Experiment 32b eating mechanic and solutions

[suxkar]

Hello!
I am about to deal with the swamp planetoid and the resin tree. The wiki says that the information displayed is not up to date, can anyone tell me is the mechanic behind it changed or not? I wasn't able to find info about it.

If what the wiki says is still valid, I was thinking of feeding it mushroom wraps from wild plants. Considering the time wasted expelling the resin and not eating, I was thinking to aim to 17-18kg of mushroom wraps per cycle, what do you guys think? How are you feeding the tree?

Thanks!

[Gurgel]

I made a large stack of berry sludge on my main planetoid. Excellent as space-food as well. Then I put a huge tank unter the tree, threw in a 10 tons or so of berry sludge and let it do its thing for a while. Moved the resin back to main planetoid with liquid tanks and ended up with 150t of isoresin in the end. Yes, that is massively more than you are going to need. That colony is at cycle 20'000 so you may want to do something smaller. But the nice thing about berry sludge is you do not have to worry about it going bad. 

[meekay]

I love the marsh planetoid. No water, no space, lots of volcanoes, a hot core, and maybe one other useful geyser.

A tank with 9 tamed Pacus produces more than enough eggs for omelettes to keep the tree fed, which are one of the most efficient sources of calories for the tree. I keep 5-10kg of food in the fridge and everything over that goes onto a conveyor into the tree room.

I then build a steam room to boil the resin. Depending on where the tungsten volcanoes are I might build it into one of the tamers, but if you have the room you're better off building a dedicated boiler for it using an aquatuner and the recycled heat from your main loop because a tungsten tamer can vary wildly in temperature. Boiling the resin helps supply water for oxygen.

The real trick is getting a sustainable supply of fiber. You can truck it in if you have to, but I prefer to source it on site if I can. A Drecko/Lily ranch will provide some, as well as some extra barbecue and omelettes for the tree. But if you want a lot of fiber you'll need to farm it, and they're too thirsty to use hydroponics. So that means using Pips to plant wild reeds, lots of them.

Where to find the space? At the bottom of the map! With 3 or 4 steam turbines and plenty of patience you can solidify the core in about 200 cycles. Then you just need to build a naphtha lock, don your suits, and carefully drill it out, diagonally filling in any oxygen pockets as you go to preserve the vacuum so you don't expose your base to the 1300° rock.

Finally enough room to breathe! If you were lucky enough to get a natural gas vent you've got another source of pee-water. Otherwise, a Puft ranch fed from either a polluted oxygen vent or a Morb room will trickle enough "liquid gold" (ew) to minimize the number of water runs you'll have to do. Some wild mushrooms at the very bottom of the map provides a little variety to your diet, and you're better off venting CO2 to space rather than trying to scrub it.

[suxkar]

5 hours ago, meekay said:

I love the marsh planetoid. No water, no space, lots of volcanoes, a hot core, and maybe one other useful geyser.

A tank with 9 tamed Pacus produces more than enough eggs for omelettes to keep the tree fed, which are one of the most efficient sources of calories for the tree. I keep 5-10kg of food in the fridge and everything over that goes onto a conveyor into the tree room.

I then build a steam room to boil the resin. Depending on where the tungsten volcanoes are I might build it into one of the tamers, but if you have the room you're better off building a dedicated boiler for it using an aquatuner and the recycled heat from your main loop because a tungsten tamer can vary wildly in temperature. Boiling the resin helps supply water for oxygen.

The real trick is getting a sustainable supply of fiber. You can truck it in if you have to, but I prefer to source it on site if I can. A Drecko/Lily ranch will provide some, as well as some extra barbecue and omelettes for the tree. But if you want a lot of fiber you'll need to farm it, and they're too thirsty to use hydroponics. So that means using Pips to plant wild reeds, lots of them.

Where to find the space? At the bottom of the map! With 3 or 4 steam turbines and plenty of patience you can solidify the core in about 200 cycles. Then you just need to build a naphtha lock, don your suits, and carefully drill it out, diagonally filling in any oxygen pockets as you go to preserve the vacuum so you don't expose your base to the 1300° rock.

Finally enough room to breathe! If you were lucky enough to get a natural gas vent you've got another source of pee-water. Otherwise, a Puft ranch fed from either a polluted oxygen vent or a Morb room will trickle enough "liquid gold" (ew) to minimize the number of water runs you'll have to do. Some wild mushrooms at the very bottom of the map provides a little variety to your diet, and you're better off venting CO2 to space rather than trying to scrub it.

Oh wow, I discarded pacus because I was only thinking about fillet and the ridiculous amout of them (and frames) needed to feed the tree. I never thought of omelettes!
Considering that going for mushroom would require 750 wild planted dusk caps, I'm surely going for omelettes, I'm guessing you also get ridiculous amounts of egg shells, right?

I am very much enjoying automating 100% any planet I can (I've already done it with frozen planetoid and the one full of metal volcanos), so I only need energy (solar) and something to feed pacus. Since algae seems impossible, how are you feeding the pacus? Balm lily seeds?

Anyway thank you very much, this was definitely illuminating.

[Gurgel]

2 hours ago, suxkar said:

Oh wow, I discarded pacus because I was only thinking about fillet and the ridiculous amout of them (and frames) needed to feed the tree. I never thought of omelettes!
Considering that going for mushroom would require 750 wild planted dusk caps, I'm surely going for omelettes, I'm guessing you also get ridiculous amounts of egg shells, right?

You need large water tanks for that to really work and then some detector+pickup system to keep the feeder-tanks uncrowded and remove just the right number of eggs. You also need to farm enough seeds to keep the Pacus fed. I used balm-lily seeds because they are free even when domesticated. Last time I did it, I let the eggs hatch in an 1-tile hatching tank, but doing omelets is also an option.

