Scalding critters to death (especially baby seals)

[blakemw]

It's always been possible to kill critters with hot or cold. But the new critter scalding mechanism can do it a lot faster.

How critter scalding works is that a critter which is immersed in a gas or liquid outside its "livable range" will lose 1 health every 10 seconds. Most critters have 25 health so will take 250 seconds (slightly less than half a cycle) to scald to death. Stone Hatches have 200 health, Smooth Hatches have 400 health, and Shine Bugs (and morphs) have 5 health.

Because the game only looks at the environment temperature there's no need for actual heat exchange with the critter, and thus energy costs are minimized by using a gas with very low thermal conductivity, such as Chlorine or Carbon Dioxide for heating, or Oxygen for freezing. Also the actual temperature makes no difference, as long as it's outside livable range. Most critters livable range extends up to 100 C, there are a few exceptions: Shove Voles, Moos and Slicksters have higher thresholds. Only the Gulp Fish has a lower threshold (25 C), even other cold-adapted critters like Seals and Floxes have the 100 C threshold.

When scalding Spigot Seals to death, there can be the issue where the tallow melts into crude oil. However, if your critter gassing chamber consists of hot CO2 (say 150 C) and insulated tile floors it will take well over a minute for the Tallow to melt, plenty of time for a Sweeper to move it unless you have very serious sweeping dysfunction problems.

Critter gassing chambers are quite cheap and easy to build. Of those critters you'd actually want to scald to death, you can get away with a temperature of like 110 C which is easily accomplished with common ores or common refined metals, no need for steel. The actual heat input required is very small compared with old fashioned boiling critters alive, as there's no need to actually heat the critter, like in the above chlorine gas chamber the baby seal changed temperature by only about 0.4 C before expiring. You can actually easily get away with a Thermo Regulator probably with only like 10% uptime, which along with putting less peak load on a circuit, also eliminates issues with coolant freezing if you are using a cold base.

We can rejoice that we now have a relatively quick and "humane" way to kill aquatic critters, not just seals but also pacus, pokeshells and slugs.

Also one other thing I tested: Will critters voluntarily go into lethally hot or cold liquids? In short: Yes. So if you prefer to let the critters choose for themselves when it is time to expire for the good of the colony an extra hot tub is an option. But if you want to kill seals this way, then many liquids will melt the tallow nearly instantly, use a relatively low conductivity one like Liquid Sulfur or Phosphorus.

[imazined]

This change just has not so advantageous consequences for cold starts without cold critters.
 

 

[Gurgel]

There really is no need. Domesticated critters sarve fast enough is you just stop feeding them. Others are only present in limited numbers. 

[JRup]

Why power an aquatuner when you can get free heat. Would I forget about this gem? No, of course not... Funny that you mentioned the hot tub.

I present a 5kDTU/s source of heat. Just load 'er up, cut the power cable and let 'er rip:

The hot tub is a funny building in that it's permanently generating and adding heat to itself, be it powered or unpowered. It happens in working condition or when broken. This behavior will only start once its operating requirements are met, it can even be disabled by automation. It.Won't.Stop.

The only trick is to disallow duplicant access for when it eventually breaks and cool it somewhat so that it won't melt. There, it's not a time machine, but still has some infinity to it.

[asurendra]

15 hours ago, Gurgel said:

There really is no need. Domesticated critters sarve fast enough is you just stop feeding them. Others are only present in limited numbers. 

10 cycles plus some more to reach 0 calories threshold. . Glum hatch, for example, takes approximately 35 cycles. Thats definitely not fast

[Primalflower]

Very good. I look forward to building proper cow melters

[Prince Mandor]

It don't sure it even needs heating, as I see several micrograms of hot CO2 kills beetas very quickly, and don't exchange heat with them in a process, so may be just having micro amount of once heated gas will be enough

[blakemw]

6 hours ago, Prince Mandor said:

It don't sure it even needs heating, as I see several micrograms of hot CO2 kills beetas very quickly, and don't exchange heat with them in a process, so may be just having micro amount of once heated gas will be enough

Yeah, you can exploit the fact that mcg quantities of gas don't exchange heat with debris (or critters in this case).

Personally I find that "glitch" in the heat exchange physics super annoying and I don't think that quantities that are too small to exchange heat should be allowed to scald. But if you don't mind that particular exploit, yeah, it works.

[Gurgel]

On 8/1/2024 at 6:17 AM, asurendra said:

10 cycles plus some more to reach 0 calories threshold. . Glum hatch, for example, takes approximately 35 cycles. Thats definitely not fast

I did not say "fast". I said "fast enough". And once it reaches equilibrium, you get exactly the same output rate. 

[Pedro_L]

On 8/2/2024 at 12:01 PM, Gurgel said:

I did not say "fast". I said "fast enough". And once it reaches equilibrium, you get exactly the same output rate. 

But why waste computation when you can just kill them faster

[thegroundbelow]

On 8/2/2024 at 11:01 AM, Gurgel said:

I did not say "fast". I said "fast enough". And once it reaches equilibrium, you get exactly the same output rate. 

