Are hatches supposed to eat this much material?

[ZombieDupe]

140kg per cycle, per hatch or 100kg of ore per cycle, per hatch, if you have smooth hatches, if I did the calculations correctly. What does this mean? Late game, you can only fully sustain ONE hatch/stone hatch ranch IF you tame all 3 minor volcanos found in easier, smaller variations of spaced out maps. And if I did even more math correctly, that's only enough food for like 4 or 5 duplicants indefinitely. Where am I supposed to get the material? How am I supposed to feed the colony with this? Clearly they should not eat this much material when tamed, this is insane!

Instead, I found myself putting down a ranch full of pips with arbor trees. 2 of those will do the same as 1 hatch ranch (since pips drop half the meat value) but they don't require me to tame dozens of volcanos that are nowhere to be found. Just let them eat the arbor trees and I get free dirt to go with it. I could also use thimble reeds, thougkh it would take up quite a bit more space unless I grow them using hydroponics tile .

For additional reference, let's take Sage Hatches for example. it appears that they eat 140kg per cycle of dirt, while each mealwood only requires 10kg per cycle. If I grow mealwood however, they will only consume just above 1 meal lice per cycle each, which is no more than 40kg per cycle. Why is it done like this? I understand maybe a little more efficiency, so you have reason to grow mealwood beyond late game, but it instead goes from impractical to more reasonable just like that.

Seems not all ranching methods are long-term practical. You would think taming 3 volcanoes would be enough to sustain enough hatch ranches to feed your whole colony and have material left over for construction and then some, but nope, that is not the case.

[calibayzone]

Hatches are valuable mostly because of their poop. More so in spaced-out where you need lots of diamond for rocket drillcones. Pacus and shove voles are a much better food source. Although you can melt regolith and freeze it back to igneous rock for way more hatch food late game.

On a side note: A default-morph hatch ranch won't starve to zero population because hatches aren't exactly ... picky ... about what they eat. Makes things a bit easier if you run dry.

[blakemw]

Hatches are meant to be garbage disposal (turning garbage into useful stuff), and while easy to start out with due to an abundance of "windfall food", difficult in the long term because the sustainable sources of hatch food produce slowly relative to Hatch appetite. This is similar to oxygen production, where algae is easy but not very sustainable, hatches are meant to be easy to get started with, bad long term. There are other critters which are much more sustainable.

I'm going to copy some stuff from a reddit post I made, about how much meat an individual critter can produce (in terms of itself, and its offspring):
 

Quote

 

We can rank critters by how much meat they drop:

• Shove Vole: 10 kg meat, lays egg every 6 cycles.
• Gassy Moo: 10 kg meat, doesn't lay eggs.
• Delecta Vole: 5 kg meat, lays egg every 6 cycles.
• Grubgrub: 3 kg meat, lays egg every 9 cycles.
• All Hatches, Slicksters (except Longhair), Plug Slugs: 2 kg meat. Lays an egg every 6 cycles.
• Longhair Slickster, Drecko: 2 kg meat, lays egg every 9 cycles.
• Sweetle: 1 kg meat, lays egg every 4.5 cycles.
• All Pufts: 1 kg meat, lay egg every 4.5 cycles.
• Pips: 1 kg meat, lays egg every 6 cycles.

Basically in terms of meat production per unit time and "grooming efficiency", if we normalize Hatches to "1" unit of meat production and disregard some bad options, then:

• 5: Shove Voles
• 2: Sweetles laying Grubgrub eggs (probably slightly less in reality)
• 1: Hatches, Slicksters, Plug Slugs, Grubgrubs
• 0.67: Dreckos, Longhair Slicksters, Sweetles, Pufts
• 0.5: Pips

 

Note that in terms of grooming efficiency, Pips are at the very bottom, though they produce a lot more calories as Omelettes than BBQ. Pips do work for BBQ, but unless you really want their dirt poop (which sometimes you do), the only thing going for them is the ease of feeding them wild plants, thus making a ranch that produces dirt, meat and egg shell out of thin air.

In Spaced Out, Sweetles laying mainly Grubgrub eggs is a ridiculously good option, and a Sulfur Geyser should be good for feeding about 100 dupes, it's kind of ridiculous how high the output of the sulfur geyser is relative to deviant sulfur consumption. They also have grooming efficiency second only to Shove Voles. A suitably engineered Sweetle ranch (with enough grubfruit plants to up the Grubgrub egg chance) is nearly twice as productive as a Hatch ranch and it's really hard to argue for ranching anything other than Sweetles if it's high volumes of meat you want, with the only downside being the "impurity" of the setups, they are combination ranch and farm. I guess also their output isn't that useful, being Sucrose which is pretty niche, though you can use Grubgrubs to convert it into mud and thus dirt and water.

