The shove vole ranch that will get them nerfed, again

[MinhPham]

As the pacu will get nerfed in the future i move on to the next best food : voles !

What does this thing do ? At greediest setting It can make over 200kg/cycle of meat, enough to feed 400 dupes on BBQ or over 500 dupes on Frost Burger.

I will start with some basic math on their life cycle, a shove vole start with 20 cycles as an egg, 5 cycles as a baby and another 6 cycles for reproduction. That is 31 cycles, but you only need to take care of them for 6 cycles (at least, as their are down times during the grooming phase).

After the egg is laid they still have 12,000 kcal leftover and should be able to happy for another 2.5 cycles, and then they still have another 10 starving cycles. That's 12.5 cycles is unnecessary (just like your retirement - jk :D) but dupes still need to spend time grooming them, and put a stress on the engine.

The idea is to cut their retirement down, lots of ways to do that but if your dupes is only work for 6/31 cycles then the remaining 25 cycles is unoccupied, it is a waste.

I stacked 5 batches of voles into one build, each of them will spend 7 cycles inside the grooming area and 28 cycles inside the waiting area, so the grooming area is almost always occupied. Why 7 ? because there are down times in the grooming phase, travel time, and a single duplicant can queue up some critters, work alone refusing help from other idle duplicants.

There isn't a lot of automation, i don't use buffer/filter gates because they are unreliable, instead i use liquid, with the liquid valve/meter i can count up to hundreds of cycle with lore accuracy. The weight plate is used to determine how much egg/critter you should have in one batch.

To "count" the 7 cycles i used a liquid valves at 0.1g/s and 4 liquid meters set at 0.42kg, that would take them 4200 seconds to count, or 7 cycles. Once the liquid meter is done it with activate the next meter in the chain, creating a loop.

The signal counter are in advanced mode, count to 1, it's the same as the NOT/AND gate but more compact.

Another liquid/gas meter also used to replace buffer gate for the doors opening/closing.

The building should be vacuumed, or you need to preheat it above 100C, because between 60-100C you will have a lot of delecta voles.

On the left is a small minimal feed ranch that used to replace the delecta voles, and probably populate the main ranch too but it is very slow.

The hard part is to fill the ranch, as each batch is 7 cycles away from each other. You need to build a bunch of minimal feed ranches to speed up the process.

All the egg loaders must be connected to the door automation through a not gate so they will only release eggs during close time of the door, the "evolution time", make sure all voles in a batch will hatch at the same time.

What is the "batch" size ? I tested with 125 voles each batch and 8 dupes still have lots of idle time. Higher batch size mean more production but also more delecta voles, more downtime so you will need to replace them more often, and probably need to increase the timer from 7 to 7.5 or 8 cycles.

At 125 batch size i should have 1250kg of meat every 7 cycles, or 178kg/cycles, that is a lot already

How to deal with delecta voles ? You don't, they will just "evolve" into meat inside main grooming area, or go back to regular vole inside the minimal feeding ranch eventually, or stave and die.

I updated the build to solve some issues, excess eggs are now burried under a door to preserve their viability and incubation time, along with the excess eggs counter.

What is the value of conveyor meter ? It depends on how many voles per batch, with 2% of them will be delecta vole a batch size of 100 will need 2 extra eggs every 7 cycles.

• Reproduction rate of glum/wild voles is 1.67% per cycle, with 60 wild/glum voles you will get 1 egg per cycle on average.
• Below 0.1kg/s (60kg/cycle or less) you barely see more than 20 voles around, that's 0.33 eggs per cycle or 2 eggs every 7 cycles.
• At 0.5kg/s (300kg/cycle) you should see 60 starving voles around, that's 1 egg per cycle.
• At 1kg/s (600kg/cycle) you should see 80 starving voles around, that's 1.3 eggs per cycle.

Some values :

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Automation overlay:

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Conveyor overlay :

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Liquid/gas overlay:

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Save file:

Vole.sav

Blueprint:

Voles.blueprint

Edited Monday at 07:41 PM by MinhPham

[Frustrated]

Is there a way to stop them from popping up in random places in the space biome, belching up regolith all over my space scanners and entombing them?  Besides killing them, that is.

[MinhPham]

If you explore space biome a little bit late most of them are dead, eggs a buried under regolith/mafic rock tiles, just relocate the eggs to somewhere safe, but most of the case you should be able to relocate the voles themself.