It really doesn't kill spigot seals "fast enough" though.  The ever-popular pez dropper, for example, fails if there is more than one critter in the dropper. Its functionality depends on unneeded critters being killed as they hatch.  Without a way to "actively" cull the population, you have to resort to more complicated solutions for ranch population management.

[blakemw]

11 hours ago, thegroundbelow said:

It really doesn't kill spigot seals "fast enough" though.  The ever-popular pez dropper, for example, fails if there is more than one critter in the dropper. Its functionality depends on unneeded critters being killed as they hatch.  Without a way to "actively" cull the population, you have to resort to more complicated solutions for ranch population management.

Technically, while I am fond of death chambers, there are "two chamber" dropper solutions that can deal with that, it requires a setup of Critter Sensors that detects when there is exactly 1 critter in the dropper before it allows the ranch critter sensor to open the "dropper" door, and it holds that single critter it has isolated indefinitely until the critter sensor in the ranch announces it needs one.

Here's a quick example I made in Sandbox, spread out a bit to make the automation easier to follow:

Essentially how it works, is if there is less than 1, or more than 1, critter in the dropper cell, then the door opens to let critters in and out. If there is exactly 1, the entry door closes. There's a FILTER gate that keeps the dropper door closed until there has been exactly one critter in the room for a few seconds, meaning the door has definitely closed and critters have stopped moving. And then if there are fewer than 8 critters in the ranch, the dropper door opens (note there are many possible ways to do the automation, also I prefer to use a layout which doesn't needlessly trap critters in doors, but that is by no means essential).

There is at least one gotcha: if you're doing this you want the "holding floor" to be quite wide. Critters always try to path at least 5 tiles before stopping. So if you're keeping all the critters in a space of 5 or fewer tiles, they'll all be pathing into the dropper all the time making it very unlikely to filter out just one (it basically requires all the critters to decide to path to the other end simultaneously). But if it's like 10 tiles wide, many critters will stop before reaching the dropper, making it much less likely to isolate just one because there are many places critters could possibly decide to stop. So if you want things to be as compact as possible, you need a kill box.

[Tigin]

Scalders can be quite compact and may even be the most practical for some critters. Here is a nifty pez dispenser setup for 25 seals. The invisible mercury on the airflow tiles is heated by an aquatuner. Adult seals will slowly scald themselves to death

The thermo aquatuner can even be replaced with a single battery for small amounts of critters (<8)

[Gurgel]

On 8/9/2024 at 2:59 AM, Pedro_L said:

But why waste computation when you can just kill them faster

Simplicity over complexity? But I am an engineer, so KISS is actually one of the few things I firmly believe in. 

[thegroundbelow]

15 hours ago, blakemw said:

Technically, while I am fond of death chambers, there are "two chamber" dropper solutions that can deal with that, it requires a setup of Critter Sensors that detects when there is exactly 1 critter in the dropper before it allows the ranch critter sensor to open the "dropper" door, and it holds that single critter it has isolated indefinitely until the critter sensor in the ranch announces it needs one.

Yeah, you can make just about anything work if you make it bigger and add more automation   I've got pokeshell ranches that use this kind of "feed" system, but I like to, as the man said, keep things simple.  Which will probably sound ironic considering the rest of my post.

Here's what I'm currently doing in my sandbox (overlays are in the spoiler). 

This is my 6 tree, 12 seal farm using only 3 mercury lights.  Took me several agonizing hours and many iterations to find a 96 tile layout that allowed me to fit everything in and still allow the seals to feed on every tree. One single branch of a single tree is blocked by the bottom-left conveyor loader, so it's 29/30 branches at full efficiency.  If you leave the mercury lights on until all of the branches are sitting at 100% efficiency, you can then set the lights to 5.1g/5.0r to keep the branches at 100% efficiency while using basically half the mercury (most of you probably know this, but just including it for anyone who doesn't).  With the cozy cottage in there you can even run this with 8 seals and no rancher with no reduction in ethanol production, and you can tap two trees for excess nectar if you do (which is the use case I was really aiming at, hence my insistence on including the cozy cottage).

As you had suggested, I'm taking advantage of a low TC liquid (naphtha) to scald my baby seals. The low TC and relatively high SHC is especially crucial given that the hot blob is basically uninsulated at the top of the very cold ranch, though I've done my best to minimize the thermal exposure. If you look at the conveyor overlay I've actually got a conveyor bridge linking that heat exchanger door with the naphtha puddle, so the little liquid loop I have there is really just so I can monitor the temp of the naptha.  I like this solution because you can stick this heat exchanger setup in any steam room you've already got running (well, not the conveyor bridge thing, but the liquid loop works perfectly well by itself). The liquid tepidizer is just there to bootstrap everything up to temp.  Once it's going, just move the tepidizer into the ethanol at the bottom, set the hydro sensor to keep at least 400kg of ethanol to allow it to work, and add a thermo sensor to keep the ethanol warm enough to keep the steam room hot enough, if you know what I mean.

If you're making your own snow (you poor bastard) the ice makers will provide plenty of heat to keep your steam room hot enough

 

In testing this ranch produced an average of 445kg of ethanol per cycle.

 

Spoiler