How Many Dreckos Can a DreckaPod hold?

[tuxii]

By melting and freezing Phosphorus the DreckaPod is able to maintain a drecko population mostly uncramped status leading to approximately 80% reproduction rate, versus 0% for a standard cramped drecko-overflow shearing room.

At first, I dropped in 6 dreckos into the DreckaPod. After 100 cycles there were 24 dreckos and eggs.  After 310 cycles Abe managed to get up to 40 dreckos in a DreckaPod, working alone.

I thought we were just making a drecko-overflow room but once I added in the balm lillies... The boys in the lab are still scratching their heads wondering why this works so well.

I have yet to build this on a live survival playthrough so I don't know how many dreckos a DreckaPod can actually hold if fully manned.

 

[Prince Mandor]

Is it really better than plain auto-sweeper removing eggs?

Also, you can create two liquid columns, like in airlock, to prevent drecko movement, minimizing time of duplicant waiting for drecko

[riwenna]

This is really really cool, I love the design. It is very, very cool A bit overly complicated, but building overly complicated designs is most of the fun in ONI.

No suggestions on the design itself, but I would like to note a couple of mistakes you make in your video (I do work mostly with Glossy Dreckos in my colony, so sorry if they don't apply to regular Dreckos, no way for me to check currently):
- The GDreckos scale regrowth rate is 33% a cycle while tame and in Hydrogen. So in a regular starve-shearing-ranch, it is not true that you only shave them once before they die. I think they starve around cycle 35-37 (oldest one in my starve ranch is currently 26 cycles old, has enough juice to last for 1 more cycle, and then it takes 10 cycles to starve). So, you'd be able to shear a GDrecko around 11-12 times before it dies (no shearing for 5 cycles while a baby, but then it grows up with scales already grown).
- It is also incorrect that you need more individual Mealwood plants than Bristle Blossom plants per GDrecko; you need exactly the same amount. A GDrecko will consume 100% of growth of a Mealwood plant or 50% of BB plant a day. However, a Mealwood plant will mature (from 0 to 100) in half the time as a BB plant. I don't know the exact numbers for regular Dreckos, just that they consume less. (As a consequence you still can't mix Dreckos and GDreckos indiscriminately in a ranch as they would consume a different amount of food depending on the current random balance of GDreckos... and anyway if you plant it with mealwood they'll eventually all turn into GDreckos anyway). However, I am fairly certain that they actually require a certain amount of calories per day, rather than this many % of plant A or that many % of plant B (and Drecs consume less cals than GDrecks). As Mealwood produces calories at the exact same speed as BB... the choice really comes down to whether you prefer to spend water or dirt to feed your GDreckos.
- Renewability of dirt: If you're into ranching (which you do seem to be), then dirt is "infinitely renewable for no cost" just like reed fibers from Dreckos. Pips poop dirt, and 3 wild, untended arbor trees are sufficient to support a full pip ranch. The only labour involved is the rancher grooming them. I actually find this preferable to BBs as I find room-temperature dirt easier to handle than 95*C water (as most sources are typically hot) required for BB growing. Additionally (tho this was long ages ago), in one of my previous GDrecko ranch incarnations, I found that providing light for BBs actually introduced sufficient heat to the room that the Drecko body temperature wasn't enough to temperature-control the ranch any more. So the BB irrigation water had to be used for cooling as well.... I personally found it easier to just route a conveyor from the pip ranch to the Drecko ranch.

I am almost certain there was another thing I wanted to note about what you presented, but alas, I forgot. I'll add it in if I remember.

Oooh and thank you for mentioning you can level up ranching by hugging incubating eggs. That is a very very useful detail I never knew.

[tuxii]

• Regular Dreckos scale growth is 13% per cycle or 4% wild.
• I based my information off the wiki for the BB/MW info but I didn't test it/didn't do all the math.  It's hard to get every detail right.
• I've never actually ranched Pips since I prefer to keep them wild if at all, I always forget they're easy dirt.  Much easier than the ethanol route for dirt.  I ween myself off dirt early in the game usually.

Now that I know Glossy Dreckos regrow at 33% I would change the GDreckaPod to cycle every 3 cycles... 1 GDrecko produces 50 kg of plastic a day? My next playthrough I think I'll pass on the polymer press.

The food crops in the DreckaPod are completely optional and it could be used exclusively as an overflow-shear-starve room, but I found that by adding the food crops in, the DreckaPod could easily serve without needing any additional ranches to actually feed it eggs.

Thanks for the comment, you're keeping me going.

 

[riwenna]

3 hours ago, tuxii said:

Regular Dreckos scale growth is 13% per cycle or 4% wild.

Okay, then I can see why this would be way more efficient than just starve-shearing them, especially if you can get the overflow ones to mostly lay an egg with the plants. The only concern would be that I am a bit weary of these "self-reproducing" builds (i.e. where all your overflow critters keep propagating too), as a shinebug solar farm made my last run chug like hell 100s of cycles before I would expect it to. Plenty of critters on the map makes all the critters and dupes really bad at pathfinding...

I prefer avoiding to produce heat rather than remove it, so I don't think I ever built a polymer press

Yeah, the math on the MW/BB is a bit confusing, but I remember doing it a long while back and realising that MW plants can be directly replaced with BB after the MW does it's magic and turns the initial Dreckos Glossy. Tho I do usually end up with surplus plants growing as I run auto-ranches so there's a period the eggs are hatching so the ranches don't have 8 adult critters at those times (which might be the one good reason to actually switch to BB... I have absolutely no use of the surplus MM).

Pips and regular Dreckos actually seem to be the only food meat source that requires exactly 0 inputs (except grooming time) (you can get any plant-food for 0 inputs if you have Pips plant it wild). And due to their long life cycle Dreckos are not... the most efficient meat source. So while I know that I won't need to look into "renewable" minerals if using hatches probably until cycle 3000 or so, I have a slight preference for Pips (plus, they're cuter).

Ethanol... route for dirt? Ethanol distillers produce p-dirt which I then... use as food in my Pokeshell ranch. The amount of p-dirt those things produce I don't think any amout of Compost heaps could deal with that (okay, maybe if you had 3 duplicants dedicated just to turning the compost over :P), and feeding it to critters seemed the least labour intensive solution.

 

[tuxii]

@GreezyHammer posted a dirt farm on Youtube which perfectly demonstrates industrial dirt production.  It shows everything you said to be true. 

 

[riwenna]

Been meaning to respond for a day now ....

@GreezyHammerhas a very methodical and nice video there, but that is basically 3 dupes dedicating their life to that dirt (with many resources that need to be balanced, a bit of p-water input required etc)

True enough, the contraption there produces 3kg/s, but by my calculations, since a single pip produces dirt at 20kg/day, my ranch will top at 0.27kg/s when full, and assuming it has on average 6 adult pips in there while the eggs are hatching (not sure what the actual average is), it'll even out around 0.2kg/s. You would need ... 12 of them to match the productivity of Greezy's system, which would probably amount to a similar amount of duplicant labour to keep all the pips happy. But, space-wise it's no larger than his dirt-base and there are no inputs needed at all except the grooming.

2 of these are more than enough to supply dirt for a handful of mealwood in the drecko ranch