At Risk of Buffing Orehulls

[Wharflord]

Orehulls and tower kelp are a very strong self sustaining loop. That being said, they behave strangely compared to every other critter in the expansion. Blowters can eat growth off of waterweed proportional to the lettuce they would produce. Same for beakons and starnacles. Same for glo Squids and tublia. Even seaquines can eat pearls straight out of clampums despite dupes needing the tier 1 farming skill to open those tough nuts. Orehulls, however, must wait for kelpole to spawn from tower kelp before eating them.

Letting dupes harvest the tower kelp, you can make a ranch of 8 orehull and 6 tower kelp. Each tile of the kelp is harvested individually, meaning 48 harvests every 3 cycles. If you disable auto harvest, kelpole will spawn after another 4 cycles (7 total), reducing efficiency to 42.86% and effectively starvation ranching the orehulls.

On the one hand, I acknowledge the need for some drawback and appreciate requiring dupe interaction or setting up a separate nori farm. Orehull and tower kelp are an infinite loop by themselves, so it should cost something valuable to keep them going.

On the other hand, each tower kelp generating 10 separate errands every 3 cycles is not an elegant solution to the problem. It doesn't allow another option besides raw dupe labor.

I'd much rather allow orehulls to eat 50% growth off a tower kelp node like every other aquatic critter, but add a step somewhere else in their resource loop.

Two ideas for this (either or both would work):

1. Have orehulls drop rust instead of iron ore. Like jawbos, this would require setting up a rust deoxodizer, which would be a great use for the abundant salt on the aquatic asteroid. It would also create another barrier to steel production, which is currently too simple in the early game.

2. Have tower kelp require polluted dirt as fertilizer instead of polluted mud. This would require a sludge press in the early game and a steam boiling room in the mid game to complete the loop. It would replace the dupe labor of harvesting plants with the labor of operating a sludge press, but allow for a more efficient solution in the late game. Plus there are other ways of making polluted dirt, making tower kelp viable without orehulls.

Given the conversion ratio from polluted mud to polluted dirt, I would change the quantity required for fertilization to 25 kg/cycle of polluted dirt. The basic ranch with 6 tower kelp and 8 orehull produces 320 kg/cycle of polluted mud. That refines to 40% polluted dirt and 60% polluted water, giving 128 kg/cycle of polluted dirt. That means 21.33 kg/cycle per tower kelp, making them close to, but not quite, a balanced system. This would require that the player make good use of the polluted water to shore up the production loop.

[Cautious Cookie]

I came up with a ranch design that mixes pip planted tower kelps with domesticated kelps at a ratio of 2 wild, 1 domesticated, 1 Orehull. This ranch works without dupes harvesting the tower kelps constantly, and was an interesting way for me to "solve" the dupe labor problem, and instead takes more planning & space.

That being said, I still wouldn't mind a change. I think instead of eating directly off the kelp, the Orehull could be given an ability similar the Lumb for harvesting aquatic plants. This way we still get to see the kelpole, and the Orehull could be used in other aquatic farms.

I think changing the fertilizer to polluted dirt could be interesting.

Personally I like when critters have their own niche, so I would want Jawbos to produce something else if Orehulls made Rust too. I'm hoping to make an Orehull/Plug Slug Power set up 

[w0rph]

I like the suggestion of replacing mud with dirt. This is just good all around.
But them giving rust I think is not great, mostly because it turns them into a semi-vegetarian jawbo, which is redundant design.

I still think they could use a bit more flavour.
Maybe make it necessary for them to be in saltwater or brine in order to generate iron ore shells.
This way you can keep them in their original biome and ressource positive on food/mud/nori. But you will not receive iron.
If you want iron you need to transport nori and mud back and forth.

Bonus points if they receive a critter morph that breaks that loop.
Let's say the default morphs egg will be layed when in polluted water.
And the other morphs egg will be layed when not in pwater.
So essentially you have to keep juggling eggs, morphs, mud and nori back and forth. Probably not something that can be done before release, but maybe interesting to keep in mind.
 

[Cautious Cookie]

The recent patch changed 2 things.

1. Changed Kelp fertilizer from Polluted Mud to Polluted Dirt + Polluted Water

2. Changed Orehull excretion from 50kg/cycle of Polluted Mud to 10 kg/cycle of Polluted Dirt.

Both of these are nerfs. The first change alone would add complexity to a simple resource loop. The second change means that farming these will require significant external resources, most likely from Arbor Tree -> Ethanol Distillation for obtaining enough polluted dirt for the Tower Kelp. And the problem of significant duple labor still exists.

Plus, polluted dirt usages has competition with feeding Pokeshells & variants & that's the best way to get sand for Clampums.

With the current setup, I think I would revert to wild farming tower kelps or simply looking for other sources of iron.

 

I think there are a few ways to change this, but my personal suggestions would be to:

1. Revert Orehull Excretion to 50kg/cycle of Polluted Mud.

2. Change Tower Kelp to take in more Polluted Water than Polluted Dirt (even if there's still at a slight loss of resources from the 50kg of polluted mud). Currently about 3/4 of Polluted Dirt is lost and 100% of Polluted Water.

