Why do dreckos move a certain way when a door is added?

[MinhPham]

It's not even a competition for food, in the video you can see the vole i've selected always gets to eat every time, inside a room with 46 voles "looking for food". What make it worse is they are the younger one that is not starve yet

 

 

[BLACKBERREST3]

2 hours ago, MinhPham said:

What make it worse is they are the younger one that is not starve yet

If it's the younger one, does this also mean that every new critter overrides the old one. if we set up a test with limited food and 1 critter and 1 egg. we let the egg hatch, and then see who eats first. If it's always the youngest one, then that means that they can override each other with every added critter. Even if it didn't change the order I think the outcome is still the same, there will always be a starving critter if you don't have enough food. I think I actually like this sort of system in the game, it's another way to prevent infinite cheesing of critters. I might have to rethink how I handle ranching altogether now.

maybe if i get lucky, the critters that are hogging all the food are the ones that get trapped in the hydrogen chamber for 10 cycles XD

One really obscure way to handle the starving critter situation would be to somehow cycle out a batch of 8 critters at a time to the limited food source. Then you just have to do the math for grow cycles, their consumption rate, etc. Then you would have to figure out if all that space and automation is worth it vs just building more space for food. i.e. if you are limited on dirt, you could cycle a batch of 8 dreckos every 3 cycles for 8 plants of mealwood (8 because glossies). That would theoretically be 24 dreckos per ranch if done correctly with a buffer of 1 cycle. It can be done, but I don't know if it's worth it to set up all that.

Edited May 27 by BLACKBERREST3

[BLACKBERREST3]

I've done it!!! Finally. After several iterations and trying every possible option, I was able to make the drecko compatible egg shell conveyor. The dreckletts/dreckos will never get stuck or clip into walls under ANY circumstance, it only uses 40g of water (other 40g is for the liquid lock on the right), it is much less expensive than the drecko tank, it has automation for egg retrieval, it doesn't delete any gasses, it can only be built in one orientation [critters love to go right when in water], it uses invalid pathing so they never go back into the traps. Same thing with the incubator, they will never get stuck in the door below it. dreckletts don't path up when hatching because water tiles block it's path. This has everything. I switched gears and decided to build a really low tech drecko ranch. I was only able to make it for a max of 5 glossies, but if dupes are going to be ranching anyways, might as well have them move the critters themselves too. There is much more to explain in terms of how dreckletts/dreckos move and I'll post later on how it all works, but here's the blueprint for now. I used the mirror of saturnus' egg shell conveyor as the base and went from there.

edit: improved it slightly. added a critter sensor that closes the door under the incubator when detecting that a critter has hatched inside of the liquid lock. This prevents the drecks from moving left into the breeding room on rare occurrences. although if eggs were in the liquid lock to begin with that means that the egg retrieval process has started so it may not be a good or bad thing, but if those eggs dwell in the 10s then your ranchers would have a lot of wrangling to do to get them back over to the right. Again, rare chance of occurring and even more rare chance that say 40 of them hatch all at once. Also fixed the 200s filter going out of the critter sensor. The automation was starting the egg retrieval too soon. added a second 200s filter on the other side to fix this issue.

 

If you are thinking about building a similar egg shell conveyor elsewhere, try going from left to right, critters like that

I moved the video and blueprint to this post

 

 

 

 

 

Edited Friday at 12:34 PM by BLACKBERREST3

[BLACKBERREST3]

Also like to mention that under certain circumstances critters can get stuck in walls and floors when opening doors too. So if you are wondering how critters are magically transporting inside walls, that is also one way for that to happen. My build prevents them from pathing back inwards to make sure that didn't happen.

 

Edited Friday at 12:44 AM by BLACKBERREST3

[BLACKBERREST3]

I was testing out some more egg shell conveyor builds and I found another way to separate the eggs from the eggshells. On the top part of the door, there has to be adjacent tiles to the north and east for this to work.

