Plug Slug Math

[blakemw]

So now the refined metal diet for Plug Slugs has been implemented, we can look at how viable they actually are for long term food and power.

They eat 60 kg/cycle of refined metal, and poop out 5% of the consumed mass as hydrogen.

The average metal volcano produces about 200 kg/cycle, so basically each refined metal volcano supports 3 Plug Slugs, or to be more exact, it should be 3.4 Plug Slugs for a totally average metal volcano.

This gives Plug Slugs a similar economy to Stone Hatches, as a Volcano supports around 4 Stone Hatches.

Plug Slugs only exist in the context of Spaced Out, which has a lot of guaranteed metal volcanos, I believe there are at least 4 Metal Volcanoes on the typical swampy metal volcano planetoid in the cluster but there can be more on that planetoid. Then there are exactly 3 Tungsten Volcanos on the Marshy planetoid, and exactly 4 Iron Volcanos on the Tundra asteroid. Plug Slugs do not eat Niobium so that volcano does not count. The Classic maps are a bit more random in their metal volcano spawns (other than Marshy and Tundra), but I believe the expected total is about the same.

So basically on the "swampy" planetoid at least 14 Plug Slugs could be supported. On the Marshy planetoid about 10 Plug Slugs could be supported, and on Tundra about 14 could be supported. In total for a typical Spaced Out map, around 40 Plug Slugs could be supported, or about 5 ranches. In total around 24 Dupes could be fed Slug BBQ. This is nowhere near the population of Slicksters or Deviants that could be supported but is still a totally reasonable amount for pursuing achievements/victory.

Comparison with Hatches:

Plug Slugs are identical to Hatches in nearly all regards for the purposes of meat production and normal Hatch numbers can be used when figuring the number of critters required to support a number of dupes. A Hatch or Stone Hatch optimally produces coal at a rate of 70 kg/cycle while a Sage Hatch produces 140 kg/cycle. 1 kg of coal is worth 0.6 kJ so the Hatch produces 42 kJ/cycle (84 kJ/cycle for Sage Hatch).

A Plug Slug generates power for 75 seconds out of a cycle, and now they path to their plug-in-point in advance, making it easier to get this entire 75 seconds. Since they produce 1.6 kW the total energy is 120 kJ. Furthermore the Plug Slug poops out 3 kg of Hydrogen Gas, 1 kg of Hydrogen has an energy value of 8 kJ, so the poop is worth 24 kJ.

So in Summary:

1. (Stone) Hatch: 42 kJ/cycle storable. (70 W)
2. Sage Hatch: 84 kJ/cycle storable. (140 W)
3. Plug Slug: 120 kJ/cycle electricity, 24 kJ/cycle storable. (240 W)

So a Plug Slug produces more energy than a Hatch, even Sage Hatch. BUT, the Hatch produces all of that energy in the most storable form in the game, allowing it to be turned into power at leisure. The majority of the power produced by a Plug Slug is in the difficult to store form of electricity, approximately 5 Smart Batteries per Slug would be required to store the surplus energy for use during the day, but in the context of having metal volcanoes Smart Batteries are cheap to spam.

TL;DR

Plug Slugs fed refined metal are extremely comparable to Hatches. All the metal volcanoes on a typical Spaced Out map should support about 40 Plug Slugs, about 24 Duplicants. A Plug Slug used for power generation produces on average 240 W, and is worth 3.4 (Stone) Hatches or 1.7 Sage Hatches.

[ZombieDupe]

Wait, so 4 to 5 dupes per ranch too? Hatches sound less and less viable by the minute. I had a situation where I would have needed to tame all 3 minor volcanoes I had just to support 1 ranch of stone hatches, feeding only a few dupes. Given some calculations I've done before on them and throughput of Sage Hatches as well as how much they will eat of organic food, they may be the better option over stone hatches.

Non-metal volcanoes are just so difficult to tame while held in steam and that really bothered me, I really didn't want to set up a vacuum around them. It does give a lot less coal, if I were to feed them meal lice, pickled meal or lice loaf for example, but it would feed the colony. Guess in that case I can have them in addition to stone hatches, but the magma volcanoes are still very tough to try and tame in a steam room without niobium available.

