labor efficient ranching (breeding ranch / feeding ranch)

[avc15]

Hello everyone, I've seen a similar idea about pacus but those discussions focus on some additional things and the point for this post gets buried a bit. There's nothing really new in this post, I'm just stringing together old ideas to arrive at something complete.

Problem: large-scale ranching for meat or materials processing (i.e. coal) takes far too much dupe time!

A simple silo ranch with 8 hatches in it, well geez, my dupes have to tend the critters 8 times per cycle. That adds up quickly. Also if I let them sit in expecting, my dupes will keep on tending them but that's a bit wasteful! So if my micro is off at all, some dupe effort goes to waste.

If I split my ranching operation into two rooms, one for breeding and one for feeding, I can choose between:

- Cutting my dupe time in a quarter for the same production, or

- Quadruping production for the same dupe time

The breeding ranch

Just put a small number of critters in a room, say 2 or 3. Suppose they're hatches - hatches reproduce 16 times per lifecycle if you never let them have the expecting debuff for more than a few seconds.

Here are my two actual ranches for hatches. Top left ranch has just 3 stone hatches, bottom right ranch has just 2 smooth hatches. This is more than enough breeders to sustain more coal and gold production than I can use, and I'm only tending 5 critters - but I'm making as much coal as if I were tending 12 stone hatches and as much gold as if I were tending 8 smooth hatches. (and critters should never waste tendings)

Never let an egg sit on the ground, pick it up immediately. All the sweepers and rails in our breeding rooms do is send eggs to a receptacle in the correct feeding room.

In the feeding room, your sweepers must NOT be able to pick eggs up off the ground, so these rooms need to be at least 6 high?

Now, some people use automation to shut off the sweeper as soon as a smart storage detects that it's no longer full. I am using a timer instead. The timer turns on our sweeper for exactly 3 seconds, which isn't long enough to move an egg from the receptacle to the loader. Each time the timer activates, it will pick up any egg it can reach and then drop it on the ground.

Now, here are our feeding rooms. The critters are overcrowded, they all have only 20% metabolism and they will not reproduce. But because we're making sure the breeders always keep on reproducing, each breeder plus its glum offspring in the feed room is worth the same production as 4 happy breeders. Look at how many stone hatches I have here:

9 of those 51 are eggs (you can see the number of hatched critters by mousing over the critter drop-off), so I have 42 glum stone hatches for 3 happy ones in the breeding room. To match the production of those 42 glum hatches, I'd have to tend 8-9 more happy hatches in the breeding ranch.

But you said four times the production, and you're just a bit above three times production?

Yeah, the upper limit is about four times, but there are a few things that will reduce that a bit.

First, this operation takes about one critter lifecycle plus one egg incubation period to ramp up to full speed - your feeder population has to get near its maximum. So, for hatches, it takes 120 cycles for your production to reach a maximum. You can start with more breeders to speed it up.

Second, dupe priorities. You can only reach 4 times production if your critters get tended immediately each time they're due.

Third, once in a while they lay the wrong kind of egg. I normally kill the off-breed ones manually because I'm OCD like that, but you could just ignore them - the result is the same. The wrong breed will just go hungry and die leaving behind some meat.

Last, there's one bit of micro, and every cycle you miss on this one slows down your production too. Every time one of your breeders is about to die you have to wrangle in a young critter from the feeding room. That's the only micro for this whole thing. Not moving eggs, nothing. Just gotta replenish your breeding stock once in a long while.

Interesting things to look into

If your feeding rooms aren't actually rooms, the critters become glum but not overcrowded! What does that mean?

Well, it means their reproduction counter ticks up at the lowest possible rate. Interesting. Some glum critters are able to reproduce. Others are not. A glum hatchling won't produce an egg before dying, but a glum shine bug will. HMMMMM. (I haven't tested all critter types).

For certain kinds of critters (only one I confirmed was shinebugs) it means that your population growth will be linear forever and never settle out. It also means that your lime production will ramp up quadratically and you'll just keep tending the same small number of critters! Every egg your breeders lay permanently increases your population of "feral" critters by 1 (ie tame, released back to wild) and also increases your rate of lime production a little bit. (and you don't even have to let them eat)

Shinebug eggs are only 100g of lime each, but at a quadratic rate of growth you'll soon have a lot of lime.

 

 

[Djoums]

53 minutes ago, avc15 said:

If your feeding rooms aren't actually rooms, the critters become glum but not overcrowded! What does that mean?

Critters consider the entirety of the space they're in and see that as their "room" size. If that size is enough for all of them, no overcrowding.

 

You can make your stables 4*24 to cut on auto-sweepers and dupes movement.

Spoiler

 

[avc15]

26 minutes ago, Djoums said:

Critters consider the entirety of the space they're in and see that as their "room" size. If that size is enough for all of them, no overcrowding.

 

You can make your stables 4*24 to cut on auto-sweepers and dupes movement.

I had 12 shinebugs breeding and kept putting offspring in my main base until shinebugs were everywhere and the game performance suffered quite a bit, over something like 200 cycles - I didn't manage to get their reproduction rate to go to zero. I'll try that part again in a more controlled space where I actually know the sizes.

Also, yes, make your breeding stables vertical to save a few seconds per tending action. But cutting the number of tending errands down to a quarter of what it would have been is the main point of this idea, and optimizing pathing here is a fairly minor improvement.

Let me re-state it: if you're doing a full 4x24 ranch, with 8 critters, you can get the same production from a much smaller ranch with only 2 critters. I've illustrated a stable containing only 2 smooth hatches, which are the only 2 smooth hatches I'm tending. This ranch produces the same amount of gold as a full sized 4x24 ranch with 8 smooth hatches, because I hatch all their offspring glum/overcrowded and stuff them all into a second room where they won't ever be tended.

When you're only tending 2 vs the 8 you would have otherwise, geometry and pathing become much less important.

[Carnis]

Your setup is not good For meat.

Glum hatches Will cannibalise The dead feeder hatches. Reducing meat output. Its better to drown for hatchmeat.

You also must Feed your glum hatches at least 1kg/cycle but More likely they eat 140/5 so 28kg.

Not really impressive IMO.

[avc15]

coming back to it.

What this does is let you get the same material production by only tending a quarter of the critters. I did mention meat production in one spot but you don't get the meat immediately - I wait for my working critters to get old and die naturally.

52 minutes ago, Carnis said:

Your setup is not good For meat.

The glum ones aren't ravenous hungry or anything, they're being fed. Meat doesn't vanish when it hits the floor, you have to leave it there for a while. Set edible storage to a high priority. If you can't lose any at all, put in another sweeper. 

Like many things, what are your goals? My goals were to make coal and gold, and I realized I could be tending 5 instead of 20 critters.

52 minutes ago, Carnis said:

You also must Feed your glum hatches at least 1kg/cycle but More likely they eat 140/5 so 28kg.

Indeed, but it's actually 140kcal per cycle per glum critter, not 28kcal. Glum critters process 20% of what happy critters do (time it if the tooltip seems confusing). This is a concept called leverage: each happy tended critter can maintain 15 living offspring, so the lot of them together produces as much as 4 happy critters would.

The choice is between having a ranch of 8 tended critters and killing their offspring immediately, or just having 2 in your stable and letting the offspring live somewhere else un-tended. Save those 6 ranching errands per day, get your meat 100 cycles later.