 

This goes for all items that have a higher density like refined metals and eggs.

 

Edited Friday at 06:14 PM by BLACKBERREST3

[BLACKBERREST3]

working on alternate designs for what works already. I might turn it into a drecklett holding area where they only escape once they mature. I could keep the area in a vacuum too if I want.

I don't think I've hit the limit yet for dreck tech.

[BLACKBERREST3]

Made another breakthrough in dreck tech. Automation is much simpler in this version and dreckletts can stay contained as we do not need them until maturity. Easy to maintain vacuum if you need one in that area for whatever reason. It has all the features of the other design and now has bi-directional input and a roof access bypass for easy dupe traversal. You can configure the roof access from a different point as to not interfere with the atmosphere in the exit chamber on the right. Sweeper upgrade is easy to install in this location and I provide an example in the video on how to set up priority for egg handling and retrieval. I think I've hit the limit for this design. I don't see it getting any better than this.

Other Valid Configurations

 

forgot to mention in the other build I was working on, two doors have their permissions set to none so dupes don’t go back in to sweep eggs. it’s the one to the right of the dispenser and one to the right of the conveyor chute.

I’ll add automation to it and release a blueprint later using this.

Edited Sunday at 12:25 AM by BLACKBERREST3

[Saturnus]

@BLACKBERREST3 More dreck-tech

Dispenser powered through shutoff to not waste power.

Dispensers without foundation cannot accept items and will not issue delivery orders.

When egg sensor senses egg in the breeding room, dispenser is turned on and it's output disabled while the door closes to provide a foundation for the dispenser.

Dupe delivers eggs to dispenser and when they leave the shearing room the dispenser is activated to release content before being turned off and the door opens to disable the dispenser. 

Automation is crude but functional

[Saturnus]

Simplified setup.

Shutoff not needed as dispenser does not draw power with no foundation.

Single Counter set to 1 (not advanced mode) and a single NOT is all that is needed for the automation

[BLACKBERREST3]

9 hours ago, Saturnus said:

Dispensers without foundation cannot accept items and will not issue delivery orders.

I was actively avoiding dispensers with shutoffs at one time when I was making hatch ranches. @MinhPham told me that there is a potential bug where even though they are supposed to lock their automation state when unpowered, sometimes they will hold/drop items anyways. I haven’t had this happen to me yet, but I’m down to play with a build that uses this mechanic until I find out for myself if there is a bug or not or if it’s been fixed since he tested it. Also, I am playing on spaced out dlc while he is playing on vanilla. I believe there are a few differences between them including how dispensers work when unpowered.

I’m going to test that build in a sec, I have a suspicion of a few pros/cons with it, but I want to try some things added to it first. pros is that it’s cheap, but I think there might be the issue that if there is 40 eggs at one time, dupes would be staying a little longer to sweep up each time.

[BLACKBERREST3]

I am away from my pc rn, but I do have another suspicion that even though in theory it shouldn’t generate a task for them, I still think it might even for a split second and once they have that task, they’ll drop what they’re doing if this is set to a higher priority.

[MinhPham]

12 hours ago, BLACKBERREST3 said:

@MinhPham told me that there is a potential bug where even though they are supposed to lock their automation state when unpowered, sometimes they will hold/drop items anyways.

The bug happened is they always drop the item despite of automation signal being red. Toggle the signal to green again fix the issue, and it seems to be only a one-time thing happen when you built it. Once it works properly it never broken again.

 

Anyway this is the build that i used every game. It's a wrangle-free, incubator-free build with a refill mechanism, excess dreckos have an open area for scale growth. Overall scale-growth up time is close to 90% as they only leave hydrogen area for food. Wild dreckos are thrown into the excess zone and they always reproduce. I don't see a way to further improve this build anymore, would you take that challenge  

Sandbox Drec.sav

Spoiler

 

[BLACKBERREST3]

@MinhPham

Could you send a blueprint instead?

