is critter ranching a "noob trap"?

[snuggleform]

Reflecting on my first few colonies, my thoughts are

1) ranching is not useless by any means and certainly won't kill you if you focus on it,

2) however, I feel like the opportunity cost early-mid game does not make sense, it's better to just "get out there" and dig/scout to find rare/unique resources (in addition to finding more wild animals which you can passively collect whatever stuff they drop).

If I'm wrong which I could very well be, which animals do you find worth ranching very early on? I feel like my time was wasted with early ranching - I could have just been looking for fossils for lime (and I'd want oil anyways later on) or spending time looking for critical buried geysers to plan out the future better.

[InstableMonster]

Hatch to start making coal reserves and switch to coal generator as soom as possible to free a dupe to do other things

[Milo de Vries]

There are definitely maps where it is harder to deal with the heat from machines in the early mid game. So I wouldn't call it a noob trap.

You can go full machinery, you can go full ranching, or you can go both.

I enjoy doing both; the map is too large to only fill it with optimal builds.

[Milo de Vries]

Plus, early drecko plastic can be a game changer

[snuggleform]

Originally posted by InstableMonster:

Hatch to start making coal reserves and switch to coal generator as soom as possible to free a dupe to do other things

But don't you just find enough coal naturally anyways? I'm sure on specific maps there might be a deficit of certain resources which encourages early ranching, but besides that am I making the right inference or not.

[snuggleform]

Originally posted by bmilohill:

There are definitely maps where it is harder to deal with the heat from machines in the early mid game. So I wouldn't call it a noob trap.

You can go full machinery, you can go full ranching, or you can go both.

I enjoy doing both; the map is too large to only fill it with optimal builds.

I think late game ranching certainly makes sense.

Ok, I like your glossy drecko idea, I'll have to look into it. Early plastic does seem to make a lot of sense vs digging down to oil and dealing with all the associated headaches, but I'd have to look at how "easy" it is to ranch dreckos. Uusually it involves digging into hydrogen/chlorine early on which requires power to pumps to deal with.

[Russell]

I started ranching to farm Coal but I've ended up farming eggs. Well worth it IMO.

[InstableMonster]

Originally posted by wsc150:

Originally posted by InstableMonster:

Hatch to start making coal reserves and switch to coal generator as soom as possible to free a dupe to do other things

But don't you just find enough coal naturally anyways? I'm sure on specific maps there might be a deficit of certain resources which encourages early ranching, but besides that am I making the right inference or not.

Once you start leaving your base normally yes but before that if you want to power with coal as soon as possible you might end up not having enough. I try not to explore outside my base until it has been isulated to prevent too much heat transfer

[Just a dog]

Building a simple ranch doesn't really take that much time or effort.

[snuggleform]

Originally posted by KucheKlizma:

Building a simple ranch doesn't really take that much time or effort.

Building a ranch I agree doesn't take that many resources.

Maintaining however, is a different story entirely. You have to feed and groom the critters if you want any significant output from them, which is time you could spend exploring instead in the early to mid game. Any automation you put into the system requires power, which is not trivial.

Again, sure late game ranching why not you might as well get renewable resources.

[Just a dog]

Perhaps you should rename the title to "unnecessary automation" is a noob trap, because it certainly is. xD
And you don't have to spend JACK to maintain a simple ranch. Just set up a small box for offload (of ALL ranches) and set auto-wrangle on your main ranches to a small number so you can repopulate if they become needed once again. (Alternatively just cull most of the critters via mass select or cull them all if there's enough eggs)

[L37]

I personally have 2 issues with ranching:
1. Dupe time. And a lot of it, from bringing "food" to grooming and removing eggs. Some automatable, some not.
2. And most important one - micromanagement. No way to properly automate things, you always have to remember about critter's lifecycles and manually hatch new ones. There are some clunky ways to automate things, but you still have to monitor it or you risk loosing whole population.

As a result, early game i do not ranch because there are alternative ways to get food/fuel and i want dupes to be able to do something usefull, late game i do not ranch because it is annoying and i am generally occupied with more fun things than micromanaging critters.

Guess it depends on personal preference, but even though i dislike it - IMO no, it is not "noob trap", it can be viable if done right...
For example i tried it with hatches and it is totally possible to survive using random rocks both for food and fuel, without any food production apart from meat/eggs and with only coal generators for power. Then there are some interesting critters like glossy dreckos and smooth hatches using which you can bypass most power/heat intensive production...

[fractalgem]

My coal stockpile vanished rather quickly when I went to try and use it for power, despite having...10, 20 tons? Granted, I didn't have the generators wired up very well, but still-I wound up switching back to hamsterdupe power.


I admit, I don't see much appeal to bothering with the smooth hatch, except maybe on hot maps or if you just cannot find a nice cool geyser.

Morbs are completely free polluted o2 once you have them. Polluted o2 can be turned into slime with pufts, or turned into normal o2 with a little bit of sand or regolith. Slime itself has lots of uses, from feeding it to sage hatches for a bit of coal, to using for mushroom farms, to turning it back into normal o2.

Granted, electrolyzing water is usually just so much less effort to setup, but I can still see the appeal of running a base with an essentially arbitrary number of duplicants expanding off of morb farts and regolith (or else going through the trouble of converting slime all the way into sand instead of regolith)...