Cubalicious omelette and seed factories

[Saturnus]

In the thread https://forums.kleientertainment.com/forums/topic/152512-the-pacu-box-is-dead-long-live-the-pacu-box/ I explored a starvation farm alternative to the pacu boxes of old using the new rules.

However, it may be better to just make omelettes instead. The advantage is massively reduced size, no need for a kitchen or even spending skill points on cooking, and you get a reasonable quality food. On the other hand it does require a steady supply of algae or seeds. The latter option is explored here.

First the self-enclosed fully automated omelette factory.

Now in this picture I've used several different liquids but 2 is strictly speaking all that is necessary. The layers with the feeder where the pacus are contained and the layer with the tepidizer needs to be at least 35% of full tile for both to register as submerged in enough liquid.

It's important to note that the tile of interest of the egg receptacle where the eggs crack cannot be touching the liquid or the pacus will be cramped. You make a gas pocket in the corner to prevent that. Likewise, the eggs that hatched to produce more breeders is in a gas pocket with 3 different gases. If you've ever made an escher it should be straight-forward to make one with 3 gases instead of the normal 2 gases.

Top sweeper can see the feeder tile but not the egg receptacle or the hatching tile. The bottom conveyor cannot see the egg loader.
That's basically the whole principle if you want to make it larger or a different shape. I strongly recommend that you do not have more than 4 breeders though as 5 (or more) will be throttled by the time it takes to hatch the eggs, and you'll get significantly less output than you'd expect.

Speaking of which, there will always be inefficiencies in such a system as this. And although great effort has been made into eliminating them.
This build with 3 breeding pacus should ideally output 9.2kkcal per cycle on average but actually outputs 8.6kkcal per cycle on average. That's 93.5% of the theoretical output so really close to ideal.

 

The automation is relatively simple even if it has a few advanced features.
The egg loader is on a 1s/3s timer so that the eggs are released one by one. When released they go past the element sensor and if it's a tropical pacu egg the buffer will make the AND gate stay on, with the additional condition that there isn't an egg already present, until the egg is past the egg chute. If there already is an egg in the hatcher or the egg is not a tropical pacu egg then it's sent to the receptacle to hatch. Note that since pacu eggs weight 4kg each the receptacle can only hold 25 eggs at a time. Important if you have more than 4 total breeders in a variant setup as each breeder will produce about 6 eggs to sit in the receptacle constantly.

Also note that I originally had the buffer at 5s and the timer at 1s/5s but that made the eggs sit long enough in the pool that the pacu would not produce the last egg, dying at around 92%. 3s and 1s/3s gives enough headroom for all but the most severe lag conditions, and enough time is saved that the pacus will always produce that final egg before dying.

The temperature is kept at 75c because higher just means spending more energy although it's ridiculously miniscule amounts either way but I also want the build to work with a regular pacu to start it up so it had to be lower than 80c. And 75c is plenty to cook the raw eggs that drops out of the receptacle into omelettes. The tepidizer is 0.3% active over 5 cycles, so just 2s per cycle.

The egg shell (or pdirt if you want) loader is on a cycle sensor so that it's not wasting time shipping tiny packages.

The seed weight plate can be eliminated if you don't care about surplus seeds building up.

Next up the seed factory.

Here I have to mention getting inspiration from @Luma plays and his seed duplication videos. I've just refined it, compacted it, and costum made it to made pincha seeds to feed pacus. And note, this only duplicates pincha seeds. If you want other seeds I suggest watching Luma's videos and make your own build.

The strangest thing I realised was that having a permanently closed door doesn't prevent pips from planting pincha seeds as long as the atmosphere condition is met by one of the tiles. And the drowning condition is met by the liquid blob below so it instantly starts drowning as soon as the pips have planted it.

When drowned the sweeper attempts to send the full dropped seed to the smart storage but it contains 5g of some material. I recommend table salt at that is made in 5g portions by the rock crusher. So the sweeper can only deposit 0.995 seeds.

When the smart storage is full it activates the sweeper to bring it to the loader, and the 0.05 remaining seed is now swept into the storage and from there swept into the loader with a delay from the first one.

The smart storage also resets the toggle counter that then ignores the first large seed part but sends green to dump the small seed part back inside so the pips can plant that seed fragment to make a new full seed.

The result is a seed duplicator that runs at 99.5% of the theoretical maximum efficiency. Giving 3.98 seeds per cycle on average.

Important note. The pips' pathing is restricted by liquid blobs so that they can't rummage in the smart storage and seed loader.

Egg shells and meat is shipped out.

I'd recommend having a minimum of two wild pips to prevent downtime, or if you have a dirt factory excess pip eggs from that could just be dumped inside. In the latter case, I recommend bridging those eggs in before the element sensor but after the loader as shown in the upper left corner.

