Musing: Beakons are hatches

[blakemw]

So after a couple of partial playthroughs of Aquatic, I've started to get a handle on the role of different critters.

And Beakons are Hatches. What do I mean by this? Hatches are a critter which are easy to get started with, because they eat stuff you just dig out of the ground (dirt, sandstone, sand or sedimentary rock), they poop something immediately useful (coal), and are generally low fuss. On hatch-friendly starts, there's an abundance of them to populate your first ranch. They have some long term sustainability problems, though not insurmountable.

Beakons are a critter which eats something you just dig out of the ground (phosphorite), they poop something immediately useful, lime (for Flue Coral), there's an abundance of them to populate an initial ranch, they're low-fuss (there's no need to give them access to oxygen), and may have long term sustainability problems due to first and foremost eating mined phosphorite, there are solutions to this though you probably don't want them as your primary long term food source as there are critters which are easier to feed long term.

Beakons are so easy, I got Carnivore achievement in my second playthrough by complete accident, just from the amount of fillet my 20 Beakon ranch was pumping out - while they only drop 1000 kcal of fillet, as their life cycle is only 25 cycles this works out about the same as hatches on a per-critter basis, but you can easily run 20 Beakons per ranch - they scale up a lot faster than hatches both due to this factor, and their short lifecycle. (I hardly use Beakons as lamps at all, just a few wild ones that I might seal in with wild flue coral).

With how easy Beakons are to ranch, this also results in basically infinite lime largely negating the need for other sources of lime.

But also let's look at the other critters available early on:

• Blowters have the same food per critter economy as Beakons, but need to eat Waterweed, either the plant or harvest. This immediately complicates ranching them compared with Beakons, you can't just trivially scale up to 20 Blowters. They poop oxygen which is okay, but Flue Corals are pretty great.
• Slogos eat salt and poop a  respectable amount of dirt, mining the salt is no problem, but the dirt is not immediately useful because you can just mine hundreds of tons of the stuff. They drop 1/4 as much meat, with 1/4 the lifespan, of hatches. Their shells can be crushed into lime. As a terrestrial critter, you can only have 8 to a ranch. Slogos seem to have a role comparable to pips, as second-rate food producers with a long term utility in producing dirt for the various purposes dirt is needed for - though I think many players would prefer just using pips for dirt. I am far from compelled by Mucin though it probably has a few uses.
• Seaquines eat pearl and poop slime - a very tiny amount that is basically irrelevant. They drop 1000 kcal of fillet on a 100 cycle lifecycle, making them terrible for food. I think it's clear that Seaquine are not an early game critter, being roughly moos, unlike moos you COULD ranch them early, but all the incentives are to not.
• Orehulls drop 6000 kcal on a 100 cycle lifecycle, making them a very respectable source of food on a per-critter basis. They are sustained in a circular resource loop with Tower Kelp. Not an early game option, slow scaling for one, but infinite food and iron ore in the late game.
• Glo squids are fine but niche, but they are very late game due to low accessibility. Lots of food per critter which is an easy route to +5 quality food, easy enough to ranch. But very rare, which would make them very slow to scale up. Not that you'd need to as you already have tons of food from other critters.
• Pacu have the same food-per-critter economy as Beakons, but the only immediately mineable food to feed them is algae, otherwise their main diet will be seeds. This makes them highly sustainable once farming is established but not as good as Beakons for your first primary critter. They poop an irrelevantly small amount of polluted dirt.
• Pokeshells produce shellfish now but only 1200 kcal on a 100 cycle lifecyle. Sanishells produce a more respectable 4000 kcal, and can also eat slime but there's not really any easy source of slime unless you have slime molds world trait. I see very little reason to ranch Pokeshells except a few for trash disposal, you can like, have a few live in a pacu ranch and eat the poop.

Edited June 2 by blakemw

[Lacero]

slime from mucin boiling make sanishells much more useful.
though I suppose you could also make mushrooms  

[blakemw]

29 minutes ago, Lacero said:

slime from mucin boiling make sanishells much more useful.
though I suppose you could also make mushrooms  

Makes sanishell kind of viable... but why would you use them when Orehulls drop 50% more raw shellfish with the same lifecycle, and have a trivial feeding setup?

