What happened to Moto Rolo?

[KittenIsAGeek]

So for a long time I'm watching my dupes go around doing things and I notice that Moto Rolo isn't traveling from one job to the next.  He's also not in the barracks, or helping with the new dig... 

 

Eventually I found him.  He's stuck grooming.

There's 180 Flox in the ranch.  I forgot to close off the overflow room.  Oops.

I guess we're not gonna have to worry about having enough meat.

[Prince Mandor]

Can they increase in numbers without feeding?

[asurendra]

2 hours ago, Prince Mandor said:

Can they increase in numbers without feeding?

 Floxes? Nope. Only short-lived creatures like shine bugs can. But its possible to feed them with already harvested plants. 

[KittenIsAGeek]

4 hours ago, Prince Mandor said:

Can they increase in numbers without feeding?

Yes, and no.  I have 7 farm tiles with pikeapple bushes outside of a greenhouse that is supporting a starving community of around 225 flox.  I decided to leave the overflow room open-ended.  The 'ranch' side has a groomer and a shearing station.  The overflow room has a feeder supplied by those 7 pikapples.  I'm closing in on cycle 400, and I'm sitting at 100t of dirt and 180t of wood.  I've got two ranchers on different schedules at this point and the grooming station is almost always in use.  I've also got about 510k kcal of meat, most of which is frozen in CO2.

As far as eggs and stuff, a groomed, tame, starving flox will not lay eggs.  However, a groomed, tame, hungry -- but otherwise happy -- flox will lay an egg in 6 cycles.  So occasionally eating will guarantee an increase in numbers just through the law of averages.  When they're on the ranch side, they're cramped so won't reproduce, but when they wander into the open area they will.  I started with 3 flox. I'm relatively stable around 225 with only 7 farm tiles, sooo. *shrug*

I came up with the overflow room idea when farming hatches.  At the time I was essentially using their burrowing ability to over-load the ranch.  I decided to see if it worked with other critters.  For the record, Bammoths will get up to around 10, then collapse down to 2 with 7 plume squash hydroponics tiles.  Bammoths also grow fur really REALLY slow if they're not continually fed.  I get more reed fibers from one well-fed bammoth than I do from multiple partially-fed ones.