[Tranoze]

1 hour ago, ZombieDupe said:

Hatches sound less and less viable by the minute.

Hatches are for coal as they are source of renewable diamond. For some critter that produce pure power, of course they suppose to be better than hatches.

Hatch is an all route critter, produce meat, coal, power, refined metal ..., do you think there a critter that have more use than hatches?

Hatch also transfer other edible to meat at ratio 4200Kcal food -> 4000 Kcal BBQ. Meat is the ultimate food needed for experiment 52B. For 52B to give maximum output, you need both frost burger and surf n turf, only 2 food that have 6000 calories per kg, both need meat. Once you produce vast amount of food but not much meat, you can use hatch to transform them.

[blakemw]

14 hours ago, ZombieDupe said:

Wait, so 4 to 5 dupes per ranch too? Hatches sound less and less viable by the minute. I had a situation where I would have needed to tame all 3 minor volcanoes I had just to support 1 ranch of stone hatches, feeding only a few dupes. Given some calculations I've done before on them and throughput of Sage Hatches as well as how much they will eat of organic food, they may be the better option over stone hatches.

I believe it's intended that bulk food supplies comes from farming, since it scales a lot more easily than ranching. Like a Water Geyser would support around 30 dupes via farming, much more than a Volcano. Critters are more things which have meat as a side effect rather than that being their primary purpose, for the most part anyway.

Quote

Non-metal volcanoes are just so difficult to tame while held in steam and that really bothered me, I really didn't want to set up a vacuum around them. It does give a lot less coal, if I were to feed them meal lice, pickled meal or lice loaf for example, but it would feed the colony. Guess in that case I can have them in addition to stone hatches, but the magma volcanoes are still very tough to try and tame in a steam room without niobium available.

There are "flooded" designs. Here's a couple for inspiration:

Petroleum or crude lake. Crude Oil is cheaper thermal mass than water if you have Oil Wells, and Petroleum is cheap if you have a Petroleum Boiler.

Split chamber design which has high pressure steam in a separate chamber. You can also use infinite storage to make it smaller. Here I use steam dynamics to make a cooler area for housing the less tolerant Sweeper and Conveyor Loader.

Obviously non-flooded designs are superior in terms of stability of power output. But flooded designs can be good with enough thermal mass and if you mainly care about the rock rather than power stability.

 

[sirloxley]

Definitely a nice build and way better contained than what I usually do (see below). Love it, bookmarked, thanks for sharing!

How much heat is there left in that debris? And it never forms tiles?

On 9/24/2022 at 11:05 AM, blakemw said:

I believe it's intended that bulk food supplies comes from farming, since it scales a lot more easily than ranching. Like a Water Geyser would support around 30 dupes via farming, much more than a Volcano. Critters are more things which have meat as a side effect rather than that being their primary purpose, for the most part anyway.

Until you have (molten) Slicksters. I have 35 of these critters on one planet and still am dumping 4kg/s of CO2 into space. My numbers say that ~3 slicksters can feed one dupe (640kcal/cycle per Slickster) in ideal circumstances.

[blakemw]

49 minutes ago, sirloxley said:

Definitely a nice build and way better contained than what I usually do (see below). Love it, bookmarked, thanks for sharing!

How much heat is there left in that debris? And it never forms tiles?

About 200 C, if you want it lower you can run the debris through the Steam Turbine room, but the idea is to feed the hot debris to Stone Hatches living in vacuum, or relying on the fact that new constructions have their temperature set to maximum 45 C, so I don't see much value in lowering temperatures further.

It doesn't form tiles because enough magma never accumulates. Normally you get a solid tile when debris re-melt into a liquid tile that then freezes. In this case the debris are too cold to melt again, and the magma solidifies mid-air.

49 minutes ago, sirloxley said:

Until you have (molten) Slicksters. I have 35 of these critters on one planet and still am dumping 4kg/s of CO2 into space. My numbers say that ~3 slicksters can feed one dupe (640kcal/cycle per Slickster) in ideal circumstances.

