Hatch productivity and what to do with shine bugs?

[SKull]

I've reached a bit of a dead end with my ranching now, and yes I am slow. Still working on ranching. Any suggestions are welcome.

1: The first problem I have is hatch productivity. I get the ranches set up and I think things should be working, but somehow they don't seem to. I have three ranches with 20 or so hatches, but they rarely eat and therefore rarely poo out the stuff I need.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1558912873

Should I kill some off maybe? They have the overcowded thing off and on, depending on where in the ranch they are, and I've stopped incubating eggs long ago. Why aren't they producing?

And what to do with all the unwanted animals? I have dumped them all in the bottom of my base as usual, but they are all glum because I don't have enough ranchers to tend to them and don't produce a lot either. Lots of them by now though. https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1558912937

2: I have tried to breed shine bugs, but usually end up with something like this: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1558912837

After incubating about 10 of them they started spreading all over my base by themselves and I just gave it up, again. And the numbers are still growing as eggs drop down to the basement, which is full of them now too. What should I do with them? I was planning to put up two solar panels with a lure between them but got distracted. Would there be any point to that? How do people ranch these things exactly?

3: Unproductive fish. I was originally intending to build a large glass aquarium above my base and fill it with tropical fish, which is why I intentionally heated up the PH2O I found at the start. https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1558912891

But for some reason they produce less dirt than the last time I bred fish, and I gave that up too. Not much point if they're just going to be pretty and nothing else. They've eaten all my algae now though, but don't regularly produce dirt when they do. They seem buggy now too, and will often stay stationary in one spot until they die unless you reload a save, which is a lot of work for one fish.

4: The only thing that is working more or less as I want right now is my glossy drecko ranching. They are productive, but I'm too dumb to build the cage right. Always something wrong...

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1558912785

This is in my current base, and I thought I had done it right but had not. It does most of the things I want: keeps the dreckos in, the gases in place and not changing, and it avoids the stunted scales thing entirely so I get my plastic. They are very productive inside this ranch. But I can't get the planning right. When I do it with this spacing the ranch is four to six tiles too big and I have to fill in somewhere to shrink it. So I thought I was very clever by making a door to the incubator. Perfect! Save the space needed and I can insulate it a little extra so it doesn't heat up the rest of the ranch. Except that now all the dreckos have the "cramped" modifier every time they go up there instead, which is a lot. And I'm not really sure what that does. But it lasts after they leave the area, and I was hoping to come up with a way to get rid of the problem.
Also, the auto sweeper placement. It works sort of OK, but obviously I have to manually clean the mealwood floor and the egg shells when I'm incubating. Otherwise it's self cleaning. But it's not very elegant. Could someone with more design acumen come up with a few suggestions to get it all slightly less dysfunctional?

.....


Please send help...

[Angpaur]

For shine bugs solar panels are a good choice. I have right now in my base a 5 solar panels surrounding a lure and now there are about 300 shine bugs producing constant 5x380W power for me.

[SKull]

Originally posted by angpaur:

For shine bugs solar panels are a good choice. I have right now in my base a 5 solar panels surrounding a lure and now there are about 300 shine bugs producing constant 5x380W power for me.

OK, I'll try that then. I was going to but didn't want to close things off too much for them.

[Ellip]

1. I use an open room for hatch farming now. They eat very infrequently so a small number won't give you a lot of coal. I have like 40+ hatches in a very small area with a lot of feeder boxes full of sedimentary and igneous rock. This helps me keep up with my coal demands easily.

2. I stop bothering with shine bugs because I had a huge population explosion early on because of my open room hatch farm. They stop being useful a while back so I let most of them die off. They are only good for decor and egg shells and eat small amount of phosphorus so they are easy to keep and just look pretty.

3. A large fish population is very good actually, I'm trying to get a large fish tank right now myself but I've ran low on algae so it's hard for me. Fish are good for 2 things, meat and egg shells. What you want to do is get a large population by feeding a few of them so they can lay a bunch of eggs. Once those eggs hatched and you think you have enough fishes, take out the feeder and they should then be self sustaining. This will then net you free meat(when the old fishes die) and large amounts of egg shells which is very useful for when you start making large amounts of steel for rockets.

[mrockstarfrog]

he should be able to eat them all shouldn't he? one drown and they ate him. not very far along in the gme.

[Ellip]

Originally posted by mrockstarfrog:

he should be able to eat them all shouldn't he? one drown and they ate him. not very far along in the gme.

You don't want to kill any of your hatches because they produce coal for your coal generator. Shine bugs drop no meat on death and you can get meat from fishes when they die naturally.

[SKull]

Originally posted by Ellip:

1. I use an open room for hatch farming now. They eat very infrequently so a small number won't give you a lot of coal. I have like 40+ hatches in a very small area with a lot of feeder boxes full of sedimentary and igneous rock. This helps me keep up with my coal demands easily.

