Lazy hatch automation example.

[Greep]

Figured I'd share this little setup for everyone.  Basically a neat way to almost fully automate everything hatch related except the grooming, using only a small amount of refined metal.:

 

 

 

 First of all, the hatch rooms have a full 96 squares to prevent overcrowding, however, most of the room is blocked off to hatches.  This makes sure the hatches lay their eggs in a small area and cuts down on time to groom because you don't need to call hatches from across the room.

The autosweeper in the hatch area both picks up eggs and picks up hatch food from the storage container to put it into the autofeeder.  Every 50 cycles or so you have to enable the storage units and then disable them after they're all full, though.

The eggs are taken to a room that is always completely shut, with one tile deep of water.  If there's room in the fridge, the sweeper sweeps it into it, so you get room for 100+100 eggs.  When it eventually hatches, it drowns instantly with no work (the doors are for a plan I realized I never needed), then the meat is swept into a conveyor loader, which takes it to a loader and then is sweeped into a fridge.  When needed for BBQ, it is sweeped from the fridge to the grill with the same sweeper.

 

If eggs are to replace hatches, dupes can actually take them from the fridge ascross the locked door without even entering the room

[Siromatik]

Hi ! I ended with a close/similar setup, trying to automate most stuffs and reach the workless of a plant farms, but...

On 13/05/2018 at 1:04 AM, Greep said:

automate everything hatch related except the grooming

... and refill hatches rooms when any of them died of old age. Including catching an egg, incubate it, catch the hatchling and deliver it back to hatches room. And I'm stuck to find any efficient way, a way you dont have to check often if the room is always full-fill with 8 Hatches.

1. If you dispose an high priority fridge in the hatches room, reproduction rate stops and no more eggs are produced, so the idea came to place it next to this room with a max storage at 1kg to always have an "ready new hatchling" to fill with, with automation dooring stuff... witch need 300 BUFFERS GATES to open it once each 100 cycles (hatch life cycle) !! Not a solution at all.

2. Tried an automation build to know how many critters are living in a room with pressure plate but its impossible to do outside of debug mode anyway, so i canceled it.

3. The Room Overlay show us how many critters are livin' in, so we need something like an automation signal on the Grooming Station with a slider from 1 to 8, and the whole process gonna be fully automatable

Next I went with this question : is it braining worth enought ? Quick Maths done, 1 Hatches Farms is enought for 5 dupes,
so anyway i keep one Hatchs farm for now, for Coal production and the welcomed meat for BBQ party!
And then keeping a lower-water plants farm plus some Pincha Pepper. Maybe gonna switch to more Hatchs Room if more water is needed and to avoid Idles Duplicants lategame.

On 13/05/2018 at 1:04 AM, Greep said:

most of the room is blocked off to hatches

On 13/05/2018 at 1:04 AM, Greep said:

When it eventually hatches, it drowns instantly

Nice optimisations !

BTW take care to always keep at least one egg of each species, if your hatches are all on a dying cycle at the same time and all eggs are already cooked (or even any other random ONI stuff), RIP like a dodo bird inc.

[Greep]

Yeah there's a lot that you just can't optimize unfortunately.  We need an incubator-continuous option.  And a critter # sensor.  Although you can sort of half ass the latter with some weight sensors by guesstimating activity, but as you said in #2, kinda ridiculous to attempt with current logic.

As for is it worth it.  Shine bugs are better for resource efficiency, mushrooms are better for work efficiency, but since I was building hatches anyways for coal->medicine, I find this worth it.

 

I think you can, if you really must, automate everything by solving the critter detection and using unincubated hatching.  But i don't think there'd be much point to do that with hatches, since it takes a lot of time and their resources are technically finite, except maybe fertilizer->sage hatches.

[Siromatik]

18 minutes ago, Greep said:

but since I was building hatches anyways for coal

Thats was my point, only keeping alive Sages Hatches and dumping them useless ressources for Coal, other things coming as 'free' anyway.
Its in Klei hands now, so Wait & See