Out of Dirt, cull my Sage Hatch Herds?

[Riph]

It's cycle 947 and I'm finally out of dirt. For about 600 cycles I've been putting my dirt into mealwood farms, then feeding the mealwood to sage hatches. The sage hatches give me meat, shell, and omelettes. I have a very small amount of dirt production due to dirty water cleaning, but that dirt is just enough to keep my fertilizer production rolling, I have no extra. I now have a few options.

1) Kill my sage hatches and eat em. There's no more dirt, no more mealwood, the era of the sage hatch is over. I have more than enough stone hatch to pick up the slack.

2) Fly to a terrestrial planet for dirt. I've only got one, it's 100,000km away, and dirt is only 20%. Seems like a bad trade.

3) Go on a massive digging spree for slime, refine the slime into dirty water, refine the dirty water into clean water and dirt. Seems like a hassle, and slime is how I feed my mushrooms which is how I feed my colonists. Seems like a bad deal.

4) Expand mushroom production and feed the mushrooms to the Sage Hatches. Seems like a bad deal because hatches gain calories based on the KG of the food they eat, not the calorie value. The relatively calorie dense mushrooms will be wasted on the sage hatch. Previous sentence was wrong, hatches gain Kcal based on the kcal value of the food, just like your dupes do.

edit: 5) Use my 36 tons of algae and feed a ton of fish, fish will poop polluted dirt, refine to regular dirt.

 

 

Honestly I'm leaning toward #1 right now. Harvesting all that mealwood was labor intensive anyway even with an autosweeper handling the dirt insertion.

What are your thoughts, forum? What would you do with these sage hatches?

ps.

For those of you looking at the screenshot, have a look at my CO2 pit in the lower left corner. Electricity free refrigeration! Easy mushrooms!

[Neotuck]

when ranching sage hatches it's best to get a fertilizer synthesizer build up and running

for every 65g of dirt you get 120g fertilizer

that's almost double mass

feed fertilizer to sage hatches

[PhailRaptor]

7 minutes ago, Riph said:

4) Expand mushroom production and feed the mushrooms to the Sage Hatches. Seems like a bad deal because hatches gain calories based on the KG of the food they eat, not the calorie value. The relatively calorie dense mushrooms will be wasted on the sage hatch.

Not quite the way it works.  Critters have an overall small storage capacity for kCals.  But Hatches produce Coal based on kg consumed, not kCals.  So food items will produce basically nothing in Coal when compared to other food sources, even with the Sage Hatch's 100% conversion rate.  With Bristles, at 1,700 kCal for 1 kg, it would take a Sage Hatch almost 3 days to eat a single raw Bristle Blossom.  Over the course of that time period, you'd get 1 kg of Coal.

The Mushroom route seems totally viable from your scenario, but it depends on how much over-production you currently have versus what you are capable of sustaining.  And any Coal you were producing can be considered lost.

[Riph]

1 minute ago, Neotuck said:

when ranching sage hatches it's best to get a fertilizer synthesizer build up and running

for every 65g of dirt you get 120g fertilizer

that's almost double mass

feed fertilizer to sage hatches

That doesn't sound right. Instead of feeding the sage hatch 300kg of fertilizer, I can instead feed it 1.5kg of mealwood. (food items are calculated differently)

Are you sure?

[Neotuck]

Just now, Riph said:

That doesn't sound right. Instead of feeding the sage hatch 300kg of fertilizer, I can instead feed it 1.5kg of mealwood. (food items are calculated differently)

Are you sure?

that depends if you want coal

mealwood will keep sages alive but they poop very little coal

[Riph]

I have 294 tons of coal, and I don't burn it ever because my natgas and hydrogen gens can barely keep up with the oversupply of those gasses. Coal is for making ceramic

[Neotuck]

1 minute ago, Riph said:

I have 294 tons of coal, and I don't burn it ever because my natgas and hydrogen gens can barely keep up with the oversupply of those gasses. Coal is for making ceramic

then you are find then, ether cull them or feed them mealwood

[Riph]

11 minutes ago, PhailRaptor said:

Not quite the way it works.  ... With Bristles, at 1,700 kCal for 1 kg, it would take a Sage Hatch almost 3 days to eat a single raw Bristle Blossom.  Over the course of that time period, you'd get 1 kg of Coal.

The Mushroom route seems totally viable from your scenario, but it depends on how much over-production you currently have versus what you are capable of sustaining.  And any Coal you were producing can be considered lost.

