How good are Smog Slugs for space travel right now?

[ZombieDupe]

Trying to think ahead in my first rocket build (I skipped the first few rocketry tiers, got straight into Steam Engine rocket in Spaced Out) and how to best implement this critter so that it can continuously get rid of unbreathable gases at the bottom of the living module. Might even be good at collecting any chlorine that might off-gas from bleach stone supplied to the hand sanitizer. Worried about space efficiency and it morphing back to a Plug Slug. I assume it would need to be kept wild as well.

[blakemw]

I think they are somewhat gimmicky.

If they dwell in breathable atmosphere their egg chance rapidly reverts to Plug Slug. So you'll basically have to rely on it turning into meat or its Plug Slug descendant being auto-wrangled out of the capsule, and add new ones over time. I haven't really experimented with Smog Slugs much, but presumably they should be bred in a room which they can vacuum out to vacuum as otherwise their egg chance will keep trending towards Plug Slug.

If you're willing to go with restocking every hundred cycles or so, then a Plug Slug takes up the same area as a Mini Gas Pump, but with some pros and cons. The primary con is it can't be used to fill atmosuit docks or an enclosed telescope with oxygen, and at least personally most of my rockets have at least one of those things and I normally fill them using oxygen pumped from Oxylite outgassing. Pros: it automatically filters gases instead of needing a filtering strategy, under normal circumstances gas filtering requires 2 additional tiles, though there are some exploity ways to reduce that to zero tiles, and if you want to automatically re-stock dead Plug Slugs you'd need 3 tiles for a Critter Dropoff more than negating the space taken advantage. It doesn't need any power. It also doesn't count as Industrial Machinery, making it flexible as to which room it is in. And it can be killed for meat if there is a food shortage on board the rocket, I often throw critter eggs into Spacefarers for just such a contingency, though of course you can do this with non-slug critters too.

I don't think Smog Slugs are a particularly compelling solution, but if you happen to be breeding the things anyway they do have some perks over gas pumps, but you need to not want a gas pump in order for Smog Slugs to look good. For me the only remotely compelling perk is that it doesn't count as industrial machinery.