Requirements to keep wild critters indefinitely.

[zOldBulldog]

Since I don't build all of my farms right away, I used to keep 2 wild critters of each kind (so long as they don't fight or injure my dupes) in my nature preserve as a reserve for when I am ready to start their ranching.

But I noticed that my shine bugs inevitably died off after some time (probably due to other critters consuming the food supply). I also realized that I might combine this function to generate some decor (like placing a Bristle Berry and a shine bug in the restroom or research room).

That led me to think that we need a compendium for what each wild critter needs to stay alive (or die only after laying at least one egg) . I am starting this thread for that purpose. I will update the main post as I find more stuff or if others post in the thread with additional information.

So... On to the compendium for the minimum requirements to keep wild critters alive:

REGULAR HATCH
- A tile of dirt.
- No debris on the floor (to reduce chance of eggs of different kind).

SHINE BUG
- A Bristle Berry plant or better yet a dispenser with Bristle Berries.
- No other plants that might lead to evolution.

REGULAR DRECKO
- 2? Balm lily plants and the chlorine to keep them alive. Or can wild drecko survive with no food?

PACU
- 1 tile of water. No food needed.

[madcow]

Nothing is needed. No food needed. Just don't let them get too cold or too hot or drown (obviosuly pacus need 1 tile with water). Atmosphere does not matter. Its that ****ing simple. For every critter. Its the easiest ***ing thing to manage, by not managing anything. So don't take away the eggs, wild critters lay 1 egg.

Your compendium should look like this:

Every wild critter except pacu needs:

Nothing.

Wild Pacus need:

Water.

[zOldBulldog]

Originally posted by madcow:

Nothing is needed. No food needed. Just don't let them get too cold or too hot or drown (obviosuly pacus need 1 tile with water). Atmosphere does not matter. Its that ****ing simple. For every critter. Its the easiest ***ing thing to manage, by not managing anything. So don't take away the eggs, wild critters lay 1 egg.

Your compendium should look like this:

Every wild critter except pacu needs:

Nothing.

Wild Pacus need:

Water.

That sounds great, but it doesn't seem "quite" accurate.

Every single time I had shine bugs in a nature preserve with little or no food (and temperature very stable between 20-30C all the time) they eventually died off. And according to the wiki they are supposed to survive from -20C to almost 50C.

Did they perhaps randomly evolve to a higher form and then die of starvation? Or maybe their eggs got eaten by hatches? Something else?

Regardless of the cause, what I am trying to achieve here is not "mostly survive", but "always survive" as wild critters. Whatever is needed to do that... that is what I want to capture.

[madcow]

Nothing eats eggs. If you aren't producing eggs then your temps are wrong.

And there is your answer...you are doing it wrong. -20 to 50 is livable range. They need to be in comfortable range to make egg. -10 to 40. If they are kept in those temps during their entire life cycle, they will make egg. Unless something kills them (a Dupe or a Pokeshell).

Also make sure you are not collecting those eggs and cracking them or storing them.

Also make sure they are actually wild (they won't have tags if they are wild). Once tamed they will never spawn wild, all eggs will hatch as tame.

I'm trying to figure out what is happening to your critters; I can't think of any other reason why you might not have eggs. If these were hatches I might suggest that if they burrow into natural tiles, that might affect reproductive rate (now I'm grasping at straws, because I don't think this is the case, burrowing just affects coal production I think) but these are shine bugs you are talking about.

Outside of all this, maybe make sure you don't have some mod that affects shine bugs. I haven't looked over all the mods, so I can't rule that out.

Ug....last thing. Are you really sure that the bugs in question DIDN'T already lay an egg and you missed it? Now I hope I covered all possibilities.

[CPT Chthonbeard the Pirate]

Over time, you may be pushing the critters off into a smaller and smaller area outside your base. That with the long egg hatching time, they may be getting the "CRAMPED" debuff causing them to stop producing eggs for long enough that they won't produce an egg.

This is not the same debuff as "OVERCROWDED." That debuff happens when there are too many critters in a room. CRAMPED happens when Critters + Eggs would be too many when all the eggs hatch.

The best way to avoid this is to remove the eggs as they are laid, and hatch them yourself. This will also train your ranchers. If you put a critter drop off back where you want these critters, you can pretty much automate this process and in theory keep them from dying off.

In short, sometimes we players ruin the environment in ways we don't even see, and even wild critters need our help to survive.

[zOldBulldog]

Originally posted by madcow:

Nothing eats eggs. If you aren't producing eggs then your temps are wrong.

And there is your answer...you are doing it wrong. -20 to 50 is livable range. They need to be in comfortable range to make egg. -10 to 40. If they are kept in those temps during their entire life cycle, they will make egg. Unless something kills them (a Dupe or a Pokeshell).

Also make sure you are not collecting those eggs and cracking them or storing them.

Also make sure they are actually wild (they won't have tags if they are wild). Once tamed they will never spawn wild, all eggs will hatch as tame.

I'm trying to figure out what is happening to your critters; I can't think of any other reason why you might not have eggs. If these were hatches I might suggest that if they burrow into natural tiles, that might affect reproductive rate (now I'm grasping at straws, because I don't think this is the case, burrowing just affects coal production I think) but these are shine bugs you are talking about.

Outside of all this, maybe make sure you don't have some mod that affects shine bugs. I haven't looked over all the mods, so I can't rule that out.

Ug....last thing. Are you really sure that the bugs in question DIDN'T already lay an egg and you missed it? Now I hope I covered all possibilities.

