Beeta Hives: Food Supply Low

[madcat1188]

Hello. I have sent dupes to a second planet using the teleporter and built a colony on that world. There is a large biome with beetas and lots of uranium ore on the bottom of the map, which I have largely ignored since I wasn't quite ready to dive into enriched uranium and the reactor just yet. I have created some lead suit docs and checkpoint and made it so the dupes can only get to this biome if they put on a lead suit, and also created a liquid lock to minimize the transfer of gasses into this biome. Still, there is some cold chlorine (about 1000g) surrounding the beetas, but I don't think it is effecting them. Also, some CO2 found its way in there, which seems to put them to sleep, but I dug some pits and the CO2 has gone into the pits.

I am trying to "wild ranch" the beetas by digging into their biome and clearing out as much as possible except the uranium ore, trying to leave it untouched. I've ended up building quite a few ladders in that biome to get around, and I noticed that the beeta hives need to be on a surface, similar to any of the buildings in the game, so in two cases I've built tiles under the middle two cells under a beeta hive.

Unfortunately, even though the beetas all are "Happy", the hives all say "Food Supply Low", and the amount of enriched uranium inside the hives is not increasing. I've tried building a small room around one of the hives using tiles and pneumatic doors, but that hasn't solved the problem either. Anybody know how to make the beetas generate more enriched uranium? Is there a maximum distance that beetas will travel to get uranium ore? Even if there is, I do have once case where there is uranium ore two cells away from a beeta hive and it doesn't look like they are extracting it, even though they appear to be sticking their noses in it from time to time.

Thanks.

 

[KonfigSys]

you need to dig the uranium ore and bring to the hive

That's it.

I dug all uranium ore and left only ice. It was converted into 17t of enriched uranium.

Spoiler

 

[NeoDeusMachina]

14 minutes ago, KonfigSys said:

you need to dig the uranium ore and bring to the hive

That's it.

They seem to do that on their own. I see beetas harvest uranium from tiles and bring it to the hives. It might be more efficient that way since you don't lose mass from digging up the tiles.

I also noticed that when I started opening up the biome, only 1 hive out of 4 was producing, the others just stopped. But they seem to have started harvesting again after I put them in "separate rooms". Now all 4 hives are harvesting again.

I don't know if this is the normal behavior, or some weird glitch (when they stop harvesting), it's a bit obscure for me atm. I was wondering if others had observed that behavior, and it seems like it is the case.

[KonfigSys]

Just now, NeoDeusMachina said:

They seem to do that on their own. I see beetas harvest uranium from tiles and bring it to the hives. It might be more efficient that way since you don't lose mass from digging up the tiles.

I also noticed that when I started opening up the biome, only 1 hive out of 4 was producing, the others just stopped. But they seem to have started harvesting again after I put them in "separate rooms". Now all 4 hives are harvesting again.

I don't know if this is the normal behavior, or some weird glitch (when they stop harvesting), it's a bit obscure for me atm.

They did not dig for me (perhaps it depends on game version/mods/updates) and I waited like 100s cycles. But once I brought the ore, BOTH hives (in one room) started generating enriched uranium. 17 tones of enriched uranium will lasts a long while and then I can bring more from POIs.

[NeoDeusMachina]

Just now, KonfigSys said:

They did not dig for me (perhaps it depends on game version/mods/updates) and I waited like 100s cycles. But once I brought the ore, BOTH hives (in one room) started generating enriched uranium. 17 tones of enriched uranium will lasts a long while and then I can bring more from POIs.

Yeah that's exactly what I meant. Like the hives were digging and doing their business before I entered the biome (they were all in separate cavities. They collected like 15t of refined uranium collectively. Then somehow when I started harvesting the hives and opening up their individual rooms, only 1 kept producing on its own the other three stopped.

After building some pneumatic doors around each hive and opening the doors, all hives started collecting again. I also made a 5th hive with a beetiny and that one also started collecting ore from the natural tiles in the area.

I don't know what makes them stop harvesting, if it's normal or a bug, etc. But those were my observations. I am sure (and certainly hope) that bringing them ore directly will work, as the only sustainable way of producing uranium is from space POI. In any case, like you said, there is a LOT of uranium on the map to last for an excessively long time (thousands of cycles I believe).

