Automatic Hatch Farm

[Hylle]

Hello there, fellow Duplicants,

@Glaemyr and @Hylle here with our Hatch Farm. These delightful creatures play a crucial role in our colonies, serving as a primary source of meat and facilitating power generation through coal.

In our Hatch farm design, our priorities lie in self-sustainability and flexibility. We aim for a build that effortlessly scales up or down depending on your needs, self-regulates its Hatch population, and efficiently handles surplus Hatches by turning them into meat.

When we ventured into creating or discovering designs, we aimed to focus on:

• Automation: We're all for reducing manual work where we can. Our designs aim to run themselves to free up your precious duplicants' time for other important tasks.
• Efficiency: We've tried to get the most out of every resource used in these builds. The goal has always been to achieve maximum results without unnecessary extravagance(Sometimes with the exception of symmetry).
• Simplicity: We understand that not everyone loves tackling overly complicated projects, and so we've done our best to keep our designs as straightforward as possible.

We're aiming to release our Oxygen Not Included build guides in a series, with each guide focusing on a different aspect of ranching. Stay tuned for more guides coming soon, covering various creatures and farm setups. You can also visit my profile for a collection of all released build guides.

 

Hatches 

Our first venture into the realm of ranching is none other than the invaluable hatch. These lovable critters form the cornerstone of early ranching efforts and are a consistent, robust resource in our bases, serving as the main supply for meat and contributing to power generation via coal production.

Recognizing their vital role, we endeavored to engineer a build that accommodates expansion as per need, automatically fills up the ranches with hatches, and efficiently manages any excess hatches by "evolving" them into meat.

Behold our hatch build solution! The design uses a top divider to populate each ranch. When a ranch is short of hatches, the door on the right of the divider opens, allowing the water/oil lock to push the hatches into the ranch. These hatches land on the first closed door, usually leading to the ranch that is in need of a hatch. If all ranches are saturated with hatches, the left door on the top divider opens instead, and the water/oil lock nudges the excess hatch into an evolution chamber to be processed into meat.

Each ranch should be built as a 25x4 room. This accounts for the space taken up by the door (which prevents the hatches from wandering too far), the tile atop the door, and the door used to supply the ranch, resulting in a 96-tile max sized ranch.

Automation Overlay:

Each room has an OR gate that controls the doors, ensuring they open when a ranch requires additional hatches or if the ranch below does. At the top, AND gates dictate which door to open based on whether there are missing hatches or not, and these gates only activate once a hatch has hatched the small middle chamber.

Inside the small chamber, a water/oil lock forces the hatches to move to either side. Without this lock, you might face complications like excessive simultaneous hatching of eggs (leading to an ever-present hatchling in the middle chamber, which gums up the system), and hatchlings sleeping during the night (also leading to an ever-present hatch in the middle chamber). By implementing an airlock, we ensure quick hatchling displacement and prevent them from wandering back in.

Shipping Overlay:

 

May your colony thrive and prosper, and as always, happy ranching!

 

[Jorge Junior]

[Primalflower]

is it truly automatic if there is the grooming station instead of the critter fountain? there is a duplicant chore you could be replacing in this build.

[alexkuzmov]

On 8/21/2023 at 5:21 AM, Primalflower said:

is it truly automatic if there is the grooming station instead of the critter fountain? there is a duplicant chore you could be replacing in this build.

You cant replace the grooming station on the duplicant chore in this case.
Ranching always requires at least some duplicant labor with Pacus being the only exception.

[Primalflower]

Just now, alexkuzmov said:

You cant replace the grooming station on the duplicant chore in this case.
Ranching always requires at least some duplicant labor with Pacus being the only exception.

why not?

[alexkuzmov]

5 hours ago, Primalflower said:

why not?

Its a game mechanic: https://oxygennotincluded.fandom.com/wiki/Ranching

[SackMaggie]

1 hour ago, alexkuzmov said:

Its a game mechanic: https://oxygennotincluded.fandom.com/wiki/Ranching

Wiki is no longer accurate for the moo update, try the new critter fountain XD

[Primalflower]

13 hours ago, alexkuzmov said:

Its a game mechanic: https://oxygennotincluded.fandom.com/wiki/Ranching

do you... know how the critter fountain works?

[cyberwarlord]

Am I the only one that drops critters into a crab kill box? 

Rancor pit build.

[alexkuzmov]

19 hours ago, SackMaggie said:

Wiki is no longer accurate for the moo update, try the new critter fountain XD

Noted

7 hours ago, Primalflower said:

do you... know how the critter fountain works?

The new building which takes in Brackene from gassy moos?
Brackene which requries dupe labor to extract?

Yea, I know of it, what about it?
Do you know how the game mechanics work?

[Primalflower]

23 minutes ago, alexkuzmov said:

Yea, I know of it, what about it?
Do you know how the game mechanics work?

