Pacu: Our Future Polluted Dirt Overlords?

[Vertel]

Polluted dirt is currently a problem on beta. Pokeshell eat a lot of it, orehull ranching needs a lot of it, and the only good source of polluted dirt that currently exists in the game is ethanol distillers, which is at best boring and at worst unreasonable. All in all it makes pokeshell and orehull ranching a chore. With the heavy (well deserved) nerf pacu got as food and lime sources there's room to open up a new niche for them to live in: polluted dirt creation.

 

Specifically, I would suggest, rather than buffing how much they eat and poop, give at least one more pacu morph a similar behaviour to gulp fish, where they drink polluted water, but emit polluted dirt instead of clean water. This works as an extension to the existing flavour of pacu, it lets us directly convert a resource we can get a lot of into something that now has a lot of use but limited sources, and in doing so it makes pacu synergise with pokeshell ranching and orehull ranching, making pacu ranching still valuable and useful even though other food and/or lime sources are now more attractive options.

 

Overall I like what's happening with the ranching changes, but I do not like where pacu currently sit on beta, especially if you don't have APP active on a save. I would like there to be good reasons to keep raising my fishy friends, and to me this seems like a good way to keep them relevant without reverting the nerf, and to integrate into the whole ecosystem better.

[AugyBear]

I love the idea in concept, but if they drink PWater and don't have a liquid output, they'll eventually drink away their environment and die out.

What if it was an amphibious creature like a Pokeshell morph instead? Similar to how we ranch multiple kinds of Pufts in order to keep their population stable, a Pokeshell morph that consumes PWater and outputs PDirt (or PMud) could be mixed with other Pokeshell varieties to keep the populations stable.

This would also give purpose to Carbon Dioxide generators, since the easiest way to quickly make PWater is to run Water through a few CO2 Skimmers

[Tenedas]

22 hours ago, JarrettM said:

Changes and Improvements

• The Aquatic Planet Pack
  • Critter Changes
    • Orehulls
      • Orehulls will now cull excess Kelpoles when overcrowded.
      • Orehull's scale growth status is now called Ore Growth.
      • Minor update to animations for the Orehull's interaction with the Aquatic Critter Condo.
      • Orehulls now excrete Polluted Dirt instead of Polluted Mud.

 

Actually, polluted dirt is now produced by orehulls as per last patch note

[Vertel]

1 hour ago, Tenedas said:

Actually, polluted dirt is now produced by orehulls as per last patch note

Orehulls produce pdirt, but only a fraction of what's needed to feed the kelpoles that feed those orehulls; it's not a sustainable loop. Some additional source of pdirt needs to be involved.

 

2 hours ago, AugyBear said:

I love the idea in concept, but if they drink PWater and don't have a liquid output, they'll eventually drink away their environment and die out.

Only if the morph that drinks it lives in pwater; most tropical pacu don't spawn in a pwater environment, so giving the drinking behaviour to them would largely avoid any issues. Alternately, they could emit a portion of what they drink as pdirt, a portion as plain water, and a portion outright deleted as payment for the process.

2 hours ago, AugyBear said:

What if it was an amphibious creature like a Pokeshell morph instead? Similar to how we ranch multiple kinds of Pufts in order to keep their population stable, a Pokeshell morph that consumes PWater and outputs PDirt (or PMud) could be mixed with other Pokeshell varieties to keep the populations stable.

This would also give purpose to Carbon Dioxide generators, since the easiest way to quickly make PWater is to run Water through a few CO2 Skimmers

This doesn't address the problem of pacu being unattractive to ranch with the current shape of things on beta, and makes pokeshell even more powerful than they (currently) are. If it was purely a mechanical problem of making pdirt this would work pretty well.

Edited June 3 by Vertel
Typo

[Tenedas]

1 minute ago, Vertel said:

Orehulls produce pdirt, but only a fraction of what's needed to feed the kelpoles that feed those orehulls; it's not a sustainable loop. Some additional source of pdirt needs to be involved.

wow sorry double checked now, they changed the amount too so now is not 1:1 with kelpole, didn't realize the nerf is real and probably really heavy too
need to dismantle my ranch ASAP 

[Shinkarr]

Totally agree that we need more ways to make polluted dirt. I don't play atm. But with farmer's touch one can save a lot of plant fertilizer for the same output. That should help to make orehull/kelpole loop closer to being resource neutral. Same for pacu/seakomb loop. 

Edited June 4 by Shinkarr

[NitroDino]

I agree we need more ways to reliable produce polluted dirt.

[SlippyCheeze]

I definitely feel like the current pacu changes are for the best: now, I won't feel like a sucker if I even think about using anything other than a small pacu ranch for lime production, and I won't be staring down 2,000,000 or more unused calories in omelette by the time I hit cycle 365 because of their food output.   Removing the lime entirely, and combining the reduced egg volume with the faster breeding from happiness makes them much more interesting than just "shove in a one cell ranch with a feeder, and a timer driver replacement egg keeper", and ignoring them.

The p-dirt output is the most distinctive thing about them, in general, other than their food value; I'd be happy to see it enhanced, to make them (more) competitive with large scale ethanol distillation for getting it.   Beyond that, I basically never use gulp fish despite generally liking critter mechanics rather than machinery for my production chains.   Largely, that is the inconvenience of managing them due to temperature, which the proposed p-water to p-dirt mechanism would eliminate, making them more attractive to me.

[zoehange]

There could be a polluted brine variant that emitted brine and pdirt in exchange for pbrine. Or a super-hot industrial pacu variant that prefers temps over 100c and excretes extra pdirt.

 

Though just enhancing the pdirt output seems justifiable given how much everything else about them has been nerfed. I guess the pacu treat makes them still good enough for food that maybe they don't need the buff, but I haven't tried playing with them yet.