Aren't Slogo feeding costs a little... excessive?

[Paperbag]

I haven't gotten around to ranching Slogos just yet, and I know they got nerfed a patch or two ago, so I have no idea how strong they were initially. But isn't 100KG/cycle of salt for one critter ridiculously excessive? An average Salt Water Geyser with the entire output desalinated feeds two Slogos. It takes ten Saltvines to feed a single Slogo. And for an output of only 10KG/cycle of Lime and 30KG/cycle of Mucin each, on a 25 cycle lifespan critter. It also makes 50KG/cycle of Dirt, but there's no way any of you are ranching this thing for Dirt. Especially when Pips are on the same planetoid.

Am I missing something obvious? Why is this thing so randomly expensive to ranch for such a miniscule return? 30KG of Mucin doesn't even make one round of Liceloaf.

Edited May 29 by Paperbag

[Tigin]

4 hours ago, Paperbag said:

Am I missing something obvious?

An average polluted brine geyser produces 4.2x the salt of a salt water geyser

[Paperbag]

2 hours ago, Tigin said:

An average polluted brine geyser produces 4.2x the salt of a salt water geyser

Ah, I see.

...so, you want me to use the entire PBrine geyser for nine Slogos, or one ranch plus one. When the PBrine geyser is also the only way to get PBrine for Tubila because they didn't add it to the Emulsifier. I don't see how that's in any way better.

Actually, it's worse than that because my original estimation was completely misinformed. I said one Salt Water Geyser feeds 2 Slogos. However, what the figure actually is is that one Desalinator running at 3000KG/cycle of Salt Water feeds 2.1 Slogos. An average Salt Water Geyser runs at 1800KG/cycle according to the wiki, or 126KG/cycle of Salt. In other words, 1.2 Slogos per geyser.

Even if I desalinate the entire PBrine geyser and give up ever using Tubilas, assuming it's the same output as the average Salt Water Geyser, that's 1800KG/cycle of PBrine, or 540KG/cycle of Salt, or 5.4 Slogos. That's not even a full ranch. The return on investment for Slogos is absolutely abysmal, why the hell were they ever nerfed? Why the hell do these tiny snails eat so much salt?

Like, these are 12-tile-per-critter critters. It's not even a big 16-tile-per-critter 2X2 critter like Bammoths or Lumbs. These guys eat way too much for their production and their size. No other critter in the game needs ten whole damned plants to feed a single critter, except apparently these guys, who eat ten Saltvines of Salt every damn cycle. It's unreasonable. It's baffling. These little guys suck so bad for no reason.

To reiterate, a Slogo makes 10KG/cycle of Lime, 30KG/cycle of Mucin, and 50KG/cycle of Dirt. Is it mass-by-mass, 80% of its food? Sure. It's also an incredibly irrelevant selection of products. Dirt is just kicking it when its down, Lime is okay, but is both a byproduct of every non-fish ranch in the game and more easily made with the new Beakons, and the Mucin output is just sad, especially on a critter whose description specifically talks about how much Mucin it leaves behind on the ground. You'd think it would be a big Mucin producer, but no. 30KG/cycle, not even enough for a round of Liceloaf.

Edited May 29 by Paperbag

[AugyBear]

Their Lime output is the main benefit. Compared to Hatches for example, who produce 1kg of Eggshell per 6 cycles (.16kg Lime/cycle), or Pokeshells who now produce 90kg of Molt and 1kg of Eggshell per 11 cycles (8.27kg Lime/cycle), Slogos producing 10kg Lime/cycle for a resource that was otherwise basically useless seems perfectly fine to me.

For another example of taming a Geyser and feeding its full, otherwise useless output to Critters, Volcanoes are the best way to sustainably feed Stone Hatches. They only support 5 Hatches for a Large Volcano, 2.5 for a Minor Volcano. Based on your math, that looks pretty comparable for Polluted Brine/Salt Water geysers for Slogos.

The only uses for Salt are making Saltwater, Bleach Stone, Table Salt/Sand, running a Rust Deoxidizer, or fertilizing the new Sodicanes. The new planetoid has tons of Saltwater and Sand, better options for Food/Oxygen than Sodicane and Rust Deoxidizers, and Bleach Stone is never needed in industrial quantities. What else would we use the Salt for?

[AugyBear]

4 hours ago, Paperbag said:

Even if I desalinate the entire PBrine geyser and give up ever using Tubilas

Also important to note that Tublias can be irrigated with regular old Brine, and can also be wild-planted to produce 6.25kg Plastic per Cycle per Tublia, for free, forever. They even have a 10% seed harvest chance, so you can make more of them!

