Saturn Critter Trap Observations

[Xenologist]

Now this may seem out of place, an observation on a strange "new" plant. Now with a save!

 

Saturn critter traps don't trap critters after they've been harvested. You'll see later these things are crazy.

This grubgrub will not be harmed until someone decides to load sometime after cycle 19, and most importantly, it works as a normal grubgrub.

Nevermind. For my first observation, not only can these critter traps be greedy when feeding (sometimes devouring up 2 critters at a time!), it seems they eat when a critter moves, but after being harvested they won't eat critters atop them unless you reload. Don't put these in small rooms next to the critter you want eaten, they move too little to be worth the effort.

Secondly, the hydrogen they produce is interesting. These plants produce approximately 166.6 grams of hydrogen every 4 or so in game seconds, or approximately 41.65 grams a second, and release it when they reach 33.4 kg of hydrogen inside. They have no pressure limit, will keep on venting until either they stifle or they're finished digesting. They produce hydrogen at a temperature that isn't fixed, though through sandbox testing it seems to be -20.1 c for a -30.1 plant and a 19.9 c grubgrub. Most importantly though, they produce that hydrogen at a constant rate, no matter if they're wild, tame, or in super growth (see Last but not least for that). So if you're after hydrogen, get a pip to plant and then get devoured by one, and watch as the hydrogen wells up and wait through 120 cycles of free hydrogen (Just don't get it too hot!)

Spoiler

 

Third, they store the critters inside of them (sometimes). You may or may not see it, but checking inside of them lies the critter (or two!) they ate, but it seems only the second one they ate shows up inside of them.  This still counts as a living critter for the purposes of other critters, so any other critter will be overcrowded and cramped. (I haven't quite checked if they eat those extra critters after their initial critter).

Fourth, these critter traps have no seed chance. This makes it so that every critter trap you have are the only ones you have. I doubt a level 20 agriculture specialist will change that if they have no seed chance in the first place. This makes it almost impossible to grow farms of these, especially if you have pacu nibbling away at your seeds. I don't quite know either if the printing pod can print seeds for these (I'd suspect it could)

Last but not least, other general observations. These plants take a really long time to grow, 120 cycles naturally, 30 cycles with minimal assistance, to around about 12 cycles with grubgrub rub and farmer's touch. Note that this is ONE TENTH OF THE WILD GROWING TIME, while simultaneously PRODUCES ONE TENTH THE HYDROGEN. If you want planty plant meat, go for grubgrub rubs and farmer's touch, otherwise go as wild as possible. This would produce 1000 kcal a cycle, with a noticeable lack of recipes for the meat, which however is as good as either a fried mushroom, gristle berry, swampy delights, roast grubfruit nut and more, with only one plant (and probably 60 kg of fertilizer, one critter of the ground hugging variety, plus the grubgrub).

 

My final closing thoughts are that this thing is pretty strange. Each one produces roughly 41.65 grams of hydrogen a second regardless of how tame or wild it is (Imagine that being the wild throughput, going at the 4*2.5 through farmers touch and grubgrub rub plus being planted in a farm tile, that would be like 416.5 grams a second), tells me that the best way to ranch it seriously depends on what you want it for. For food it requires constant attention, several grubgrubs per plant and a farmer at standby, and where for power asks that you get one wild and find that it ate the pip that planted it. If you decide to capitalize on the hydrogen produced, it produces approximately 333 watts a second when run through a hydrogen generator regardless if you decide to do it wild or tame. Another thing I'd like to note is that they should produce seeds and should have some recipes associated with them. I know they might still be relatively new to the public eye, but they intrigued me and I hope this analysis of the saturn critter trap will inspire more to look into the untapped potential of the critter trap (and for klei to add more ways to use this plant.)

Spoiler

P.S. Here's the save if you want to test the critter traps out more. Titans of Traps - Copy.sav

 

[NeoDeusMachina]

Not sure why the second thread, you already had one there for saturn critter traps, so I'll just link it here for reference:

 

8 hours ago, Xenologist said:

Nevermind. For my first observation, not only can these critter traps be greedy when feeding (sometimes devouring up 2 critters at a time!), it seems they eat when a critter moves, but after being harvested they won't eat critters atop them unless you reload. Don't put these in small rooms next to the critter you want eaten, they move too little to be worth the effort.

Indeed - and I hope this will change. There seems to be no reason that makes sense for the plants to not eat critters standing on top of them after being harvested. The bug has already been reported, hopefully it will get addressed now that they are focusing more on bug fixes and polishing the DLC.

Quite interesting list of observations you have made there - the numbers regarding hydrogen production and seeds are similar to what I have observed and reported in your previous thread.

8 hours ago, Xenologist said:

Last but not least, other general observations. These plants take a really long time to grow, 120 cycles naturally, 30 cycles with minimal assistance, to around about 12 cycles with grubgrub rub and farmer's touch. Note that this is ONE TENTH OF THE WILD GROWING TIME, while simultaneously PRODUCES ONE TENTH THE HYDROGEN. If you want planty plant meat, go for grubgrub rubs and farmer's touch, otherwise go as wild as possible. This would produce 1000 kcal a cycle, with a noticeable lack of recipes for the meat, which however is as good as either a fried mushroom, gristle berry, swampy delights, roast grubfruit nut and more, with only one plant (and probably 60 kg of fertilizer, one critter of the ground hugging variety, plus the grubgrub).

It seems a bit strange that they produce hydrogen at the same rate when wild or domesticated. I think they should produce the same total amount of hydrogen, but at different rates. So you can either produce 750kg over 30 cycles when domesticated (average of 41,65g/s as you reported), or 750kg over 120cycles (10,42g/s average). The digestion process is slower when wild and it releases less hydrogen per cycle while keeping the total amount of hydrogen the same. That also means that fertilizer and grubrub rub/sweetle's tending would also increase the hydrogen production rate, but never the total amount of hydrogen you get per critter digested, which would make sense imo. Similarly, you would get more plant meat by working on improving the plants digestion (aka growth) speed, but you would also need to feed it more critters.

Another suggestion would be that the total amount of hydrogen produced by the plant depends on the kcal of meat it is fed. Pips and dreckos would yield slightly less hydrogen than hatches, shove voles would yield a lot more hydrogen than hatches, etc. The current number (750kg over 30 cycles) could be for hatches, and then scale the rest up or down based on the amount of kcal of meat each critter produces compared to hatches. If that is the route they decide to take, then it could also make sense that the amount of kcal of plant meat scales up or down accordingly, keeping the same ratio "kcal plant meat / kcal of meat".

8 hours ago, Xenologist said:

If you decide to capitalize on the hydrogen produced, it produces approximately 333 watts a second when run through a hydrogen generator regardless if you decide to do it wild or tame.

You probably mean "Watts" - no such thing as watts per second in this context.

8 hours ago, Xenologist said:

I know they might still be relatively new to the public eye, but they intrigued me and I hope this analysis of the saturn critter trap will inspire more to look into the untapped potential of the critter trap (and for klei to add more ways to use this plant.)

Agreed - and thanks for taking some time to look into it further and sharing your observations with us!

I certainly hope they get at the minimum fixed, and maybe even reworked a little bit.