There should be a low tech option for ranching!

[bleepbloopinato]

After like 900 hours now I think I've realized what I always felt was missing from ranching. Currently you have to kinda wait until you've gotten a bunch of stuff unlocked like auto sweepers to really get into ranching, and that makes it hard, especially for new players, to get into it. Imo there should be dupe labor-intensive buildings for ranching that are more accessible in the early game but objectively worse, to smooth that transition. for example a station that allows dupes to manually remove eggs from a ranch as a task, or a worse incubator that doesnt need power but allows you to organize your eggs. Also an actual critter execution building(maybe a Guillotine!) would be generally really useful

[imazined]

There is. It's called storage bin or egg evolution chamber

[Curry MAMA]

Simpler solutions risk hiding the problem from players, just as not all players are going to want to replace their ladders with plastic ones.

And best of all, there are already several solutions in the game: Automatic Dispenser, Critter Sensor and Automated Notifier.

You can also make some of the eggs escape on their own by placing a Pneumatic Door on the floor.

[Slvrsrfr]

i use storage containers, and generally wait until the egg appears. The just sweep it, I have sometimes a single bin that accepts nothing but those kinds of sweep tasks in very import places. Like for shinebugs, and natural bristle berry.

[blakemw]

Just want to throw out some solutions.

For the most part, low tech ranching means "removing the critter eggs to prevent crowding/confinement". The Automated Dispenser is very useful for this, but requires that where it drops the egg be inaccessible to dupes.

This basic pattern of a door which is locked open, and with access restrictions, is one I use a lot:

Critters can go through the door, Dupes can't. The idea is to wrangle the critters when they come out.

Here's a variants with liquid-based expulsion:

This is the GTFO setup with stacked liquid ejecting the hatched critter into the room, preventing it from escaping the notice of Critter Sensors and Critter Pickups/Dropoffs.

Alternatively for those with allergy to stacked liquids, there's a mechanical version:

This relies on door dropper behaviour. The bottom door is locked. The upper door is automated by a Timer Sensor and just opens and shuts continuously. You may "need" the dropper design for amphibious critters like Plug Slugs, it can also have advantages for wall climbers, wall climbers can't climb up an open door with liquid behind it, so if you actually want your wall climbers to be able to reach the ceiling (e.g. to eat plants), if using with wall climbers add a second pneumatic door next to the toggling one to stop wall climbers entering it.

There is also automated slaughter of adult critters (not babies, though there's a variant for babies too):

It's simply a Mechanical Airlock over shallow liquid, with a Critter Sensor set to "Count < 1", the moment a Critter enters the Mechanical Airlock shuts, this turns the liquid tiles into full liquid tiles, and the critter drowns. Once it has drowned, the Critter Count is zero so the trap opens ready for its next victim. It's not perfectly ideal for cannibals (Hatches and Sage Hatches mostly) because they'll eat some of the produced meat, unlike the conventional "hatching in a drowning hazard" setup. However the "Dropper" design I showed earlier, can be used to drop cannibals into deep liquid to drown with no possibility of eating their brethren.

Incubators, whether powered or not, make it easy to populate a ranch. Generally you want the Incubator with a higher priority than the Automated Dispenser. One thing I do, which some may consider a crime, is automating an Incubator with logic like "Critter Sensor < 8", so if the Ranch is not full new eggs will be quickly incubated. Some may consider this a crime because I'm letting the Incubator consume the full 240 W instead of tricking it but it's only running until the ranch is fully populated which means it's not running most the time.

So overall there are tons of ranching options pre-Mechanics Engineer, some of which are so good I still use them once I have Mechatronics Engineers. These won't be obvious to new players, critter droppers are especially arcane, but I'm pretty sure the ONI new player experience is meant to be a "rolling crisis/disaster" where things are always going wrong, forcing the player to engineer solutions or muddle along with manual interventions.

Edited June 11, 2025 by blakemw

[Cmagik]

On 6/11/2025 at 8:55 AM, blakemw said:

Just want to throw out some solutions.

For the most part, low tech ranching means "removing the critter eggs to prevent crowding/confinement". The Automated Dispenser is very useful for this, but requires that where it drops the egg be inaccessible to dupes.

This basic pattern of a door which is locked open, and with access restrictions, is one I use a lot:

I really like that design

Perhaps to make it more newbi friendly they could add an to prevent dupe from attempting to grab item in front of the dispenser..

This would make it much more approachable (and useful tbh). What you do is nice and quite lowtech but it's definitely not something someone new to the game would think of.

I agree with OP that ranching requires a bit too much knowledge to just "work" at an early stage.

Something dumb like an egg basket which would do what I quoted, gather eggs but prevent dupes from getting them indefinitely, some sort of pre-evolution chamber, would be a good addition.

Compared to just (early) farming which is quite approachable, (early) ranching could see some improvement.