[Paperbag]

6 hours ago, AugyBear said:

Also important to note that Tublias can be irrigated with regular old Brine

Alright, fair. I did completely miss that. But also, the APP planetoid has no Brine geyser, and the only other way to get Brine is Gleaning Brackene.

9 hours ago, AugyBear said:

Their Lime output is the main benefit. Compared to Hatches for example, who produce 1kg of Eggshell per 6 cycles (.16kg Lime/cycle), or Pokeshells who now produce 90kg of Molt and 1kg of Eggshell per 11 cycles (8.27kg Lime/cycle), Slogos producing 10kg Lime/cycle for a resource that was otherwise basically useless seems perfectly fine to me.

For another example of taming a Geyser and feeding its full, otherwise useless output to Critters, Volcanoes are the best way to sustainably feed Stone Hatches. They only support 5 Hatches for a Large Volcano, 2.5 for a Minor Volcano. Based on your math, that looks pretty comparable for Polluted Brine/Salt Water geysers for Slogos.

The only uses for Salt are making Saltwater, Bleach Stone, Table Salt/Sand, running a Rust Deoxidizer, or fertilizing the new Sodicanes. The new planetoid has tons of Saltwater and Sand, better options for Food/Oxygen than Sodicane and Rust Deoxidizers, and Bleach Stone is never needed in industrial quantities. What else would we use the Salt for?

I disagree that the Lime is the main benefit, honestly? Lime is only used to make Steel, and you're no doubt going to set up other ranches that produce Lime as a byproduct, so the value in ranching a critter for 10KG/cycle is really low to me. Also, like. If you're only going to get 5 or so Slogos, what's the point? That's barely anything. Even if it was the main benefit, Beakons produce 5KG/cycle for 20KG/cycle of Phosphorite, which is simple to get via Dreckos. I think the Mucin is the main benefit, because it's used in Liceloaf for the new foods, Pacu Treat production, and Brackene production as a water substitute. The Slogo's description even talks about how they leave large amounts of Mucin behind. Lime in comparison is just not as valuable. Plus the new Pinpoki->Diamond->Ancient Specimen->Fossil chain really devalues it further. The value of Lime is honestly pretty low.

idk, I just fundamentally think that Lime, while incredibly important for Steel, is also utterly worthless, and doesn't justify the extreme cost of feeding Slogos. Mucin is the far more interesting and valuable product of Slogos.

You are correct that Salt is basically unused in other areas. But I heavily disagree that the uselessness of Salt justifies the extreme cost of feeding Slogos. It's the exact opposite. Salt is so unused, and we finally have a critter to justify its existence because it eats Salt and could give the Dasha Saltvine new life and purpose. But its ridiculous diet cost means its basically impossible to get any significant use out of it, and even the one way we have to make Salt in Saltvines is terrible, because the ratio is ten plants to one critter. It's not just about Slogos being usable, it's also about Salt and Saltvines finally being useful for something.

[AugyBear]

Honestly now that I'm thinking more about it, there's the very real argument that "sustainable" ranching of Slogos is totally pointless anyway. From digging out my testing world, I ended up with 506 Tons of Salt in total, 80% of it coming from the starting biome due to the Natural Salt Backwalls.

For the other Lime options:

• Drecko -> Beakon ranching requires finding Dreckos, setting up a ranch for them, and then feeding their outputs to Beakons. 1 Drecko feeds 1 Beakon, so you're ranching double the critters for half the output of Slogos.
• The Ancient Specimen requires a Masterworks Dupe, completing a quest chain across the entire asteroid, and then spending Dupe labor to get a small amount of Fossil/cycle, which is processed into an even smaller amount of Lime.
• Crushing up eggshells from your other ranches gets you a tiny trickle of Lime for early-game processing, but very quickly becomes a bottleneck once you start building Bunker Tiles and taming Volcanoes, let alone working on endgame builds.

Compared to those options, dumping all of your dug up Salt into Slogos to do a Boom and Bust ranch is fast, scalable, and easily done from the very beginning of the game. By cycle 100 you can have enough Lime to fuel your Steel production for the rest of the game.

100kg of Salt producing Lime for 100kg of Steel is more than enough, and the Dirt and Mucin outputs are a nice bonus for the early game. Seaquines already fill the niche for late game industrial Mucin production, so I don't see a need to make Slogos do the same job.

EDIT to Add: Slogos only need +1 Happiness and a food source to produce their molts, so you can also just Wild Ranch the starting 5-6 Slogos with a Critter Condo for an easy trickle of Lime and Mucin at 1/4 the Salt cost. You lose out on the Dirt, but that's not really a deal breaker on an asteroid with Pips and Arbor Trees.