Yeah Slicksters are something of an exception, they are terrible at garbage disposal because they consume so little but good for meat production. In Spaced Out, Deviants are also good for meat production, though this would seem to be because the Sulfur Geyser produces anomalously much sulfur rather than deviants eating particularly little.

[sirloxley]

1 hour ago, blakemw said:

About 200 C, if you want it lower you can run the debris through the Steam Turbine room, but the idea is to feed the hot debris to Stone Hatches living in vacuum, or relying on the fact that new constructions have their temperature set to maximum 45 C, so I don't see much value in lowering temperatures further.

Actually I want it higher, like a lot . As soon as it's debris get it out and don't 'waste' heat in that 'magma solidifyer'. I guess it's achievable if I just skip the meter.

For context - I want to use its heat to power a sour gas condenser/petro boiler and then a po2 cleaner (and then finally turn it into sand or coal via stone hatches once it's at 130C). Granted this is early late game type of usage, later on I probably should use aqua tuners as heat source to make the builds more local, because moving around (very) hot debris requires vast areas of vacuum

[Jann5s]

As an aside to the OP, I noticed that the in-game database says that sage hatches produce way more coal when fed raw grub fruit. I assumed it was a typo, and didn't confirm it in any test.

[blakemw]

11 hours ago, Jann5s said:

As an aside to the OP, I noticed that the in-game database says that sage hatches produce way more coal when fed raw grub fruit. I assumed it was a typo, and didn't confirm it in any test.

There's nothing special about Grubfruit except that it's exceptionally low calorie density, at only 250 kcal/kg - the next lowest is Lettuce at 400 kcal/kg. 2000 kcal of Grubfruit is 8 kg, while 2000 kcal of BBQ is only 0.5 kg. Sage Hatches produce the most coal *per calorie* when eating Grubfruit but it's really just 100% mass conversion that disregards calories.

[NNOUS]

To think plug slug can "de-fusion" the metal element core(Fe) to hydrogen (H) and don't require any heat nor emit any heat, they are the true marvel of the universe

[Sasza22]

8 hours ago, NNOUS said:

To think plug slug can "de-fusion" the metal element core(Fe) to hydrogen (H) and don't require any heat nor emit any heat, they are the true marvel of the universe

It kinda makes sense to produce hydrogen out of metal if the critter produces acid on it`s own like out of atmospheric nitrogen and water. Wouldn`t be that hard for a critter that can produce it`s own electrical current.

[suicide commando]

One way plug slug power can be stored is by using it to power ethanol refineries. Then you can keep the ethanol around for when you want power.

 

[blakemw]

So some more musings on Plug Slug balance.

Now there's no penalty for glumness in terms of direct power production (obviously hydrogen is still based on food consumption) if simple power production is the goal, glumness is very much preferable to happiness, as a glum critter requires feeding only 1/5th as often and requires no grooming. If you breed up a stock of tame plug slugs you can then just let the population replace itself with the 1 glum egg per lifetime.

A general principle with glum reproduction is to make all efforts to avoid evolving Smog Slugs, by flooding the room with oxygen and allowing the hydrogen to rise freely. Smog Slugs can't be avoided entirely when feeding Plug Slugs, because every time a Plug Slug farts it gets a small amount of Smog Slug egg chance, that then rapidly decays to 0, so the chance of actually laying an egg just after farting and the chance of that like 1% chance actually rolling, means the actual chance of getting a Smog Slug is extremely small, but it does exist and can't be reasonably avoided.

Some concepts:

Individual Slugpartments:

Basically the low tech zero egg management option. Also works well with wild Plug Slugs if you don't want to feed them.

With Conveyor:

Just sweep the eggs into a place inaccessible to the Sweeper. It doesn't really matter if the adult Plug Slugs go in there, their egg progress will slow slightly but it would be astonishingly unlikely to be enough to prevent them laying their one egg during their life span. The above layout supports 12 Plug Slugs "plugging in", but it's trivial to expand it to about 21 Plug Slugs if you can absorb that much power surge every night (33.6 kW, requiring about 110 Smart Batteries of storage).

Single Slug Power Unit:

 

Providing an average of 200 watts. Variants using Jumbo Batteries can be a bit smaller.

