Can someone sell me the idea of the spigot seal?

[Pproy]

So I like the new bonbon gourd tree. Even though I find that it requirement for 100kg of snow per cycle is high (especially since snow is only renewable by meteor shower), I really like that nectar is a great coolant pre super coolant and is a good alternative for plastic production.

 

So why would I want to waste that precious nectar to the spigot seal? I can produce ethanol via the ethanol distiller (which also provide polluted dirt) and while tallow can be used for the new recipes, they don't seem to be a game changer for me. And converting tallow into oil sound like a waste of time (especially since nectar can produce plastic anyway and getting to the oil biome doesn't seem to be more complicated than before).

 

I feel like the new seals should either produce a lot more ethanol (so they can be used for mass power production), or excrete something more valuable when consuming nectar.

[imazined]

Basically I have the same question. The biggest selling of the seal is probably early powerless, byproduct free ethanol with the main use case to feed the bammoths. Why I would need this with hundreds of tons of ethanol around me is question for a bigger mind than mine.

At cycle 470, 21 dupes an still running on the ethanol from around the map for power

 

[StarvingAngler]

Really the only benefit I see is pemmican, due to its infinite spoilage time, and I guess if you feel satisfied in your production of plastic and sucrose from nectar, you could use the seals for oil and ethanol. Feel like fried food should definately get some buff to make it more worthwhile, and perhaps the seals should produce something other than ethanol, as that can already be obtained in a net positive loop between floxen and bammoths, and I want a slickster varient for ethanol, and a seal producing ethanol would make that less novel

[imazined]

Oh, I have an idea what we could do with the mercury. A slickster that eats mercury gas and excretes molten lead.

[Carib94]

imo they just need to basically reduce the BonBon Gourds light and snow requirement and we should be fine actually.

[Pproy]

So an idea. What if we switch the fertilizer from snow to something relatively trivial, like ice, and reduce the light requirement, but instead of producing nectar, the bonbon tree make "bonbon water". That water could then be drank by the seals, which would then excrete the nectar, or could be boiled to nectar. It would then be easier to build a sugar shack made of bonbon tree and would give some purpose to the seals.

On a side note, since there a clear parallel between the bonbon tree and maple tree (or maple syrup), I would like a recipe to combine snow and nectar to make "bonbon taffy" and an recipe to combine the nectar with the soufflé pancakes.

[JDL]

I'm fairly sure the devs deliberately decided on snow as a fertilizer specifically because it's not able to be produced in large quantities. This directly limits the ability to produce large volumes of nectar, making it a limited mid-game resource.

If I were wishing for a rethink, I'd love if bonbons instead required 100 kg/cycle of liquid carbon dioxide.

It kinda makes screwy chemical sense (carbon and oxygen into water and sucrose), it fits the theme (low temperature fertilizer), and creates a use for an otherwise dead end product (CO2).

It also forms an interesting challenge, where you take a normally high temperature gas made from power generation and liquify it, then keep it at a safe temperature inside the pipes.

[NewWorldDan]

The bon-bon gourds are fine as is. The space biome is automatically populated with them, all you need to do is go up there and pipe that sweet, sweet nectar back into your base. Easy plastic. Ranching seals would be so much more practical if there was some sort of feeding station that you could dump the nectar in. After that, I think starvation ranching is the way to go for tallow, especially since you need so little of it. As a means of producing ethanol, it just doesn't seem to be worth the effort. It's really one of those nuisance obstacles the game throws at you. Part of what makes the game compelling is that it's messy. Things break, liquids and gasses spill everywhere. Right now, I'm working on practical solutions to spigot seal ranching. Definitely requires natural light, pip planting a bunch of trees, and repeating things vertically. Unfortunately, my Pips froze to death, so I'm waiting on the printing pod for some new eggs. Not that we need the ethanol, but still. I'm doing this on principle. 

[NewWorldDan]

4 hours ago, imazined said:

Oh, I have an idea what we could do with the mercury. A slickster that eats mercury gas and excretes molten lead.

