any longer once you have the egg.
It might work for larger stables if all the critters have the same age... if you have N critter of the same age you can set the critter sensor to either N x 2 critters/eggs or N eggs. You need a dropper on the other side of the door. And a memory gate to control it: something like, set  when eggs = N reset  when critters = 0 (you need two sensors). It's a bit more risky than the single stable version.

 

How do you get critters of the same age? Well I think, eggs in a bin don't hatch. So you can put all eggs in a basket... ehm, bin, and keep them there. They loose viabilitly (my understanding is that there's a chance they'll turn into raw eggs) but the hatching timer starts at the same time for all eggs when you drop them out of the bin. So you can say set a bin for 8kg and collect 8 eggs in there, you then drop them and they should hatch at the same time (of course assuming they have been moved to the bin right after being laid). Of course the longer they stay in the bin, the higher the chance to loose one egg. And the whole process is kinda ruined (well you have one critter less in the stable, big deal).
 

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Maybe using single critter drowning ranches. When critter but no egg is present -> groom, when critter and egg is present -> drown. incubator and groom station should fit into a singles farm. Automation for fast drowning could be a challenge, maybe with door compressors.

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35 minutes ago, TheMule said:

I have thought of that in the past (for shove voles). I think you can do that with single critter stables, you can have a door open and let the pokeshell out when there's an egg inside. Then you can drop the pokeshell in an evolution chamber or a big common room or even just leave it there. The thing is you don't need to groom it any longer once you have the egg.
It might work for larger stables if all the critters have the same age... if you have N critter of the same age you can set the critter sensor to either N x 2 critters/eggs or N eggs. You need a dropper on the other side of the door. And a memory gate to control it: something like, set  when eggs = N reset  when critters = 0 (you need two sensors). It's a bit more risky than the single stable version.

 

How do you get critters of the same age? Well I think, eggs in a bin don't hatch. So you can put all eggs in a basket... ehm, bin, and keep them there. They loose viabilitly (my understanding is that there's a chance they'll turn into raw eggs) but the hatching timer starts at the same time for all eggs when you drop them out of the bin. So you can say set a bin for 8kg and collect 8 eggs in there, you then drop them and they should hatch at the same time (of course assuming they have been moved to the bin right after being laid). Of course the longer they stay in the bin, the higher the chance to loose one egg. And the whole process is kinda ruined (well you have one critter less in the stable, big deal).
 

Single stable version seems more reliant, any percent of lost viability means the population will drop over the long run.

 

I was thinking about a sub optimal approach about the synchronization of the egg timer.

Starting with sychronized eggs with the basket as you described and incubate them roughly at the same time, spawns get moved to the stable and whenever they lay the 8th egg (using conveyor element sensor to count them so you can start incubate them right away) and dropped in another room then  it disable the grooming station or lock the doors and start over in a second stable the time the other pokeshells evolve in the first one. You would loose a couple of cycles due to dysinchronization of eggs over time but the bigger the population the more eggs there are, the better chances to have eggs ready around the same time.

Still unsure if i'll implement it tho.

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1 hour ago, psusi said:

No, they simply expire when the viability reaches zero.

Does this means that between 1 and 100% viability, nothing can happen to the egg when it reaches 100% incubation ?

Now that i read the tooltip i realise i'm misunderstanding it, it simply says "at 0% viability a critter egg will crack and produce a raw egg and egg shell".

This means sychronization of incubation timer in a storage bin temporarily might be possible without losses.

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2 hours ago, TheMule said:

How do you get critters of the same age? Well I think, eggs in a bin don't hatch. So you can put all eggs in a basket... ehm, bin, and keep them there. They loose viabilitly (my understanding is that there's a chance they'll turn into raw eggs)

If you bury them in solid tiles they will not incubate, but will also not lose viability.

To do this easily, trap them in a door.

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Micromanaging this much will make you go crazy.

And yes, they turn into shells and raw eggs at 0% viability with a 100% chance.

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17 minutes ago, Edoc_ said:

Does this means that between 1 and 100% viability, nothing can happen to the egg when it reaches 100% incubation ?

To be clear, it will hatch 100% of the time at 100% incubation, and break 100% of the time at 0% viability, and undergo no material changes any other time.

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20 minutes ago, nakomaru said:

To do this easily, trap them in a door.

 

Very good to know thanks ! 

I just tested and unfortunatelly critter sensor do not detect them while in the door beeing closed.

22 minutes ago, nakomaru said:

Micromanaging this much will make you go crazy.

There is potential to automate a way to double the output of groomed unfed pokeshells. But maybe it's just simpler to add another regular stable and get more this way.

 

25 minutes ago, nakomaru said:

Well, it will hatch 100% of the time at 100% incubation, and break 100% of the time at 0% viability, and undergo no material changes any other time.

Ok simpler than i thought, and easier to manage as well, thanks.

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20 hours ago, psusi said:

No, they simply expire when the viability reaches zero.

Well, that's even better. You can automate collecting eggs in bins and either when you have 8 of them or after 9 cycles you drop them somewhere. Or even setup a notification that reminds you to do so. All you have to do is deconstruct the bin. Once the stable is up and running you don't have to do anything else.

 

19 hours ago, nakomaru said:

If you bury them in solid tiles they will not incubate, but will also not lose viability.

To do this easily, trap them in a door

I know but that sounds buggy to me, and it is possible they fix it in the future.

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I'm trying to figure out why people use "evolution" chambers.  Isn't it better (I don't mean ethically) to send your extra creatures somewhere where they don't get groomed, and not even fed (unless you want to get rid of stuff), and maybe drop an egg before they die of starvation or old age?  You end up with the same amount of meat in the long run, and probably more since some of the gulag critters will reproduce, right?

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1 hour ago, Sigma Cypher said:

I'm trying to figure out why people use "evolution" chambers.  Isn't it better (I don't mean ethically) to send your extra creatures somewhere where they don't get groomed, and not even fed (unless you want to get rid of stuff), and maybe drop an egg before they die of starvation or old age?  You end up with the same amount of meat in the long run, and probably more since some of the gulag critters will reproduce, right?

What's an "evolution chamber"?  I try to keep extra, ungroomed, unfed critters in a room where they can hopefully still reproduce once before they die.

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23 hours ago, Sigma Cypher said:

I'm trying to figure out why people use "evolution" chambers.  Isn't it better (I don't mean ethically) to send your extra creatures somewhere where they don't get groomed, and not even fed (unless you want to get rid of stuff), and maybe drop an egg before they die of starvation or old age?  You end up with the same amount of meat in the long run, and probably more since some of the gulag critters will reproduce, right?

Ungroomed unfed tame critters don't usually drop an egg. They die first.

Also, the most common critter kind ranched for food is hatches, and they eat meat. So when one of them dies, the sweepers may not be able to move all the meat before some other hatch has a bite at it.

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