What do people do with fish?

[SKull]

I made a very serious (I thought) attempt at starting an aquarium. But as soon as I plopped the fish feeder down a single Pacu ate all my algae. About seven tons went down the drain to Mr Pacu and his endless offspring. Now I didn't really need the algae, except that now the fish are starving after mass reproduction from eating my algae. So they are going extinct basically, unless I forage for more fish food that they can eat instantly. Which seems like an enormous enterprise just for some polluted dirt and meat. It just feels like pointless, futile busywork to me. What am I missing? Where are the fish gurus?

[Andrewbh2003]

well pacus are usefull for the meat and eggs they provide and the dirt can be composted but as you said they take algae so its not worth it the main purpose of them is the gulp fish given that it cleans ph20 in to h20

[SKull]

Ah, so cold water aquarium then, and get rid of all the normal and troipcal ones?

[Andrewbh2003]

Originally posted by SKull:

Ah, so cold water aquarium then, and get rid of all the normal and troipcal ones?

well leave 1 normal 1 just to have the species end game when i have a almost sarcastic amount of puft/morb farms i like to mess around with sustainable algae so i run almost sarcastic amount of algae distillers and have loads of pacus so yeah breed the gulp fish and leave "wild and dont feed them unless you want to" leave a few normal and tropical pacus and yeah thats the main purpose of pacus is the gulp fish frozen acquarium for free water purification

[SamuraiJones]

I totally disagree.

Pacus kick out an insane amount of meat, eggs and eggshells. If you want to feed dupes omelets, pacus are the best way to do it. You can realistically feed a colony on pacu omlets if you can keep em fed. Also, they're crucial to getting eggsshells for lime and thus steel, and thus solar power. They're also the only critter that doesn't need to be groomed to stay happy, so they're super-low maintenance.

Now... they also are the least useful critter in terms of metabolism. Converting algae to polluted dirt has some use, but not much. So when you look at em, look at em like chickens -- good eating but not good for much else. (As opposed to other creatures which generate useful resources.)

[SamuraiJones]

Here's the interesting thing I've been trying... I *think* you don't actually need to feed pacus. Last time I did the math, it looked like they were born with enough calories to survive until they could lay an egg (as long as they're glum the whole time to keep their metabolism low). Then that egg will hatch on it's own... and then the new pacu has enough calories to survive.

You gotta make sure all those eggs hatch, which means you can't eat em... but I think if you stock a pool of semi-wild pacus, they'll just endlessly (but slowly) drop eggshells and meat. I'm stocking up a pool to try it en masse.

Take this all with a bit of skepticism... it looked possible when I crunched the numbers, but haven't actually implemented it yet.

[SamuraiJones]

Sorry, I get excited about pacus...

Just to put the food thing in perspective, a single (well fed) adult pacu creates 2 large eggs every 3 days. That's 4kg of raw egg, which becomes 11000kcals of omelet.

That's 3700kcal a day, nearly enough for 4 dupes per pacu. Someone feel free to correct me if I messed up the math, but they create alot.

It is alot of clicking though. You gotta put in orders to crack or incubate every egg manually.

[Andrewbh2003]

while i do agree they have a use eggshells are usually not an issue since they acumulate over 400 cycles "the time it takes for me to hit space" so by the time i need lime i have enough eggshells to mass produce and while yes the food is amazing there are other much cheaper options that use water a much more acessible resource than precious algae "though once you fully replace algae deoxidizers then you could feed pacus i guess still a bit of a waste since even once you acquire electrolizers algae still has a use"

[Angpaur]

As SamuraiJones already mentioned you don't need to feed all your pacus. Just feed 2 for example and all the egs they lay put to some other water tank and just leave them there to incubate and never feed those. They will spend their miserable life hungry all the time, but at the end will lay an egg, so cycle will continue, leaving you with meat and egg shells.
From time to time check the 2 pacus, that are being fed, if their age is old, if so then leave 2 eggs, so you will replace those pacus.

[SKull]

Well, I'm removing the feeder then. Gotta rethink this. I found a slush geyser outside my base, so I think I'll let that pool for the gulps to live in and close it in, and I'll feed one or two of those and see what happens.
As for egg shells, is it like reed fibers, where you think you need loads of them but really only end up needing about 20 or so, so you can harvest a few from the wild and bee happy forever?