Wild Hatch Farm...Again! And a ranch too :)

[BLACKBERREST3]

I forgot my other builds [it was called "hatch batch"], so here's a new one!

Left is for wild, Right is for tame-fed or tame-glum.

 

 

 

 

 

Stripped versions to start with

 

Concepts used in both: 350kg water tile critter traps / critter door traps

Features of Wild Farm

• Hatches! [Automation is specifically geared towards hatches, while it may work for sweetles if you open up a tile on the left side, you will not get the full benefit of burrowing hatches as they do not count towards the overall critter cap of the entire asteroid]
• Full separation of tamed vs wild hatch areas. Keep your wild hatches wild.
• Visiting Hours! Automation set to allow visiting hours when hatches fully buried [Critter sensor detects 0 when hatches are buried]. Newly grown hatches are reintroduced every night when hatches are already out and about.

Features of Hatch Ranch

• Eco Incubator Automation, use less power
• Precise feeding control every step of the way
• 3 high walls to congregate hatches to an area
• Fully Dupe maneuverable. Access whatever whenever you want.
• Automated Hatch and Morph handling. Renew hatches automatically and send the excess away when incubator is disabled.
• Hatchery integrated inside each stable
• Passive Evolution chamber with Active Evolution chamber redirect. Passively process a batch of hatches to feed them after 8 cycles to get one final egg before they pass. Flip a switch to send excess eggs to an ethical Active Evolution chamber.
• Deep Freeze Eggs. After Passive Evolution chamber, send excess eggs to deep freeze storage and bury them for future use. Flip a switch to automatically send eggs back through the loop to automate renewal in case of emergency hatch extinction.

Cons: Expensive! This is the cheapest I could build that included everything I wanted. Couldn't make it any cheaper without sacrificing a feature or two.

 

Math:

hatches start with exactly 90% of 7000kcal or 6300kcal. Using ONI database we get -1.17kcal/s for 100% metabolism. baby hatches use 70.2kcal/cycle roughly because of rounding [-90% metabolism for 5 cycles at 600s/cycle = 6300 - (5*0.1*1.17*600)) = Slightly under 5950kcal left. Tamed glum will be -233.33kcal/s or 600*.23333 = a little under 140kcal/cycle. 5950 / 140 = 42.5 cycles + 10 for starving timer = 52.5 cycles to die. Math is a little weird when he multiplies 1.66% by 52.5 cycles whatever that means in this post. So instead the actual number is 100/1.66 = 60.24096 Cycles or a little under 60 and quarter. Haven't seen it mentioned too much, but I'm assuming only full grown hatches start their egg timer and not hatchlings. So the final rough numbers are in cycles, 5 to mature - > 42.5 to run out of kcal -> 10 to starve and die. Meanwhile it takes 5 to mature -> 60.25 to produce an egg. Hatches eat when they are at 90% or below and since they start at 90% they can eat whenever we want them to at least once before sending them to the next chamber. We need to delay their death by 60.25 - (10+42.5) = 7.75 Cycles Bare Minimum. If we give them a buffer of .25 of a cycle, we would need to feed the fresh batch of hatches all they can eat 8 cycles after they have fully grown before pushing them to the next area.

 

Blueprints

Hatch Ranch LR.blueprint

Hatch Ranch Stripped RL.blueprint

Hatch Ranch RL.blueprint

Hatch Farm Stripped RL.blueprint

Hatch Farm RL.blueprint

Hatch Farm Stripped LR.blueprint

Hatch Farm LR.blueprint

Hatch Ranch Stripped LR.blueprint

 

 

 

Thank you @MinhPham and @KittenIsAGeek for the help and ideas. Much appreciated.

 

 

Edited 13 hours ago by BLACKBERREST3
Made a mirror version of each blueprint

[Frustrated]

I have a bunch of wild hatches in a room in the middle of my colony.  I give them walls too high to escape, or doors they can't open.  To get them there, I just had dupes carry any eggs they found over there and a rancher wrangle the hatches.

[BLACKBERREST3]

Updated the post. I workshopped a better build. That's what I was doing too, but I got tired of all my wild hatches eating their own drops when they died. I also wanted a controlled way to breed for smooth hatches without taming them. Benefits of wild hatches are that they don't starve from not eating. If you print enough eggs, you can sustain yourself for free over time. Also, this build is almost free with how easy it is to get the materials for it. Only takes a bit of refinement in the rock crusher, then you can start feeding your wild hatches sediment.