 

[KittenIsAGeek]

On 6/11/2025 at 12:55 AM, blakemw said:

This basic pattern of a door which is locked open, and with access restrictions, is one I use a lot:

I've done this a LOT.  Another neat trick is to leave a few of the softer natural tiles (dirt, etc) in the ranch.  The hatches then bury themselves most of the time and don't realize they're overcrowded.  Then they pop out their eggs as they leave the ground, and get groomed.  Put the door up one block and the hatchlings can't get out until they mature, so they won't occupy your dupes during the day.  Make sure you have a rancher (or two, or three) awake during the night cycle for grooming.  I had one ranch with 40 units of space that held well over 200 hatches.  Kept 3 ranchers busy every night.  Had more meat and coal than I knew what to do with.  The biggest problem I had was getting the meat from deceased hatches before one of their starving buddies found it!

On 9/23/2025 at 6:30 PM, Cmagik said:

Something dumb like an egg basket which would do what I quoted, gather eggs but prevent dupes from getting them indefinitely,

That's what the door does.  There's a few other ways to do it, like positioning the dispenser to drop the egg farther than a dupe can get it, but then it gets complicated.  I think I figured out door permissions the third or forth time I played the game, when it was first accessible on Steam, because I had dupes going into parts of the base that they weren't optimized for and thus were making everything break.  Like, why is my digging dupe hanging out in the farm while the farming dupe is down in the CO2 suffocating trying to dig?

 

I mean, there are definitely nuances to this game that aren't obvious to figure out, but doors aren't one of them.  Also, a new player probably isn't thinking about overcrowding their ranch as much as they're thinking about "how do I set up a ranch so my hatches don't die off?"  As far as that particular problem goes.. Pacu are the WORST.  I've had more pacu ranches annihilate themselves due to cramping... grr.  Anyway!

[cyberwarlord]

.....Why are there no egg nests?

Would having some critters nest or sit on their eggs reduce pathing?

Idle animation, sitting on beds, eggs, seeing 2 stone hatches acting like rams.

Edited November 1, 2025 by cyberwarlord

[Slightquills]

Why not have an "egg box" that can be connected to rails to transport the eggs?

I think it's an elegant simple solution that is relatively low tech and doesn't involve complex builds or deep understanding of game mechanics to make automation work then.

[asurendra]

16 hours ago, Slightquills said:

Why not have an "egg box" that can be connected to rails to transport the eggs?

I think it's an elegant simple solution that is relatively low tech and doesn't involve complex builds or deep understanding of game mechanics to make automation work then.

Rails require Mechatronic skill. So its definitely not early-game option

[okranger1777]

I like the idea of an actual abattoir building!

In the early game I do Hatch ranches without Mechatronics.

Basically: start with a standard 96-tile ranch with Mechanized Airlocks for the 6-tile grooming area floor. When you access Critter Sensors, hook them up and set to 1 Egg (no need for power). Underneath build a 6-tile wide pool with polluted water topped by regular water in small amounts, which works as an evolution chamber.

Keep the ranch populated with incubators, I usually hook them up to a Manual Generator behind a door which functions as a Athleticism gym. I add a low priority Critter Drop-off set to Hatchlings to the pool.

Once you have Auto-Sweepers you can make it a bit more efficient but a dupe has to groom the critters anyway.

 

 

 

 

[KittenIsAGeek]

On 2/8/2026 at 8:06 AM, okranger1777 said:

In the early game I do Hatch ranches without Mechatronics.

You can do a really simple hatch ranch that will quickly get you way too many critters happily eating, laying eggs, and producing coal.

Your groomer will work non-stop through the night, so you may need a second or third grooming station at some point.. but I've had 40-grid ranch with over 100 hatches that were all content and happy.  When a hatch is buried, it doesn't care about ANY of the other critters in the area.  So confined, crowded, overcrowded, etc, only apply during the night cycle.  If they're ready to, they'll lay the egg as soon as they unburrow before the overcrowded status applies.

I had 10 dupes and after about cycle 150, the ranch was producing more meat than my dupes could eat --without me having to kill any of them.  Though I did have to get an auto sweeper in there to pick up the meat before the other hatches munched it down.

[ThePyro]

I love ONI for this.

Old, experienced players: building neat, perfectly rectangular rooms, automating farms with conveyors, min-maxing every second of dupe time...

A newbie: builds a crooked, square-peg room with a natural block floor for a hatch farm... But you know what? It works just the same! 👍

[KittenIsAGeek]

On 2/26/2026 at 12:46 AM, ThePyro said:

A newbie: builds a crooked, square-peg room with a natural block floor for a hatch farm...

I've been here since Alpha.  I will admit I haven't played for maybe 8 months or so, but.. 

And I used to make everything very neat and orderly.  Now I just do whatever until all the needs are taken care of, then I go back and re-design everything. 

The natural tile hatch ranch is probably one of the easiest ways to ranch hatches.  If you need meat early, your dupes can safely attack them while burrowed.  If you get them to be stone hatches, its easier to keep them from eating their buddy's corpses.   Or if you're in a metal-rich world (or have metal volcanoes), go for smooth hatches.

 

Its also fun to post a really awkward build just to watch the OCD folks pull their hair out.

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