Resin Crates: full Experiment 52B tamers

[Fradow]

So you discovered that weird tree on a planetoid and don’t know how to approach it? Fear not, I got you covered!

Introducing Resin Crates!
Resin Crates are a combination of 4 different builds. Each of those builds has several variants, so you can mix and match quite a bit for your ideal Resin Crate. Please note that it doesn’t have to be a rectangular shape, you can have each build detached or arranged however you like. I just like having rectangular shapes…

A properly sized Resin Crate will output within 2% of the theoretical maximum, which is 210kg Water and 70kg Isoresin per cycle. The power consumption is minimal, I measured around 33W overall in the first build shown here. It's very close to being self-powered, but unfortunately that claim cannot be made without some optimizations that would likely use more space.

This is a community build, and a lot of people took part in getting everything working: @ghkbrew, @Saturnus, @tuxii, zivvel (apologies if I forgot someone, post a comment so that I can add your username).

Builds used

• An Arbor Acorn farm, see the primer here. It must produce enough seeds to feed the target Pacu breeders population
• A fed Pacu farm, see the primer here. It must produce enough eggs to keep the tree fed all the time on Omelettes.
• An automatic egg cracker/omelette cooker. This is the simplest part and does not have a write-up, just a few details explained below
• An Experiment 52B tamer that transforms food into Isoresin and Water. The Exspilement is used here, but you can use a simpler build if you’d like.

Why Omelettes?
Experiment 52b output scales with calorie density, and Omelettes are the food with the highest calorie density you can produce without Dupe labor. You can get more out of Experiment 52B by feeding it higher calorie density such as Surf’n’Turf or Frost Burger, but that requires a lot of Dupe labor.

The bottleneck in this build is Experiment 52b: it can only process 20kg of Omelette per cycle (when taking venting Resin into account).
The Exspilement (or any decent tamer) will easily handle that, so downstream is not an issue.
Upstream must be properly scaled though: you need to crack 10 eggs per cycle. Since eggs take 10 cycles to crack in storage, weigh 4kg and each receptacle can only store 100kg, you need 4 receptacles to store eggs. A Tepidizer easily handles the cooking, at about 20 to 25% uptime.

For the cracker/cooker design, the only detail to take into account is heat:

• You want to have your Sweeper and Loader in contact with the liquid so that they can disperse heat in it
• You want to keep Receptacles in vacuum to avoid exchanging heat with eggs for nothing.

As long as those 2 requirements are satisfied, it can be in any shape and arrangement you want.

Providing 10 eggs per cycle is not a small requirement. According to tests, you need roughly either 20/25 breeders in a regular farm or 2/3 flopping farms of 20+ breeders for that. See the primer for more details.

Then you need to provide seeds for those pacus. It doesn’t require all that much arbor trees, about 4 are more than enough for that.

When putting all that together, here are 2 Resin Crates you can do, and that I’ve endurance tested for quite a long time.

First, one with a regular Pacu farm, a safe 4 tree acorn farm:

All relevant overlays:

Spoiler

 

 

Then, a compact one with flopping farms and a barely sufficient acorn farm:

Note that I’m not perfectly with that one, and just display it for the sake of showing different possibilities, but it has 2 flaws:
- the acorn farm is barely enough for that many Pacus, and they might be hungry from time to time.
- the shipping is not working properly: I made it as simple as possible, but it has some flaws: Acorns are not splitted evenly, and Gulps/Tropical eggs are not sent to the cooker

All relevant overlays:

Spoiler

 

 

Neither of those builds is particularly optimized, I just squished the different builds together in a general rectangular form. I’m sure better can be done. Feel free to post your version of a Resin Crate!

A personal message to Klei (if someone from Klei read this): having to explore new builds to tame Experiment 52B was amazing. I wish, if more content is added, that we got good reasons to explore under-used parts of the game. That tree was likely little effort to add compared to just how many opportunities for design it opened up.

 

[Fradow]

On Discord, there were some concerns about actually building such a thing in survival. I'm happy to announce it's very doable, and have done so. It was mostly done by a single Dupe over .... way too long (probably at least 50 to 100 cycles, I didn't keep track, plus 50 cycles of initialization for Pacus).

So here it is, a survival example:

It isn't quite a "Crate" as in it's not rectangular: I prioritized ease of construction over form, and tried to make it fit with the terrain constraint (there is a metal volcano just left of the pacu tank.

Everything you see on the screen is on the same Conductive Wire, which doesn't receive power from an external source: the excess from the Quasi Rodriguez is enough to make up for the Resin Crate slight power need. There is a back-up Manual Generator half-visible on the left just in case it fails, but it barely see any action.

There is also an excess water dump because the build actually provides more Oxygen than needed for the 2 Dupes currently on the asteroid.

 

I'm happy to answer any question!

[tuxii]

Do any of these builds throttle the food input to 52B's "mouth" or does 52B just keep up with the food produced?

While a completely self-contained unit is nice, it would also be nice to use 52B as a food garbage disposal.  For example, as a place to send a million calories of fried mushrooms once the planetoid that produced it has transitioned to Surf & Turf.

[Fradow]

Those builds do not throttle food input.

Instead, a sweeper is used to take excess food rotting out of the room before it turns to Polluted Dirt (Rot Pile, contrary to some popular belief, do not off-gas). That's a modification I made in the comments of the Exspilement build.

As I noted in the Exspilement thread, there are several ways to tame Experiment 52B. Mine isn't really good at being a food garbage disposal, as the food isn't deep-frozen and thus will rot.

