Sweetle in a Box - (poor) renewable source of food

[sirloxley]

My previous post about Sweetles and ranching them had an interesting conclusion to which I gave more thought only a couple of days later:

Quote

A glum Sweetle will last for 42.5 cycles before entering starvation, plus another 10 cycles starving. This implies that the Sweetle will reproduce after 50 cycles, i.e 2.5 cycles before it dies.

What I didn't get when I wrote it is that Sweetles can be treated like Pacus, i.e. they will reproduce as long as they are not cramped/confined; I have prepared a little build to illustrate how to make use of this. In the rest of the post I will post pictures of that build and some notes.

The build draws a lot of inspiration of this excellent guide on Divergents from Magialis, which is my go to build.

A word of warning, my calculations tell me that the expected return on this build is quite low due to the high live expectancy of Sweetles, even with 64 Sweetles this won't feed more than 2-3 Dupes (see also below) ... but it was fun to build

The build in pictures

Automation

Shipping

Here I have three (four) chambers, the top two are for collecting, harvesting products and dropping the Sweetles. The dropper is built so that only adult Sweetles can leave the chamber, that way the breeding chamber will not get congested with Sweetle larvas.

 

Facts on the build

• There can be as many Sweetles in the Living chamber as you want, as long as they don't get cramped. Above statement illustrates that such a Sweetle will lay one egg 2.5 cycles before it dies. It will take a looong time, though (55 cycles); Pacus are much faster
• The dispenser on the bottom can be used to bootstrap the build, but any other means are fine, too
• The breeding chamber is obviously oversized (96 tiles), no need to go that big
• Both breeding and living chamber need to have at least 12 tiles, though
• Feeding Sulfur to the Sweetles in the breeding chamber is optional. Above post also illustrates that a starvation ranched Sweetle will lay two eggs during its lifetime.
• Since a Sweetle has a 2% chance of laying a Grubgrub egg, these need to be removed as I do not want them in the Breeding Chamber.
• This implies that the total population in the living chamber might drop over time, there's a little automation I added to activate the breeding for that eventuality to maintain a stable population

 

Some calculations

A glum Sweetle will reproduce at age 55; this means every 55 cycles you get 1kg worth of meat, i.e. 2k kcal BBQ. That's around 36kcal/cycle.

In this setup you will need 27.5 Sweetles per Dupe.