Easy pacu farm

[SeerBird]

Here's a nice midgame automated pacu farm for people with tonnes of algae:

Fully automated, spends 5-10W on average when has 60-120 pacus in the small pool. Don't know if the power consumption rises rapidly after, but it probably doesn't. It also produces crazy amounts of egg shells. I prefer to dump about 30 tonnes algae in it without time restrictions and then take the easy food(30 tonnes of algae lets you supply about 8 dupes with food)

I think you could figure out the perfectly efficient timings for pacu feeding, but, considering ONI bugs like pacus getting stuck for no reason or lagging eating/defecating animations, I guess it's very hard

The critter sensor is set on (above 0) or (above 1) and the door system is like that:

All in all, it's pretty easy to build, very easy to maintain and, at some point, provides you with infinite food.

It's also easily stackable.

[SeerBird]

Any suggestions for improvements? Pacu feeding maths?

 

[Nxf7]

Is the purpose of the door under the feeder just to let the player disable the breeder once they have enough pacu?

As for anyone wanting to replicate it, is this exactly how you would build it in survival yourself, with a visco gel lock and all insulated tiles? Also the player may need to understand that they can't build it right up against something to the right of it; because the starvation pacu stack needs 8 tiles of space otherwise they get the Confined status. 

3 hours ago, GovorunBird said:

Any suggestions for improvements? Pacu feeding maths?

It doesn't look like it would have any major issues. Not sure what you're asking about Pacu feeding maths. This is just an algae dump design right, or did you want to explore algae restriction method, where you only load feeders 1kg/cycle?

Technically age:0 pacu fry are dropped in and they don't get reproduction benefit until 5 cycles later. I've been playing around with unpowered incubators as an alternative method of replenishing the breeder, because they won't leave the incubator until they are a mature Pacu.

The left design is how to use an incubator correctly. There will be exactly 2 Pacu in there at all times.
The right design fails because the sweeper that loads the incubator is highly likely to load it with an old egg that will hatch sooner. Eventually there will be 3 at a time and since it only has enough water for 2 Pacu, this ruins the breeding and it never recovers for long until it's halted again.

[SeerBird]

Yeah, I was talking about algae restriction methods. Thanks for the build!

21 minutes ago, Nxf7 said:

did you want to explore algae restriction method

 

I thought that the door with the timer could help reduce algae consumption while not reducing effectiveness, but it seems it's not the best way

[StoneToad]

When I did some testing, I successfully had only 1kg delivered to the feeder with the door powered and the timer set for 1s green (and 599s red if you're just trying to keep the buff on, haven't done much with optimizing the feeding rates for non-purging designs).

 

Does the sweeper have too much else to do even with the feeder set to priority 9? In that case, what about putting the sweeper arm on it's own circuit and using a watt sensor like so (sorry, can't run the game and mock up a screenshot atm, if it's not clear I can post one later)

timer -> counter set to 1 -> and gate inputs <- watt sensor green on 0w

and gate output -> 1s buffer -> powered door

and gate output -> counter reset

So the idea is to use the power draw of the arm to detect when it's idle, and only then open the door for the fish feeder.  Theoretically it should work.

 

 

That said, you know what they say about theory and practice.

[ghkbrew]

On 8/16/2020 at 10:11 AM, GovorunBird said:

Yeah, I was talking about algae restriction methods.

I've been using a modified version of @Nxf7's farm here.  One of it's (many) cool features is a very reliable 1kg/cycle feeding method.  The idea is to load the algae onto a shipping rail in 1kg chunks, then once per cycle open the conveyor chute for 1s to drop out exactly 1 chunk.

I've played around restricting the sweeper by automation or with doors and it seems to be much more finicky.  The length of time the sweeper has to be active seems to depends on how far the arm has to move.  If you interrupt the sweeper in the middle of an action it will drop the algae, so you have to give it exactly the amount of time to perform 1 action (no more no less).  What's worse is the needed time seems to be game speed dependent.