If you want to do that, it's better to pin Experiment 52B to ~99°C, use an insulated tile instead of a heat conductive tile, and ship deep-frozen food. That comes with the additional challenge of pinning the tree to a specific temperature (more priming work), having to deep-freeze food (an additional requirement), and it's more brittle: if anything bad happens, you have to re-do the temperature priming.

That's certainly doable, but not a direction I personally want to take.

[tuxii]

The approach I thought of is using your design but controlling the amount food at 52B's "mouth" by using a weight plate for the diamond or metal tile. Surprisingly the weight plate only uses 50 kg of any metal. I'm thinking about using the weight plate and some other automation to keep the amount of food at the mouth at minimum while also keeping 52B constantly eating.

The problem with this idea is that the weight plate would be cooled by the food hitting the plate... Perhaps it would need to be an insulated tile because of this.

I still haven't got that planetoid on my map yet so I'm just spitballing.

[Fradow]

I did a half-hearted attempt at that that did not go well: food on rails will also rot, unless it's deep-frozen first (and if you do, you are already half-way to the deep-freezing + temperature pinning strategy).

That means not letting food sit on rail, which add complexity. It's just simpler to sweep rot piles out of the room, assuming that food would get wasted in the first place (which is in my opinion a reasonnable assumption, I wasn't planning to feed Dupes with the same food).

Also of note: there isn't a set order in which the tree will consume food. Sometime it'll go with the stale food, sometime with the fresh food, sometime with some in-between.... If you want to regulate food, you have to ensure everything is eaten before letting the next food packet in, meaning the weight plate must be set at 0kg.

[tuxii]

13 hours ago, Fradow said:

meaning the weight plate must be set at 0kg.

But by wanting 52B to be constantly eating I know I can't set the weight plate to 0 kg.  Thank the temporal bow we can use a decimal place, since I figure the correct number will be < 1 kg.

[ekimmak]

Are the Pips important for anything other than planting the first Arbor Trees? Thinking about how they now have the Cuddle Pip mutation, and that could cause trouble if they're needed for getting the Arbor Acorns out.

How do you safely build when near the tree? Does it go inactive if you deconstruct everything below it, or do you just have a Dupe with Regenerative take the punishment, and heal it off each night?

[Fradow]

Pips get the acorns out of tree trunks. They are needed for the build, yes.

To avoid any complication, an ideal strategy is to trap 2 wild pips in there, with a different age (so that there is always at least one adult pip).

As far as I know, Cuddle Pips are also able to rummage acorns (though I don't remember testing it, so a confirmation would be welcomed).

 

To build around the tree, you just avoid getting anywhere near it. The build conveniently has a 2 cells clearance so a Dupe can go below and everything can be built from there or using ladders around / above the tree. You can safely deconstruct everything around the tree, but you need a tile right below its center cell to give it food anyway (that's the only place it will eat from).

[ekimmak]

Thanks. Doing a 100% achievements run, and this is the closest I've seen to any actual build for the angry tree (Well, obviously the Exspilement, but that's not a full build on its own without food).

Definitely going to go over the primers for each part in detail before I start (not that I've gotten to this tree yet, I've only ever seen it once), and I'll also see if I can test a Cuddle Pip before actually starting. My question wasn't "Wait, cuddle pips can't get acorns", it was more "Can cuddle pips get acorns? I haven't seen one yet".

[sirloxley]

A side question, how do you "endurance test" a build properly? (I can open a separate thread if you prefer)

I once started in debug to do it for a separate build, yet ALT+Q and that other speed up option didn't really make any (visible) difference

[Fradow]

Let it run for a large number of cycles and see if anything fails. The length of testing is a bit arbitrary, but at least 100 cycles is good enough for most builds. There are always things that can fail later on, it comes down to experience and not just checking that the build run but also if everything looks correct (for example, if an insulated tile very slowly heats up, it can definitely cause some issues way way later, for example because it's going to heat up enough to flake something).

Note that when endurance testing, you generally want to avoid using Superspeed (which is 10x), because above 3x some things start behaving differently (and even at 3x if you experience poor performance). Ideally, you'd also want to test at a high cycle count because some things start to break down, but it's not realistic to do that all the time.

 

As for this build, it's now in the hundreds of cycles in survival without any issue (apart from a strange issue where liquids got compressed in a way that shouldn't happen, which is not really an integral part of the build).

[ekimmak]

It would be nice to see a step-by-step for building it in Survival mode, because I have struggles with getting a functional waterfall like that.

Ah, well. I suppose that'll be episode 400 of my LP or something ridiculous like that. I am quite slow at this game, and I don't think the Experiment planet was spawned in easy travel distance.

[Tranoze]

Personally with a potato computer, having lots living critter on other asteroid will cause me lots of lag, what i do is just make automation space gun and shot the food to the asteroid. which i can control the type of food i send for resin speed i need.

[Tranoze]

On 4/12/2022 at 1:21 PM, Fradow said:

If you want to do that, it's better to pin Experiment 52B to ~99°C, use an insulated tile instead of a heat conductive tile, and ship deep-frozen food. That comes with the additional challenge of pinning the tree to a specific temperature (more priming work), having to deep-freeze food (an additional requirement), and it's more brittle: if anything bad happens, you have to re-do the temperature priming.

That's certainly doable, but not a direction I personally want to take.

Doing Experiment 52B to below 20C is a pain as the resin will turn into solid and entomb it. I learnt it the hard way....

 

[ekimmak]

17 hours ago, Tranoze said:

Doing Experiment 52B to below 20C is a pain as the resin will turn into solid and entomb it. I learnt it the hard way....

 

Now there's a way to protect your duplicants while building things around it.