[madcat1188]

Quote

After building some pneumatic doors around each hive and opening the doors, all hives started collecting again.

I'm finding exactly the same thing. I didn't want to mine the uranium since that takes away 1/2 of the mass, but I did mine everything else so all the hives could see each other. Before I entered the biome, all the hives were separated by natural walls of some sort, and they were collecting uranium on their own. After I built rooms around them with open doors and tiles, they started working again. It seems like they don't like having more than one hive in the same room, no matter how big the room is.

Found this with more information:

 

It would appear that mining the uranium and feeding it to them is much faster, but you lose 1/2 the mass.

[NeoDeusMachina]

Another thing I've noticed is that beetas don't seem to be linked to the hive that spawned them. They can roam very far away and bring ore to any hive, which means you can end up having hives that produce less than other hives and wasting beetas in hives that have a surplus of workers (haven't properly investigated, based on observation in my survival playthrough).

I often end up with clouds of beetas in an area and very small amount of beetas in others. According to the tooltip, hives seem to have a maximum production capacity per cycle (10kg ore->9kg refined), so it might be more efficient to restrict areas beetas can reach to make sure each hive produces at its maximum capacity? Hives near beetas cloud in my game produce more than those with low beetas count even if they all have ore nearby. 

[Padishar]

On 10/8/2021 at 12:52 PM, NeoDeusMachina said:

After building some pneumatic doors around each hive and opening the doors, all hives started collecting again. I also made a 5th hive with a beetiny and that one also started collecting ore from the natural tiles in the area.

I had the same experience, probably there is a problem with beetas not knowing for wich hive they have to harvest, once you put doors the problem disappear because there is only hive thy can feed.

[ClownBaby]

I was confused by the "food supply low" warning too, but it seems to just be a fairly common warning if the bees do all the harvesting themselves.  Using the method that Francis John shows in the method above, just separate every hive/potential hive location by open doors to create new hives.  They each need to be in a new room to work properly, distance between each hive doesn't seem to matter.

  You can put critter markers (set a few of the established ones to autowrangle and low capacity) in each room if they are on different levels, or let the beetinys move along a shared floor.  I recommend just making a bunch of hives, as there does feel like there is a max harvest distance of 5ish tiles.

One last thing i noticed, the two tiles immediately above the hive need to be dug up, otherwise you may get the confined debuff.

[WhiteWind36]

If digging up the uranium so where specifically I should bring the uranium for beetas to harvest it? 'Cause I have one hive that I opened, and mined lot's of uranium around, left it on the ground, but there's still message "low food" on the hive... Also there was a hot abyssalite break, near the hive, which I noticed when all beetas disappeared. When beetiny climbs that spot of hot abyssalite it dies immediately. Is it possible to loose all your beetas and hives like this if unnoticed?

[Sasza22]

38 minutes ago, WhiteWind36 said:

Cause I have one hive that I opened, and mined lot's of uranium around, left it on the ground, but there's still message "low food" on the hive... Also there was a hot abyssalite break, near the hive, which I noticed when all beetas disappeared. When beetiny climbs that spot of hot abyssalite it dies immediately

Looks like mtemperature is the problem here. Beetas won`t harvest uranium if temperature kills them all. Luckily the hive won`t starve to death so when you manage to cool down the surrowndings it should start working.

[thegroundbelow]

One mod I don't mind recommending is "Happy digging: Dwarf Edition." Basically, it changes the amount of resources you get from digging a tile based on the digging dupe's excavation stat + mining skills.

From the description:

Quote

 

If Duplicant have no mining skill :
Efficiency = 0.5 + Digging/120
if Duplicant have 'Hard digging' skill :
Efficiency = 0.55 + digging/100
if Duplicant have 'Superhard Digging' skill :
Efficiency = 0.6 + digging/90
and If duplicant have 'Improved Digging I' skill:
Efficiency = 0.65 + digging/70
if duplicant has INTEREST in digging:
Efficiency = Efficiency +0.07 (+ 7 %)

Efficiency can never exceed 100%

 

You can also change the config if you like, and there's an optional feature to make atmo/lead suits add a penalty to the efficiency calculation.

[KonfigSys]

The temperature should be kept below zero or better below -10C (and above -90C).