I've been using this mod and it allows you to share builds between dlc.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3468585385

tbf last time I tried to load in with this mod in vanilla it wouldn't load for me so I couldn't copy with it, idk if that was because of the other ui mods I have installed conflicting with vanilla.

Edited Sunday at 03:46 PM by BLACKBERREST3

[MinhPham]

Never use this mod before ... it even keep the settings of the building if built in debug, very cool mod

Drec.blueprint

Edited Sunday at 04:26 PM by MinhPham

[BLACKBERREST3]

My suspicions were correct, too many issues with this build, but I still may be able to use the concept. Some of these issues might be solved with one-way doors for dupes and locking them in until all eggs have been swept. Could be risky in hydrogen areas. I'll keep this in mind.

 

 

• It only works with small number of eggs or they will be constantly sweeping every few cycles
• It generates a task on leaving so some dupe somewhere will drop it's task briefly. It doesn't even have to be the closest dupe either.
• If you build it too close to the breeding room it looks like the dupe might pick up and drop the egg which would place the egg outside the door [untested but looks likely]

 

 

 

9 hours ago, MinhPham said:

Never use this mod before ... it even keep the settings of the building if built in debug, very cool mod

I used to use another blueprint mod before but the saved settings is new to me and I love it. There is also changing materials on the fly if you've accidentally built a blueprint out of the wrong material. And if you want a mirror version, you can flip your build horizontally except for specific buildings. I usually delete all the buildings I can't flip, then add them back in manually after flipping.

Edited Monday at 01:59 AM by BLACKBERREST3

[MinhPham]

You need to hide the eggs from their prying eyes, which is why you go through all the troubles earlier

[BLACKBERREST3]

2 minutes ago, MinhPham said:

You need to hide the eggs from their prying eyes, which is why you go through all the troubles earlier

Yes, but I also wanted it to work manually as well which is why I'm using the dispenser at all and not purely relying on sweepers. The plan is to build the skeleton first with minimal refined metal and then upgrade to sweepers later after taming a metal volcano and setting up cooling so i can use the refinery full time. There's a method to the madness. I wanted my build to work as early as possible with minimal dupe interaction as I only have 6 despite the game REALLY wanting me to mass print dupes.

I looked at your build btw, that is really good design. It's compact, it has a drecklett holding chamber, automatically handles drecko pathing when hatching, and it fits the max amount at 96 tiles. The only issue I've found with it is that if multiple dreckos hatch&mature at the same time, it could add 1 too many critters in the breeding chamber. You might want to add a failsafe either with automation or critter pickup/dropoffs.

[MinhPham]

The chance is very low and you can always delay incubation by adding a timer sensor to the conveyor chute to delay incubation time.

But ... I never seen more than 8 dreckos in the main ranch since i use the build, mostly because it's a build and forget thing, i ..... barely check, also you can replace the conveyor chute with the dispenser as the "early" version of the build, a couple seconds delay is all it need 

I do realize that i can sort the eggs using conveyor element sensor, but i don't see much difference here so i didn't. The chance for the other drecko variant is low because they don't have the right food.

[BLACKBERREST3]

3 hours ago, MinhPham said:

The chance is very low and you can always delay incubation by adding a timer sensor to the conveyor chute to delay incubation time.

But ... I never seen more than 8 dreckos in the main ranch since i use the build, mostly because it's a build and forget thing, i ..... barely check, also you can replace the conveyor chute with the dispenser as the "early" version of the build, a couple seconds delay is all it need 

I do realize that i can sort the eggs using conveyor element sensor, but i don't see much difference here so i didn't. The chance for the other drecko variant is low because they don't have the right food.

Every time I've played this game I've come to learn one thing. If there is a slight chance of something happening, it absolutely will. This is because in most playthroughs a world will last a few thousand cycles. It might not be that important with dreckos, but other mission critical builds need 0% chance of failure or the consequences are extreme.

