A mildly impractical wild bonbon meteor guard and spigot seal ranch

[Tigin]

It's become vogue to hate on seals and bonbon trees, so I'm also going to throw some tallow into the fire. These space trees and space seals and very cool, but there's this awkward element to them that makes them difficult to use. That added difficulty combined with their low mass output means even in the best case, late-game scenario they look slightly ridiculous for how little ethanol they produce.

This is my survival build, where I plant wild bonbon trees in the space biome to automatically mine the ice/snow from above. The top row also provides nectar for plastic production - 36 wild bonbon trees at 10k luminance nets about 401 kg nectar/cycle, which I think is pretty decent as this can be accomplished by itself just through meteor showers without any shenanigans.

The bottom row of trees is illuminated by ceiling lights (about 5k lux worth) in addition to the 10k luminance. Each stable can support 2 satisfied seals, which nets 480kg/cycle in total of ethanol production. For context, 12 wild arbor trees fed into 2 ethanol distillers (about 1/4 the size of this!) will produce about the same ethanol as this behemoth. The tallow that the seals drop is great, but you don't need much tallow for the current recipes to ranch them.

I used half the map's horizontal space on Ceres Classic to build this. Although it is vertically scalable I'm not sure if I will do anything like this again unless their numbers are tweaked. Perhaps Instead of a 1:1 conversion, 20kg of nectar can be converted into 40kg ethanol. Perhaps I'm doing it wrong and I should be using domestic trees instead.

The recipes that call for tallow also don't use enough of it, which dis-incentivizes actually ranching them. They would be far more useful if there were additional recipes that required a lot more tallow. Ideas include:

• A building that burns tallow for power (perhaps a direct conversion from tallow to natural gas)
• More fried food that uses excessive amounts of tallow
• Using Tallow as a lubricant, such as allow greasing with Tallow as an alternative to Brackwax for Smooth Rides
• Intermediate recipe between plastium and plastic that calls for tallow (Plallow?) similar to how Steel sits below Thermium

[pnambic]

4 minutes ago, Tigin said:

Plallow?

Tastic? Tastium? Food-grade plastic, to remove the morale downgrade from rehydrated food. 

[Tigin]

3 minutes ago, pnambic said:

Tastic? Tastium? Food-grade plastic, to remove the morale downgrade from rehydrated food. 

Chat GPT gives...

• Talloplastic
• Plastallow
• Tallowplastic
• Tallstic
• Plalow
• Talstic
• Plastalow
• Talloplast
• Plaslow
• Taloplast

All these are much better than the tongue twister I came up with

[goetzjam]

So the design of this is cool (no pun intended)

 

I think the fact they can dig out themselves is really nice, but they don't dig out the full block around them only the root and branches, which leads to this awkward design becoming mandatory to build around.   I think it would be far better if it dug out the full surrounding blocks allowing you to place these back to back and still keep the same size stable.

 

As far as domesticating the plants, I think the top row having some wild plants passively produce nectar is fine, but with the bottom row you have so little critters for so much space it begs the question if its even worth?   If you domesticate the trees then you can have full ranches increasing your production significantly, at the cost of snow, which currently is nice to be able to make, but isn't what I think anyone was expecting in terms of production amount or dupe labor required.

 

I suppose it is possible to stack the ranches below the defense a few times to increase production but with the space required and time it takes to build expand the system it goes back to why?

 

It might be too overpowered to allow them to be fertilized with ice instead, but at least then you have more options available to you.

 

 

As far as the critter goes, its screaming to me to want a morph of it, but I"m not sure its in the design space or if they want to do it.   Making some of the stuff higher quality food helped, but then they added sleet wheat as a requirement (which isn't necessarily an issue on the astroid itself) but if your needing any production of that there are other food options available to you.

 

 

Wanted to add that for these ranches if you aren't going to fill them with seals you could maybe swap out the lights for 6 shinebugs (no need to feed them, just hug them) but then your trading power for dupe labor, which you could otherwise do.

[Mariolo]

You could theoretically melt excess tallow into oil but they produce less than slicksters so not very practical