Maximizing a Dartle ranch

[Mariolo]

This was the max amount of dewdrips I could fit in a ranch with autosweepers, 36. This is enough for 18 dartles which can feed a full ranch of 6 rhex + enough chlorine for 6 megafrond after the huge nerf. You can harvest the dewdrips on a separate farm because unlike dreckos they don't eat the plant itself but rather the product. The reason you would want to do it like this is because dartles can harvest dewdrips themselves so it saves quite a lot of dupe labour.

It may be possible to fit a full ranch of 24 dartles with mutated plants but it doesn't get much better than this.

[Tigin]

You might be able to fit 1/2 more dartles by adding one or two mimika to the side with a 1-way door

EDIT: Unfortunately since dartles need to be both upside down and right-side up I couldn't find a way to keep the dartles from leaving

Edited June 1, 2025 by Tigin

[BGB]

You could do a single auto sweeper with a bin in its range that gets supplied by a flydo that collects and fertilises everything outside of sweepers range. Works decently well in my colony but I didn’t try to maximise everything and I’m doing a 21 dartle ranch.

[ghkbrew]

Interesting.  I didn't realize the dartles would do the harvesting for you.  Still, if you have the plants in the ranch you're locked out of using fertilizer.  Even with the extra labor, I think using a separate green house to halve the resource requirements is worth it.  You should, even, be able to use lumbs for auto-harvesting in a greenhouse if you wanted.  Then you can compact your dartle ranch to minimize pathing and grooming time.

 

Will dartles harvest any dewdrip, or just when they're hungry?

[Mariolo]

8 minutes ago, ghkbrew said:

Interesting.  I didn't realize the dartles would do the harvesting for you.  Still, if you have the plants in the ranch you're locked out of using fertilizer.  Even with the extra labor, I think using a separate green house to halve the resource requirements is worth it.  You should, even, be able to use lumbs for auto-harvesting in a greenhouse if you wanted.  Then you can compact your dartle ranch to minimize pathing and grooming time.

 

Will dartles harvest any dewdrip, or just when they're hungry?

I feel like fertilizing dewdrops would take too much dupe labour as their growth cycle is quick enough. They are sustainable with rhexes and there's not much reason to ranch a huge amount of dartles

 

18 hours ago, BGB said:

You could do a single auto sweeper with a bin in its range that gets supplied by a flydo that collects and fertilises everything outside of sweepers range. Works decently well in my colony but I didn’t try to maximise everything and I’m doing a 21 dartle ranch.

Unfortunately there's no way to prevent dupes from delivering eggs to the storage bin while making the flydo able to supply it, so unless you make sure no dupes have access to the eggs they will be moving them back a forth to the bin

Edited June 2, 2025 by Mariolo

[Epicteus]

1 hour ago, ghkbrew said:

Still, if you have the plants in the ranch you're locked out of using fertilizer.  Even with the extra labor, I think using a separate green house to halve the resource requirements is worth it.

As of the last version, the farm station doesn't work on dewdrips