Out of Dirt, cull my Sage Hatch Herds?

[Neotuck]

1 hour ago, Thrundarr said:

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.

true, only reason I didn't list that is you are ranching 2 critters in order to sustain another

that's a lot of critters and can be hard on FPS

[psusi]

4 hours ago, crypticorb said:

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.

Hrm.. that doesn't happen when you freeze water; you get balls of ice.  Is this only for solid -> other solid changes, or doesn't it depend on the mass?

[PhailRaptor]

1 minute ago, psusi said:

Hrm.. that doesn't happen when you freeze water; you get balls of ice.  Is this only for solid -> other solid changes, or doesn't it depend on the mass?

There are some areas where it gets wonky, but those tend to be due to relative mass between mediums.  At least, as far as I know it's related to mass.

[psusi]

7 minutes ago, PhailRaptor said:

There are some areas where it gets wonky, but those tend to be due to relative mass between mediums.  At least, as far as I know it's related to mass.

So cook a small enough ball of fertilizer and you get a ball of dirt?  How small is small enough, and how to you automate delivery of only that amount?

[Neotuck]

1 hour ago, psusi said:

So cook a small enough ball of fertilizer and you get a ball of dirt?  How small is small enough, and how to you automate delivery of only that amount?

you don't and can't

[Rebrait]

11 hours ago, Neotuck said:

you don't and can't

Maybe you can, you can produce a precise amount of ice, and maybe if you put in a storage compactor the ideal amount of ice, would leave a perfect amount of space to put the fertilizer.

with the perfect amount and some automation you can cook to a 1/1 ratio

[crypticorb]

12 hours ago, psusi said:

Hrm.. that doesn't happen when you freeze water; you get balls of ice.  Is this only for solid -> other solid changes, or doesn't it depend on the mass?

It does happen when you freeze water. When a liquid becomes a solid, and the liquid tile has a mass >200kg, it will create a solid tile. If <200kg, it drops small balls of ice. The same thing happens with gold volcanoes, magma, crude oil, etc.

When cooking fertilizer into dirt, the rules aren't quite the same. It will always become a dirt tile upon transition, even to the point of dislocating itself off a shipping rail and creating a tile. This always happens when a solid object transitions to a different solid. Digging this tile will lose 50% of the mass.

You can see this in action in this video, skip to 37:00 to see it happening.

 

[SakuraKoi]

^also happens a lot with volcanoes, specifically when their products come into contact with polluted water, the bits of dirt which remain becomes sand tiles which have very little mass

[avc15]

I was intrigued by this idea of using sage hatches and feeding them mealwood as a source of eggs. I'd always thought sage hatches were just not very useful (dirt and fertilizer are scarce after all). But I had this question, how does this approach compare overall to just feeding plain meal lice?

Some unit analysis:

First, the hatchling stage is 4.5 cycles long. The sage hatchling eats 700 kcal/cycle but produces no eggs. In the remaining 95.5 cycles each sage hatch can produce 16 eggs if your ranchers don't waste any time, but I'm going to say 15 eggs per sage hatch lifecycle is more realistic. So, you feed 100 * 700 kcal = 70,000 kcal to each sage hatch for 15 eggs and 2000g of meat. (I didn't adjust calories consumed for the quarter of a day I'm assuming each hatch spends glum, it's pretty negligible) Let's make omelettes from the eggs and bbq from the meat.

15 hatch eggs * (1000g cracked egg / hatch egg) * (2800 kcal omelette / 1000g cracked egg) ~~ 42,000 kcal of omelettes per sage hatch lifecycle

3200 kcal meat * (4000 kcal bbq / 3200 kcal meat) ~~ 4000 kcal of bbq per sage hatch lifecycle

46,000 kcal total of omelettes and bbq (quality +1 and +2 respectively) from 70,000 kcal of mealwood (quality -1): a 60% utilization rate

----

Also if you look at this from a perspective of how many hatches per dupe you need, and how many mealwood plants per dupe you need, that turns out a bit of a downside also:

hatches per dupe: 46,000 kcal per sage hatch over 100 cycles ~~ require 2.17 hatches per dupe (this is just 1000 [ kcal/cycle ] / 460 [ kcal/cycle ])

mealwood per hatch: 1 mealwood plant * (3 cycles / 1 meal lice) * (1 meal lice / 600 kcal) * (700 kcal / cycle [per hatch]) ~~ require to farm 3.5 mealwood plants per hatch 

mealwood per dupe: 2.17 hatches / dupe * 3.5 mealwood / hatch ~~

Farming sage hatch for omelettes and feeding mealwood, you must farm 7.6 mealwoods per dupe. 

In comparison, feeding just straight raw mealwood: 1 mealwood plant * (3 cycles / 1 meal lice) * (1 meal lice / 600 kcal) * (1000 kcal / cycle [per dupe]) ~~ 5 mealwoods per dupe and 2.2 fewer daily groomings per dupe.

------

Alright, look, this may seem rather harsh. I just wanted to know how it stacks up.

Pros: +3 morale (omelette +2, meal lice -1). Omeletted is the only +2 morale food that's really accessible early on.

egg shell / save up lime for later (I often bottleneck on lime, my experience seems opposite of others here: I often burn through whatever fossil is in my magma biome rather quickly)

Cons: 60% calorie utilization

Roughly two to three times more dupe labor in farming and ranching than the alternative.

