Do shine bugs produce anything useful?

[Joseph Sneed]

The in game database shows they eat fairly valuable materel and doesnt show them producing anything so I was wondering if there is a point to ranching them.

[Owlchemist]

...well that and their most prominent feature: light. Many things benefit from light. Algae. Work activities. Solar panels. Plants. If you can harness it just right, that's some free energy.

[SamuraiJones]

farming em for food always seemed like a waste of time to me. They're so small and their eggs are so small... hatches eat more, but take alot less attention to keep em happy.

I saw brothgar lock like 100 of em in a room with a solar panel, but that's gotta do horrible things to your fps. Free power if you do it though.

If you can keep em out of the bedrooms, they can help out if you just let em wander around your base. Personally though, my dupes just eat em into extinction.

[Owlchemist]

Personally, I just keep several locked in my algae terrarium room (which is about as automated as I could make it). The light bonus for those are only worth it if you can get it for free, as far as the math works out.

[Xilo The Odd]

light!

got a garden that needs to be lit? dont wanna spend the 20w to keep it lit all the time? just trap a bunch of em in your garden and put a feed station for em in there and bam! lit garden for free.

and any lit machine is operated faster if i remember reading right. so having them in production areas is nice. helps counter balance the lower decor as well.

as said keep them out of bedrooms.

[M. Havoc]

When wild ones drop an egg I move it into a room - dining hall, research, toilet, whatever - free Decor forever as long as the room is 24 tiles. I also usually put one in a 4x6 hydroponic room fairly early and grow 6 blossums in it - 5 of the 6 will be lit at all times and the last is usually lit.

[Xilo The Odd]

Originally posted by M. Havoc:

When wild ones drop an egg I move it into a room - dining hall, research, toilet, whatever - free Decor forever as long as the room is 24 tiles. I also usually put one in a 4x6 hydroponic room fairly early and grow 6 blossums in it - 5 of the 6 will be lit at all times and the last is usually lit.

i forget how wide i made my hydroponic room, i was enough 2 lights lit the entire room efficiently.

then i pulled a plot out, and put a feeder for shine bugs in. and left the door open.

now there is like, 8 of em in there of their own choosing and i pretty much dont need those lights on except for the edges of the room.

[D#]

You can make unlimited solar array farms with shine bugs. I think each bug makes 7.6 watts of power. This means you need 50 bugs per panel. If this sounds interesting to you google Brothgar vids , he has a couple that go through the process of figuring out how to make the farms. The basic concept is they will drop an egg before they die so will always replenish if you trick them into thinking they have a lot of room even when confined to a single tile.

[John Hadley]

Shine bugs use relatively little resources to feed. If you keep them groomed then each shine bug produces an egg about once every 2 cycles at least. It takes 10 eggs to make an omelette that provides 2800 kCal of nutrition so each shine bug egg provides 280 kCal. That's at least 140 kCal per cycle per shine bug, so it takes less than 8 shine bugs to feed one duplicant. According to the tooltip shine bugs eat 0.2 kg phosphorite per cycle. When you mine phosphorite you get about 300 kg from each tile you mine, so mining one tile of phosphorite is enough to feed 8 shine bugs for 187.5 cycles. If you want to compare this to using dirt to grow meal lice, it takes 5 meal lice plants 50 kg of dirt per cycle to feed a duplicant. To feed a duplicant for 187.5 cycles it would take 9,375 kg of dirt versus 300 kg of phosphorite. A dirt tile provides about 920 kg of dirt after mining, so it would take almost 10.2 tiles of dirt to provide as much food as one tile of phosphorite.

Automating an incubator used for shine bugs is simpler than for other critters because they hatch in 1 cycle when incubated so the incubator only needs to be powered and the egg only needs to be lullabied one time when the egg is first dropped off, making it simple to use a duplicant motion sensor to only power on the incubator when the duplicant walks next to it to deliver the egg. The incubator can be unpowered the rest of the time so it will use relatively little power.

The drawback of shine bugs is that they require more personal time from duplicants to keep grooming the shine bugs, tending the incubator as needed to replace the ones that die of old age, delivering and cracking eggs, and cooking the omelettes and I would guess that if you try to feed dozens of duplicants with shine bugs you would need so many of them that it might slow the game down when it renders them all on the screen due to the lighting effects.

[Jarcionek]

Sun Nymph egg is required to make a Medicine Pack to treat slimelung.