Edited May 30 by AugyBear

[PatrykC159753]

i agree  the cost is exesive there are tons of other uses for salt. If salt was a single use material like sucrose or mercury cost maby would be fair but right now it seems like i  will just ignore them.

[w0rph]

If you put all the wild Slogos you have into a ranch with a disabled grooming station and a critter condo, you get all of the following with no labor for upkeep and next to no power:
- some free lime
- some free food
- mucin, which is great for liquid locks in many situations and you could even process it further.
(- dirt, if you ever run low on it and have excess salt but aren't ranching pips already)

I think they are one of the coolest and most interesting critters in the update for being able to essentially "ranch wild" for some noteworthy benefit and almost no cost.

[DarkMaster13]

The mucin is free, wild unfed slugos make it.  Just toss the starting ones in a room somewhere with a sweepy bot (first time I've had a use for him) and you get plenty for making slime or locks with.  Using mucin as a replacement for water in food recipes feels unnecessary to me, since we get so much free water from the new start's coral biomes and geysers.

[w0rph]

Be careful: The sweepy will eventually kill the Slogos in the current game's state.
The Slogos require moisture to be above 0% and it only rises slowly when excreting and subsequently pathing through mucin.
If Sweepy successfully keeps the stable somewhat clean, the moisture will eventually drop to zero and then they die.

I noticed this earlier and it is really sad, especially so, since we can't reliably put sweepy on a timer.
The only option you have is to disable his dock, which will have him continue sweepy for about half a cycle to a cyle. Then he will generate an errand for a cupe to bring him to the dock. And then he will keep complaining about not being able to charge and constantly emote.

I wish they would just add more automation for Sweepy or change the existing behaviour as I really love how well they go together, given we could time it better.

[TraxKB]

4 hours ago, w0rph said:

Be careful: The sweepy will eventually kill the Slogos in the current game's state.
The Slogos require moisture to be above 0% and it only rises slowly when excreting and subsequently pathing through mucin.
If Sweepy successfully keeps the stable somewhat clean, the moisture will eventually drop to zero and then they die.

I noticed this earlier and it is really sad, especially so, since we can't reliably put sweepy on a timer.
The only option you have is to disable his dock, which will have him continue sweepy for about half a cycle to a cyle. Then he will generate an errand for a cupe to bring him to the dock. And then he will keep complaining about not being able to charge and constantly emote.

I wish they would just add more automation for Sweepy or change the existing behaviour as I really love how well they go together, given we could time it better.

Could block him with a door on a timer

[TraxKB]

I originally thought that the the salt requirement was excessive too as it IS a huge amount, but I then compared it to the outputs per cycle:
-100kg salt
+ 50kg Dirt
+ 30kg(max) Mucin
+ 10kg Lime
= -10kg mass.or 90% return.

I think that from an input-output perspective, they are balanced and the dirt+mucin pairs well with mealwood for liceloaf (sushi and nigiri.)  I wouldn't want to mess with that pairing to the point that you would need to add dirt as well as salt to the inputs.  I also agree that lime is never a thing I've had a shortage of and even if you account for the flue coral, they have a 1:1 symbiosis with beakons for a reason.  If the salt consumption was to be reduced, then I wouldn't mind seeing something like:
-70kg salt
+ 30kg Dirt
+ 28kg(max) Mucin
+ 5kg Lime

Basically a higher ratio of their output being their unique byproduct, but not dropping the dirt:mucin ratio below 6:5.  I don't want to see something as busted as the PPP where animals are outputting over 42k% of what they intake.

Final thoughts:
- each DLC should be primarily assessed on its own merits as if it was played with the base game without any other DLCs.
- I disagree that sustainable ranching is ever pointless.  It can be complex, but it should be attainable.
- I always have garbage luck with chlorine sources so salt has been quite important for bleach stone for me in the past.  I also had garbage luck with my water vents on this playtest so mucin as a water replacement and bleachstone for geotuning are definitely things I'm interested in.

[Twiki]

13 hours ago, w0rph said:

Be careful: The sweepy will eventually kill the Slogos in the current game's state.
The Slogos require moisture to be above 0% and it only rises slowly when excreting and subsequently pathing through mucin.
If Sweepy successfully keeps the stable somewhat clean, the moisture will eventually drop to zero and then they die.

I noticed this earlier and it is really sad, especially so, since we can't reliably put sweepy on a timer.
The only option you have is to disable his dock, which will have him continue sweepy for about half a cycle to a cyle. Then he will generate an errand for a cupe to bring him to the dock. And then he will keep complaining about not being able to charge and constantly emote.

I wish they would just add more automation for Sweepy or change the existing behaviour as I really love how well they go together, given we could time it better.

Snails can climb. Sweepy can't.

Snails also only need 1 wet tile to live. Should be manageable.