3. Solve the intensive dupe labor issue by allowing Orehulls to harvest plants similar to Lumbs. 

 

What do other people think about the recent changes?
 

[Wharflord]

@Cautious Cookie I think you're spot on. This is too big of a nerf. Either half - the reduced output of orehulls or the increased cost of tower kelp - would be reasonable by itself. Both together are crushing. I stand by the analysis of my original post.

Let's look at what it would take to maintain a single orehull + domestic tower kelp ranch now. Manually harvesting the tower kelp, you need 6 plants for 8 orehulls. This generates 200kg/cycle of iron ore, plus a good amount of food. The kelp require 300kg/cycle of polluted dirt and 180kg/cycle of polluted water. The orehulls provide 80kg/cycle of polluted dirt, so we need another 220kg/cycle to maintain balance. A single ethanol distiller running constantly is the only realistic source of polluted dirt at scale, giving 200kg/cycle We therefore need 1.1 distillers running full time, requiring 10 domestic arbor trees to sustain it. That's another 700kg/cycle of polluted water, assuming perfect uptime. Adding back in the polluted water used directly by the tower kelp, that is 880kg/cycle to keep a single ranch running. For reference, the average geyser of polluted water, salt water, or polluted brine gives 1,800kg/cycle.

Iron ore is good, but making it at 22.7% throughput from polluted water is frankly not worth the investment.

I worry that this extreme cost will simple push players into wild planting everything. Why bother producing large quantities of difficult materials like polluted dirt when you can just use the native pips to bypass the intended game loop?

The orehull + tower kelp loop should not be free. It should also not be gratuitously expensive.

Before the patch, an orehull ranch dropped 320kg/cycle of polluted mud, which could be converted into 192kg/cycle polluted water and 128kg/cycle of polluted dirt. That's 32kg/cycle/plant of polluted water and 21.33kg/cycle/plant of polluted dirt. 

I agree with the principals of the suggestions made by @Cautious Cookie

1. Please let the orehulls auto-harvest tower kelp like lumbs, even if that means nerfing their output.

2. Have orehulls excrete polluted mud while tower kelp require polluted dirt and polluted water to require some refinement in their loop.

3. Balance the numbers

so that the loop is worthwhile, but not infinite on its own. If orehulls excreted 40kg/cycle polluted mud and tower kelp required 40kg/cycle polluted water and 25kg/cycle of polluted dirt, the loop would be net negative, but manageable with other sources. There's a lot of wiggle room here to make them more or less strong overall. If you adopt the QoL suggesting to let orehulls auto-harvest kelpole, by all means make them weaker.

[Cautious Cookie]

I think things are at a decent spot with the new patch. When using the Sludge Press to turn polluted mud into polluted water & dirt, you get just over 1/2 of the polluted dirt back.

So the kelps will require about 15-20kg/cycle of external polluted dirt now, and the polluted water is fully refunded (little excess though).

1 Domestic Arbor Tree can provide 333kg of wood per cycle according to the wiki, which we can get over 100kg/cycle of polluted dirt, or over 5 kelps.

@Wharflord Looking at the Arbor Tree production in game is confusing. I think it tells you the wood per cycle of each branch. So I think it's accurate if you multiply it by 6.

 

I think currently, Orehulls are solid enough to use now with domestic tower kelp, but wouldn't be overpowered if they do get the Lumb auto harvest ability, which I'm still rooting for.

[Wharflord]

Agreed entirely @Cautious Cookie, and good call on the arbor tree math.

Withe the reversion to orehulls dropping 50 kg/cycle polluted mud, the standard 8 orehull + 6 tower kelp setup generates 60 kg/cycle excess polluted water, but require 80 kg/cycle polluted dirt externally. That is entirely manageable using either pacu or arbor trees. It makes the ranch immensely more interesting than before!

I agree that the lumb style auto-harvest would be very welcome. I wonder if there is some technical limitation in the game code around pathing that makes it hard to implement. Perhaps a good middle ground would be to allow dupes to harvest every node on the tower with a single errand to the base of the kelp. Imagine shaking the whole plant to flush out the kelpoles like a hunting dog flushes birds from a bush. That would retain some dupe labor requirement, but cut down from a 48 errands to 6. Much more reasonable.

I'd like to see something of the sort. Regardless, orehulls and tower kelps are in a much better spot than any previous version. Good job Klei!

[Tenedas]

5 hours ago, Cautious Cookie said:

I think currently, Orehulls are solid enough to use now with domestic tower kelp, but wouldn't be overpowered if they do get the Lumb auto harvest ability, which I'm still rooting for.

I like they added the culling behavior for the kelp in the same ranch, it solves the problem of critter management even if kelpoles are manually harvested.

At the end of the day we are putting some polluted dirt in the loop + some watts to get some iron ores in return. Not a random ore but the one used for steel. I think it's ok  to pay a high dupe labor cost. (and you have to specialize a dupe in farm/ranch + Swimming which i find fitting for the theme  )

[TraxKB]

I agree that the current balance is manageable but I question why it needed changing when Balm Lily Drecko ranching exists in the base game and that doesn't require 48 errands to harvest the food.