Also, pretty sure that one exploit with suffocating dupes still works, so now infinite food and water too, no geyser necessary.

edit: workshopped it a bit more to fix the automation. Now too many hatches won't leave the doors closed all the time.

edit2: replaced memory toggle with poor mans not-not latch and xor gate

edit3: while building realized xor gate uses material research, replaced xor with nand gates for earlier build

Edited April 23 by BLACKBERREST3

[KittenIsAGeek]

Wild hatch ranchers are a lot easier than this.  Make a room with natural "soft" floor tiles that hatches can burrow into.  Doesn't matter how crowded it gets -- while they're burrowed, they're not crowded or cramped.  What will happen is that when they're ready to lay an egg, they'll  pop it out as soon as they dig out for the evening.  If you throw a grooming station (or two, or three) in there, you can get an absurd number of hatches running around.   I don't seem to have any screenshots readily available.. .I'll have to post one at some point.

[SackMaggie]

16 hours ago, KittenIsAGeek said:

Wild hatch ranchers are a lot easier than this.  Make a room with natural "soft" floor tiles that hatches can burrow into.  Doesn't matter how crowded it gets -- while they're burrowed, they're not crowded or cramped.  What will happen is that when they're ready to lay an egg, they'll  pop it out as soon as they dig out for the evening.  If you throw a grooming station (or two, or three) in there, you can get an absurd number of hatches running around.   I don't seem to have any screenshots readily available.. .I'll have to post one at some point.

If grooming station are used eventually hatch will not be wild... What am i missing here ?

[BLACKBERREST3]

On 4/27/2026 at 10:37 AM, SackMaggie said:

If grooming station are used eventually hatch will not be wild... What am i missing here ?

I like to keep as many hatches wild as possible, plus you can just print more wild ones from the pod. Eventually you can get a stream of free food from them.

On 4/26/2026 at 5:52 PM, KittenIsAGeek said:

Wild hatch ranchers are a lot easier than this.  Make a room with natural "soft" floor tiles that hatches can burrow into.  Doesn't matter how crowded it gets -- while they're burrowed, they're not crowded or cramped.  What will happen is that when they're ready to lay an egg, they'll  pop it out as soon as they dig out for the evening.  If you throw a grooming station (or two, or three) in there, you can get an absurd number of hatches running around.   I don't seem to have any screenshots readily available.. .I'll have to post one at some point.

I didn't know this! Thanks. Wait, does this work for tamed glum ones too? I might've been ranching wrong. Pretty sure tamed glum still starve even when burrowed. Seems like wild hatches will eat their meat drops at night if dupes haven't swept them in time. My build solves this, but the down side is that eventually the critter cap will be reached because there is only a few thousand tiles per asteroid.

I might explore a burrow hatch ranch later.

Edited May 7 by BLACKBERREST3

[MinhPham]

I start hatch ranch as soon as the i have a duplicant with 3 skill points, usually around cycle 12 and it is a burrow ranch, but the purpose is to increase the population while i'm expanding and allocate a big enough room for proper ranch.3 blocks of night is not enough to groom them all, so i place a pneumatic door on top of the dirt tile to prevent them from burrowing while a duplicant is in the room doing his thing.

My problem with the wild hatch ranch is they produce 66kcal/cycle for every wild or glum hatch (you can stack some insane amount of tame+glum hatches and feed them stones, they will live up to 100 cycles and produce one egg before dying)

[BLACKBERREST3]

7 hours ago, MinhPham said:

I start hatch ranch as soon as the i have a duplicant with 3 skill points, usually around cycle 12 and it is a burrow ranch, but the purpose is to increase the population while i'm expanding and allocate a big enough room for proper ranch.3 blocks of night is not enough to groom them all, so i place a pneumatic door on top of the dirt tile to prevent them from burrowing while a duplicant is in the room doing his thing.

My problem with the wild hatch ranch is they produce 66kcal/cycle for every wild or glum hatch (you can stack some insane amount of tame+glum hatches and feed them stones, they will live up to 100 cycles and produce one egg before dying)

I used to have a build, It's actually buried somewhere in my posts. It used the exact same mechanics this one used, but in a slightly different way. It would take a fresh batch of hatches and feed them after a certain amount of time the bare minimum so they would produce an egg and then die. It saved me on a lot of material. The problem was after a certain amount of time, I had maxed out the critter cap for my entire world. Food wasn't scarce by any means, but it was fun to make. I think if I make a few adjustments to this build like flooding their area at night only so they don't eat the drops, sweep them away with an autosweeper, then let them go back into their burrow in the day time, it would fix the eventual critter cap. The benefit of this build is that I didn't need any power requirements, but I think an autosweeper would be a nice upgrade. The mechanical door on the bottom right of this build already allows the hatches to jump down if they want.

edit: I'm gonna fix the pics on this post, idk why I can't see them anymore. I'll fix them in a moment irl stuff.

also while testing, my dupes would drop their food all the time near the great hall after eating. The big downside is that sometimes the hatches would eat their leftovers. there is room for an autosweeper there, but I'll take a guess and say that there is still a chance even with the autosweeper that hatches might still eat the leftovers.

