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

[BLACKBERREST3]

Yeah pacu rush is definitely the way to go and you can skip hatches entirely. But...I really like them, they are my favorite critter so I'll attempt an overengineered solution. I usually go for a drecko ranch for plastic, it is way too easy to get plastic with them. I could always dump heat to a spom, but I feel like I don't need as much energy as I do water and atmosphere (doesn't even have to be O2). For longevity I was going to go straight to ranching shine bugs and get the third tier research out of the way with a shinebug reactor so I could make a steam loop and not worry about heat ever again. 

[MinhPham]

I built them all it's just in different order, either pacu or hatch first is a fine choice, drecko egg production is very slow so they can't be an early food source.

Hatches are required for coal, you need them for ceramic, i want some stupid amount of ceramics. Hatches need more spaice but easier to build.

Pacus are actually a better lime source than the pokeshells, also the omelette can be upgraded into mushroom quiche. Pacus cost less space but require more advanced tech for multiple liquid layers, otherwise it will need some stupid amount of liquid, which is a problem as a single pump can only do 6 tiles of water per cycle.

Drecko are required for reed fibers and plastics, some stupid amount of plastics so i can either melt them into sourgas->methane, or convert them into metal by melting the germ sensors, or both. But they're not my first plastic production either, going from regular drecko into glossy one takes time, i make my way into the oil biome and get plastic to make the turbines from them.

[BLACKBERREST3]

I don't see why this wouldn't work. I'm gonna update the post with a new pic.

[KittenIsAGeek]

On 5/6/2026 at 10:44 PM, BLACKBERREST3 said:

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.

Hmm.   While they're buried, unless they're actively starving to death (10 cycles of starvation), they'll be fine.

Spoiler

I don't generally run starving because I almost always have something excessive to feed them, like sandstone.  If you do run starving, then you'll want to throw a sweeper in there to 'rescue' the corpses.  You'll lose a little to hatches, especially if there are multiple simultaneous deaths.

Spoiler

If they're tame, but didn't get groomed during the night cycle, their metabolism drops to 20% and their reproduction will drop to 2%.  Which means a hatch from a tame egg will lay its own egg after 55 cycles without any grooming, provided it isn't starving.  With the 80% metabolism drop, one chomp of sandstone will last 'em 8 cycles.
** EDIT: Reproduction Correction: It will be closer to cycle 65 because the reproduction won't increase while they're wandering around at night.

I think I had one ranch set up where I used pips to plant a bunch of mealwood and just let it go wild.  Put in two grooming stations with two ranchers on a night shift and ended up with a hundred hatches at one point without feeding them anything.  Sure they ate some of their own corpses, but I was still getting more than my outpost was using.

On 4/27/2026 at 8:37 AM, SackMaggie said:

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

Yeah, but wild hatches won't increase in population.  If you're keeping them wild, just don't throw the grooming station in.  If you want to increase your population, you'll have to tame 'em.

Edited May 10 by KittenIsAGeek

[BLACKBERREST3]

10 hours ago, KittenIsAGeek said:

Hmm.   While they're buried, unless they're actively starving to death (10 cycles of starvation), they'll be fine.

  Hide contents

I don't generally run starving because I almost always have something excessive to feed them, like sandstone.  If you do run starving, then you'll want to throw a sweeper in there to 'rescue' the corpses.  You'll lose a little to hatches, especially if there are multiple simultaneous deaths.

  Hide contents

If they're tame, but didn't get groomed during the night cycle, their metabolism drops to 20% and their reproduction will drop to 2%.  Which means a hatch from a tame egg will lay its own egg after 55 cycles without any grooming, provided it isn't starving.  With the 80% metabolism drop, one chomp of sandstone will last 'em 8 cycles.
** EDIT: Reproduction Correction: It will be closer to cycle 65 because the reproduction won't increase while they're wandering around at night.

I think I had one ranch set up where I used pips to plant a bunch of mealwood and just let it go wild.  Put in two grooming stations with two ranchers on a night shift and ended up with a hundred hatches at one point without feeding them anything.  Sure they ate some of their own corpses, but I was still getting more than my outpost was using.

Yeah, but wild hatches won't increase in population.  If you're keeping them wild, just don't throw the grooming station in.  If you want to increase your population, you'll have to tame 'em.

That is all the info I needed. I think I did it. I had to make two separate builds. One was for the wild hatches and the other is for tamed-glum and tamed-fed hatches. I have to rewrite the post to include everything that's changed. It has everything I want in it. except for a redirect to an active kill chamber, but I'm not sure I'll ever need one. Currently looking for a compact active evolution chamber, I have enough space left over. nvm, found out the war crime way.