I finally found something I could build with mercury. Rocket platforms. They don't exchange heat with their environment, so the game never checks to see if they've melted. Everything else I've tried instantly melts, no matter the temperature of the materials or environment, due to minimum/maximum build temperatures. I haven't tried temp shift plates (which have a max build temp, but I think they don't have a minimum build temp or maybe they do only for certain materials like ice). Anyway, rocket platforms and liquid locks. No other uses for mercury.

[StarvingAngler]

This is primarily about the spigot seal, not about the bonbon gourd or mercury, both of which I think are fine. Mercury's main purpose is to encourage you to keep most of your base besides living quarters at lower temperatures than normal, as it will melt at temperatures people are used to being at. However, I think I heard building is currently bugged with a minimum temperature so buildings will always be made hotter than the recommended cold temperatures and thus instantly melt mercury. Once they fix that bug it will be great.

[GluttonyMain]

I dont think its worth botherign with it. You can get Iron in the starting asteroid, and thats enough to get you to Rockets, than you can get more metals.

[Pproy]

On 6/30/2024 at 1:47 AM, StarvingAngler said:

This is primarily about the spigot seal, not about the bonbon gourd or mercury, both of which I think are fine.

Eh, since spigot seal are to be used in conjunction with the tree, its was a bit inevitable that they were going to be part of that discussion. That said:

 

On 6/29/2024 at 10:42 PM, NewWorldDan said:

Ranching seals would be so much more practical if there was some sort of feeding station that you could dump the nectar in. After that, I think starvation ranching is the way to go for tallow, especially since you need so little of it. As a means of producing ethanol, it just doesn't seem to be worth the effort. It's really one of those nuisance obstacles the game throws at you.

My main gripe with the seal is this. The seal eat nectar that, like I said, is very valuable, to produce ethanol, which has less uses than nectar itself. Plus, with the ethanol distiller, there no reason to use the seal for ethanol production. Even if I was desperate, I could just harvest the branch of the bonbon tree for wood to produce said ethanol.

For tallow, the new recipe are not that enticing (although it is another subject that is already being discussed elsewhere). However, since those recipes take so little tallow, I don't even see the point of ranching the seal. I can just go kill a couple of them and have enough tallow to produce those food until I move on to better recipes. Overall, the seals, at best, provide nothing useful and, at worst, eat the precious nectar that could've been used for plastic or cooling.

I like to think that everything in the game can be useful. Even shine bug, which are generally considered a nuisance, can be farmed to make shines bugs reactor, or provide light, decor and radiation. Even gassy moos, which ranching them was more of a flex, now produce brakeen. I'm afraid that if there no change made to the seal, the best strategy to exterminate every single one of them (which would be a shame, they are narwhal seal hybrid, and I love narwhal).

I feel that buffing the recipes wouldn't be enough, they need to provide something else than ethanol. Since there was the discussion of the non-renewability of snow, they could even have the job of crushing ice into snow (they could eat ice and eject snow through a spout, like I said, they are an hybrid derived from narwhal). Then, an equilibrium seal/tree could be achieved to upscale bonbon tree farm.

[Tigin]

Seals can be a comedic source of power. Each seal produces about 7.5kg tallow/cycle, which when heat-multiplied with 3900C liquid uranium outputs about 90W per seal. That's not too shabby all things considered, and also doesn't include the ethanol they produce.

[Pproy]

40 minutes ago, Tigin said:

Seals can be a comedic source of power. Each seal produces about 7.5kg tallow/cycle, which when heat-multiplied with 3900C liquid uranium outputs about 90W per seal. That's not too shabby all things considered, and also doesn't include the ethanol they produce.

That like getting oxygen for your base through algae productions:

1. We get a source of polluted oxygen.

2. Ranch puffs for slime.

3. Build a couple algae distiller.

4. Realize how pointlessly convoluted the whole process is and build an SPOM.

While not every build need to be optimal, I feel like it at least need to be more valid than for "Lolz". Plus, there going to be the geothermal pump that going to provide power anyway, if the classic strategies are not used.

