Shine Bug Farm

[Thanatos994]

The builds I've seen here have been a big help for me learning the game, so here's one that's a bit different from what I've seen.

Caveat: I understand having large number of shine bugs around isn't kosher for most, due to fps drop-off. This isn't a huge issue for me as my laptop build happens to be flush with ram, which appears to handle the bugs (hah) fine.

My farm is designed to hold 8 bugs per 'unit', and you can add on as many units as you wish. Each unit is rigged to send eggs to a hopper that leads to water kept at 76 degrees (not shown), for automated omelet production. However, this leaves the problem of keeping the population from dropping off to nothing, which is why all the circuitry.

The circuit has three parts per unit: a three-cycle clock made of and gates and memory toggles (off to the left stretching up and down), a pulsator (very top), and some logic (very bottom). The logic is hooked up to a weight plate and a door. The idea is as follows: the pulsed autosweeper drops the egg through the open door onto the weight plate, the weight plate then triggers the door to close which displaces the egg sideways, forcing it into a little nook where it can safely wait to hatch (also where the clock part of the clock unit is).

So long as it's tended to by ranchers and has a supply of phosphorite, the rest is taken care of. The phosphorite is consumed too slowly to be worth automating and I can't auto ranch, otherwise it would be wholly autonomous xD

This set of units feeds about half my dupes and supplies a decent amount of eggshells. Mainly though, it looks cool and was fun to make, I'll admit it's not all that practical for how many resources it takes to set up.

[DaveSatx]

complex but fun.   ONI at some of its most fun

[Nativel]

So much automation. Ahhh I get it, bugs farm... developers like such reports.

[Nitroturtle]

As someone who spends a significant amount of time in the game building pointless structures just to see if I can, I approve!

This was my latest nonsensical contraption for cooling water:

[0xFADE]

Very nice population regulation.

i decided to not ranch shinebugs this time so far though I am down to one left. The other two must have randomly gotten stuck in a door. The last is in the infirmary which doesn’t get used but I’ll have to start ranching or find a spot out of the way to keep it safe. 

[crypticorb]

36 minutes ago, 0xFADE said:

Very nice population regulation.

i decided to not ranch shinebugs this time so far though I am down to one left. The other two must have randomly gotten stuck in a door. The last is in the infirmary which doesn’t get used but I’ll have to start ranching or find a spot out of the way to keep it safe. 

You can revive the wild population slowly by incubating them. So long as you don't groom them with a ranching station, you can accelerate their reproduction by cutting down on the incubation time. This is far more effective on longer lifecycle critters, but over time it'll give you an extra purely wild shinebug or two.

[Nxf7]

28 minutes ago, crypticorb said:

You can revive the wild population slowly by incubating them. So long as you don't groom them with a ranching station, you can accelerate their reproduction by cutting down on the incubation time. This is far more effective on longer lifecycle critters, but over time it'll give you an extra purely wild shinebug or two.

Isn't this purely perception? As soon as you stop incubating it will go back to 1 shine left. Incubating doesn't make them lay more than 1 egg per lifecycle.

It's a moot point anyway, shines can live on when tame, unfed and un-groomed just like Pacu due to a dis-proportionally high reproduction rate relative to Birth Calorie and Daily Tamed Calorie Loss. Don't have to feed them anything ever in fact, just groom them and they will lay several eggs before starving.

[crypticorb]

2 hours ago, Nxf7 said:

Isn't this purely perception? As soon as you stop incubating it will go back to 1 shine left. Incubating doesn't make them lay more than 1 egg per lifecycle.

It's a moot point anyway, shines can live on when tame, unfed and un-groomed just like Pacu due to a dis-proportionally high reproduction rate relative to Birth Calorie and Daily Tamed Calorie Loss. Don't have to feed them anything ever in fact, just groom them and they will lay several eggs before starving.

It's not perception, the mechanic you are using is accelerating the incubation rate of the egg, not the adult laying speed. An wild adult will lay exactly one egg per lifespan, and that one egg will hatch just before the adult dies, rinse and repeat.

If you incubate the egg, it speeds up the process of it hatching, giving you a shorter incubation of the egg, so the new wild critter will hatch before it would otherwise.

You're right that it's somewhat a moot point for shinebugs, but the "critter starving" popup is annoying, so I like to keep 2-3 wild critters boxed somewhere for safekeeping. This strategy is FAR more effective on longer lifespan critters, such as hatches or pufts, which have very long lifespans, and incubation can anywhere from 14 to 33 cycles, depending on which critter. You can cut those incubation times to 5 days, greatly accelerating the reproduction rate of wild hatches.

This can allow you to revive an otherwise nearly extinct species, while keeping it wild, which has benefits of zero maintenance.

[0xFADE]

6 hours ago, crypticorb said:

You can revive the wild population slowly by incubating them. So long as you don't groom them with a ranching station, you can accelerate their reproduction by cutting down on the incubation time. This is far more effective on longer lifecycle critters, but over time it'll give you an extra purely wild shinebug or two.

Does it really work?  Wild only ever lay one egg. They hatch at 0. Incubating wouldn’t change that. 

I guess you would have more overlap but never more than the one.

you can always keep a wild population at least. You can tame a wild adult that already dropped a wild egg. 

[crypticorb]

8 hours ago, 0xFADE said:

Does it really work?  Wild only ever lay one egg. They hatch at 0. Incubating wouldn’t change that. 

I guess you would have more overlap but never more than the one.

you can always keep a wild population at least. You can tame a wild adult that already dropped a wild egg. 

Consider the hatch lifespan. 100 cycles, with a 5%/cycle incubation rate for the egg. They'll always lay one egg per lifespan per critter, and it will hatch before the adult dies, and the new hatchling will continue the cycle, always leaving one critter with a small overlap.

If you incubate that egg rather than letting it sit, it'll go up to 25%/cycle incubation, which means it'll hatch within 4 cycles instead of 20. Now you have a second fully wild hatch FAR sooner than it would have otherwise appeared, which will lay another egg at about 75% of it's lifespan.

Eventually, you'll have moved up the timeframe of the wild hatches enough to have revived an extinct species. You can take one of the extra hatches and start ranching it, while leaving one of them wild.

 

This is an incredibly useful strategy, because you can go to space and bring back smooth hatches, which you can reverse-breed for stone and normal hatches, and keep them completely wild for backup. You can also force a species to near extinction, such as shove voles, and still revive a completely wild population.