Suggestions for slaughtering Hatches?

[langstraad]

My Hatch farm is up and running and I have a Rancher Duplicant assigned. 

As their numbers grow, I will want to convert the older creatures to Meat. Must I Attack each one in turn?

Is there a feature I have not witnessed yet?

[Lifegrow]

3 minutes ago, langstraad said:

My Hatch farm is up and running and I have a Rancher Duplicant assigned. 

As their numbers grow, I will want to convert the older creatures to Meat. Must I Attack each one in turn?

Is there a feature I have not witnessed yet?

Unfortunately the critter sensor is somewhat limited at the moment (hopefully the klei devs will show it some love in the future and allow distinctions between critter type, whether it's sensing eggs or not, etc).

[Neotuck]

I been working on a "nursery" room set above a hatch stable that will drop baby hatches every time the critter sensor detects less than 8 hatches in the room

It works but has been too buggy to work 100% of the time, hoping after the Q1 update come out I'm able to make a better design

[Iriswaters]

I set up a breeding room and an overpopulated housing.   Breeding room is kept at low numbers, either by autosweeping away excess eggs or just having an incubator or 2 in another room and having them set to continually pull eggs, with occasional intervention by you to either incubate replacement hatches in the hatchery, or wrangle replacements.    For the other room, the one where they are going to be constantly overpopulated your options for killing them are: Let them die of old age, starve them to death, or drown them.  

Depending on whether you are trying to milk them for their coal/metal production abilities or if they are just for the meat.  If you are after the coal, it's best to feed them continually until death and autosweep or carry away the carcass.   Your dupes don't care the age, so that's the way to get the most production out of them, and it doesn't change how much meat you get, just delays it for 100 cycles.   If you are trying to maximize meat production to resource cost then letting them die as babies is best.  Again, babies seem to provide the same meat as adults, so no reason to wait until they are old.  Either toss them in a room with no food to starve, or toss them in a room filled with water.  For the water, they do not fall through open horizontal doors, but should still fall through open vertical ones.  You can also use some other liquid, like liquid chlorine, for better sterilization if you prefer, but with autosweepers it doesn't matter too much, and by the time you are condensing chlorine you probably have autosweepers..

 

Having a separate, or multiple separate breeding room/s is also helpful for controlling what breeds you get.   Having a breeding room full of stone hatches results in almost entirely stone hatches being born.   Though I like to keep some basic hatches around too, as they are the only ones that eat clay, and you end up with a lot of clay and it's not all that useful.  You only need so much ceramic insulation.

[babba]

Non-Vegan, but also works with the Tofu Cow. Workflow as follows:

Critter Auto Lasagne Production ( CrAoLePn )

[Coolthulhu]

You can't discriminate them by age, but you wouldn't gain much from it anyway.

Build an egg dropper that drops eggs onto a 1 tile with critter drop-off on it. Set the drop-off to autowrangle everything. Create a kill chamber with a low-priority drop-off on vertical door above 1000kg of water.

Now dupes will wrangle all new hatches and either put them in your stables or in the kill chamber. Hook the vertical door to clock sensor set to 5% at 0 time (if you set it too low, the hatches will hover in the air and the door will close - such is the AI in ONI) and the hatches will get auto-drowned.

[Neotuck]

I have set drop offs to auto wrangle but my rancher ignores it.  I even set priority on all other tasks except ranching to 0 and the rancher still ignores it

[Gurgel]

3 hours ago, Neotuck said:

I have set drop offs to auto wrangle but my rancher ignores it.  I even set priority on all other tasks except ranching to 0 and the rancher still ignores it

I had that working in the past, but you may need some free target critter drop-off. I had a dark, damp cellar with a lower-prio drop-off to quietly let the surplus die out of sight.

[greggbert]

The older creatures will die and turn to meat without your intervention.  Move the eggs out into a smaller room and kill them when they hatch.  If you run low on hatches, then wrangle them instead of killing them.