Ranching is near impossible without intervention

[Juicearific]

I was in love with the Ranching MK I and MK II upgrades. And I'll admit that shine bug food farms and such were too OP - but that's been toned down by the eggs giving 1/10 the food they used to.

My concern is that I can't easily and accurately make an automated system for eggs. Now, I can put up an automated system for most critters (shine bugs included) that will auto-fill incubators before it ships off eggs for food. That's not the problem. The problem is that incubators still need to be queued for every egg, and if I'm not paying attention they'll get auto-swept into the food department. Which means I need dupes to manually load the incubators later, so my cook can't cook any time in the day. But that's still not my problem. I still have to manually set the incubator every time I want to hatch an egg.

Is there a reason incubators can't be queued like plants (when you harvest the plant, there's a re-plant option)? Because as it stands, it's not worth farming any critter for eggs. For meat sure, you can just hatch them all elsewhere, kill any you don't want, and auto-fill the old room. But eggs aren't worth it, because you can't really say 'I want to drop an egg in here' (ever, let alone every X cycles) without doing some weird clock-cycling stuff with autosweepers, which shouldn't even be remotely necessary.

I just don't understand, it feels like the intent of ranching was to be able to supplement one's food, hence the massive egg rebalance and such, but it isn't even slightly applicable in that sense.

[Oozinator]

4 hours ago, Juicearific said:

I just don't understand, it feels like the intent of ranching was to be able to supplement one's food, hence the massive egg rebalance and such, but it isn't even slightly applicable in that sense.

Same feeling here.
Ranching is no longer a cute addition for me, it's a pain and shifts the game in a direction, i don't like.
Micro everywhere. Audio and visuals great, but gameplay sucks.
Temperature handling was one of the most interesting parts in ONI for me and it's ruined/buggy now.
Ranching at first with hatches for coal and so on was nice too, but a tierbased secondary ressource chain, to balance the game is off for me.

[lDeathkingl]

Well I have found a solution for shine bug ranching without intervention.The main idea here is to let shine bugs stay in one pen while giving eggs which are not reachable by dupes.After that with autowrangleing move them to a different pen where they lay eggs which are reachable by dupes.This way your egg pens will never run out of shinebugs. That same principle can be applied to pufts.

Idk about pacus but if the can be autowrangled then its possible(never tried cause algae is too messed up to produce).

And about dreckos and hatches am still figuring it out .

[Yunru]

What if you just don't incubate, and let them hatch naturally?

Have the eggs dropped off to a hatching pen via sweeper that loses power mid-sweep.

[lDeathkingl]

yep as it only needs 5 cycles for shine bugs

[Juicearific]

9 hours ago, lDeathkingl said:

Well I have found a solution for shine bug ranching without intervention.The main idea here is to let shine bugs stay in one pen while giving eggs which are not reachable by dupes.After that with autowrangleing move them to a different pen where they lay eggs which are reachable by dupes.This way your egg pens will never run out of shinebugs. That same principle can be applied to pufts.

I suppose that's not a terrible way to do it - How do you make sure that the eggs in the original pen aren't reachable by dupes (given that you're autowrangling them)? I have a few ideas, but I'm not sure how much I like them, lol.
 

8 hours ago, Yunru said:

What if you just don't incubate, and let them hatch naturally?

Have the eggs dropped off to a hatching pen via sweeper that loses power mid-sweep.

 

20 hours ago, Juicearific said:

But eggs aren't worth it, because you can't really say 'I want to drop an egg in here' (ever, let alone every X cycles) without doing some weird clock-cycling stuff with autosweepers, which shouldn't even be remotely necessary.

My feelings on having to cycle an autosweeper's power to drop items. It shouldn't be necessary - there should be a storage-type building that drops it for you, or there should be a building they can be stored in. I don't see cycling a sweeper's power as being the way to do something, I see it as the way we're forced to do something because nothing else exists.

[Mlah]

I feel like the incubator is too tempting of a trap for players. In a stable ranch, it actually doesn't provide anything.I think most players would have better luck if they avoided them completely. The decreased hatch time only matters during the setup of a ranch. Hatching eggs naturally provide the same throughput you just need to shift when you quarantine your next set of eggs. It actually simplifies shinebug ranching as the incubation time synchs perfectly with the old age counter.

[Juicearific]

3 hours ago, Mlah said:

I feel like the incubator is too tempting of a trap for players. In a stable ranch, it actually doesn't provide anything.I think most players would have better luck if they avoided them completely. The decreased hatch time only matters during the setup of a ranch. Hatching eggs naturally provide the same throughput you just need to shift when you quarantine your next set of eggs. It actually simplifies shinebug ranching as the incubation time synchs perfectly with the old age counter.

I don't speed up the hatching with incubators, I use them as a guaranteed way to get the egg into the room (and not removed by dupes). I would gladly not use them if I had some other way to guarantee my egg ended up in the room, in a safe spot.

