Please buff delecta voles

[pether]

Recently I played on Skewed Asteroid, I got teleport colony with beans and meteor showers and I decided it's a perfect place to do Delecta Voles ranch here as I've never done it before.

I found just one tutorial video (maybe I didn't look hard enough) and it said "just don't". They were so right... But I tried to do it anyway.

I lost track of time, but it took much longer that I'd like... like 300 cycles? Maybe more... I made a ranch design, had to rebuild it because it was too cold, then again because it was too hot, but it's fine I made mistakes and I did learn from them.

In the end I had my ranch ready and in perfect temperature. I got my first delecta egg, it hatched, I wanted to shear it like the drecos... and I can't because Delecta Voles hatch without their quills... So now I had to feed them...

Of course my regolith was too cold at first. Then too hot. Then I made huge rail system to made it perfect temerature... And it was never enough... my vole was always hungry...

So I made huge regolith collection system on the surface. Tones of steel, huge project to collect the regolith. Finally my vole could eat as much as it needed...

...only to produce 8 tonic roots per 8 cycles, so I could make 2 curry beans every 8 cycles...

...and then it stressed my dupes out...

TLDR: It took too long to recive not enough results. Whole endeavor was one big waste of time, both mine and my duplicants. The cost of making required infrastructure is much to high and the yields are too small..

So yeah, Delecta voles need a buff, or the tutorial "just don't" will be the only valid one there. I'm OK with costly infrastructure and very precise temperature requirements, but they should grant more. 1 tonic root per cycle for 5t of regolith is not enough. They should hatch with fully grown roots so we had one free shear and then they should grow roots faster and with lesser food requirements. Also, final product should be made the best food out there, on the level of Frost Burger, with massive morale boost. +4 morale is not enough, better food is much easier to produce, for exaple: Spicy Tofu requires similar ingridients, much easier to get and grants +5 morale.... 

It looks like just a little changes, some number tweaks here and there, but would make "upgraded" voles a little more viable...

[Knurek]

Shooting in the dark here, but maybe it makes more sense to keep a wild population of delecta voles and maybe that's how they are supposed to be handled. Grooming has no impact on the growth of quills, has it? They would consume less and conditions for growth would be easier to achieve and sustain.

According to wiki they can also be fed dirt or iron ore and they will still grow the quills, although in-game description might say otherwise.

You can still have a completely separated tame population of normal shove voles for meat production.

Or another way - if they don't need to be groomed for quills, then maybe keep a separate tame ungroomed population with -80% metabolism from glum debuff.

[Primalflower]

delecta voles serve the important purpose of screwing up wild/groomed-and-unfed shove vole ranches by making it so theres a 1% or higher chance that a given shove vole will suddenly begin to produce half as much meat as before, so you either need to account for this by supplying double the shove voles you did before and take the hit to your frames, or just not use that exploit at all. I respect delecta voles a lot for this purpose. But i definitely wouldn't turn my nose up to a buff for them, that doesn't involve them receiving increased meat production.

[pether]

10 hours ago, Primalflower said:

delecta voles serve the important purpose of screwing up wild/groomed-and-unfed shove vole ranches by making it so theres a 1% or higher chance that a given shove vole will suddenly begin to produce half as much meat as before, so you either need to account for this by supplying double the shove voles you did before and take the hit to your frames, or just not use that exploit at all. I respect delecta voles a lot for this purpose.

Yeah, I can see that and I'm super OK with that balance change. But at the same point, I'd love to have my attempts of ranching morphed version somehow rewarded... Right now I feel that the whole idea of makind delecta ranch was one big waste of time. I don't really care if they drop 0kcal meat on death, but 2 bean plates per 8 cycles of huge space industry working just for them is not really enough

[Knurek]

I read somewhere that you can put a regular vole in the Flux-O-Matic and a delecta comes out with quills fully grown. Can someone check if that's the case? I don't have a way to test this since I don't have that story trait on my map anymore.

I noticed that composting building outputs dirt at ~85 degrees Celsius, so when I get a chance I'll try to have some wild delectas have that dirt fed to them after cooling it a little. I'll also try trapping them inside a pneumatic door to make them confined and glum and further reduce their metabolism. In ideal conditions this could reduce consumption to 250kg/cycle per delecta. Does this make any sense? Has anyone tried this before?

Nevermind. I missed that confined stops reproduction.

By the way why don't voles get overcrowded debuff like other critters?