By giving the seal a more prominent role in Bonbon tree farming or nectar production, there would then be a reason to ranch them and have more of them. Then, because we get more tallow anyway, there more reasons to use it in some way. Boil it for petroleum, for new recipes, etc... Its more interesting to make builds to bring value to a resource we produce non-intentionally through another resource loop than shooting our-self in the foot trying to make complicated power or survival production loops just to include said resource.

[Gurgel]

I think they need some major rebalancing. Unless they are aimed at mid- to endgame. 

[Carib94]

So this is my ranch that supports 2 seals at a time(breeder ranch basically) since 1 max dom bonbon tree can feed 2 seals.The tree has 10 light stones on it lol. IMO I think this is probably the best way to ranch these guys as they are now, if all you going for is getting Tallow. The ethanol for me is just an added bonus and can be used for power or feed the Plump Squash.  Also Note that I found out that these guys cant drown LOL(duh their seals after all stupid me)so yeah the overflow will have to starve to death. But I will say that the Tallow does adds up pretty nicely to make some Fries and Steak.

[imazined]

56 minutes ago, Carib94 said:

Also Note that I found out that these guys cant drown LOL(duh their seals after all stupid me)so yeah the overflow will have to starve to death.

Cook them to death. Critters take heat damage way faster than before.

[misotoma]

On 7/2/2024 at 8:13 AM, imazined said:

Cook them to death. Critters take heat damage way faster than before.

He's right they will have to starve to death or kill them off. Cooking them to death will yield tallow but tallow melts at a lower temperature than the spigot dies so you will have crude oil instead. And I don't think it's worth cooling them down to -100 Celsius to freeze them to death either.

On 7/2/2024 at 7:16 AM, Carib94 said:

So this is my ranch

thanks for the idea on using the quartz stone to help light them up!

[Carib94]

Thanks, the mercury lamps works great and can support 2 trees but gotta be vertical and altho mercury is kinda plentiful for 1 lamp it can still run out, but their is a space POI so it should be fine. The quartz stones are still good for trees, but I realise(in SO Mode Ceres at least) that the number quartz stones can be random.

[imazined]

6 hours ago, misotoma said:

He's right they will have to starve to death or kill them off. Cooking them to death will yield tallow but tallow melts at a lower temperature than the spigot dies so you will have crude oil instead. And I don't think it's worth cooling them down to -100 Celsius to freeze them to death either.

thanks for the idea on using the quartz stone to help light them up!

That's a valid point. Critters take damage based on the environments temperature not their own. It should be possible to remove the tallow with an autosweeper before it melts.

[gronkjuice]

WOW THIS IS LONGER THAN I PLANED

I try to find ways to use anything in a game like this.  "Seal be dammed, I will find a way!" Is what I was thinking when I took this challenge.  Found this post and decided to find a way to make this possible with best return on my investment.

I FOUND IT!!!

Wild plant the trees.  This eliminates the requirement for the snow.  You get pips on both the Ceres planetoid and printing pod so you should be able to change to wild before you run out of snow.  Sure this slows down each tree to 1/4th of their output but if you have a ranch of perfect output your seals turn 100% nectar into ethanol after the drop in production.  Leading you to have a different farm for nectar in a more optimized location later.

If you don't care about the eggs this leads you to make it simpler. However my answer to egg requirements is a Dispenser/C-Loader.  I also then use incubators, as non powered one will hatch 1 egg every 20 cycles, leading to 5 resupply in perpetuity.  meaning you can safely do this with two ranches per 3 incubators (since you now have 1 extra slot for the two farms for seals,  this can be considered that egg that still needs to be swept)

now onto the farm

I like making module style rooms for games like this (DF anyone?) as you can then just Tetris them into the base as needed.  this one is no different.

it is 27x6 or 29x6 (depending on if you want to loose 2 branches of 1 tree for a critter drop-off or 3/6 locations of lights for 1/2 respectively).  this allows you to do two things based on where you place it.

