The most efficient Drecko Ranch: breed + starve vs ungroomed tame-glum-fed.

[blakemw]

The Drecko Meta is to have a "breeder ranch" of Dreckos, usually in oxygen or chlorine, and then a starvation ranch where Dreckos go to die a slow death by starvation while being sheared.

I use an alternative strategy, which I generally call "tame-glum", in this strategy grooming is only used to breed up a stock of Dreckos, which thereafter are kept in a glum state, but with access to food. Tame-glum dreckos grow scales at full speed (unlike wild Dreckos), and only need 20% calories, the breed+starve strategy also takes advantage of tame-glum by having the Drecko's starting calories last 5x longer before it starts starving, but in my strategy the tame-glum Dreckos are fed, so they lay a single egg in their life and so no grooming is needed to maintain the population. Food is provided by Pincha Peppernuts growing in hydrogen (typically I pip-plant them), or Mealwood/Bristle Blossom growing in a CO2 tile.

I've made many variants on this, but since the patch that made critters queue for ranching I've usually made them roomier because queuing greatly reduces the value of confinement. A typical one might look something like this:

That one has manual egg retrieval and drecklet return out of laziness, but it should be considered that eggs are not laid at a very fast pace with no grooming, that is for each Drecko, an egg has to be retrieved once every 100 cycles, hence if a setup was made pre-mechatronics it can take a while to get around to fully automating it since the labor is highly inconsequential anyway.

You can also see my old Grooming station, which I used while breeding the population up before disabling it and never getting around to deconstructing it.

(That version was on a very cold map, so even with the insulated tiles I had to heat the mealwood rather than cool it)

A more compact automated version:

To make it automated is pretty simple, eggs are just conveyed into a separate "room" which is flooded to force the drecklets to leave. The mealwood needs a small amount of cooling from a TR (something like 15% uptime) or AQ because Dreckos run hot. In this kind of build I usually replace the Shearing Station with a Grooming Station + Critter Dropoff during the breeding up period, though sometimes I make a very ugly and temporary breeding ranch.

The plant pit

Unless using Pincha Peppernuts, a CO2/Chlorine pit is needed for growing Mealwood, Bristle Blossom, Balm Lily in a nominally hydrogen atmosphere. Dreckos will spend some of their time in the Pit, not gaining scale growth. This is one motivation to make the room larger with a longer perimeter so Dreckos are more likely to not be in the pit, a large room might have Dreckos in the pit only 5% of the time, while for a small room it might be like 20% of the time: which is not the hugest deal. Honestly I just like the Dreckos to have some freedom.

The Pit is quite easy to make, as heavy gas will naturally settle into it if it's sunken into the floor then anything that spills over can be pumped out or allowed to collect in another hollow then deleted by building on top of it (or even automatically expelled out of a CO2 gas lock), or if it's elevated it's easy enough to just deconstruct a gas pipe with the desired gas inside it to displace the hydrogen. The pit is generally stable if the hydrogen pressure is higher than the heavy gas pressure but for maximum stability I prefer hydrogen at 2x the heavy gas pressure, mealwood only needs like 150 g of CO2 so the hydrogen pressure doesn't need to be very high either.

Drecko / Glossy management

In the above screenshots I'm using lazy mixed Drecko/Glossy ranches eating mealwood. Sometimes I've made segregated ranches where the Drecko ranch has Peppernuts while the Glossy ranch has Mealwood and/or Bristle Blossom. You need a scheme to deal with the "wrong" eggs but it's not particularly hard to devise schemes to direct them to the correct ranch.

Labor Efficiency

When comparing breed+starve with tame-glum the tame-glum strategy is trivially lower labor, once the population has been bred up there is simply no grooming whatsoever ever again, while the shearing requirements are precisely the same in both cases.

CPU Efficiency:

This is hard to estimate but is probably lower for tame-glum due to no grooming at all. With tame-glum the Dreckos can path for further and all of them path to eat, though with 1/5th the frequency that a breeder paths to eat, so "meals per shearing" is pretty similar.

In both cases though I'd expect the CPU usage is quite trivial.

Build Complexity

The game-glum approach has generally lower complexity and the build can be ridiculously compact if you aren't trying to minimize Pit-time, even if you are trying to minimize Pit-time its just "dumb space" for the Dreckos to roam around. Not that breed-starve is particularly complex.

Plant Efficiency (Shearing):

This is the most complicated aspect to analyze.

I'll analyze Glossies because the ratios are cleaner, and I'll work it out in terms of "idealized Glossies" which grow their coat 100% of the time and are always adults. Each groomed Glossy requires 1 plant. It lays an egg once every 9 cycles, each offspring lives for 37 cycles, of which 34 are shearable cycles, so basically for each plant, you have 1 Breeder, and 3.8 Starvers. If you're clever enough that the Breeder is in hydrogen 80% of the time, then it counts for 0.8 Glossies, and in total the ratio is 4.6 idealized Glossies per plant.

For tame-glum if being fully fed, 1 plant trivially fully feeds 5 Glossies due to the 20% metabolism, and the scale-growth efficiency might be say 95% due to the Pit, and the Glossy is shearable for 95% of its life due to babyhood, for effectively 4.51 idealized Glossies per plant. However full feeding is by no means required, due to the large amount of starting calories and how long it lasts when tame-glum you can easily reduce feeding to like 70% of full and probably hardly ever see starvation, increasing Dreckos to like 7 per plant. And I routinely do 10 Glossies to a plant, making it more like 9 idealized Glossies per plant.

Plant Efficiency (Byproducts):

As before, let's say that 1 plant can support 1 Breeder The Breeder in its lifetime will spawn 16 more Glossies, so you get 17 Egg Shells and Meats per 150 cycles.

The tame-glum is simpler, each tame-glum Glossy is simply good for 1 Egg Shell and Meat per 100 cycles, so to match the byproducts it would be necessary to stock at 17 tame-glum Glossies per plant, which is higher than the previously calculated stocking levels of 5, 7 or 10 Dreckos per plant. To maximize byproducts a tame-glum Drecko only has to lay its egg before starving to death, it's fine if it then starves before reaching old age, and because the starvation timer resets with each feed it's certainly very likely you could like stock 17 Dreckos per plant, and probably get like 16 eggs for the next generation. So tame-glum doesn't necessarily do badly in the byproducts department, but in a non-deterministic way with the population slowly diminishing over time as starving Dreckos get unlucky and fail to eat enough times to lay an egg, until eventually the ranch reaches a sustainable level at something like 7 dreckos per plant. I don't mind non-determinism so sometimes heavily overstock plants but I do understand that some players hate non-determinism.

TL;DR / Summary

The tame-glum-fed approach offers superior efficiency in terms of labor as it entirely eliminates grooming beyond the breeding up period, while shearing efficiency is always just one shearing per shearing. It also generally offers more shearings per plant. It does generally offer less byproducts per plant, though the byproducts you do get don't require any labor at all.