I don't think a tamed starving ranch works as well becuase it takes up a lot of dupe time for each hatch to only lay one egg before dying if i'm not mistaken. It seems better to feed one happy hatch right?

Edited May 8 by BLACKBERREST3

[BLACKBERREST3]

Dang, turns out there is not enough room for an autosweeper in the great hall. It's either redesign this or my hatches get the leftovers XD

Yep, not enough room at all. Tried to do too much in a tiny area. I'm just gonna make a dedicated hatch ranching area where they can burrow

[BLACKBERREST3]

I have new plans for an actual ranch this time. one they can burrow in to avoid total critter cap and lay an egg before dying by feeding the min amount. When target critters are reached, I will redirect new hatches to the active evolution chamber. Easiest way I can think of to sort hatches is by their eggs. Been a while since I messed with sweepers and bins, I'm gonna need a refresher on how to use automation to disable bins until needing to be sorted. I can't remember if that used doors to hide bins or just automation. Maybe I'll add some manual automation for dumping metal into the passive chamber to get on demand refined metal / coal / rot cleanup.

I need more data on burrowed hatches and how this affects their egg laying cycle before starving.

[BLACKBERREST3]

I forgot that hatches could be overcrowded and still lay an egg

Overcrowding won't work. It says they lose happiness for "each" critter over the cap. That means that at 5 over and glum they would be at -10 happiness and won't produce eggs. If they are burrowed I can't ranch them as well so burrowed and ranched ones have to be in two separate areas

[BLACKBERREST3]

The new conveyor meter might help to limit 1 egg in waiting at all times.

[MinhPham]

You can delay their incubation by keeping the eggs inside a storage, up to 10 cycles, then release at once, those eggs will hatch at almost the same time, feed them, send them to the starving zone ...

[BLACKBERREST3]

2 hours ago, MinhPham said:

You can delay their incubation by keeping the eggs inside a storage, up to 10 cycles, then release at once, those eggs will hatch at almost the same time, feed them, send them to the starving zone ...

that's a good idea! I'll keep that in mind.

I had a thought. Since I haven't decided if I was going to even feed my hatches at all in the ranching area yet [gotta save that food for batch of hatches]. I might have a passive waiting area right on top so I don't have to worry about sorting hatches later. I won't even need an incubator as one or two will always be waiting. I haven't figured out what all the automation will be yet. I'm thinking I might even overcrowd the ranching area a little bit since that doesn't stop egg laying. pretend these two rooms are combined in the pic. I think I came up with a more concentrated holding area.

It's tough finding a way to delay egg hatching without it requiring constant power of some kind. Minimum power draw I could find was 10W for the conveyor meter that you could hook up to a receptacle. The less complex design uses 1 single dispenser to hold an egg and drop it later. I might do that actually cause I could fit in an incubator with a dispenser.

Edited Friday at 10:36 PM by BLACKBERREST3

[BLACKBERREST3]

They fixed the dispenser!!! This has to be a dlc fix. It didn't use to operate this way. It now holds its items even when power is lost. It also locks it's automation state in general on power loss, this simplifies everything.

Edited Friday at 11:23 PM by BLACKBERREST3

[BLACKBERREST3]

I could try to use the egg viability exploit with doors, but that adds some space complexity to the build

[MinhPham]

The dispenser needs power to release items, they can hold items without power when there is a red automation input. Sometimes It also bugged and release items without power, only work properly after an automation toggle.

[BLACKBERREST3]

I think i'm on to something really good

1 hour ago, MinhPham said:

The dispenser needs power to release items, they can hold items without power when there is a red automation input. Sometimes It also bugged and release items without power, only work properly after an automation toggle.

So in the base game, they would just dump stuff if they lose power. How they work now with what I think is the spaced out dlc, they will take an automation input only when powered and act accordingly. It seems to be pretty consistent so far, but I'll test it and see if I get that bug. Also, if you remove ground with a mech door, they will also lock their automation input until they are enabled with ground again. This makes them 1000x more useful than they used to be.

You can always shutoff power to them and only power them when you need to dump stuff.

