Misadventures in puft ranching

[myxal]

Cheers. I recently made a semi-automated mixed puft ranch, and thought to re-post it here (considering the Reddit situation  ).

TL;DR: Split the ranch into prince, dense, and empty chambers, appropriately set drop-offs in each. Prince's death enables an incubator, and blocks delivery of dense pufts. Dense pufts can be delivered by dupes, but are more likely to be dispensed from the built-in dispenser. Prince is always delivered by a dupe, which is also how prince delivery is reliably detected. Fits in 16x4 room stack and includes a 2nd, dense-only ranch to produce prince eggs when grooming is disabled.

Had this with grooming enabled in proper game for >200 cycles, turned out pretty well.

Spoiler

I decided to take on the challenge of making a dense puft ranch that doesn't require (too much) micromanagement - ie. produces all the eggs required to keep itself (and perhaps other dense puft ranches) going, and ensures that there's at most 1 puft prince in the stable to avoid wasting resources/dying out. Also - the prince puft cannot reach the grooming station, so it's not wasting dupe time, either. Also, subsisting on oxygen, I wanted something more compact, that can be put into the base - dense puft ranching doesn't require suits or gas locks.

Null overlay:

Room overlay:

Shipping rails (the line one upper right is bringing farm produce into the base ie not part of the ranch):

Automation (switches and notifier optional):

Liquids:

Blueprints link

(please ignore differing layouts of automation and mesh vs. airflow tile usage throughout the screenshots - the blueprints layout is the most recent and one I have switched to in the game since; also, not fully implemented in the game screenshot is the prince puftlet incubator automation, hat tip to u/GCFungus)

I found an older design by u/Santosch where I shamelessly stole the idea of keeping the prince puft above a weight plate sensing >0.9kg to reliably detect when the puft prince dies. I like the mechanic so I used another weight plate under a flooded critter drop-off to detect puft prince delivery.

I went for a severely simplified design - the prince puft is delivered by dupes and the dense puft dispenser is less foolproof - it may dispense more dense pufts than the ranch can take, and dupes can reach the eggs inside, so you might want to disable dense puftlet egg incubation after you get this up and running.

Compared to Santosh's design, this is smaller, fits in the standard 4x16-tile room stack, and only requires dupe access from one side, so doesn't need to be in between corridors. I like having this in the base where it can serve to skill up ranching on dupes without suits (I'm done with hatches), as an alternative to keeping newbies in the gym.

There's practically no need to repeat this multiple times on a map - the dense puftlet egg production is enough to sustain multiple dense-puft-only ranches, where the design can be trivial - 1 drop-off, accepting 6 dense pufts/puftlets, and nothing else. You could also run the rail line carrying dense eggs through those other ranches and make a dispenser there.

Some mechanics used in the design, and design considerations:

Door automation prevents dupes from accessing the "wrong" drop-off. Door to the base ladder shaft on the upper floor must be set exit-enly.

When a dense puft is to be delivered, pneumatic door on the dispenser stays open, and the airlock starts cycling to coax the puft out of there.

Upright liquid lock over open doors to keep pufts in the ranch. (If they were free to fly into the open door, the critter sensor would detect a drop in critter count, and the critter could become confined if the door closed on them.)

Triple liquid lock on the dense puft drop-off (to avoid sopping wet debuff) is probably overkill, the dispenser takes care of keeping the ranch populated pretty well.

Prince puft diet: In my game I just replaced one of the outer wall tiles with an airflow tile. This requires setting the conveyor loader to also accept bleach stone/slime, depending on the gasses outside the base - failure to do so will trigger the weight plate after a short while. I wouldn't recommend replacing (just) the ceiling tile, as the area would just collect CO2. A gas vent is an option, after moving the automation out of the way. You could also just let it starve, if you don't mind replacing it more frequently. Note that prince puftlets (babies) DO NOT count as princes for the morph egg chances mechanic, so you'll see a drop in dense puftlet egg production.

Low-mass upright liquid lock over prince puft drop-off and adjacent doorway to keep it pinned to the wall, and prevent the drop-off from flooding. CAUTION - last time I checked, if a dropoff becomes flooded, its CoI must become completely dry before it becomes usable again. It doesn't have a "maximum liquid pressure", AFAICT. I used a liquid meter valve, 2 liquid vents and a plumber to dispense 30 g of each liquid in each tile.

The weight plate below the prince puft drop-off is used to detect prince puft delivery, then the duplicant sensor keeps the door open to allow the duplicant to leave.

A dedicated conveyor loader accepts only dense puftlet eggs, feeding the dense puft dispenser. The other loaders accept everything else you want taken out of the ranch - other morph eggs, meat, oxylite. I Do not forget to enable also slime and/or bleachstone, depending on gasses available to the prince - not just in the ranch, but wherever the prince gets moved from.

Lower right sweeper cannot reach any loader that accepts dense pufltet eggs - the loader it can reach accepts everything else, to collect stuff from the dispenser room - egg shells, oxylite, possibly meat.

The mini-ranch produces prince eggs. It could be replaced with anything else if you are building full-size, single-morph ranches or have other source of prince eggs.

Multiple drop-offs in a room:

Every drop-off counts all freely-moving critters in the room, regardless of the critters' species/morph, regardless of the drop-off's filter, and regardless of any critter's reachability of the drop-off. Wrangled critters, and critters carried by dupes are not counted. The same counting mechanics apply to critter sensor set to count only critters. This is notably different from room overlay info card, which does include carried/wrangled critters in the count.

Delivery errands follow the drop-off's own filter (a wrangled/incubated critter matching the filter must be available for delivery) and the room's critter count. The respective drop-offs in this ranch will never have a dupe deliver the wrong morph, and will never make dupes deliver more than the room's limit.

Ranching errands (auto-wrangling) follow the drop-off's filter, limit, and are also subject to critter's reachability. The drop-off in the empty part of the ranch serves to move out any pufts (adults only) that might get dropped as dupes drop a wrangled critter mid-delivery (these drop as freely-moving critters, which is particularly annoying when it happens with puftlets).

I'm considering making a dispenser for the prince area, and having the prince egg production ranch on another floor, where the ranch could be larger. Not sure I'll ever need that much oxylite, though. For both meat and eggshells there are better options.

Currently I'm trying to design an automated prince dispenser. The gist of it is a single-egg/critter room that has a waterfall flood it (and the door separating it from the ranch) when the ranch needs prince replenishing, so that the prince doesn't dilly-dally in the doorway, which would lead to the door locking on the prince:

That's the theory, but in practice the weirdness of critter navigation scheduling managed to defeat my persistence. At least for now.

• The prince occasionally hops from waterfall straight into the vertical liquid lock, through the air gap, and enters the empty chamber of the ranch.
• More rarely, the prince doesn't finish climbing through the waterfall, stalls in the airlock, and gets the door locked on itself. One time, this was AFTER the prince first exited the waterfall into the low-mass liquid cells on the right.

Tried making the liquid lock double-wide, didn't help.

Several iterations later, I think I've got my "least error-prone" design, though it hasn't been tested in a proper map. Anyone looking to burn some CPU time on this, make improvements or provide suggestions is welcome. (oxylite ranch research.sav)

Build - Null overlay:

Spoiler

Rooms: (96+16 ranches)

Plumbing: (Valve set to 185 g/s; bridge coming from the pump is yielding to bridge coming from vent; valve feeds directly into vent)

Shipping:

Automation:

Details:

Alternative automation layout (doesn't stick out of the room):

 

 

[Nova Starlight]

People may disagree, but I think stacking 4 liquids is just beautiful.