Edited May 11 by BLACKBERREST3

[BLACKBERREST3]

I reused the passive evolution chamber as the active one as well. They get trapped inside the door to get the meat while the passive ones remain on top. This is way over-engineered, but I think it uses almost every concept for hatches.

[BLACKBERREST3]

good news and bad news. I was able to build it early game. Bad news, I nearly ran out of metal. I'm gonna restart and rush print pacu. I'll have to build my hatch pet shop after volcano taming.

Simple pacu printer cheese. I probably don't have to farm any pacu, but I could dig out that build if I need to.

Edited May 14 by BLACKBERREST3

[BLACKBERREST3]

tony really was on top of volcano and vent tamers.

[MinhPham]

The difficulty of pacu is the part where you had to "tame" them ... only -15% wilderness per cycle, once they are tamed the populationw will explode

[BLACKBERREST3]

I think I have wild pacu mechanics wrong. Last time I piled a bunch of them in one tile, it gave them the confined status even though they had 8 tiles of water? I'm going to try it again. I think pacu cheese still works. hmmmmm. idk what's going on here. they are fine at 8, but not at 16? why are wild pacu affected by the crowded debuff?

do flopper builds work with these nerfed mechanics?

okay, I figured out something that may or may not be useful. pacu (and maybe other critters) will calculate mood every time you load in the game.

The first 8 pacu will be fine, but then when you add more, the second batch will be miserable until reload in which case all of them will be miserable. I don't know of any builds that move pacu 8 at a time and I don't think they have movement mechanics that allow you to do that either.

Edited May 16 by BLACKBERREST3

[BLACKBERREST3]

simplest solution just seems to be to keep 8 pacu in 8 tiles of water, move eggs to a flopper filter so when the old ones die off at age 25, new age 5 pacu will replace them (age 15 to lay an egg and 5 cycles to hatch). Still not that bad. for 6 dupes I would need:

[moved and correcting math below]

Edited May 18 by BLACKBERREST3

[MinhPham]

You need a tamed pacu to see what actually happen, as their happiness decide everything.

• Once overcrowed, every extra critter gives a -1 happiness debuff ontop of a -5 happiness (or -4 i'm not sure yet)
• Happiness value below -9 is miserable, reproduction paused

A wild pacu pool with the size of 8 holding 10 pacus, will have -14 (-5 crowded and -9 extra critter)happiness debuff, their happiness is -9 and still reproduce, but if you add the 10th pacu they all will be miserable.

Same pool but with tamed pacu you can have 9 pacus at max.

And yes they are not worth the effort right now because a lot of patches that nerfed them, better to stick with a tamed feed one.

[BLACKBERREST3]

ah, my mistake. you right, I can cram another 2 pacu in there. lemme edit the math on that.

2 hours ago, MinhPham said:

You need a tamed pacu to see what actually happen, as their happiness decide everything.

• Once overcrowed, every extra critter gives a -1 happiness debuff ontop of a -5 happiness (or -4 i'm not sure yet)
• Happiness value below -9 is miserable, reproduction paused

A wild pacu pool with the size of 8 holding 10 pacus, will have -14 (-5 crowded and -9 extra critter)happiness debuff, their happiness is -9 and still reproduce, but if you add the 10th pacu they all will be miserable.

Same pool but with tamed pacu you can have 9 pacus at max.

And yes they are not worth the effort right now because a lot of patches that nerfed them, better to stick with a tamed feed one.

how crowding works is a little differently now I believe.

• Only tame critters get the -1 happiness debuff
• crowding is not a set -5 happiness debuff, it is -1 happiness for every 1 critter over the cap for that sized room. In our case, if one pacu needs 8 tiles then that is 1 happy pacu and 9 unhappy pacu for a -9 happiness debuff. That lets us have either 10 wild pacu or 9 tame pacu in an 8 tile pool.

edit: I think I misread what you said, so this is just to clarify.

It's marginally worth it to keep them wild and you can print 8 of them every 3 cycles if you supplement food with meallice until you are set up.

I checked the other critters for how much meat/cycle they give and I think pacu still wins at 40cal/cycle. The only one to beat it are gassy moos and shovoles, but shovoles live to 100 and gassy moos are hard to come by without rushing rockets.

too lazy to actually ranch pacu

given the math for wild pacu, I would need to build a sweeper arm for every 8 tiles of water. That's 15 sweeper arms and 15 Loaders at 6T of refined metal. That's not that much in the grand scheme of things.