Now let's look at the power-economy, while one slug is alive (two slugs distort the numbers), the unit consumes 20 g/s of metal to produce 200 W (10 W/g). Let's compare this with the Coal Generator that consumes 1000 g/s to generate 600 W (0.6 W/g) or the Natural Gas Generator that consumes 90 g/s to produce 800 W (8.9 W/g). Basically if you're transporting fuel to another planetoid, then on a mass basis Plug Slugs dramatically out-perform Coal Generators and basically match the highly mass-efficient Natural Gas Generator. In per cycle terms the consumption is 12 kg/cycle. Given the outmost ease of piling random stuff into a Spacefarer module you could easily bring a few tons of refined metal and have steady power output for hundreds of cycles.

As a less favorable comparison a Solar Panel on a planetoid with a lux intensity of 35,000 generates on average about 150 W, while consuming nothing. It is probably only on the dimmest asteroids or one with meteors where a Plug Slug power unit might be a good idea rather than Solar Panels, even so it's a functional solution for keeping the lights on.

[asurendra]

Interesting calculations. However, last picture perfectly demonstrate main weakness of slug power grid: place. One slug need 8*6 room. To get 200w. Im not sure that many asteroids except classic could contain big  population... 

[Tranoze]

3 hours ago, asurendra said:

Last picture perfectly demonstrate main weakness of slug power grid: place. One slug need 8*6 room.

the weakness is not from slug plug power grid, it just the weakness of the design concept, you can over crowed slug plug with egg removal system and have 1 plug per 2 square area (even wild slugplut will continue to reproduce as long as they are not in the same room with egg and the room is large enough so they wont get cram.) and perform 95% power output.

[asurendra]

10 minutes ago, Tranoze said:

the weakness is not from slug plug power grid, it just the weakness of the design concept, you can over crowed slug plug with egg removal system and have 1 plug per 2 square area (even wild slugplut will continue to reproduce as long as they are not in the same room with egg and the room is large enough so they wont get cram.) and perform 95% power output.

And that change nothing. Slug needs at least 2 squares for itself and 12 squares for jumbo batteries able to store produced energy. So 42 cells for 600 wt. Coal generator need 9 cells and gives 600 wt too. If we comparing to hydrogen generator its 56 cells vs 12. I dont count battery as you usually need 1-2 batteries for all generators you have)))

[Tranoze]

9 minutes ago, asurendra said:

And that change nothing. Slug needs at least 2 squares for itself and 12 squares for jumbo batteries able to store produced energy. So 42 cells for 600 wt. Coal generator need 9 cells and gives 600 wt too. If we comparing to hydrogen generator its 56 cells vs 12. I dont count battery as you usually need 1-2 batteries for all generators you have)))

Jumbo battery? are we play the same game? we play space out, use rocket batteries modules, why you use jumbo battery then complain about space?

If you dont know how to automation rocket batteries, i can teach u.

[asurendra]

7 minutes ago, Tranoze said:

Jumbo battery? are we play the same game? we play space out, use rocket batteries modules, why you use jumbo battery then complain about space?

If you dont know how to automation rocket batteries, i can teach u.

9 cells for 100kw. Meaning 10.8 instead of 12. Big difference, yes...

[Tranoze]

4 minutes ago, asurendra said:

9 cells for 100kw. Meaning 10.8 instead of 12. Big difference, yes...

Rocket batteries doenst need tile below it, jumbo does, so jumbo need 6 tile per 40kw, rocket need 9 per 100kw.

They also leak much less compare to jumbo, which is the point of this type of battery, store a lots of power, for both solar and slug.

28 minutes ago, asurendra said:

. I dont count battery as you usually need 1-2 batteries for all generators you have)))

We play space out, solar power is free, you saying you only use 1~2 batteries for solar system?

[asurendra]

14 minutes ago, Tranoze said:

Rocket batteries doenst need tile below it, jumbo does, so jumbo need 6 tile per 40kw, rocket need 9 per 100kw.

They also leak much less compare to jumbo, which is the point of this type of battery, store a lots of power, for both solar and slug.

We play space out, solar power is free, you saying you only use 1~2 batteries for solar system?