Also, no hatching exactly matches up with lifespan anymore.
Shine bugs and pacus hatch in 3 cycles now (as of cosmic update)
Everything else hatches in <20, though admittedly I don't remember all the numbers. Seeing as all the others live for atleast 75 cycles though, that's irrelevant.

[lDeathkingl]

8 hours ago, Juicearific said:

I suppose that's not a terrible way to do it - How do you make sure that the eggs in the original pen aren't reachable by dupes (given that you're autowrangling them)? I have a few ideas, but I'm not sure how much I like them, lol.
 

 

My feelings on having to cycle an autosweeper's power to drop items. It shouldn't be necessary - there should be a storage-type building that drops it for you, or there should be a building they can be stored in. I don't see cycling a sweeper's power as being the way to do something, I see it as the way we're forced to do something because nothing else exists.

well just dig up a room with floor deep enough and remove the ladders after it,then just have a entrance at top with platform capable only of holding a grooming station.Also before removing ladders be sure to keep a lure at base floor so max eggs get dropped on ground(Doesn't really matter as i build it without lure and works fine).

[Juicearific]

1 hour ago, lDeathkingl said:

well just dig up a room with floor deep enough and remove the ladders after it,then just have a entrance at top with platform capable only of holding a grooming station.Also before removing ladders be sure to keep a lure at base floor so max eggs get dropped on ground(Doesn't really matter as i build it without lure and works fine).

For some reason I never thought about building a room with the grooming station at the top. Every time I buiild one for aerial creatures, I put my grooming station on the ground floor. That helps a ton, cheers! (my initial complaint still stands, but this will atleast give me something to work with)

[Mlah]

One thing you can do is make a room with a storage compactor that can only hold as many eggs as you need critters. Set it to high priority and once it is full dump the storage and lock the room. When the eggs hatch set the door to open and let the critters wander into the main ranch. Still requires a bit of manual intervention but I find it less work than dealing with incubators.

[old_fantom]

1 hour ago, Mlah said:

One thing you can do is make a room with a storage compactor that can only hold as many eggs as you need critters. Set it to high priority and once it is full dump the storage and lock the room. When the eggs hatch set the door to open and let the critters wander into the main ranch. Still requires a bit of manual intervention but I find it less work than dealing with incubators.

This doesn't help with the spirit of the complaint about farming.  You have to micromanage it.  There is no late game process where you have a stable system that just takes care of itself. Without ranching, I can walk away from my computer for an hour or three at late game and let the dupes do their thing.  With ranching, I come back to a either a decimated pen or starved dupes if I was using eggs for food.  You can't say, eat excess eggs.    

[Yunru]

8 minutes ago, old_fantom said:

This doesn't help with the spirit of the complaint about farming.  You have to micromanage it.  There is no late game process where you have a stable system that just takes care of itself. Without ranching, I can walk away from my computer for an hour or three at late game and let the dupes do their thing.  With ranching, I come back to a either a decimated pen or starved dupes if I was using eggs for food.  You can't say, eat excess eggs.    

You can, but it involves a lot of automation.

Some pressure plates, storage containers that can only hold one egg, and guiding the excess to a fridge.

[MatthewCline]

On 6/20/2018 at 12:51 AM, Juicearific said:

I use them as a guaranteed way to get the egg into the room (and not removed by dupes). I would gladly not use them if I had some other way to guarantee my egg ended up in the room, in a safe spot.

You could do that with the following:

1. A way to mark eggs as "don't crack, incubate or put into storage".
2. An egg drop-off building, like the critter drop-off.  Eggs dropped off at the building would automatically have the above marking applied to them.

It might be possible to make the critter drop-off building do double duty, by having its config panel have checkboxes for "drop off wrangled critters" and "drop off critter eggs".

[BlueLance]

Technically ranching is fairly easy once you have the critters needed, I let my hatches eggs hatch naturally and move all excess hatches to be slaughtered.

The incubator is there to help you quickly get the numbers you need to get it stable. 

The downside is if you want to use the eggs, but this can be done by creating a room with a 1 tile high access, critters might lay eggs there and your dupes will be unable to touch them. which means hopefully you should never "Run out" of critters since there will most likely be some eggs kept safe there, to increase the chances just put the feeders there as well with a sweeper arm set to pick up meat and the resource they drop

[Carnis]

On 21.6.2018 at 12:41 PM, BlueLance said:

Technically ranching is fairly easy once you have the critters needed, I let my hatches eggs hatch naturally and move all excess hatches to be slaughtered.

The incubator is there to help you quickly get the numbers you need to get it stable.

For me, a map started in ranch II. All critters expecting all the Time. Set autowrangle to 8 critters, at 7 critters + 2 eggs egg production dies, even though autowrangle should prevent that.

Very frustrating.

Using sweeper+conveyor to off egg, but then the pens slowly empty due no Offspring. + Kind of hard to setup good sweeper spots into drecko ranches.