Each gassy moo creates 50kg of brackene per day, and each critter fountain use by a critter takes 5kg. what this means is that the grooming of ~9 critters can be handled by milking 1 gassy moo every 4 cycles, which significantly reduces duplicant labor, and also centralizes it in one place. it's very nice, and i recommend its implementation in ranches like the one above where the idea is to reduce as much duplicant labor as possible.

EDIT: oops, i totally forgot: gassy moos start off untamed when another is made via accu moo lation, and critter fountains cannot tame critters, only keep them happy. so you can't effectively use brackene with gassy moos. it slipped my mind!

[SackMaggie]

The only downside is... to actually ranch the moo which is not possible in early game.

[Primalflower]

In such a case i only recommend that hatch ranches be designed in such a way that are capable of being easily renovated in the late game. just leaving a tile free next to the grooming station horizontally would be nice. but that and the pursuit of gassy moos ASAP are both small potatoes that i'm not super invested in. i just think brackene as a whole is worth acknowledging in the pursuit of automation.

[alexkuzmov]

2 hours ago, Primalflower said:

Each gassy moo creates 50kg of brackene per day, and each critter fountain use by a critter takes 5kg. what this means is that the grooming of ~9 critters can be handled by milking 1 gassy moo every 4 cycles, which significantly reduces duplicant labor, and also centralizes it in one place. it's very nice, and i recommend its implementation in ranches like the one above where the idea is to reduce as much duplicant labor as possible.

EDIT: oops, i totally forgot: gassy moos start off untamed when another is made via accu moo lation, and critter fountains cannot tame critters, only keep them happy. so you can't effectively use brackene with gassy moos. it slipped my mind!

Well yes, with the update, in the mid/late game, you can reduce dupe labor a lot when it comes to ranching.
Keeping a few "tamers" around and you can run massive ranches.

I`m not convinced that it`ll be a worth while reduction in labor though.
Consider that most critters that you need a lot of are starvation ranched and that in the mid/late game very few critters have the massive utility of pokeshells or slicksters or pacu.
All of which are starvation ranched.

Its a cool feature though, milking and having larger ranches with almost auto ranching features.

[NeoDeusMachina]

Can't brackene also be made out of nosh beans/sleet wheat grains/pincha peppernut with the plant pulverizer building? Only requirement is 1st two tier of science. Making automated farms is not really a late game feature. Then there is only the pulverizing errands and possibly delivery to the critter fountains. I wonder how much dupe labor can be saved via that route, instead of ranching moos.

 

[cezarica]

The plant pulverizer (btw, doesn't have an intake pipe for water) requires dupe labor, so you are back to the start.

What are the chances of having more than one baby hatch at the same time waiting to be dropped, meaning you would end up with more than 8 critters per ranch? I would tweak the dropper to take this into account.

[NeoDeusMachina]

32 minutes ago, cezarica said:

The plant pulverizer (btw, doesn't have an intake pipe for water) requires dupe labor, so you are back to the start.

Yes... as I have also said ín my post, it does require dupe labor.

But - not counting the hassle and complexity of setting up a space program just to get to where there are gassy moos, once you get there, you have to...

- Set up critter traps (activating them and delivering the moos to the stable both require dupe labor)

- Tame and ranch the moos (require dupe labor)

- Milk the moos (also require dupe labor)

And please feel free to jump in if this is incorrect, I haven't actually done this yet, but that's what I assume needs to be done at the bare minimum.

So I guess the question is, which one between plant pulverizer (which can be setup with a pitcher pump right next to it if you want) and ranching moos is the most dupe labor intensive process?

[cezarica]

Sorry for the confusion, I was merely stating out facts, wasn't against what you said.

[Primalflower]

9 hours ago, NeoDeusMachina said:

snip

my problem with the plant pulverizer in this situation is just that it takes extra food-plant resources that you could be skipping out on in favor of a non-sum of chlorine and dirt with gassy moos. The plant pulverizer is 100% going to be the less initially labor intensive process initially but i have to reckon post-setup, maintaining 1 gassy moo ranch of 6 gassy moos that then go on to manifest the brackene for the automated care of 45-54 other critters all for just chlorine and dirt would be worth the investment

[NeoDeusMachina]

5 hours ago, Primalflower said:

my problem with the plant pulverizer in this situation is just that it takes extra food-plant resources that you could be skipping out on in favor of a non-sum of chlorine and dirt with gassy moos. The plant pulverizer is 100% going to be the less initially labor intensive process initially but i have to reckon post-setup, maintaining 1 gassy moo ranch of 6 gassy moos that then go on to manifest the brackene for the automated care of 45-54 other critters all for just chlorine and dirt would be worth the investment

Good input - I'm actually looking forward to try those things out