You can dump eggs directly in a locked door to bury them so they don't lose viability

There's enough room to have incubator automation, it's open to the rest of the room, enough room for egg dispersal automation, and we can lock the vertical door to hide the sweeper from the dispenser if we need to. set the dispenser to a higher priority then send the rest of the eggs elsewhere. seems like it will work, I'll try a few things

Edited Saturday at 01:24 AM by BLACKBERREST3

[MinhPham]

In the base game they will hold the item with or without power, as long as the input signal is red, but as i said it was bugged so if you build 10 dispensers the same way, one or two of them will release stuffs even with red input, and only change their behavior once they received a green signal once ...

Anyway, when burry eggs to stop their incubation you can actually make all of them hatch at the same time, grow up at the same time, lay eggs at the same time .... and that would simplify things by a lot.

[BLACKBERREST3]

11 hours ago, MinhPham said:

In the base game they will hold the item with or without power, as long as the input signal is red, but as i said it was bugged so if you build 10 dispensers the same way, one or two of them will release stuffs even with red input, and only change their behavior once they received a green signal once ...

Anyway, when burry eggs to stop their incubation you can actually make all of them hatch at the same time, grow up at the same time, lay eggs at the same time .... and that would simplify things by a lot.

Darn, alright, probably for the best I avoid the dispenser if it bugs so much. I haven't had it happen yet, but if others are getting it, I won't use it. I have other methods I can try. I might make a cycle timer out of that mechanic to control when they hatch so I can time it right before they die of old age. It adds a bit more space requirements, but I'm close to puzzling it together. Found a way to keep the incubator inside the ranch and only have it deliver eggs when ready. Door will prevent it from being enabled until it's ready. This might be the only other way besides locking access to the incubator or timing when to unbury eggs bypassing the need for an incubator.

 

 

weird that I haven't seen anything like this yet. maybe a build like this is buried on the forums somewhere.

I think I'm ready to work on the next area now that egg resupply has been handled. I might add a deep freeze section [egg burying] just in case all my hatches die all at once as a worst case scenario.

I might add doors under their feeders for more control  That works

Only problem I have with timing the eggs in general is that you would have to do them in discrete batches which idk how efficient that would be when they hatch in 20 cycles. It's nice to have a system where you can introduce new eggs at any time and have it going continuously. Handling when to feed starving hatches on the other hand only takes 8 cycles per batch and that doesn't have any bearing on their age.

Edited Saturday at 03:18 PM by BLACKBERREST3

[BLACKBERREST3]

I think I'm able to save on sweepers and power if I just make the floor all doors That wouldn't work, nothing to auto feed them at an interval.

I have definitely seen all mech doors builds, but none with an incubator in them

Edited Saturday at 03:36 PM by BLACKBERREST3

[MinhPham]

44 minutes ago, BLACKBERREST3 said:

I have definitely seen all mech doors builds, but none with an incubator in them

Because the egg actually count as a critter, thus reduce ranch capacity by one. For most types of critter you need one powered incubator per 25 critters, or 5 critter for the unpowered one, also you can just hold one egg somewhere for every 5 critters and ignore the incubators.

Is that ... tamed ranch ? In that case i suggest my build. The ranch is independence, no stacking required, quite easy to remake into a 4-height version (i like the 7 tiles ladder system). Two built-in drowning chamber, one for the the hatch type that you're ranching and one for the others. You can add a 1s/10s timer for the conveyor chute to delay the incubation time and prevent two eggs ever hatch at the same time

 

Or, a primitive ranch that can be built far long before conveyor system available .... eggs are delivered manually by duplicants, once hatched they will go into the ranch or the "evolution" chamber depend on whether the ranch needs a refill. The baby hatch can't jump so they will spend there childhood alone without their parents, once became adult they can jump throught the one way door, meet their parents and ask them why.

My most unfavourite part of this build is they need to stacked on top of each other, so in order to have properly ranching you need to allocate a large area for them, which is not easy in early game where the biomes are separated by abyssalite, you need to dig through them to expand ...

My second unfavourite part of this build is i have no idea how to get the egg shells out  because once i got the conveyor belt i will just build my favourite ranch instead.

Excess eggs or other hatches type egg also needs to be handle, maybe on top of the stack, idk ....

Edited Saturday at 04:18 PM by MinhPham

[MinhPham]

For starving ranch you can synchronize all incubation time for the eggs and then build a system to feed them for 8-10 cycles every 80 cycles (20 egg time + 60 life time) , all at once. They can all stay on one tile open to the world so no overcrowded debuff.

