Mod Request: Critter Dens

[Zarquan]

One thing I always want that the games rules technically allow is having hundreds or thousands of critters (ungroomed).  If you had thousands of slicksters, you could convert all your excess CO2 in to crude oil or petroleum and get free food in the process.  But the lag is too much.

Therefore, I think some method of simulating the effects of a critter's entire lifecycle without the actual critter object would be a good mod.

The way I think it would work is that there would be a building which duplicants could put slicksters or slickster eggs.  The building would then perform all of the resource effects of the critters inside, but the critters themselves are removed from the simulations (expect potentially as 50 kg of genetic ooze).  You could then have the building consume 6.67 g/s crude oil from the atmosphere for each slickster added to the building. 

The building could keep a table representing all the slicksters in the building and, perhaps a few times per cycle, update each slickster (using what I would call a checkpoint).  So, if a slickster larva is added, it adds 3.33 g/s consumption, and it stays that way until the last checkpoint before they should age up.  Then, it can do math to determine an average rate between 3.33 g/s and 6.67 g/s that accurately represents a good average for the time period.   For example, if there is a checkpoint once per cycle, and a slickster larva is 4.25 cycles old at the checkpoint, then it would be a larva for three fourths of a cycle and an adult for one fourth, so it would consume 4.17 g/s for this cycle (3.33*0.75 + 6.67*0.25).

Then, it will attempt to pull 6.67 g/s for each adult slickster less than one checkpoint before death.  At this point, math can be used to determine how much that slickster should pull for the last cycle of their lives.  On the first checkpoint after a slicksters death, the 3200 kcal of meat is dropped by the building for every slickster that died in that cycle.

The eggs can be either dropped out of the building or kept inside the building and added to the table, causing the building to drop eggshells at the right time.

It is fairly hard for glum slicksters to actually starve to death, as the slicksters can reset their starvation timer very easily.  However if the building receives extremely low amount of CO2 or no CO2 for 10 cycles, all the critters that have been inside for more than 10 cycles die and their meat drops.  Similar effects for if the atmosphere becomes too hot or too cold (or their genetic ooze gets too hot or too cold).

I don't think there needs to be a mechanism to remove critters from the building, but if eggs can be stored, they should be able to be removed to maintain the proper slickster ranches.

 

I would put no limit on how many slicksters can be in the room.

This mod would allow us to do what we can already theoretically do, but without the lag associated with the tons of critters.

Similar structures can be made for other crittters.