Help with Ranching

[smithdl]

I run hatch farms where I feed my hatches clay.  The problem I run into is with eggs and overcrowding.

First I tried just leaving the eggs and the searching all the hatches ages to see which hatches to kill when it got overcrowded.  That gets really tedious and isn't practical for 4 full ranches of Hatches.  So, I pulled the eggs into a storage.  But in storage they don't spawn, so I built incubators to automate it. 

The problem I run in to is always counting my farms to see how many hatches I have to see how many eggs I need to incubate verse cook.  

Is there a way to automate the drop off or something that says when you drop below a certain number put an egg in an incubator?  Is there a way to put eggs into a container that only holds say 5 and you don't cook those eggs, but surplus eggs you can cook?

[Nickerooni]

If you search the forums, you can find some designs involving pressure plates that “count eggs”. Dropping items in the pressure plates is accomplished by having auto sweepers that cycle on and off. Good timings can be looked up or you can play with it yourself, presumably with buffer and filter gates.

I haven’t tried it myself. My takeaway is that there is no _easy_ way to automate ranching if you want to maximize the amount of meat and eggs. Lazy ranching isn’t so bad though: keep a ranch at max 4 hatches and dump the rest somewhere to die.

[Sasza22]

I like to keep 7 hatches per ranch (they go expecting at 8 in 96 tile ranches). Dropoffs set to autwrangle and excess hatches get stored in my excess critter ranch or drowned in the butcher room. I`m usually lazy and not doing anything with eggs but if i went for full optimisation i`d sweep them up with auto sweepers and drop (with the sweeper drop automation trick) into a separate room where the hatches hatch naturally. The room would only accept baby critters and adult would get auto wrnagled and put in any ranch that has room and if all are filled it gets drowned for meat.

[blash365]

Here is one example of how to do it with timed sweepers:

 

And another one without:

 

[SamLogan]

4 hours ago, smithdl said:

I run hatch farms where I feed my hatches clay.  The problem I run into is with eggs and overcrowding.

Here's some advice to help you :

1. How to regulate the population

Be sure to know how many hatchs can contain the room you made (max : 8 hatchs / 96 tiles)

Check "Auto-wrangle Suprplus" and add the max capacity of your room.

 

2. Waiting room

The excess hatchs need another small room, personnally I put them in a waiting room, no need to feed them if it's only for the coal / refining.

When I need to repopulate my main room, I pick one in the waiting room.

 

3. Extract the egg

When a hatch see a egg and if (total hatch + eggs > capacity) so they getting "cramped" and don't give egg anymore.

So you have to extract all the eggs, manually or with the auto-sweaper and stock it in a next room.

Setup your storage compactor like this (for manually extraction) :

When you have eggs in it, uncheck the eggs and check it again as well eggs drop on floor and will don't break. Note : keeping egg in storage break the eggs.

The "Sweep Only" option prevent the Duplicant to return the eggs you've droped on the ground.

With a auto-sweaper you need to automate it to force it to drop the egg before it stock it.