2. I stop bothering with shine bugs because I had a huge population explosion early on because of my open room hatch farm. They stop being useful a while back so I let most of them die off. They are only good for decor and egg shells and eat small amount of phosphorus so they are easy to keep and just look pretty.

3. A large fish population is very good actually, I'm trying to get a large fish tank right now myself but I've ran low on algae so it's hard for me. Fish are good for 2 things, meat and egg shells. What you want to do is get a large population by feeding a few of them so they can lay a bunch of eggs. Once those eggs hatched and you think you have enough fishes, take out the feeder and they should then be self sustaining. This will then net you free meat(when the old fishes die) and large amounts of egg shells which is very useful for when you start making large amounts of steel for rockets.

Thanks for the reply. But what do you mean by "open"? Doesn't it have to be enclosed to become a ranch? You're right otherwise. I definitely need more of them. I just wish they were more productive.

Secondly I know how to stock pools. But I just question how productive the fish are now. Plus they bug out all the time. I once had three fish stuck in the same square until I reloaded the game. They could move one square to the right and back again, but that was it. And they couldn't reach the feeder. And I have no idea how long they had been that way before I noticed it. So you constantly have to watch them to make sure they are behaving "normally", which is a huge pain in the....
Anyway, the fish are, or at least I thought they were, for turning excess algae into polluted dirt that you can clean and use as fertilizer for a long term supply. But that only works if they actually turn algae into dirt in a reliable fashion. And I'm not so sure now.

Also, no bugs for solar power then? It would be free if it works I mean. Well almost free. A little drecko poo, which I have a lot of, is all they need.

[Ellip]

An open room is just that, no doors, no walls, just a floor, a ranching station and feeders. You don't have to have them in a ranch for the ranching station to work, you just don't get the ranching room bonus which is just faster taming speed which is a non issue if they are all tame from birth. I just put them in a small floor with a 2 space gap on either side with ladders so a dupe can get in but the hatches can't get out.

I guess the fishes are a little buggy atm but as long as they are reproducing then having them move around isn't really an issue. If you have enough of a population already then not feeding them might be better. Trying to use them to make a polluted dirt is just a waste of algae in my opinion since you can make dirt easily from turning polluted water into steam. They are also ravenous for algae so it's super easy to obliterate your entire algae supply in a few cycles. I haven't use my fishes for anything other just having them be there and recycling themselves.

As for the shine bugs, they patch the solar power thing out in the space industry update. Shine bugs no longer emit light if there are a bunch that are close together in a small space so trying to crowd them to use as a power source no longer works.

[SKull]

So the shine bugs are in other words completely useless now then? Because decor is irrelevant after the moral crap they added.

[Ellip]

Near useless. The only good part about shine bugs now is the amount of egg shells you can get if you breed a lot of them. It'll still take a lot of shine bugs to get a lot of eggs shells though because they each only give you a couple grams of egg shells but multiply that by 100+ that you usually get from farming them it's a lot of egg shells.

[SKull]

Right, egg shells. But you can get that from breeding less ueless fish though, at least when they aren't bugged. Same life cycle I mean.

[Ellip]

It's a different option for different people. Pacu require algae to breed more then the current number of fish that you have and some people may have use for that algae.

Shine bugs only require small amounts of phosphorus and grooming to get a large population so some people maybe more incline to use them instead.

Do note that if you want a really large shine bug farm. Be prepare to have your rancher be constantly brushing shine bugs for all their waking moments.

[SKull]

Yes I've noticed that. It helped to reduce the priority on the bug grooming station though. At least then they deal with the more important critters first.

[The Queen Salis]

I think you should cage your shinebugs before breeding any.
Think about giving them a tiny corridor above your garden plants which only expands down once, for a tiny "room" of stations you want for them. Like an incubator, egg cracker, etc.

[Angpaur]

Originally posted by Ellip:

As for the shine bugs, they patch the solar power thing out in the space industry update. Shine bugs no longer emit light if there are a bunch that are close together in a small space so trying to crowd them to use as a power source no longer works.

This is easly avoidable. You just need make sure shine bugs are in open area with either a lure or alomst closed area, but with water airlock - this will count as thousands tiles room and you can have hundreds of shine bugs in one place close to each other and they will emit enough light to power multiple solar panels.
In my current colony I'm using 5 panels and get constant 5*380W. I'm planning now to rearange a bit my solar plant so I can place there more panels, because I have more than 300 shine bugs and I will try to spread their light more even so I can use more panels.

[Strygald]

Originally posted by angpaur:

For shine bugs solar panels are a good choice. I have right now in my base a 5 solar panels surrounding a lure and now there are about 300 shine bugs producing constant 5x380W power for me.

Don't you get a performance hit with that many? how many dupes do you have along with all the critters?