Murphy's Law

3 hours ago, MinhPham said:

The chance is very low and you can always delay incubation by adding a timer sensor to the conveyor chute to delay incubation time.

I completely forgot that chutes and vents have automation inputs now. I guess you could meter them out so you can time exactly when they hatch. I agree, sorting isn't all that necessary with dreckos unless you're going for something specific.

I was able to fit the same amount of dreckos, but I had to get rid of the incubator in the same room. less metal anyways so it's a worthy sacrifice. Comparison of the automation from V1 and V2 of the drecko eggshell conveyor. V2 is significantly cheaper. blueprint coming soon (this is mostly it though). The reason the vent is placed in that specific spot is because you can fit a sweeper/loader/mech door later as an upgrade to automate sweeping of eggs.

Sweeper Upgrade

added V2 BP to other post

Edited Sunday at 08:18 PM by BLACKBERREST3

[BLACKBERREST3]

I think dreckos are harder to keep wild. I'm trying to think of ways to have them without interfering in some way with the main ranch. I can't have critter sensors in with them because they need an open room or they will be miserable. hmmm. I don't know if it's possible to have both without doing them in batches, ie 8 wild drecks here and there. I might think of something.

and I keep forgetting that the shearing station needs to be in a room. So i need one-way pathing and a timer to shear them too.

Edited Monday at 02:27 AM by BLACKBERREST3

[BLACKBERREST3]

Found a different way to use the one-way trap. it uses the one-tile wide rule for dreckos. they are trapped upside down because they can't round 1 tile wide corners.

 

I don't know if I've discovered this rule yet? They are stuck on a pneumatic door? usually invalid movement was limited to mech doors. it's too late for this, i need sleep XD

I think this is the horizontal door psuedo barrier at work again, but this time it's working on full size dreckos. I think I can guess why. In the op for this post, dreckos could cross the barrier because they had an additional tile to jump the gap to on the side of the wall. In the pic above, there isn't an additional tile past the corners. Dreckos are still weird

 

Tested on both parts of the door. Dreckletts are able to round the corner.

This is a really good drecko trap for my build.

 

Edited Monday at 05:39 AM by BLACKBERREST3

[BLACKBERREST3]

I thought I was done finding new things about dreckos 🥲

Just one tile over with the door and they can use the horizontal edge as a platform

This is insane.

 

 

1 critter sensor and 2 wires of automation

[BLACKBERREST3]

I've realized that it is much easier to have an incubator hatchery as a separate module altogether, but it is not needed as once the process is started with dreckos even the 30 cycle waiting period can be mitigated by pulling from a reserve of already hatched/mature dreckos. Makes the builds cheaper and less complex than trying to fit an incubator in with it. I might go back and look into the hatch ranch to rethink the process and clean up some automation code.

Also, I feel like conveyor filters should have been cheaper in some way, it just doesn't make sense to me why you wouldn't just use conveyor loaders all the time as when loaders fail you don't have to worry about material going to the wrong belt. Is there something I'm missing with those?

found a reason.

dupes also used to be able to pick up through corners, but now only sweepers can, gonna have to rethink how to retrieve 1-tile refrigeration food dump.

just a mech door to hide the food should do it.

Edited 19 hours ago by BLACKBERREST3

[MinhPham]

On 6/2/2026 at 7:38 PM, BLACKBERREST3 said:

gonna have to rethink how to retrieve 1-tile refrigeration food dump.

Refrigeration is overrated, all you need is a wild wheeze wort. A conductor wire bridge is used to connect between wheeze wort tile and food tile. 100mg of hydrogen does transfer heat but not very much and the wild wheeze wort is able to keep up. You can either give the wheeze wort it's time to cool or speed up the cooling with an aquatuner, but after their body temperature reach -18C you can remove the aquatuner loop.

Spoiler