Your post got me thinking that I really don't have a grasp on exactly how sage hatches calculate how much kcal they get each time they bite a mouthful of food. The ONI wiki has this to say:

"Hatches gain 1 hunger every second, and will try to eat when their hunger exceeds 600. Each bite they take eats 50 kg of material (such as dirt), or 0.5 kg of food (such as meal lice), but both remove 50 hunger; this makes feeding it food only produce coal at 1% of the rate materials do."

This seems to be saying that when the hatch eats, it only gains 50 hunger per 0.5 kg of edible, regardless of food type. However, your post says that better food like Bristle Blossom satisfies a hungry hatch longer due to it having more kcal.

Do you have a source you could cite to settle my confusion?

[PhailRaptor]

2 minutes ago, Riph said:

Do you have a source you could cite to settle my confusion?

Generally speaking the Wiki is to be treated as suspect, since the game gets updated rather frequently.  The ONI Biology thread is up to date with the most recent changes:

 

[Neotuck]

7 minutes ago, Riph said:

The ONI wiki has this to say

The ONI wiki is out dated

7 minutes ago, Riph said:

Do you have a source you could cite to settle my confusion?

the forums are the best source of up to date info on ONI

@PhailRaptor beat me to the punch, I was also going to post a link to ONI Biology 

[Riph]

This Biology page is very useful.

Thank you both for your time and knowledge. The forum is richer because of you

[Mariilyn]

#4, definitely. In fact, any foodstuff can be safely given to the hatches if they are slaughtered for meat. A single sage hatch needs to be fed ~67k kcals worth of food over the course of his entire life but will produce 30 kg of meat (15 eggs x 2 kg of meat) which provides 120k kcals (actually 60k , i forgot it takes 2k of meat to make a barbecue), if cooked into barbecue. Those same 15 eggs would provide only 42k kcals of omelet.

[greggbert]

I do not find sage hatches to be useful due to labor and dirt requirements.  

Stone hatches produce more coal and eat the nearly limitless igneous rock.

Best way to get dirt is water sieve > compost or cook slime.  

Never cook omelettes if you have pinches.  Wait for eggs > kill baby hatch > barbecue.

Mushrooms are superior crop 8n every way to meal lice

Also never forget if u automate well u can <gulp> kill ur dupes and save lots of resources overall

[SakuraKoi]

10 hours ago, Riph said:

2) Fly to a terrestrial planet for dirt. I've only got one, it's 100,000km away, and dirt is only 20%. Seems like a bad trade.

It's worth noting that dirt and algae are the only solids with the exception of whatever is discovered. As a rule of thumb, if the % is the same, you get 500kg of each while half the % means a third=>333kg. Whatever you discovered will also have it's yield most likely doubled (if dirt&algae sum up to 50%) or tripled (if for some miraculous reason both together are 33% or less).

The trade is also not bad in so far that all you trade is water (to hydrogen, petroleum and oxygen), a resource of which one usually has more than enough... to the point where it is troublesome.

[crypticorb]

12 hours ago, Riph said:

The ONI wiki has this to say:

The wiki is WILDLY incorrect at times. It doesn't even have the specific heat of polluted water or magma correct, and that was changed months ago.

4 hours ago, greggbert said:

Stone hatches produce more coal and eat the nearly limitless igneous rock.

@RiphThis is the way to go, hands down. You'll get coal from the deal, and ceramic manufacturing does take massive amounts of it.

Stone hatches are INCREDIBLY tough though with 200hp, so killing them takes a lot of dupe time and can get them injured, as well as requiring manual interaction to select hatches. I'd recommend setting up a critter dropoff inside the ranch, with "Auto-wrangle extra critters" selected. This will allow you to place extra critters into a kill room.

Whats a kill room? Check this out:

The tall vertical room on the left is my "hatchery", where eggs are automatically shipped, then the auto-sweeper drops them on the floor to hatch. You have to ship all the eggs out of the main ranch room or the hatches get "overcrowded" or "expecting" and won't produce more. Let the eggs hatch naturally, and you get baby hatches. For some reason, baby hatches can't hop over the ledge through the main ranch door, even though it's open, while adult hatches can.

Once the adults join the ranch, a hatch is randomly picked by the auto-wrangle critter dropoff, and they are automatically brought to the dropoff you can see on the right of the picture. This is the kill room. Every night, those two doors open and the extra hatches brought there in the day are dunked and drown. Meat gets shipped out.

No player interaction is needed, and the amount of time spend wrangling is FAR lower than it takes to kill them, and no injuries. Since I let all the eggs hatch into critters, and every single extra critter is killed for meat when they are an adult, with 8 hatches in the ranch you will get 1.36 eggs per day, which equates to 1.36kg of meat per day, assuming the critters are groomed and wrangled instantly, so it's actually a bit less.

