Base tour and some thoughts from my Public Testing game.

[blakemw]

Pacus

I'm not actually a big Pacu user, but I decided to ranch them. I made a 4 Pacu breeder tank (to the left is some more water though the mesh tile to increase the liquid volume visible to them). And then it's awkward, because the way I see it there are about three ways of evolving the offspring into Fillet:

1. Old age.
2. Pokesnips.
3. Boiling them alive.

I decided to go with old age and also make a Decor Bomb for my beach resort. It's over 900 decor from the Tropical Pacu.

Pacus are actually quite hard to kill with heat or cold, because of their large thermal mass and rapid reproduction. The best solution would probably be to avoid Tropical Pacus, focusing on Gulp Fish, and boil them with a Liquid Tepidizer.

The Pokeshell final solution to other critters being alive is very promising, I tried it in sandbox and it's easy and works really well, you can basically have an "evolution chamber" where the Pokeshells snip through a locked pneumatic door that separates the Pokeshell chamber and the evolving critters.

Final thing to note here: I've been feeding them algae and with the new algae consumption rate it's not really putting a dent in the algae/slime supplies. They might even eat too little Algae now.

 

Pokeshells

Traditionally I get all the wild Pokeshells and stuff them in a small room and remove the eggs to prevent Confined. This doesn't work anymore because they'd become miserable. So eh, I put them in a large room and removed the eggs. Originally it was a 96 tile room, until I realized the Water Fort has no requirement to be in a ranch, then I made holes in the wall so I could stuff in more than 17 Pokeshells. The Water Fort achieves very little, it's tooltip says "Even wild critters are a little happier after they've had a little R&R", but I can't think of any tangible benefit whatsoever. I like the animation though.

 

Dreckos

If you use the Drecko meta of groom+starve them I'm pretty sure this patch doesn't change anything at all, like literally nothing unless you want to use the Critter Condo to have an extra breeder in the same size of breeder ranch, so eh, it's slightly buffed.

However I've for a long time used tame-glum ranching, where breeding is only used to increase the initial population, and the Dreckos are kept in a tame and glum state, kept alive by feeding them, but benefiting from the 20% metabolism of glumness. While groom+starve is unerfed, tame-glum is nerfed, though not seriously. Specifically with the old critter happiness you only had to be concerned about feeding them enough and removing the eggs, you could stuff 25 Dreckos into a single ranch and it'd be fine with the dreckos reliably laying one replacement egg per lifetime. Now you can't do that because they'd become miserable from overcrowding. Also becoming miserable from starvation makes it easier for a Drecko to never lay an egg if severely under-fed, the old way of gaining reproduction while starving and the starving timer resetting after any feed definitely made it more lenient.

Both chambers are 96 tiles, and so can hold 17 Dreckos. In the upper chamber the single Critter Condo does quite a good job of keeping all 17 Dreckos Cozy. I split the bottom chamber into Dreckos and Glossies, the Glossies are just the "2%" and using that half of the chamber for them was kind of an afterthought.(later I actually knocked the wall out and let them mingle).

The top chamber, because it is using wild Pincha Peppernuts, involves some serious under-feeding. I think the full-feed ratio (ignoring starting calories) is 4.8 domesticated plants for 8 glum Dreckos, so for 17 glum Dreckos I should want roughly 10 domesticated plants or 40 wild plants. I have 9 wild plants. Of course, starting calories can't just be ignored, you only need like half that many plants, maybe even a third, to have a really good chance of having each Drecko lay an egg. It's fine though if some starve before laying an egg, the productivity is already absurd.

Note that tame-glum ranching doesn't involve much egg creation, and so it's very reasonable to not have a "pez dispenser", the labor required to bring Dreckletts to the chamber is very small.

 

Pufts

I decided to ranch Pufts to make slime. It's not at all optimized but the basic scheme is keeping one Prince, one spare Prince/Prince egg, to ensure an ample supply of Puft eggs. The surplus Pufts go in a misery chamber to convert at 20% (the misery chamber converts almost as much as the happy chamber), and a Critter Trap will ensure that a Puft is moved into the Happy ranch.

It's producing way more slime than my 4 Pacus can eat (via Algae Distiller). Note that AFAIK nothing much has changed about Puft Ranching with the Public Beta (because there's no Critter Condo equivalent for flying Critters), it's just something I decided to do to make renewable algae.

