The Aquamaton

[Saturnus]

When discussing automated Pacu farms it's a contentious subject if you want it compact or fast breeding, and if you want high or low algae cost which in turn affects breeding speed. So I thought, why not all of the above? And let's make it a good old square box that's easy to tesselate. And without further ado here it is.

First, let me explain the different parts of the build

For Pacus to lay eggs before dying they must be in a tile of water, there must be 8 tiles in total, and there must not be eggs in the same room. Those conditions are fulfilled in the aquarium part.

For Pacus to breed, ie. gain reproduction from feeding, they must be in 8 tiles of water and there must not be eggs in the same room. Those conditions are fulfilled in the breeders.

The hatchers are a bit special here, and divided in two. One part makes a Pacu ready for dropping into the breeder when the Pacu in that dies. The Pacu can "flop" several cycles there after hatching. The other part drops hatched Pacus into the aquarium. It's important to note that even if the door next the feeding station is open a Pacu dropping from the top will ALWAYS chose the aquarium pool, and NOT the breeder because the aquarium pool of water is closer by one tile.

To make it a bit clearer here's how it works. Hatched Pacus can only flop in the direction indicated by a green arrow. And under no circumstance in the direction indicated by a red arrow.

Here's the sweeper point of interest set up. The arrows point to the sweeper in question. And the sweeper "sees" the points indicated by squares of that colour.

The aquarium pool in blue can be reached by all the sweepers.

The yellow sweeper cleans up egg shells because it's the only sweeper that can reach those locations where Pacus hatch. It cannot reach neither the egg conveyor loaders nor the feeding stations so it ignores eggs and algae.

The green sweeper collects meat, eggs and polluted dirt to the respective loaders. And it delivers the algae dropped by the right chute to the left feeding station.
The red sweeper is the same except it delivers algae dropped by the left chute to the right feeding station.

Before the overlay spoilers there just one thing to ask: To cool or let cool? If you don't actively cool the setup it'll equalize around 30c which is too hot for gulp fish to breed and lay eggs in. So the general advice is to actively cool it to between 10c and 25c.

However, since it will actually equalize to about 30c by itself you can also use it as a low strength base cooler at the cost of a tiny bit more algae as 2% of the Pacus (those that by random chance are gulp fish) will die without producing eggs so you need to make up for that by constantly breeding an extra Pacu once in a while. This is probably the best idea with this set up as it has automated feeding stop so that a reproduction overshoot will even itself out by the population of gulp fishes dying off.

Automation overlay

Spoiler

Critter sensors are a little annoying in that they are always green on a reload so you have to account for that in the design by either adding a delay filter or by inverting the settings needed for a positive result. However, also note that critter sensor will also pulse green when a Pacu hatches or matures as it does not register any critters for a fraction of a second so you also have to account for that in the design. Here both methods are used to avoid any chance that you might get two Pacus drop into either of the breeders.

The breeder critter sensors are set to only count critters and goes green if below 1 and through a 5s delay activates the door so a new Pacu can drop.

The hatcher critter sensors are set to count both critters and eggs and goes green if above 0. Though a NOT that is inverted to open the chute if there's no egg or pacu in the breeder hatcher.

The top timer is the egg conveyor loader timer. It's set to 1s on and 2s off. This is to make sure that there's at least 2 spaces between eggs on the rails eliminating any possibility of two eggs being dropped into the breeder hatcher part.

The bottom timer is the feeder timer. It's set to an equal amount on and off because it drives the counters set up as positive edge detectors by setting them to 1, and joining the output and reset (I know that in theory advanced mode does the same without connecting reset to the output but I've seen it fail to many times to trust it), and then opening the chute through a 1s buffer gate. A NOT gate makes sure that the two chutes alternates dropping algae, and since each drop zone and feeding station can only be seen by one sweeper that makes sure the feeding stations are delivered an equal amount of algae.

For example if the timer sensor is set to 60s on and 60s off then each feeding station is being delivered 20kg of algae 5 times per cycle. That means a Pacu should produce an average of 10 eggs in the on average 15 cycles it's in the breeder.

The aquarium critter sensor is the feeder stop. In the vanilla game the critter sensor only goes up to 64 critters but that's actually quite a lot especially if you're using the fillets for surf'n'turf. Remember that the critter sensor only counts the critters in the pool which is only 5/6th to total amount when you include the eggs. And that the breeder (and it's hatcher) effectively counts a 4 critters. Also note that the life cycle of a Pacu is 30 cycles. 5 cycles as an egg, 5 cycles as a fry, and 20 cycles as an adult. If the sensor goes green it overrides the feeding timer from switching and thereby stops the feeding.

If we refer to the https://oni-assistant.com/tools/foodcalculator then we find that for surf'n'turf for 12 dupes you need 2 fillets per cycle which is equal to a sensor setting of green above 47 critters (no eggs) as (47*6/5)+4 / 30 = 2.013(3). Add 2% to the critter sensor setting if not cooled as discussed above.

Should a maximum setting of 64 not suffice for your needs you can install the No sensor limit mod

Shipping overlay

Spoiler

The conveyor set up is as simple as possible. The loaders and chutes in red are the egg delivery system. The chutes in green delivers the algae. And the loaders in yellow ships out egg shells, polluted dirt, and pacu fillets.

Here the algae comes in from the left. And outputs goes to the right. As you can see it's easy to imagine that it's simple to set up multiple of these next to each other as you just continue the algae and output lines.  

EDIT: Added the conveyor loader timer after some of the pictures was made so it does not appear on all images except the ones where it matters.