Maybe you can actually feed them that way without the synchronization, but the interval may need a reduction, 10 cycles every 50 cycles

Timer sensor in cycle mode along with the signal counter should be able to make it happen, i used this to count over 100 cycles for the rockets to launch.

 

 

Actually it's a bad idea because you have no control on how much each hatch can/will eat, if you feed them too much it beats the purpose of starving ranch.

I think you can try the shove vole approach, feed them as much as 1g/s using the conveyor meter, cost as little as nothing while their starving timer will reset to 10 cycles. Don't know if it will work.

Edited Saturday at 04:56 PM by MinhPham

[BLACKBERREST3]

Thought about doing a two tile liquid lock and kept that in my back pocket as a just in case, was trying to avoid the wet debuff if they ever did walk in it, not that that matters too much at all anyways because you have it in a low/ no traffic area. One question about your build though. Isn't there a small chance of overcrowding when you have less than 8 hatches and more than 1 egg hatches at the same time? I see that there is a way to handle egg morphs by using more conveyor loaders, I might use that later. I was trying to avoid a whole hatchery section because then I would need some way to sort them back into the ranch and you can only sort them by eggs anyways so I thought it might be better just to have the incubator in the ranch which is already difficult enough because dupes/sweepers will deliver eggs anyways if they are not disabled. That's what the mech doors are for, eggs won't be delivered and won't count towards the critter cap if the door is left open 99% of the time until you need it by critter sensor automation. I don't mind taking the 4 cycles to replace a hatch. The one downside I had with that is if they all died at the same time, but remember I am building a passive kill chamber so I could manually grab a hatch from that if I need to, no waiting necessary. If you try to time hatching eggs by burying them, then you would need some automation to tell them to stop delivering eggs to that area which isn't hard, but it adds a little bit more refined metal for each additional automation logic. Gotta balance that cost in refined metal vs space vs profit. At the end of the day I am replacing this with a shovol farm or something, this is just for early game sustainability that I would also want to keep around later because I like hatches and will probably turn them into pets later.

54 minutes ago, MinhPham said:

For starving ranch you can synchronize all incubation time for the eggs and then build a system to feed them for 8-10 cycles every 80 cycles (20 egg time + 60 life time) , all at once. They can all stay on one tile open to the world so no overcrowded debuff.

Maybe you can actually feed them that way without the synchronization, but the interval may need a reduction, 10 cycles every 50 cycles

Timer sensor in cycle mode along with the signal counter should be able to make it happen, i used this to count over 100 cycles for the rockets to launch.

 

 

Actually it's a bad idea because you have no control on how much each hatch can/will eat, if you feed them too much it beats the purpose of starving ranch.

I think you can try the shove vole approach, feed them as much as 1g/s using the conveyor meter, cost as little as nothing while their starving timer will reset to 10 cycles. Don't know if it will work.

You talking about my build or yours? I can limit the feeding down to almost nothing with mech doors under the feeders.

I'll probably starve them after I have the target amount of hatches I need in the passive chamber. Then I can at least get 1 egg out them each time.

Edited Saturday at 05:36 PM by BLACKBERREST3

[MinhPham]

1 hour ago, BLACKBERREST3 said:

Thought about doing a two tile liquid lock and kept that in my back pocket as a just in case, was trying to avoid the wet debuff if they ever did walk in it, not that that matters too much at all anyways because you have it in a low/ no traffic area. One question about your build though. Isn't there a small chance of overcrowding when you have less than 8 hatches and more than 1 egg hatches at the same time?

For the "premitive" build ? There are ladders on the hatch one-way path and dupes actually used the ladder to prevent themself from getting wet. And yes for that build there would be a chance to have to eggs hatch at the same second, but the chance is quite small and you can use the critter pickup to remove them.

But .... i would stay away from that build, because we can pick a starting dupe with Mechatronic Engineering and start building conveyor system very very soon.

But there is a refined metal problem, with the SPOM build the heat from metal refinery can be dumped into the Electrolyzers. For the Terrarium build i have no idea where to dump that heat. Oil biome rush for plastic is a thing but it's quite an adventure. If your asteroid have metal rich trait or a lot of metals then the Rock Crusher should be good enough and there won't be a lot of heat to worry about  

Better way for food, which can also fulfill the carnivore archievement is the pacus, their production rate is insane and require little to no care.
The pacu ranch below requires zero care, it produces 16.000kcal/cycle of cooked seafood or 60.000kcal/cycle of omelette (which is an auto-cook food), room size is 29x9 because it's the 7-ladder system)

 

For the 4-ladder version consider this build

 

Edited Saturday at 06:55 PM by MinhPham