How to maintain a fixed number of critters with incubator automation?

[Jarcionek]

I am trying to keep a stable at 8 slicksters automatically (dupes can work, I just don't want to be checking those numbers all the time).

I built stables and sweepers to move all eggs to the kill room. I thought that I can use critter sensor to disable incubator, however dupes still bring egg to the incubator, even if its disabled. This means that the egg hatches after 20 cycles, the dupe brings another egg (incubator is set on "continuous") and critters become unhappy...

Is there any work around using incubators?

The only solution that comes to my mind is to skip incubators and use two conveyor loaders - one for molten slicksters that can be controlled with critter sensor and another one always active for other eggs.

[SKull]

It depends on the ranch. And you don't really need automation or an incubator.

A closed ranch with limited space and no outdoors area next ti it has a maximum number of critter possible before they get the debuffs and stop laying eggs.
With an open ranch with an outdoors area you're going for numbers and volume anyway, and don't really need to limit them.

[Jarcionek]

This is what I came up with:

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1824729017

• bottom sweeper is always active
  
• top sweeper activates when there is more than 8 eggs/critters (it's a 96 tile big stable, critter sensor is set to 8)
  
• bottom loader takes larva egg, longhair egg, meat and egg shell
  
• top loader is out of range for bottom sweeper, it takes molten larva egg
  
• incubator is for manual operation only, no continuous incubation set

So if one critter dies, there will be one egg left on the ground but all others will be collected.

Not fully efficient as the eggs will be occupying a stable taking 20 cycles. Given the slickster lifetime of 100 cycles, that's a 16.6% decrease in efficiency.

The improvement I can see is to make another room with incubators only, set maximum critters to 0 and enable auto wrap. As soon as something hatches the duplicants will automatically move it to the stable.

Given 100 cycles lifespan and 4 days for egg to hatch in incubator, this means that I will need one incubator for every 25 critters I have. I built 8 stables, so that's 64 critters, so I will need 3 incubators constantly on. However this will cause the incubator room to constantly increase the number of critters that duplicants will be constantly wrapping but not moving anywhere (since all stables are already full). I think the incubators can then be disabled if there is more than 3 critters/eggs in the incubator room (i.e. if there is a live critter but it hasn't been moved to the stable). This should bring the overall efficiency to about 100%.

PS Currently that my stables are not full yet, I have set incubators to continuous, limited the size to 7 and enabled auto wrapping - this is to make it possible for incubator in one stable to hatch an egg for another stable. Once all stables are full, these incubators can be removed/disabled, and the table size has to be set to 8.