puft Flying Pez Dispenser

[Occam Blazer]

I've been using polluted water offgassing for oxygen production for a while now and decided it might be fun to try ranching pufts for food. It is not fun, but I built a thing that works pretty well so here's a convoluted way to auto-populate ranches with flying creatures.

I've been running this ranch for 700-800 cycles so I can say it is mostly stable.

Otto is excited.

A pez-dispenser style ranch filler uses a critter dropper over stacked ranches to automatically populate a ranch when the room is short on critters. Three are a few designs floating around on the forum that work great. If your critters fly though they can't be dropped and must be herded into their pens. I encourage the flappers to go the right place with a waterfall once released from the mouth of the pez dispenser.

I set up six ranches with six pufts each, which is enough for 15-16 dupes with a little cooked fish to supplement.

The whole system is pretty crowded because it's all condensed down. I'll take you on a tour.

Spoiler

Here's the waterfall in action. There's a puft drowning in the waterfall headed for the one open door. (how to create a three-tile wide waterfall)

The pez dispenser is simple enough.

Spoiler

Puftlet eggs are sorted elsewhere and come in on a rail and are deposited in a cubicle if it does not contain an egg. Pufts progress right-to-left towards the waterfall. The mesh door is locked behind them if there is a critter in the cubicle. Sometimes it gets crowded, but they sort themselves out.

The leftmost cubicle (just before they get to the waterfall) only opens when a ranch is short on critters. The waterfall door opens when a ranch says it needs critters and there is one on deck. There's a signal switch just in case Otto gets trapped in the final cubicle for some dumb dupe reason. They can climb up and out of all the other cubicles.

The waterfall turns on whenever there is a critter in the chute.

Spoiler

Automation is pretty simple. Sensor says there's a critter in the chute. Passes through a 2 second filter (because critter sensors flash green on load). Then it keeps the waterfall on for an extra 31 seconds after a critter leaves the chute to reduce the likelihood a critter is hanging out in a door between rooms.

The switch is there because I had to work out some kinks with the waterfall and that gave me a way to turn it on at will. Plus it's kinda fun to watch.

Each ranch has two doors. One for dupe access and one to admit new critters to the room.

Spoiler

Princes are kept on their own lonely balcony. I snagged this idea from @Gouflax (here). There are three automation machines in each ranch.

Sorted prince puftlet eggs come in on their own rail and get deposited in waiting room. They only are allowed in the room if there isn't an egg (weight plate) AND no critters (sensor). (It looks like I have that sensor set wrong - it should only detect critters.)

Now, since we only want one prince on the balcony and pufts like getting stuck in doors we can't reliably just use the sensor in the cubicle to let the prince out onto the balcony. To manage princes we open the balcony door only when the current prince becomes meat. (memory toggle). There's also a reset switch on the memory toggle side because occasionally the machine gets out of sync.

On the left you see the automation to call for and admit more pufts. The upper door on the ranch opens when the ranch needs more critters AND there is one in the chute.

Here's a ranch level.

Stripe 1 on the ribbon says "some ranch needs critters". Stripe 2 says "there's a critter in the chute".

Sometimes you can get a few pufts in the chute, but only need one to fill up a ranch. The ranch will manage its own population but to prevent a puft from getting stuck in the waterfall with no place to go we have a overflow chamber at the bottom to catch them.

Spoiler

That door only opens if all the ranches are full and there is a critter in the chute. (XOR gate).

Pufts are auto-wrangled from this room and taken to the drowning chamber on the left.

You can also see the polluted water bottle dropper to the right of the overflow chamber.

I just let the slime off-gas on rails back into polluted oxygen. There is a separate room where it goes to sublimate when pressure in the ranch room gets too high. Pufts convert 95% of their consumed polluted oxygen to slime so I'm only losing 5% of my pO2. Slime has a lower specific heat capacity than pO2, which I take advantage of by cooling the slime before letting it revert back to gas.

There's a chlorine chamber for cleaning pO2 that I pump into the system and the filter chamber is full of buddy buds which neatly eliminates any slime lung.

Speaking of filter chambers.

Spoiler

This design relies on a layer of liquid under the deodorizers, which can reach two tiles down into the airflow tiles full of pO2.

Automation admits more pO2 into the airflow tiles when the deodorizer chamber has less than 8k of pressure.

When the base is below 1,500g pressure it asks for more O2. The upper doors open when the pressure in the deodorizer room is between 2 and 5 kg pressure.

This was a challenge to design and implement. I can't recommend it unless you want the slime for something.

• There are more efficient ways to get meat.
• It doesn't exactly manage the mix of critters in the ranch.  (For example a ranch can have 6 pufts and a prince can emerge, requiring a dupe to auto-wrangle a puft.)
• Prince pufts are never groomed and always sad.
• You have to route rails in such a way that they don't cross any water tiles.
• Sometimes a dupe will decide to take a piece of slime somewhere and break your water corrals. Then a puft wanders off to a restricted part of the ranch and lays an egg out of range of an autosweeper and everybody gets cramped.
• For some reason, likely because of egg probabilities, the ranch population can crash when too many squeaky puft eggs come out. An observant dupe can see the emergency musher I just had to set up because it recently happened. It may come and go in waves especially because I'm now at the theoretical dupe limit of six ranches.

I'm gonna keep playing this map because there are a few more challenge projects I'd like to try but I'll probably switch over to shove-voles while I'm gathering space materials for late-game builds.

Now that I've developed the flying pez dispenser I can move on to my next personal challenge - Radiant Bugs.

AMA

The Super Antfarm.sav

[giygus]

Jesus, can this game get complicated or what... 

[Occam Blazer]

Just now, giygus said:

Jesus, can this game get complicated or what... 

Yes

[Parusoid]

whats a pez?

[minespatch]

On 6/1/2021 at 10:56 PM, giygus said:

Jesus, can this game get complicated or what... 

It's why I don't check the ONI side often unless I'm mentioned or a update.

16 hours ago, Parusoid said:

whats a pez?

It's a candy dispensing device they sell in the states.