[AugyBear]

Some other things I think would be good to consider:

Slogos - Since they only need +1 Happiness to maintain their full rate of production, I think the better option is to use heavily overpopulated ranches and shovel as much salt into them as they can handle. You lose out on some Food production, but convert the starting biome's Salt into Lime (10kg/cycle) and Dirt (50kg/cycle) at a much higher rate compared to Beakons (5kg/cycle) or Pips (20kg/cycle). The Mucin and Food are a nice side-benefit, but not their main appeal.

Seaquines - Ovolene boils into Steam and immediately condenses into Water at 80*C, with more production based on Happiness. Seaquines can be used for Slime production, but as you noted, it's not very much. It's much more efficient to just use Seaquines as an option for converting Sand to Water, or a slightly smaller mass of Mucin (PWater and Slime) and Caviar (+3 Morale for your dupes).

Glo-Squids - Squid Ink enables full-auto Food ranching, since it can be produced by having Glo-Squids attack critters in your evolution chamber. With a Squid Ink Critter Fountain and Critter Condo, you get a net +3 Happiness, which means you get some reproduction buffs with no Dupe labor required! You can also use Squid Ink to just buff your ranches in general, producing more output for less labor and space, but that's less exciting imo. I like more automation options so my colonists can spend more time chilling

Edited June 2 by AugyBear

[blakemw]

1 hour ago, AugyBear said:

Glo-Squids - Squid Ink enables full-auto Food ranching, since it can be produced by having Glo-Squids attack critters in your evolution chamber. With a Squid Ink Critter Fountain and Critter Condo, you get a net +3 Happiness, which means you get some reproduction buffs with no Dupe labor required! You can also use Squid Ink to just buff your ranches in general, producing more output for less labor and space, but that's less exciting imo. I like more automation options so my colonists can spend more time chilling

I feel that at the moment one of the main problems with Glo-squids, is they are so rare that you may not even have one spawn! At least on Spaced Out maps it seems entirely possible to get 0 of them.

[AugyBear]

2 hours ago, blakemw said:

I feel that at the moment one of the main problems with Glo-squids, is they are so rare that you may not even have one spawn! At least on Spaced Out maps it seems entirely possible to get 0 of them.

Funnily enough, today's Patch Notes mention they fixed the spawn rates for Glo-Squids!

Edited June 3 by AugyBear

[blakemw]

Here is my present Beakon ranch, which works unchanged in today's patch:

Here are principles:

1. I use concentration camp fish-farm, cramming all the fish into a little pen for the sake of animal cruelty. This is liquidly connected to a much larger body of water. It can house any desired number of fish as long as the entire body of water is big enough.
2. I use an auto dispenser to store the eggs in a separate room, doors have restrictions to stop dupes entering, and a critter sensor opens either one door or the other to either deliver the babies to the breeding pen or a holding puddle. I haven't bothered setting up automatic culling and just have my dupes slaughter them periodically.
3. Beakons "breath of fresh air" seems to work on the principle of "it's the thought that counts", it seems what happens is that all the Beakons decide simultaneously to breath some air (which they might have to do from the side? I seemed to have little luck getting them to breath from the surface), they all then head to the oxygen and get the "breath of fresh air" buff. It doesn't seem to matter how much oxygen there actually is relative to the number of fish, it seems once the errand has started, it is destined to complete.
4. I'm using a wild flue coral and an "upside down staircase" to deliver the oxygen bubbles into the ranch, then they get trapped on the ceiling.
5. I'm illuminating the flue coral with a lamp in an air bubble (which I made by taking a canister of gas, move-to, and emptying). I had been using a beakon but it was causing issues with the main fish farm. I'm sure it could be solved but power is free on aqua anyway and I think the lamp is less work than creating a stable beakon setup that doesn't interfere with the fish breeding in any way.
6. Because of the "fury of a thousand suns" thing from ranching glow-critters, I took this screenshot soon after reloading the game, when the lighting system goes haywire. Actually that also seemed to be an issue with using beakons to illuminate flue coral, at times they seem haphazard in whether they produce light or not, possibly an issue with having way too many glowing critters.