1) walk through ranch - works well for center placements and bases that have more than 1 elevator (main vertical bus for dupes).  This however requires you to have at least 27 tiles between those elevators to work right however.
This design has you placing two Grooming S's one on each side at entrances letting whatever side your rancher enters be able to go right into calling for grooming, also lets two ranchers groom at once letting you make sure every seal is ready to drop eggs at max levels.  You will have to build them on top of each other as well as all ethanol will drop down the mesh tiles to a collection pit, where you will have sweepies picking them up and holding it at the ends or a pump/sensor moving it to required locations. 

As you can see a few requirements for this setup, but useful to giving you additional crosswalk locations in your base. 
This should really only be used if you want eggs from these as the sweepy ranch is easier to automat with less space.

2)Sweepy Ranch - This ranch as the advantage of needing nothing besides the location allotment.  you will replace the Grooming S's with Sweepies.  Letting you pick who can enter the room (as long as you use the Pneumatic doors) and still reach the sweepies to gather the ethanol. You better not care for eggs however, as it should have replacement naturally without grooming as it takes 60 cycles when not.  leading to replacement yet no additional tallow outside natural deaths.  You will still need to make sure those eggs are removed to make sure every seal lays its replacement however,  would be easier if sweepy could also pickup eggs, but your dupes will be the only ones required for eggs. 

This setup does allow you to place your ranches apart, as you no longer need a gather location, but if you have the space the prior one does yield better results with lower power and infrastructure setup
The other advantage of this farm is that you no longer have single tiles that have ethanol (where the trees are planted) being locations that can slow down and possibly give your dupes bad status effects (soggy feet)

3) Side base Ranch (or non pass through) - This combines the two with allowing you to have a locked door on the outside (if you have access) giving you only 1 sweepy and 1 Grooming.  as you can tell this is the basic way most people make ranches like this.

I prefer natural for these farms as it will be faster to make a starving groomed ranch for tallow in a location closer to a boil pit for the oil if needed.  However you could always place the C-Loaders in the center of the ranch, combine the belts, and give them Manual load options (Just make sure you don't make an endless loop by having access to the egg when it shows up at the other end.
- this could even be a center point in your ethanol drop that has a 5x1 location on the bottom, letting you still access them after they hatch as they will move around.  Just make sure the tank has a critter pickup set to 0 so you can auto wrangle them when they hatch and move out of the non access spot
- you could also use automation to turn this point on if any ranch above has less than ideal conditions, letting your ranchers only wrangle when you need them above freeing them up from actions when not needed but you could always set it to 1 prioity also to have your ranchers always have something to do for that juicy exp. as idle dupes are low level dupes

If you need more Calories there is always the egg cracker option as well. 

If you guys want picture of my ranch let me know.

[Carib94]

TBH, with snow now being renewable with the ice maker dont see any reason to wild farm BonBons unless you have no water geysers on starting planet or on Ceres you utilize the BonBons that spawn from Space. Otherwise just domesticate them for seal ranch or nectar farm, dont think they are meant to be farmed in a large scale at all.

[asurendra]

Wild bonbon to nectar to ethanol is more effective use of sun light. It gives you more power than solar panels. Also its much simpler and cheaper to build...

[gronkjuice]

first off Thx Carib94 I have not looked at the Ice Maker since the start of this DLC so I had no idea that I could make snow.

TBH.  if you can use a single petroleum gen. (if you either already got or wont go for Super Sustainable)  you can power everything needed for support of 30 seals!  this is a massive net output.  
however I like generating a closed loop and have decided to use that nectar for plastic since you don't have Scaly boys (Dreckos) and I am too lazy to push for oil for plastic when I can find easier ways

To make all math easier I decided to change the Seal to Power output as the Generator takes a 1 for 1 power to Ethanol exchange.  Meaning each seal and Generate 66.6 KWs if Paired with the Generators at full capacity.  Meaning it will take your full 30 seals to fully power 1 Generator at max forever.  so we can use this as a baseline for future power calcuations.

