A primer on fed Pacus farms

[Fradow]

After exploring Arbor Acorn farms, which are a great food source for Pacus, it’s now time to look into fed Pacus farms.
Another possible food source is wild Nosh Beans, which is going to require a lot more space, some consideration for temperature, but is simpler to build.

What’s the difference with Pacu boxes like the Aquamaton?

Fed Pacus farms aim to produce Eggs rather than Pacu Fillet. Eggs can be cracked automatically by being stored for 10 cycles, and the resulting Raw Egg cooked into Omelette with heat above 70°C.
Omelettes are the highest calorie/kg food that doesn’t require Dupe labor, and as such the best food for a labor-less Experiment 52b tamer.
Note that for all other purposes, it’s better to do a standard Pacubox as Pacu Fillets have the same food morale as Omelettes, don’t require dupe labor either, and can be cooked for better food morale.

Before delving in the details, there are 2 main methods to farm fed Pacus.

• the regular way, with a big pool
• the exploit-y way, by making them flop to keep them happy

I asked Klei through a bug report about whether that second method was a bug or intended but so far didn’t get an answer. Use that method at your own risk.
It was first discovered about a year ago on Reddit and was largely ignored until recently, because until Experiment 52b, there was no reason to do it.

@ghkbrew and I extensively tested both ways, and doing so we had some significant differences in results, though everything was in the same order of magnitude. We do not have a definitive explanation for that, but so far our leading theory is that the reason is performance: with lower performance, Pacus lay less eggs overall. This has less impact on regular farms, and more impact on flopping farms, especially with more Pacus in those.
All that to say: your mileage can vary, all numbers are indicative and may not reflect your experience.

Regular farms
First, let’s have a look at the regular way, which uses a big tank to avoid overcrowding. That big tank will need 8 cells of liquid per Pacu, for example here is the size for 20 Pacus:

It can be a single liquid, which means a lot of liquid will be required to fill it, or you can get creative and use liquid stacking to fulfill the requirement, since the actual mass per cell isn’t important. Instead of a large mass of a single liquid, you’ll require a small mass of several liquids.
Here is an example, courtesy of @ghkbrew:

A common issue with Pacus is the performance impact of having them swimming around. To prevent that, have them in a full liquid cell, then have a partial liquid on top of it: they will not be able to move around, and will also have the feeder right in front of them at all times.
Eggs must not be in a liquid connected to that main pool, which is why they should be on a cell that contains a gas.

Here is an example of that, where I took full advantage of all the empty space to have a loader by item type.

There are several ways to build it, depending on how many liquids and gases you want to use, but you have to remember that the Fish Feeder must not be flooded, and eggs must not be in a liquid (or not connected to the main tank).

The last detail is about refilling the breeder: there are 2 main solutions (credits to @Saturnus for finding those): counting eggs out with a rail sensor + counter, or using a Pressure Plate to have X eggs at all times. The latter uses less space and is incredibly stable, it's the one I recommend.
Every egg constantly hatching means 5 breeders will be in the tank, so you have to adjust according to your target breeders number: for 10 breeders, keep 2 eggs at all time, for 20 breeders keep 4 eggs, etc…

The maximum theoretical number of eggs per breeder in that sort of setup is 0.496 excess eggs per cycle and per breeder. In practice, we have seen numbers ranging from 0.4 to 0.47. Counter-intuitively, the more breeders in a tank, the higher the number, as it takes less time to refill eggs once an egg hatches, resulting in a higher occupancy.

 

Flopping farms
Flopping farms use the fact that pacus cannot be overcrowded when they are flopping. That’s because the code for pacus overcrowding assigns each water tile a "room": when dry, they aren’t in such a room, and thus they cannot be overcrowded (thanks to @Peter Han for the explanation).

Using that to our advantage, the principle is to have Pacus flop most of the time to fill their Reproduction gauge, then make them be in a liquid so that they can lay eggs and eat.
@ghkbrew experimented with various configurations for this, and the optimal way seems to be 3 feeding sessions of 60s per cycle.

Here is an example, designed by @ghkbrew:

You only need 2 cells of liquids (for example, 2t of water) and any gas to have an atmosphere to cool machinery.

@Saturnus experiments showed that, no matter what, it doesn’t seem to be possible to get more than 6 excess eggs/cycle from a flopping farm, no matter how many breeders you have. In general, expect around 2.5 excess eggs/cycle for 10 breeders, and from 4 to 5 excess eggs/cycle for 20 breeders. After that, it’s all diminishing returns, so it’s better to do multiple farms if you want more eggs.

Which one to choose?
It’s up to you which trade-offs you prefer:

• Flopping farms rely on an exploit, that could be fixed, that’s an inherent risk.
• Flopping farms probably have a higher performance impact due to more Pacus for the same output.
• Flopping farms use more construction materials and take longer to build
• Regular farms take much more space.
• Regular farms use way more liquid (either several types or a huge quantity) and require several different gases.

About the initialization
In both cases, you’ll need to initialize farms. A single Pacu is enough, but there is something to consider: you will need to first tame it. Taming using seeds is very long, especially for flopping pacus which cannot feed as often as they want. You should force the door to be closed until the Pacu is tame for flopping farms. If possible, in both designs, feed it Algae to tame faster and switch to seeds afterwards.

After taming the first Pacu, the initialization will still be very long, something like 40/50 cycles until you have enough breeders for the eggs storage to be filled quickly enough to maintain the breeders population.

 

[Pedro_L]

5 hours ago, Fradow said:

Note that for all other purposes, it’s better to do a standard Pacubox as Pacu Fillets have the same food morale as Omelettes, don’t require dupe labor either, and can be cooked for better food morale.

A pacu egg has more kcal than a dead pacu

[Fradow]

In general, I consider having enough Pacus a non-issue, so the absolute calorie output per Pacu is irrelevant.

But yeah, a Pacu Egg can get you 5600kcal of Omelette (each egg cracked output 2kg of Raw Egg which can be turned to 2kg Omelette), while a Pacu Fillet is only 1000kcal, which can be cooked to a Cooked Fish worth 1600kcal. The real winner is to combine it with BBQ for Surf'n'Turf, obviously.

[ghkbrew]

The other advantage that fed pacu have is performance. It takes about 67 starving pacu to make the same number of calories as a fed pacu.

[Pedro_L]

2 hours ago, ghkbrew said:

The other advantage that fed pacu have is performance. It takes about 67 starving pacu to make the same number of calories as a fed pacu.

We have a winner

 

Also can I get what math you used?