 

Hatches

This being "classic-style Aridio" there's tons of dirt so I ranched Sage Hatches for a bit. I didn't really need them for meat so I just let the population accumulate then shut down the ranch. I think there's about 85 of them. I have over 500 t of coal. Also I let them accumulate to see how the current version handles lots of critters, and it honestly seems to work great. Of course a few hundred critters isn't that many.

 

Fun with Sporchids

While I want to focus on the PT stuff, I was quite pleased with my toxicological hazard decor bomb, made possible by a generous number of Sporchids provided by the Biobot story trait (which I'm otherwise uninterested in). Incidentally 250 cycles later and the Buddy Bud still has the Sporchids firmly suppressed, with the CO2 being populated exclusively with Floral Scent.

 

Meters

My volcano tamers are always a bit (or sometimes a lot) unconventional. They always use Meters heavily. I'll just post one.

So this is a self-cooled Gold Volcano Tamer. For giggles I made it without Steel, the Sweeper is in the CO2 gas lock and is actively cooled by a tiny trickle of the exhaust water, very little heat exchanges between steam and CO2 and that heat which does exchange pretty much gets transported right back in by the exhaust water. The Conveyor Loader is kept in vacuum and also cooled by the trickle of exhaust water. The exhaust water trickle finally goes through a heat exchange which the Conveyor weaves through so the Gold comes out at about 102 C.

For this kind of build the Meter makes things much better because a small packet of debris equalizes temperature essentially instantly, so you never need more than "single tile" heat exchange except for the sake of counter-current heat exchange, so here I exchange heat first with the steam, then with the exhaust water for a two stage heat exchanger.

Now once upon a time all you had to do was feed the Themo Sensor into the reset port of the Meter, send green to emit, red to not emit.

Of course now this doesn't work. There are essentially three automation schemes I have figured out:

1. Feed the output signal of the Conveyor Meter into an AND gate together with the Thermo Sensor signal, so the reset port only gets a green signal once Amount == Limit. This seems to work okay when being watched but could get deadlocked when I wasn't watching: though this might have been fixed in the most recent PT patch addressing funny business around loading the game and such, not sure.
2. Probably the most intuitive, is to just have a Timer Sensor AND gated with the Thermo Sensor. This is reliable and intuitive. I've found the most reliable Timer Sensor setting seems to be 0.2 green / 0.8 red or vice-verca, it seems erratic at more middle values like 0.5/0.5, though more erratic in an erratic way than a reproducible way.
3. The less intuitive way with lower part count, is to implicit OR the Timer Sensor with an inverted logic Thermo Sensor. If the Meter receives a continuous green signal it doesn't send anything and if sending an initial packet on startup is inconsequential, a "green = don't emit" scheme is just as good as "red = don't emit", while using fewer parts. But the Thermo Sensor logic is inverted, as it sends green for "don't emit" (forcing the wire to green no matter what the Timer says), and red for "emit" (toggles on and off based on the Timer).

I said this in the PT thread, but I'd prefer it if the Meters only and always reset when receiving a green signal when Amount == Limit, preserving backwards compatibility and not requiring "blinky builds" where automation is hammering on and off once a second. While I'm willing to use blinky automation to gain an advantage, it's very un-aesthetic IMO.

Storage Tiles

Storage Tiles seem like they have a lot of potential. I remade one of my favorite designs, an "Orbital Sweatshop" that produces Databanks, launched into orbit by a CO2 rocket and with a Coal Generator for power (while I can appreciate builds like sending a Steam Rocket on a round trip for limitless powah and more room in the Spacefarer, I like this scheme, especially when I only have 12 dupes so this is already 1/3rd my population).

Previously I would have used a Conveyor Loader + Receptacle pair for both Coal and Plastic. However the Storage Tiles allow freeing up a whopping 8 tiles and stores nearly as much. I decided to use the liberated space (especially automation port cells) to add a nice Counter display showing how many seconds the rocket has been in space for, which also triggers the "land the rocket" Notifier. Previously I'd have triggered the notifier using a series of FILTER gates to count 600 seconds, but I have to say I find the display very pleasing.

Because I'm playing on Classic style Aridio rather than a cluster I haven't used rockets heavily and so haven't really explored the potential of Storage Tiles.