This does require Mercury Lights however so you should have either rushed for it, or have had the power gen required to get close anyways.

This lets you decide on if plastic or power is more important, as you will have to choose which loop to prioitize.  however I start with plastic and move into power once I proc Super Sustainable. 

Plastic Loop:
I have sized it now to have 18 trees, 9 Lamps, 4 Sweepies, 2 P Presses, and 1 Pump (sounds like a ONI Christmas XD)  This yields a total of 1k/s of plastic and Massive amounts of CO2 (which can either be turned into O2 with the Alvoe or harnessed for Rockets) And 100k DTU's of heat (if I didn't forget anything) which can be offset by 20 wheezewarts (if in Oxygen *half in Hydrogen*)/3 Thermos/ or if you spawned with the AETN then you just need to lower 20k more after using that.  meaning you can just make sure your oxygen you pump into your base is always on the chilly side and have these in the center of your base to keep it at a nice temp whole game.  leading the wood heaters mute after getting this setup.  as you can do this with a cool slush geyser to keep both the oxygen cold enough and salt to make into sand for the filtration and excess water for the snow on both the sieve and Steam from the Presses

this also lets you still have 5.81 seals of nectar left over letting me have 3 on the top and bottom rows of trees and letting them self replace with no grooming.  yielding yourself 387watts or your Mercury lights worth of power.

Self Power setup:
This drops your plastic production in half (down to 1 press)  meaning you have almost the same setup outside both the seals and presses. This gives you another 833g\s of nectar to work with granting you a total of 18.3 worth of seals being feed.  since we cant cut one in parts, we will just drop it to 18 leading us to 9 on both levels (effectively tripling our power output).  This grants us 1200watts the system take between 780-1980 (depending on both the sweepies and pump current operation)  meaning if you make this a SP system you will have to provide batteries and a liquid tank to keep in running at 100% 

you could even drop more requirements depending on the mods you use (sweepy mods can give you liquid outputs removing the pump which I actually started using due to this setup) or use the steam from the press to power a steam gen (may have to find some other sources of steam to help the process)  Personally I just use the water collected for snow.

This system now makes it so that you can consider all mercury you acquire to be possible plastic now. Since I have not found any real use for the Metal/liquide due to the horrible sustainable range with over 10x water Thermal Conduciveness.

Finally you can go...
Full Power : (or the Scotty for my fellow Trekies)   
meaning you drop the presses all together
Like I mentioned you can supply a whole 30! seals.  I'll say that again 30 Freak'n Seals!
you have 18 trees, with a total of 77 branches that hit light (-9 for the trees above, and -4 for the sweepies each preventing 1 branch each)
since each branch can provide 16k nectar you get 1232k\cycle making it feed 30.8, so technically you can squeeze another one if you want but 30 is more than enough Since now the system no longer has to power the press you get a new positive of  260-1220watts (depending on the sweepies and pump)  This means you can now either use your power shutoff (preferred method) or pump all power into batteries at a central location.

first we had the Shine Bug Reactor, now we have the Seal Burner!

All systems only need snow and Mercury for materials,  not to mention you get tallow as well that you can use for other things like cooking or making oil.

[gronkjuice]

Just discovered that my 1 press system grants enough Ethanol to support 2 full ranches of Bammonths.  As I was trying to figure out why I was not running out of Ethanol like I was before (since I don't use as much plastic anymore)

I went down to the self powered in anticipation of when I proc SS to just turn on the power plant I think I will just use this in the future.  then I can use all additional Ethanol for power instead.  Just need to find that Juicy POI for Mercury now and I'm all set for my closed system with Rocket support.

Just goes to show you if you work enough and have the math/physics knowledge to back up what you want to achieve.  anything is possible.