I usually dont care about solar panels, they give so little that it is not worth to spend resources and time...

[ZombieDupe]

@blakemw Neat designs, I have seen this as well that works somewhat similarly.

The only problem I have is being able to take out the material in such a fashion that I can also overpressurise the volcano automatically if I want to and still get the material I want as well, all without using thermium for autosweeper and conveyor loader. But from what I have gathered, not really possible to use just steel for that purpose, as you would need to probably create a box within a box when taming the volcano to make sure there is pressure differential between where the steam turbines draw it in and where the volcano resides so that you can still use pressure sensors appropriately within the steam room that the turbines draw out from. The volcano box would have higher pressure steam, which would fluctuate between below and above 150kg per tile via mechanical airlock opening/closing and everything nearby would go up to 800C or during eruptions, even with all of the high pressure. I know this is going a bit off-topic now, maybe a good idea to make a new thread regarding that to discuss some builds for that purpose, if anyone comes up with something, but thermium appears to be the necessity for what I want. It would give you the best possible control this way however if done right.

[Tranoze]

1 hour ago, ZombieDupe said:

The only problem I have is being able to take out the material in such a fashion that I can also overpressurise the volcano automatically if I want to and still get the material I want as well, all without using thermium for autosweeper and conveyor loader. But from what I have gathered, not really possible to use just steel for that purpose

You can use corner to your advantage, as sweeper can pick up items from corner. This is from my world that run 600 cycles with steel, then i replaced them with thermium later in the game.

[blakemw]

Back on the topic of Plug Slugs.

The change to make Plug Slugs produce full power when glum and above 50% calories is very significant, especially in the context of Super Sustainable.

Say you spawn on the swamp asteroid. Tame half a dozen Plug Slugs, build about 20 Jumbo Batteries, and thereafter you can burn 1200 W continuously. You don't even need to keep grooming the Plug Slugs.

But if you actually groom the Plug Slugs for food, it starts to get silly. The obvious thing to do with the excess slugs is to starve them to death in a power chamber (they can't be drowned, so ship off the eggs to the death power chamber and slaughter some if you need meat faster, unlike hatches they can't cannibalize their meat), if my calculations are correct each tame happy plug slug should maintain about 3 glum offspring still generating full power! and another 4 or so hungering and starving away generating partial power, basically you get something like a 5x power multiplier from a groomed plug slug, so instead of just 1200 W for 6 Plug Slugs, it is more than 8000 W. This is more power than anyone could reasonably use in the early-mid game. Yes, you need to build enuff Batteries, but metal ore typically isn't all that scarce and you only need to build enough batteries to actually meet consumption, very likely even one full ranch of Plug Slugs will output far more power than can be used. Building say 50 Jumbo Batteries is quite a trivial thing and provided some care is taken to preserve at least some natural terrain rather than going to the effort to build the batteries on mesh tiles in an insulated box like a youtuber [not something I can recall actually seeing, but I can easily imagine it] the batteries will not overheat for quite a long time, easily enough to unlock battery modules, and there should also be a battery to plug slug ratio where the battery pack can be kept cool sustainably just by heating up the plug slug offspring, especially if like going with like two ranches full of plug slugs you will have so much excess plug slugs their offspring will easily keep the battery pack cool.

In any game ranching Plug Slugs in an intelligent way will curbstomp power scarcity, but it's especially noticeable to Super Sustainable, where power scarcity is something that is typically felt unless on a nice watery map and going ham with electrolyzers. But with Plug Slugs you very quickly have unlimited powah even under Super Sustainable rules, with simple ranching setups you probably want to make anyway given that Plug Slugs are just as good as Hatches for ranching for meat.

I've basically always considered Plug Slugs are a very viable component of an all achievements run, even when they ate only ore, because they are just as good as hatches for ranching while providing ample power without duplicant labor, but there was the psychological aversion to them eating through some ore, now it's so trivial to feed them, and they also got the entirely unneeded buff of full power production when glum taking them from nicely and well thought out balanced, to about 4x more powerful than they should be.

[Neotuck]

Liking the Topic @blakemw just wanted to share my slug ranch designs from way back

I designed them to be stackable, what do u think?