---

So it's good if you need lime and you want a morale upgrade.

But it's also rather expensive for +3 morale. I prefer to decor bomb instead.

 

[crypticorb]

2 minutes ago, avc15 said:

I was intrigued by this idea of using sage hatches and feeding them mealwood as a source of eggs. I'd always thought sage hatches were just not very useful (dirt and fertilizer are scarce after all). But I had this question, how does this approach compare overall to just feeding plain meal lice?

Some unit analysis:

First, the hatchling stage is 4.5 cycles long. The sage hatchling eats 700 kcal/cycle but produces no eggs. In the remaining 95.5 cycles each sage hatch can produce 16 eggs if your ranchers don't waste any time, but I'm going to say 15 eggs per sage hatch lifecycle is more realistic. So, you feed 100 * 700 kcal = 70,000 kcal to each sage hatch for 15 eggs and 2000g of meat. Let's make omelettes from the eggs and bbq from the meat.

15 hatch eggs * (1000g cracked egg / hatch egg) * (2800 kcal omelette / 1000g cracked egg) ~~ 42,000 kcal of omelettes per sage hatch lifecycle

3200 kcal meat * (4000 kcal bbq / 3200 kcal meat) ~~ 4000 kcal of bbq per sage hatch lifecycle

46,000 kcal total of omelettes and bbq (quality +1 and +2 respectively) from 70,000 kcal of mealwood (quality -1): a 60% utilization rate

----

Also if you look at this from a perspective of how many hatches per dupe you need, and how many mealwood plants per dupe you need, that turns out a bit of a downside also:

hatches per dupe: 46,000 kcal per sage hatch over 100 cycles ~~ require 2.17 hatches per dupe (this is just 1000 [ kcal/cycle ] / 460 [ kcal/cycle ])

mealwood per hatch: 1 mealwood plant * (3 cycles / 1 meal lice) * (1 meal lice / 600 kcal) * (700 kcal / cycle [per hatch]) ~~ require to farm 3.5 mealwood plants per hatch 

mealwood per dupe: 2.17 hatches / dupe * 3.5 mealwood / hatch ~~

Farming sage hatch for omelettes and feeding mealwood, you must farm 7.6 mealwoods per dupe. 

In comparison, feeding just straight raw mealwood: 1 mealwood plant * (3 cycles / 1 meal lice) * (1 meal lice / 600 kcal) * (1000 kcal / cycle [per dupe]) ~~ 5 mealwoods per dupe and 2.2 fewer daily groomings per dupe.

------

Alright, look, this may seem rather harsh. I just wanted to know how it stacks up.

Pros: +3 morale (omelette +2, meal lice +1). Omeletted is the only +2 morale food that's really accessible early on.

egg shell / save up lime for later (I often bottleneck on lime, my experience seems opposite of others here: I often burn through whatever fossil is in my magma biome rather quickly)

Cons: 60% calorie utilization

Roughly two to three times more dupe labor in farming and ranching than the alternative.

---

So it's good if you need lime and you want a morale upgrade.

But it's also rather expensive for +3 morale.

 

Your numbers seem accurate, but you're forgetting something: sage hatches can eat any food. This includes BBQ, gristle berries, and mushrooms, and the amount they need to survive is based off the kCal value, not the mass.

BBQ gives a flat -2 athletics debuff, so what I've changed over to is letting all sage hatch eggs turn into adults, so no omelettes. Cooking this to BBQ gives a huge amount of food, more than sustainable for the 8-critter ranch, essentially a positive feedback loop so long as you have peppernuts.

The other method is using bristle berries and cooking them into gristle berries, then feeding that to sage hatches. This requires zero dirt, and is rather easy to sustain once you get a system in place. 

[avc15]

No matter how you stack it, though, it's still 60% calorie utilization. No matter what food you're feeding them. Even if it's the BBQ, mushrooms, gristle berries.

one dead hatch fed back as bbq will only sustain a sage hatch for 4000 / 700 or 5.7 cycles.  If you feed the BBQs to the hatches, utilization only goes up a little bit, not much; from 60% -> 64%, assuming on average each hatch gets to eat one bbq in its lifecycle.

So, you are right. But there better be some tangible advantage to omelettes over the food that you're feeding those sages, because you're only getting 60% of the calories back.

For gristle berries, the benefit would be morale.

For bbq, that'd be the athletics debuff.

[Neotuck]

14 hours ago, psusi said:

So cook a small enough ball of fertilizer and you get a ball of dirt?  How small is small enough, and how to you automate delivery of only that amount?

 

1 hour ago, Rebrait said:

Maybe you can, you can produce a precise amount of ice, and maybe if you put in a storage compactor the ideal amount of ice, would leave a perfect amount of space to put the fertilizer.

with the perfect amount and some automation you can cook to a 1/1 ratio

Maybe I should have explained when I said "can't" 

fertilizer always becomes a solid tile when cooked into dirt, no matter the size (I once cooked a 5g fert and it tuned into a 5g dirt tile)

so you will always deal with 50% loss which yields negative profit (as it cost 65g dirt to make 120g fertilizer which in turn will be cooked to 60g dirt.

you lose 5g dirt)