[Sasza22]

How useful would be feeding sage hatches pincha peppernuts instead? Or even bristle berries? They don`t use dirt and will keep the alive. I tend to have a ton of peppernuts in the midgame, feeding them to hatches for extra eggs doesn`t seem that bad.

[crypticorb]

25 minutes ago, Sasza22 said:

How useful would be feeding sage hatches pincha peppernuts instead? Or even bristle berries? They don`t use dirt and will keep the alive. I tend to have a ton of peppernuts in the midgame, feeding them to hatches for extra eggs doesn`t seem that bad.

If all you want is meat or eggs, I can't see any reason why this wouldn't be viable. You won't get crap for coal because the mass they'll be eating is negligible, but the kCals/cycle they require to keep from starving and keep producing eggs would be more than satisfied.

I don't know the exact math, but in this case the more efficient the food source for kCals the less you'd need to feed to the sage hatches to keep them alive, so cooking the food would be even better.

Edit: so long as you have peppernuts, you could even create a positive feedback (puns!) loop, feeding the hatches their parents, rotisserie style.

[psusi]

Why not feed them mushrooms or bristle berries?  That's what I do.

[simonchvz]

Surprised it hasn't been suggested, which usually means I'm wrong - but can't you create a relatively simple dirt-positive cycle through fert synths by heating the fertilizer to 125C?  Hatches don't care about the food temp if I recall, so it's less problematic than trying to auto-sweep it to a wheat farm (where the destination container can spread too much heat).  Phosphorite + PW -> fert -> dirt + more fert seems more sustainable than dirt -> fert -> fed hatch or the slime route.

[crypticorb]

17 minutes ago, simonchvz said:

Surprised it hasn't been suggested, which usually means I'm wrong - but can't you create a relatively simple dirt-positive cycle through fert synths by heating the fertilizer to 125C?  Hatches don't care about the food temp if I recall, so it's less problematic than trying to auto-sweep it to a wheat farm (where the destination container can spread too much heat).  Phosphorite + PW -> fert -> dirt + more fert seems more sustainable than dirt -> fert -> fed hatch or the slime route.

Unfortunately no.

When material goes through a phase change into a solid, it creates a solid tile rather than an item on the ground. This means that dirt cookers lose 50% of their mass to digging.

Dirt cookers of old worked so well because all they required was polluted water and a bit of power, and you'd get loads of fertilizer. This was nerfed recently because fertilizer synthesizers were being abused for generating natural gas, and fertilizer had no real use other than sleet wheat. These days, everything requires dirt, but turning fertilizer into dirt through cooking is incredibly inefficient.

You could just feed the sage hatches fertilizer directly for coal if you really want to, but this is incredibly inefficient because the amount of coal you'd get back isn't worth the phosphorite, dirt, polluted water, and power invested in making it. This is the whole reason for feeding sage hatches dirt or food, because the mass conversion ratio.

[blash365]

On 10.11.2018 at 3:03 AM, Neotuck said:

when ranching sage hatches it's best to get a fertilizer synthesizer build up and running

for every 65g of dirt you get 120g fertilizer

that's almost double mass

feed fertilizer to sage hatches

And how do you renew your dirt in that scenario? Burn half the fertilizer?

[Neotuck]

Just now, blash365 said:

And how do you renew your dirt in that scenario? Burn half the fertilizer?

dirt farming is a separate issue 

the point is you double the amount of sage hatch food which in turn increases the coal production

obviously if you don't have a proper dirt farm then this isn't renewable 

[blash365]

Just now, Neotuck said:

dirt farming is a separate issue 

the point is you double the amount of sage hatch food which in turn increases the coal production

obviously if you don't have a proper dirt farm then this isn't renewable 

So that dirt farm you are talking about. How does it work?

[Neotuck]

30 minutes ago, blash365 said:

So that dirt farm you are talking about. How does it work?

That depends on what renewable resource is available on the map, main thing is to find compostables

If you have slush and/or infected PW geysers then sieves can provide 200g/s polluted dirt, the extra water can make large bristle auto farms that can then rot

meat from dead critters can also rot, (I'm not a fan of the soul food debuf so I don't make barbecue)

If you have moved past omelets then let raw eggs rot

If you have moved beyond farming mushrooms or needing algae you can cook what's left on the map (slime and algae) to give you a boost

Of course Sage Hatch farming for coal is meant to be temporary anyways, once you reach space industry you can get plenty of coal from space and most likely don't use coal generators any more so all coal is used in the kiln only

So most of my dirt farming goes to sleet wheat farms and fertilizer synthesizers 

 

[Thrundarr]

Adding to what Neotuck said you can ranch pufts and morbs to produce slime that you then cook into dirt - this is sustainable and renewable (albeit tiny) source of dirt too.