[Hokaeru]

Time to get alot of resin !

[DimaB77]

Sorry to pry into your topic, but it seems to me that you are overcomplicating.

[Saturnus]

Just now, DimaB77 said:

Sorry to pry into your topic, but it seems to me that you are overcomplicating.

No. We've all made those open designs for years now, and we know why they're rubbish. Mine is the ultimate end-all version. 

[DimaB77]

I must have missed something, but what's wrong with open farms?

And by the way, it's not an open farm.

[AncientGammoner]

Seems to me the main limitation with Pacu setups will always be the amount of algae you have to grow the number of eggs, and for maximum algae efficiency you only need to feed a Pacu 1kg of algae four times (once per cycle) as an adult prior to it starting to starve.  This will yield 3 eggs before the Pacu starves to death, 1 serves as replacement and 2 eggs are gained, so it requires 2kg of algae per new egg (1 ton of algae will yield 500 eggs).

I don't really use Pacu (prefer shove voles myself) but I did find a working automation playing around in sandbox awhile back.  Basically it involves using cycle sensors/signal counters and reading two critter sensors (one set to egg/one set to critter) in the hatching room to count the number of cycles after it hatches to only drop it in the tank when it's an adult (it flops during this time), then dispense exactly four cycles worth of 1kg algae feedings.  Just food for thought.

[Saturnus]

To be honest ultralow algae cost breeders is really only of academic interest as algae is a plentiful resource. On any standard Terra map you have a minimum of 400 tonnes of it available, 600t that becomes 300t when dug, and 600t of slime that when dug and converted into algae becomes another 100t. Add to that almost all map seeds have 2 organic mass planet which is an indefinite source of algae. As long as you have some control over the consumption rate and don't just allow Pacus to eat what they can then you're probably going to be fine.

Even with an extremely fast breeder setting for this build it takes less than 10t of algae to grow a population of 50 Pacus. And even though that's about 100 times more algae per Pacu than an extremely slow breeder, it's still an insignificant amount because it's a one time investment.

Of course, that requires switching away from oxygen diffusers as early as possible because that's the real algae sink with every dupe requiring 66kg of it per cycle. 12 dupes will use almost 80t of algae over 100 cycles.

[AncientGammoner]

50 Pacu will feed only 3 dupes indefinitely, my current map (Oassisse) had less than 60t of algae total, at 10t per 50 I would be limited to 18 dupes, that's if I never used oxygen diffusers.  So it does seem like algae consumption is a factor on some maps.  Also, 'extremely slow' is relative, if you're playing for thousands of cycles the time it takes is less important compared to the consumption of a non-renewable (or difficult to renew from asteroid) resource.  And it's not like with any of these designs you can't just copy it and build 10, 20, 50 of them.

[Nxf7]

@AncientGammoner 50 pacu for 3 dupes seems like just fillet alone, not surf and turf which isn't a problem on any map, but you do you.

This thread's design obviously isn't a (basically) zero algae cost build. In my opinion my two designs do that as efficiently and bug-free as possible: https://forums.kleientertainment.com/forums/topic/124030-all-in-one-pacu-guide-a-farm-for-every-need/

With regards to this topic, I'm not seeing much advantage over a larger design that allows 1 large breeding pool with no limit to the breeder pacu (My 1st design above) which allows faster spool up time and very little resource cost. Although freely feeding Pacu does cost 42t of algae per 100 pacu (it doubles from 21t due to a bug with Fish Feeder), I'm not sure if this design circumvents that or your quoted "10t per 50 pacu" is accurate.

[Craigjw]

Can't you just build mesh tiles below the 8 tile breeder tank and extend it however large you want, the fish will think it's a super huge tank, but still be confined to the 8 tiles.  Unless they fixed that of course.

@DimaB77 Open designs suck in general, as it's always a battle stopping your dupes interfering, picking up eggs and delivering them elsewhere for one. Also, @Saturnus doesn't overcomplicate things, they are quite the opposite in fact.

I've seen and used a lot of fish breeding designs and this one is by far the best design, by miles.

[DimaB77]

3 hours ago, Craigjw said:

Can't you just build mesh tiles below the 8 tile breeder tank and extend it however large you want, the fish will think it's a super huge tank, but still be confined to the 8 tiles.  Unless they fixed that of course.

I have a mesh tile located in a 64 tile pool, and the 8 Pacu's are doing just fine.

3 hours ago, Craigjw said:

Open designs suck in general, as it's always a battle stopping your dupes interfering, picking up eggs and delivering them elsewhere for one

I suggest exactly a closed farm (although I used an open version at the base). This is clearly visible in the screenshot.

[degr]

open pacu farm for food and design 

[Saturnus]

21 hours ago, Craigjw said:

Can't you just build mesh tiles below the 8 tile breeder tank and extend it however large you want, the fish will think it's a super huge tank, but still be confined to the 8 tiles.  Unless they fixed that of course.

The problem is you'll want to fed just one pacu with one feeding station, otherwise you have no control over how much each Pacu is fed. That's probably fine if you don't mind overfeeding. For a design that has scalable reproduction rate like this you need absolute control over which pacu eats how much. That's also why so much effort has gone into ensuring that there can literally never be two pacus in one breeder.

That's actually a good example of why the open design falls flat on it's face so often. It uses door to control which pacus goes where, and that is riddled with chances to go wrong, like co-current hatchings and slow opening/closing times makes room for error. That's why my design uses chutes to control where the eggs go, and after that the doors play no role in determining the pacus ultimate destinations.