I'm about to build my snail farm - I'll probably use a pump and mostly mesh tiles, but I think Sweepy could work, too.

[Wharflord]

I agree that sloggos are pretty worthless at the moment.

In my experience with the DLC, sloggos are only useful for early game food and become borderline worthless by the mid game. They let you turn salt into dirt and mucin which you can cook into mush bars. Come mid game, seaquines and glo squids become much better sources of mucin, and pips remain the kings of dirt production. Despite the many tons of salt on the map, there are very few renewable sources, making sloggos hard to ranch sustainably. It reminds me a lot of hatches without volcanos.

Being a source of early food would be an interesting niche for sloggos, except that food is not a problem at all on the aquatic asteroid. Both blowters and beakons drop food like it's going out of style, and you already need to ranch them early for oxygen production.

Sloggos also give a bunch of lime from their molts. This lets you get renewable steel early combined with iron from orehulls and refined carbon from gum trees. Yet again they get outclassed in the mid game by more sustainable options. Both beakons and pokeshells provide lots of lime in more efficient and scalable builds.

TLDR. Sloggos give a number of useful resources early. However there are better, more sustainable options that outclass them once you clear the crunch of the first 100 cycles.

[Twiki]

Unless my math is wrong, Snails give a LOT more lime than Pokes. They also give a lot more dirt than Pips.

They should outclass Beakons for lime as well, since salt is easier to get on a map that always has a massive salt water supply.

Beakons are the ones I'm finding useless long term, since a single 30W light can replace them. They'd really be helped out if their best food source (starnacles) were made sustainable w/o rocketry.

[Carib94]

9 minutes ago, Twiki said:

Unless my math is wrong, Snails give a LOT more lime than Pokes. They also give a lot more dirt than Pips.

They should outclass Beakons for lime as well, since salt is easier to get on a map that always has a massive salt water supply.

Beakons are the ones I'm finding useless long term, since a single 30W light can replace them. They'd really be helped out if their best food source (starnacles) were made sustainable w/o rocketry.

By the time you run out of phosphorite or coquina you probably already finish the playthrough...unless you run a very large scale beakon ranch, otherwise and by that point you have other ways to produce lime....But Beakons are good cause they provide tons of food with the new happiness mechanic....coquina is basically like FPP Mercury, it really only serves 1 purpose.

[AugyBear]

On 6/5/2026 at 5:38 PM, Wharflord said:

TLDR. Sloggos give a number of useful resources early. However there are better, more sustainable options that outclass them once you clear the crunch of the first 100 cycles.

That sounds like a fine niche for them to exist in. They're an early-game, hyperproductive critter that allows you to quickly scale up, and then you transition to something else when you start running low on their food. Slogos output more than double the Dirt of Pips and double the Lime of Beakons in exchange for not being sustainable in the long term.

I don't see complaints about how Sage Hatches require a full Pip ranch to sustainably produce 140kg of Coal/cycle, or how a Volcano can only feed 2-5 Stone Hatches sustainably. We happily ranch them because they're great for early game food and power production, and then transition to more sustainable options once we have a thriving colony in progress.

[Tranoze]

On 6/5/2026 at 3:51 PM, w0rph said:

Be careful: The sweepy will eventually kill the Slogos in the current game's state.
The Slogos require moisture to be above 0% and it only rises slowly when excreting and subsequently pathing through mucin.
If Sweepy successfully keeps the stable somewhat clean, the moisture will eventually drop to zero and then they die.

I noticed this earlier and it is really sad, especially so, since we can't reliably put sweepy on a timer.
The only option you have is to disable his dock, which will have him continue sweepy for about half a cycle to a cyle. Then he will generate an errand for a cupe to bring him to the dock. And then he will keep complaining about not being able to charge and constantly emote.

I wish they would just add more automation for Sweepy or change the existing behaviour as I really love how well they go together, given we could time it better.

Problem is solved if you dont even think about using that useless Sweepy in first place:

[Twiki]

Nice one! I've been trying to do it in a standard 4-tile high room... and the viscosity is annoying me!

Gonna try a couple of mini-pumps next. I will defeat you, snail mucus!

And on snail sustainability... I just did the math, and my map (1 Brine geyser, 1 pBrine, 1 salt water) produces about 800kg/cycle of salt.

Some of that will be needed for other things, and I'd probably have to vent some water to space, but there's enough salt on this map to run a decent-sized snail ranch indefinitely.

[zerogamegame]

On 5/30/2026 at 10:27 AM, Paperbag said:

Alright, fair. I did completely miss that. But also, the APP planetoid has no Brine geyser, and the only other way to get Brine is Gleaning Brackene.

 

The easiest way to get brine is freezing salt water or ranching Rhex.