Fully automatic ranching.

[JonnyMonroe]

I've seen in a few threads the last few days people discussing the issue of ranches requiring ongoing manual maintenance. Rather than reply in each one I'll show here my solution:

 

 

What's happening?

1: This is just a water clock that throttles how often eggs are allowed through the hatching system. This is, frankly, the least important part of the whole thing and it works fine without it but the initial design was worked from my pre-cosmic auto ranches and it doesn't bother me enough that I care to remove it.

 

2: Egg throughput regulator. This works in tandem with the water clock to control how frequently eggs move to the hatching area.

 

3: The hatching area. this is a standard item dropper design with a 1-tile-wide gap for baby critters to walk out when they hatch. The drop-off here is set to 20 critters max and auto-wrangle. It only allows baby variants so once a baby reaches adulthood it gets wrangled and moved on.

 

4: Drowning area. For drowning excess critters. Apparently you can use a fish dropoff to dump any critter directly into water so clearly this bit could be improved.

 

5: stables. The dropoffs here only accept adults, up to 8 per stable. They have a higher prio than the drowning room so they get filled first.

 

If I were designing the whole thing again I'd get rid of the clock and regulator and just use 2 conveyor loaders in each stable - 1 for wanted eggs and 1 for unwanted eggs. This just saves some setup time and dupe time as eggs can be more intelligently sent where they're used. Doing this would also remove the need for the water clock and essentially then you would just be using an item dropper to hatch all your eggs (of desired morphs) and auto wrangle to meat or stables as they become adults, with unwanted eggs going to auto cracking locations.

 

Edit:

close up/automation overlay for the item dropper for those that aren't familiar with the design:

[Sevio]

Interesting system, I'll have to start experimenting with conveyor systems soon to get a better understanding of how to set up something like this in game. Still can't automate turning excess eggs of desired morphs into omelettes before they hatch, but at least eggs of undesired morphs can be cracked.

[Denisetwin]

Very neat system, I need to start trying to learn conveyor systems.  How much power does this system use?  Do you have to power the pneumatic doors now as well?

thanks!

[Sevio]

17 minutes ago, Denisetwin said:

Very neat system, I need to start trying to learn conveyor systems.  How much power does this system use?  Do you have to power the pneumatic doors now as well?

thanks!

You don't need to power mechanical airlock doors to control them with automation. It just makes them open and close faster.

[JonnyMonroe]

It uses very little power as the arms only activate for a second per egg. You could run the whole thing on a manual gen if you really wanted,

[Denisetwin]

4 hours ago, JonnyMonroe said:

It uses very little power as the arms only activate for a second per egg. You could run the whole thing on a manual gen if you really wanted,

so the conveyor system is not powered?  I've played a long time but never built conveyors

[JonnyMonroe]

Just now, Denisetwin said:

so the conveyor system is not powered?

loaders and sweepers only draw power while they are running, and they only run when an egg is laid.

[0xFADE]

Oooh I see the egg dropper now.  So pulling from that smart chest turns off the signal and thus the arm.  Clean.  I've never used a smart chest myself.  I wonder if it is more metal than using 2 buffers and a not to control an arm instead.

 

[JonnyMonroe]

12 hours ago, 0xFADE said:

Oooh I see the egg dropper now.  So pulling from that smart chest turns off the signal and thus the arm.  Clean.  I've never used a smart chest myself.  I wonder if it is more metal than using 2 buffers and a not to control an arm instead.

 

Yeah I've used the item dropper since before ranching mk1 but I never bothered refining the design into this more compact configuration until recently. I wasn't able to find a way to make it work with only 1 arm at the time but I've since figured it out (You need a door instead - if a sweeper  loses line of sight on it's target it will drop it's item. Just make sure the drop takes the item outside of the sweepers range or it will deposit it when the next item comes in).

 

[BadlyBurned]

8 hours ago, JonnyMonroe said:

Yeah I've used the item dropper since before ranching mk1 but I never bothered refining the design into this more compact configuration until recently. I wasn't able to find a way to make it work with only 1 arm at the time but I've since figured it out (You need a door instead - if a sweeper  loses line of sight on it's target it will drop it's item. Just make sure the drop takes the item outside of the sweepers range or it will deposit it when the next item comes in).

 

I used semi-automation for egg dropping. I find it works better in the early stages where you just arent ready to set up the rails all over to deliver eggs, or if you just think that such a setup takes too much building time, power, heat, or clutter.

I made a single door room with a metal mesh door flooring. This room has one storage compactor with a level 9 priority for all eggs, and only one supply/storage dupe has access. When he enters the room to drop off an egg, he triggers a weight plate that closes a second door inside that blocks off the storage for 5 seconds, making him drop the egg (which falls through the metal mesh door floor) and then he continues off to the next egg.

The room below where the egg falls has no access for the supply dupe, so he can't just go in circles delivering the same egg. I'm deciding right now what to do from here in terms of the room below. I can easily make it a water room so that when the eggs hatch, they die quickly and get sweeped for their meat, OR setting up some sort of open concept wild critter room where they can hatch naturally over time (which could be used as a pool to fill up missing spots in your Stables with some auto-wrangling)

You could also set up a sweeper and rail system from this wild critter/slaughter room. It would concentrate all the eggs in one place so you don't need to create so many rails and sweepers in the Stables themselves. And having only one dupe handle all the supply really isn't that big of a deal. In fact I prefer it as he collects all the wild eggs everywhere as well.

 

 

Also. FYI. I really like your design. I want to mess around with your automated egg dropper and see what I can come up with. I also think FULLY automatic ranching should consider food intake. With Sage hatches being able to eat Kabobs and Omelettes, there must be some kind of ratio that would feed critters with the extra calories you don't need, so that it will literally run forever.

Anyone know how long 10k worth of calories would last in a Sage hatch? Thats what they get for eating a kabob I think, and if it last them a whole egg cycle they might even be able to eat themselves forever. An omelette seems to last them a really really long time. Like days and days and days.

[Yunru]

8 hours ago, JonnyMonroe said:

Yeah I've used the item dropper since before ranching mk1 but I never bothered refining the design into this more compact configuration until recently. I wasn't able to find a way to make it work with only 1 arm at the time but I've since figured it out (You need a door instead - if a sweeper  loses line of sight on it's target it will drop it's item. Just make sure the drop takes the item outside of the sweepers range or it will deposit it when the next item comes in).

 

Why have a second sweeper? Why not have it drop it during the receiver -> chest?

[JonnyMonroe]

1 minute ago, Yunru said:

Why have a second sweeper? Why not have it drop it during the receiver -> chest?

You need the signal from the chest to disable the sweeper, you need the receiver to actually bring in the items and the sweeper needs to attempt to move items out from the chest to another storage. So items need to go into the smart storage then out from it, which means your priority order has to be receiver < Smart storage < other storage. To further complicate, the arm that moves stuff from the receiver to smart storage can't have line of sight on the other storage or it will just move stuff there instead. The arm arm that drops items can't have line of sight on the receiver or it will just move stuff from receiver to other storage.

[Yunru]

Ah yeah, forgot about the automation part.