Edited May 16 by BLACKBERREST3

[BLACKBERREST3]

This should work

 

Edited May 16 by BLACKBERREST3

[MinhPham]

You also need to address the 2% change of gulp fish egg ... they're not a small chance given how much pacus you will have, the same thing that broke shove vole ranch

[BLACKBERREST3]

true. The filters are for the fish filets. all others get sent towards the egg spawn even if unpowered (if filters work unpowered that is). unless you are talking about temperature in which case that is something I need to look out for.

Edited May 17 by BLACKBERREST3

[MinhPham]

The gulp survives up to 25C but then only happy when body temperature below 5C.

Mean while the tropical one survives when temperature above 10C but they only happy if body temperature above 30.

Can't make all of them happy

Low/high body temp reduces happiness by 1 so you need to reduce the population by 1 to make sure they all will reproduce, and need to maintain the water temperature in the range of 10C-25C

Edited May 17 by MinhPham

[BLACKBERREST3]

True. thank you. I also realized when I was doing the math for hatches I got the math wrong for pacu. I forgot to include how many pacu it takes to get 1000kcal/day and also factor in incubation time as well.

Wild Pacu Math:

Life Cycle = 25 cycles

Incubation = 5 cycles

Time to adult = 5 cycles

Egg Laying = 15 cycles

Meat = 1000kcal

At cycle 20 pacu lay an egg [5 to adult + 15 to incubate]

There is only an overlap in incubation time. Pacu are born immediately when old pacu die. We can deduce that the cycle does continue every 25 cycles as normal.

My earlier statement was correct after all, we do need 25 pacu to get 1000kcal per cycle.

 

1 dupe needs 1000kcal/day

25 pacu is 1000kcal/day

25*6 = 150 pacu

150 / 10 = 15 units of 8 tiles of water

15 * 8 = 120 tiles of water

minimum amount needed is 350kg/tile

120 * 350kg = 42,000kg or 42T of water for wild pacu to sustain 6 dupes.

That's a lot of water. I think I have that already in my world. I might have to roll back to cycle 24 to start on that.

 

Time for wild hatch math.

Edited May 18 by BLACKBERREST3

[BLACKBERREST3]

Wild Hatch Math:

Life Cycle = 100 cycles

Incubation = 20 cycles

Time to adult = 5 cycles

Egg Laying = 60 cycles

Meat = 1600kcal per kg.

Hatch Meat = 3200kcal at 2kg of meat

It takes 20 to incubate, 5 to adult, 60 to lay an egg so at cycle 85 you will have 1 hatch at age 65 and an egg. Assuming passive evolution, it will take 35 more cycles to get the first batch of meat at cycle 120. Meanwhile, the egg will have grown into a hatch that is age 15. We get an overlap of 35 cycles with hatches.

edit:

@MinhPham

 Reproduction cycle of wild hatches is 85, doesn't matter if they live 20 or 40 more cycles, i believe the accurate kcal per cycle for them is 3200kcal / 85 cycles = 37.5kcal.

 

We would need 1000kcal per cycle / 37.5 kcal per cycle = 26 2/3 hatches per dupplicant

It takes 3 cycles to print 3 hatch eggs. Assume an average of 1 hatch per cycle. At 6 dupes we would need 6*26 2/3 = 160 hatches.

So at cycle 160 + inaccuracies of printing time printing nothing but hatch eggs, my colony will be self sufficient needing less and less mealwood as time goes on.

 

 

 

Edited May 18 by BLACKBERREST3

[MinhPham]

Reproduction cycle of wild hatches is 85, doesn't matter if they live 20 or 40 more cycles, i believe the accurate kcal per cycle for them is 3200kcal / 85 cycles = 37.5kcal.

[BLACKBERREST3]

7 hours ago, MinhPham said:

Reproduction cycle of wild hatches is 85, doesn't matter if they live 20 or 40 more cycles, i believe the accurate kcal per cycle for them is 3200kcal / 85 cycles = 37.5kcal.

That’s the math I was unsure of. I looked it up again, that is correct. lemme fix it.

figured it out, ai was just lying to me is all XD

killing them early doesn’t change rate of meat, only shifts time of harvest by 35 cycles if you slaughter them early which won’t be a problem because we are limited to printing them every 3 cycles anyways.

Edited May 18 by BLACKBERREST3

[BLACKBERREST3]

I'm wrong a lot, I have to go back and correct stuff all the time 😛