1) As I mentioned earlier athey are in a 20-30C well regulated temperature area all their life.
2) They are not getting killed. No pokeshells there, and I am not telling the dupes to kill them.
3) I am not collecting, cracking or storing their eggs. The only egg collecting I was doing was sweep only and very targeted.
4) These are truly wild, I never domesticated the shine bugs.
5) The mods I use are: DGSM (only affects game start), Bigger Camera Zoom, Gas Overlay, Blueprints, Plan Buildings without Materials, Chained Deconstruction and Falling Sand and Self-sealing Airlocks. Largely QOL stuff that should not affect critter behavior and that should not have any negative effects if they stopped working and put me back in vanilla behavior (except for some leakage when I open airlocks if the airlock one were to break).
6) Nope... they did lay a few eggs, and those eggs hatched before they went extinct.

Also, hatches and dreckos didn't give me this issue. Only the shine bugs when they eventually went extinct. That is why I was thinking food.

[zOldBulldog]

Originally posted by CPT Chthonbeard the Pirate:

Over time, you may be pushing the critters off into a smaller and smaller area outside your base. That with the long egg hatching time, they may be getting the "CRAMPED" debuff causing them to stop producing eggs for long enough that they won't produce an egg.

This is not the same debuff as "OVERCROWDED." That debuff happens when there are too many critters in a room. CRAMPED happens when Critters + Eggs would be too many when all the eggs hatch.

The best way to avoid this is to remove the eggs as they are laid, and hatch them yourself. This will also train your ranchers. If you put a critter drop off back where you want these critters, you can pretty much automate this process and in theory keep them from dying off.

In short, sometimes we players ruin the environment in ways we don't even see, and even wild critters need our help to survive.

They were not pushed off away from base (my nature preserve is in the center where my dupes are forced to go by it every cycle) ***but "cramped" might just be it***. By the time they died off there definitely were a bunch of critters in my nature preserve.

I am going to try putting one shine bug per room (like bathrooms, great hall, etc) with no food and see if that does the trick.

[Jack]

In my previous game I did loss all my shine bug too. But They are just roaming wildly (I just put their eggs out of my base area to prevent them waking up my dupes. But well, they might die due to cramped or temperature, since I didn't really look at both thing, so can't say much.

However in my current map when I dug down below to the oil biomass, I did found 1 pocket having meat inside with no critter. I assume it must be slickster, I don't know why he die without leaving behind an egg though. Since I haven't even dug down to where the meat was, I'm very certain that the what ever I did never have anything to effect the critter itself.

[CPT Chthonbeard the Pirate]

Originally posted by zOldBulldog:

Originally posted by CPT Chthonbeard the Pirate:

Over time, you may be pushing the critters off into a smaller and smaller area outside your base. That with the long egg hatching time, they may be getting the "CRAMPED" debuff causing them to stop producing eggs for long enough that they won't produce an egg.

This is not the same debuff as "OVERCROWDED." That debuff happens when there are too many critters in a room. CRAMPED happens when Critters + Eggs would be too many when all the eggs hatch.

The best way to avoid this is to remove the eggs as they are laid, and hatch them yourself. This will also train your ranchers. If you put a critter drop off back where you want these critters, you can pretty much automate this process and in theory keep them from dying off.

In short, sometimes we players ruin the environment in ways we don't even see, and even wild critters need our help to survive.

They were not pushed off away from base (my nature preserve is in the center where my dupes are forced to go by it every cycle) ***but "cramped" might just be it***. By the time they died off there definitely were a bunch of critters in my nature preserve.

I am going to try putting one shine bug per room (like bathrooms, great hall, etc) with no food and see if that does the trick.

As I was trying to get at, it's not the number of shine bugs in the room, but if you have too many shine bugs in the room and then add an egg. At that point they gain the cramped debuff.

e.g.
If you have 8 shine bugs in a 96 tile room, not cramped, not overcrowded. Still lays eggs
If you have 9 shine bugs in a 96 tile room, not cramped, but are overcrowded. Still lays eggs
If you have 7 shine bugs in a 96 tile room plus 1 egg, not cramped, not overcrowded. Still lays eggs
If you have 7 shine bugs in a 96 tile room plus 2 eggs, is cramped, not overcrowded. Will not lay more eggs.
If you have 8 shine bugs in a 96 tile room plus 1 egg, is cramped, not overcrowded. Will not lay more eggs.
If you have 9 shine bugs in a 96 tile room plus 1 egg, is cramped, is overcrowded. Will not lay more eggs.

As I tried to tell you, it's the presence of eggs in the room causing you trouble. You can automate egg removal easily and have as many critters in a room as you want, and they'll continue laying eggs, or you can limit how many critters of a type you deliver to each room, such that 2x critters <= room limit.

[snuggleform]

I haven't read every post above but I believe the core issue is really the shine bug which seems to die in the wild much more often than the other critters. Like pointed in the first response, wild critters actually don't require any food or gas. You don't really need a guide to keep wild critters alive, except specifically for shine bugs.

I would just invest some effort into learning about ranching shinebugs if I were concerned about their survival, as the rest of the critters don't really go out of their way to die as shinebugs do.

[zOldBulldog]

Yes CPT, I understand and I am pretty sure it is the cramped status stopping egg production of shine bugs.

My old strategy of putting all excess wild critters into my nature preserve was clearly flawed and led to cramped status (of shine bugs, not the others for some reason) and eventual extinction events.

After the posts in this thread I switched to keeping one wild shine bug with no food in each of my 4x16 = 64 tile standard rooms and things seem to be working a bit better for keeping them alive until I am ready to tame them, plus it improves morale. I could probably keep 2 per room (12x4 = 64, so 2 critters and 2 eggs) without cramped egg issues.

Automation is not usually an option for this since "preserving while critters" is mainly an early game thing.

[Dalkavuk]

Maybe wiki is wrong?