Slicksters are actually far easier to ranch at scale than Hatches are and are equally grooming-efficient, though they don't produce much crude/petroleum, they also don't consume much CO2. Take for example a 4x Ethanol Distillery, 1x Petroleum Generator setup: this would allow ranching 34 Slicksters, but only 5.7 Sage Hatches. The CO2 vents and geysers are not exceptional, you'd only ranch about 3 Slickstesr from a Vent, and about 4.5 from a Geyser, though this is still better than the number of Stone Hatches you can ranch from a Volcano. Basically if you are going ethanol power or petroleum boiler then Slicksters should easily handle any reasonable BBQ requirements. It's interesting that Slicksters are balanced to be effective meat producers, rather than CO2 to Petroleum converters.

[Joe Dee]

My way to get the most out hatches (or in fact all of the critters), is to wait until each of them has laid their first wild egg before taming them. They initially have a random age, so there's usually some that lay an egg not too long after uncovering them to initially get a ranch of tame ones started.

Keeping the hatches wild allows putting all of them together in a size 12 room for a supply of free meat. They get the overcrowded debuff, but that doesn't affect their reproduction as long as you remove the eggs quickly enough (or just have them drop through a pneumatic door) and make sure they're not confined, so the population remains stable without needing to feed them.

That way it takes a few cycles longer to build a ranch of tame hatches for breeding whatever morph you need, but when you run out of things to feed them you can just let the tame ones die out and still have the wild ones as backup or emergency food supply.

[Ntr1cate]

21 hours ago, ZombieDupe said:

140kg per cycle, per hatch or 100kg of ore per cycle, per hatch, if you have smooth hatches, if I did the calculations correctly. What does this mean? Late game, you can only fully sustain ONE hatch/stone hatch ranch IF you tame all 3 minor volcanos found in easier, smaller variations of spaced out maps. And if I did even more math correctly, that's only enough food for like 4 or 5 duplicants indefinitely. Where am I supposed to get the material? How am I supposed to feed the colony with this? Clearly they should not eat this much material when tamed, this is insane!

Instead, I found myself putting down a ranch full of pips with arbor trees. 2 of those will do the same as 1 hatch ranch (since pips drop half the meat value) but they don't require me to tame dozens of volcanos that are nowhere to be found. Just let them eat the arbor trees and I get free dirt to go with it. I could also use thimble reeds, thougkh it would take up quite a bit more space unless I grow them using hydroponics tile .

For additional reference, let's take Sage Hatches for example. it appears that they eat 140kg per cycle of dirt, while each mealwood only requires 10kg per cycle. If I grow mealwood however, they will only consume just above 1 meal lice per cycle each, which is no more than 40kg per cycle. Why is it done like this? I understand maybe a little more efficiency, so you have reason to grow mealwood beyond late game, but it instead goes from impractical to more reasonable just like that.

Seems not all ranching methods are long-term practical. You would think taming 3 volcanoes would be enough to sustain enough hatch ranches to feed your whole colony and have material left over for construction and then some, but nope, that is not the case.

To put it simply, you're looking at it incorrectly.

Meat is a secondary attribute of a critter, their unique production value is their first asset.

The only critter that actually has meat as it's first value is shove voles. 

[ZombieDupe]

On 9/15/2022 at 3:38 PM, Ntr1cate said:

To put it simply, you're looking at it incorrectly.

Meat is a secondary attribute of a critter, their unique production value is their first asset.

The only critter that actually has meat as it's first value is shove voles. 

You might be right, but given how they give more meat than other critters, I got the impression that they are equally useful for both. Not the best, but still pretty up there, so if you wanted to solve your power problems for coal and food as meat for a very long time, until you can tame a volcano to continue it, hatches would be it. If they gave a lot less meat, I would not have considered them as primarily a food source. Given that you have to tame a magma volcano in the first place if you don't want to go to space to get minerals to feed to them, one of the hardest geysers to tame actually, it makes it all the more sensical.

That and the fact that everyone else uses them as a food source a lot. I think it's much better if the game is balanced to reflect player assumptions on what makes sense if at all possible, rather than shattering them for no apparent reason, like how slimelung looks to be a bigger deal than it is and players treat it that way until they either quit or realize it's not a big deal, so it absolutely should be the bigger deal that you expect it to be and the rest of the game to be rebalanced for starter-nearby-biome difficulty accordingly (so no slime biome in Terra start for example and some other easier present source of reed fiber to be the alternative, like having thimble reeds available right in the sandstone biome, makes transition to atmo suits for new players real easy if they have the polluted water build-up, which they will).

[NewWorldDan]

On 9/15/2022 at 3:20 AM, blakemw said:

it's kind of ridiculous how high the output of the sulfur geyser is relative to deviant sulfur consumption.

It absolutely is. It should be revised to behave more like the leaky oil fissure. It spits out far more sulfur than anyone knows what to do with.