Here is the set-up I use (1 Tank), just the sustained egg-production:

Details: 

• The upper conveyor loader is just out of reach of the lower auto sweeper. The non-controlled sweeper will sweep eggs otherwise.
• The upper auto sweeper and upper conveyor loader does the eggs, the conveyor loader is set accordingly. the sweeper is controlled by the critter sensor.
• The critter sensor is set to "above 9" and "count critters" (not eggs). Eggs only get removed when 10 Pacu or more are present. This ensures replenishment of died fish. 10 Pacus is not overcrowded, but less than 10 Pacus plus several eggs is. This gets resolved when enough have hatched and the remaining eggs get removed. You could automatize this further to just remove some of the eggs, but this gets really complicated as the wrong eggs may get removed and hence none ever spawn. This solution here is simple and works reliable. 
• The lower conveyor loader and auto-sweeper do cleanup. The conveyor loader is set for Pacu Fillet, Rot Pile, Egg Shell and Polluted Dirt.
• Water "area" is 90-3 = 87 tiles. 
• The Mesh tiles block dupes from going into the tanks. 
• Gives you an estimated egg production of around 9 adult, tamed and happy Pacus in total. 

 

 

[Farsight]

One thing with large pacu tanks: You can use pnuematic doors to limit their movement, making it easier to feed them and collect their resources, and the pacu will still think they're in a huge tank. It'll also help your frame rate!  

But I'd also 2nd Berry Sludge as the ideal tree food. It makes it simple to automate the entire planet to accept launched food and launch back the resin. Plus, I always make waaaaay more than my astronauts need.  

[suxkar]

5 minutes ago, Farsight said:

One thing with large pacu tanks: You can use pnuematic doors to limit their movement, making it easier to feed them and collect their resources, and the pacu will still think they're in a huge tank. It'll also help your frame rate!  

But I'd also 2nd Berry Sludge as the ideal tree food. It makes it simple to automate the entire planet to accept launched food and launch back the resin. Plus, I always make waaaaay more than my astronauts need.  

You see, I was looking to saturate the tree. In order to produce the same quantity of calories you need to saturate the tree with omelettes (57000kcal) you would need around 300 wild sleet wheat and 400 bristle berries.. which is basically the same as going for uncooked mushrooms (6000kcal less due to lower cal density, 750 wild dusk caps), but without the monstrous dupe labour to cook (I would guess it takes at least 2 cooks full time to deal with that amount of food). Unless I've made a mistake.
This is why pacu eggs were such a revelation for me.

39 minutes ago, Gurgel said:

You need large water tanks for that to really work and then some detector+pickup system to keep the feeder-tanks uncrowded and remove just the right number of eggs. You also need to farm enough seeds to keep the Pacus fed. I used balm-lily seeds because they are free even when domesticated. Last time I did it, I let the eggs hatch in an 1-tile hatching tank, but doing omelets is also an option.

Here is the set-up I use (1 Tank), just the sustained egg-production:

Details: 

• The upper conveyor loader is just out of reach of the lower auto sweeper. The non-controlled sweeper will sweep eggs otherwise.
• The upper auto sweeper and upper conveyor loader does the eggs, the conveyor loader is set accordingly. the sweeper is controlled by the critter sensor.
• The critter sensor is set to "above 9" and "count critters" (not eggs). Eggs only get removed when 10 Pacu or more are present. This ensures replenishment of died fish. 10 Pacus is not overcrowded, but less than 10 Pacus plus several eggs is. This gets resolved when enough have hatched and the remaining eggs get removed. You could automatize this further to just remove some of the eggs, but this gets really complicated as the wrong eggs may get removed and hence none ever spawn. This solution here is simple and works reliable. 
• The lower conveyor loader and auto-sweeper do cleanup. The conveyor loader is set for Pacu Fillet, Rot Pile, Egg Shell and Polluted Dirt.
• Water "area" is 90-3 = 87 tiles. 
• The Mesh tiles block dupes from going into the tanks. 
• Gives you an estimated egg production of around 9 adult, tamed and happy Pacus in total. 

 

 

Thank you, I'm already familiar with the setup, I stole Francis John's setup, which looks pretty similar to yours.

By looking around, it seems that pacu eggs weight more than other eggs at 4kg (1100 hours into the game and there still always something I didn't know), which becomes 2kg of raw egg, which becomes 2kg of omelette. The tree will eat up to 20kg of omelette, so i need 10 eggs per cycle. A tame fed pacu lays 0.666 eggs/cycle, so I need 15 pacus total.
You said 9 were enough so... what am I missing? 

[meekay]

Sounds like you want to go more automated than me, so yes you'd either need a larger tank or just truck in a bunch of fruitcake as you suggest.

I tend to keep a permanent staff of two or three dupes on each planetoid.

I do prioritize a Pacu tank on each planetoid because it provides a lot of cheap food even if you don't have temperature control yet. I feed them seeds from whatever I've got growing sustainably; as your farms get bigger and your farmers grow more experienced you'll eventually have enough seeds to keep up.

Pacu shells do produce a lot of lime but by the time I'm ready to colonize the marsh I've already transitioned from steel to needing more tungsten for niobium and thermium.

[Gurgel]

1 hour ago, suxkar said:

You said 9 were enough so... what am I missing? 

No, I said 10 were the maximum for one tank and due to losses I estimate you get the equivalent egg production of 9 full time adult tamed Pacus with one tank. Just do two tanks if you need more and that should nicely get you were you want to go. My colony had 4 tanks.