Any detail you're not quite certain how functions in either of the builds? Ask!

And no, I don't consider duplicating seeds for the purpose of making omelettes a grievous exploit. It's not a high quality food, and you could make the seeds by other means so you're not getting something for nothing. That's how I see it. If you disagree then consider keeping it to yourself

[Tigin]

You can get 100% of theoretical output by using conveyer meters to drop eggs on a schedule instead of dropping on-demand. It might simplify some other automation as well. For example, you don't need a critter sensor, possibly saving a tile in width (although the limiting factor IMO is the water tank size rather than the size of the automation station) 

[Saturnus]

Nah. You can't get 100% efficiency that way. And the automation would be vastly more complex as you'd need to make a water clock to make it work.
Just not worth the effort of scrapping in a few extra percent of output efficiency.

[Tigin]

You don't need a water clock, just a normal timer sensor is fine although the automation would be even simpler had the conveyer meter changes gone through. 

[psusi]

Wow... the eggs get you 5600 calories when cooked but the fillet is only 1600.  Or you can cook soufle pancakes instead for 7200 calories, and higher morale.

[Saturnus]

21 hours ago, Tigin said:

You don't need a water clock, just a normal timer sensor is fine although the automation would be even simpler had the conveyer meter changes gone through. 

Maybe I wasn't clear enough. It's not a timing issue that is the main cause of inefficiencies in the omelette factory. In fact it'd hardly make any difference at all before you move to a 5 breeder design. Maybe a little bit in a 4 breeder as well. But in a 3 breeder like this, absolute perfect timing makes no practical difference.

Instead it's due to a game bug that is hard to pin down. Sometimes for no apparent reason a pacu can seemingly double feed, ie. eating a whole seed in one go, which makes it skip feeding the next time which in turn removes the "ate from feeder" happiness modifier making it glum for half a cycle. When, not if, that happens that particular pacu will only produce 12 eggs instead of 13 eggs in it's life time.

[asurendra]

7 hours ago, Saturnus said:

nstead it's due to a game bug that is hard to pin down. Sometimes for no apparent reason a pacu can seemingly double feed, ie. eating a whole seed in one go, which makes it skip feeding the next time which in turn removes the "ate from feeder" happiness modifier making it glum for half a cycle. When, not if, that happens that particular pacu will only produce 12 eggs instead of 13 eggs in it's life time.

Can we use seed splitter from second build to prevent that? Pacu cant eat full seed if there is no full seed accessible. That will increase size of the box a bit though

[Saturnus]

4 hours ago, asurendra said:

Can we use seed splitter from second build to prevent that? Pacu cant eat full seed if there is no full seed accessible. That will increase size of the box a bit though

If you care enough you can probably more easily get around it by feeding algae in small packets. That just present the problem of how to get the algae instead of seeds. As well as the sweeper having to run more often consuming more power. So swings and roundabouts.

Honestly, I'm fine with the builds as they are. A 6x6 tile box that feeds 8.6 dupes consistently on normal difficulty (without any bottomless stomach dupes) without the need of a kitchen or any cooking skills at all is beyond acceptable.

[Saturnus]

Update: I think I know what happens. It seems to be if a sweeper fills a fish feeder at the exact time a pacu feeds from it. I'll test if just keeping the fish feeder completely full at all times prevents it. Out of old habit I typically have the fish feeder set at 1kg when feeding seeds. If my hypothesis is correct then keeping the fish feeder set at max storage and sending in seeds in 20kg chunks should prevent it. It'll take a while to test though.

EDIT: Seems the bug has been fixed now (at least in the preview).

[Saturnus]

I made a discovery that pacus do not care about eggs or critter that doesn't directly touch their pool of liquid. And other critters obviously doesn't care about pacus and eggs that aren't in the same room.

To illustrate. Here the hatch is overcrowded but the pacu is not.

And here neither the hatch nor the pacu is overcrowded

With that in mind I thought: can I make a single compact cube that combines both a pip ranch seed factory and a pacu breeder omelette factory?

So I did.

Here's the result.

Instead of repeating or copy/pasting the same I've written on discord, I'll just link to that. There's lots of pictures. (tease tease).

Starts here https://discord.com/channels/282741876224688128/1201140065552826508/1208788838890340363

I'll probably go more in depth explaining the different parts of the build as well as the reason for the safety measure at some point but that is for another day.

Note that it is possible to bring the pacu egg sorter inside the build but it makes it a bit more challenging to stack two staggered triple liquid stacks side-by-side in a survival game. And you also have the problem that the pacu will be crowded more often potentially limiting the output. So I'd advice not doing that.

EDIT: scratch that last part. It is totally possible to have it inside and not affect the pacus at all.