What is the point of ranching stone hatches?

[Shame]

Or if you include soon after you start ranching hatches, regular ones too for that matter. But I wanted to focus on stone hatches, because I can't find any form of benefit in doing so, yet I have heard a lot that they are in some way desirable to ranching. They are just regular hatches with slightly different diet and x8 the health, nothing particularly superior.

Sage hatches, on the other hand, give 100% mass in coal back, so they are objectively superior in getting resources back for what they take. You might think, well I need dirt and such for growing food, which is true, but in the very long term, or even early-game, if you dig smartly, you won't need any dirt for any plantation. Sure, the stuff will grow slower, but you don't lose resources while farming that way. And you can keep the dirt you get from water sieves for keeping the hatches fed. If you are ranching, why even farm that much anyway?

Is it simply that if you feed hatches a particular form of resource, they will eventually have more stone hatches as a result instead of regular hatches, which is why it is more beneficial to just assume that you are going to ranch stone hatches in the long-term?

Smooth hatches I can understand as an inter-mediary way of getting refined metal between the rock crusher and the metal refinery, kind of like how glossy dreckos can be both an alternative for getting plastic. But stone hatches, kind of unsure.

[cainboy]

Some of the stuff you pointed out sound like the E.A. discussions.
Time wise, the desire to save dirt was before there were more ways to renew the resource, and it was more scarce.

Stone hatches main desirability was because of their diet, *(IN particular This was especially true before they added more maps)
Terra, our world for most of E.A. was primarily igneous, lots of granite too. Regular Hatches diets restricted them from eating most of the map, while stone hatches could go for far longer, with no real draw backs.

New worlds shift this dynamic quite a bit more.

Ranching has always given just alternatives to other resource obtaining routes,
If you don't care to raise Stone hatches, don't.

[Stretchytall]

Stone hatches are also what you must use to breed smooth hatches. Smooth hatches are valuable for metal refining on tough maps where are you can’t afford to lose half your metal in the rock crusher and You’re not ready to deal with the heat of the metal refinery.

[Gamefever]

Stone --->Smooth Hatch.

Thermal Nullifiers and Ice Biomes are not on every map.

So Smooth Hatch offers a route to refined metal that may be the best route on some maps.

I imagine that someone could just clear a massive area and just go ham without cooling for refined metal, but since on default its got ice biome so thats what Im using for cooling.

The way I see it is this.
I will be ranching for meat and eggs...
Since the farms can die easy from heat, hatches are a main food source....Then there are the products, since coal is needed and Hatches will make a lot of it thats great.
Then the oppertunity is I might get a few smooth hatches, thats even better, less input for making the Refined Metal only costs the labor of the Rancher Dupe which I will have a few of those as it is.
I try to get quite a few ranches up and going, right now trying the Dreko but all the mealwood is dying from heat so its not easy.

[SKull]

The problem with sage hatches is that they can really only eat clay for a good return, and I have other uses for that. The rest of their diet gives very poor return or is wasteful in other ways. Algae and slime have better uses, and foodstuffs don't weigh anything anyway, so doubling the mass of that is pointless.
The advantage of stone hatches is that they can eat all the minerals you would otherwise have no uses for other than building structures: Granite, igneous rock and obsidian. Regular hatches only eat sandstone that the stone hatches can't also eat, and both can eat sed rock. So 4-2 to the stone hatches when it comes to turning minerals into coal. And obviously you want to feed them minerals, since other things are far more useful as they are.
So from this ratio you know that you should at all times have twice as many stone hatches as regular hatches. I would add a modest stable of sage hatches only if I have abnormal amounts of clay.
Smooth hatches are interesting as a heat-free option to metal refinery/rock crusher. But since it really requires more dupe time to do as well, I have opted against smooth hatches now. It also wastes some ore I think. I would certainly have a limited number of them in a closed ranch if I were to have any. Stone hatches and regular hatches I will happily mass ranch in their hundreds. No shortage of minerals usually.

[Angpaur]

Originally posted by SKull:

The problem with sage hatches is that they can really only eat clay for a good return,

Sage hatches can't eat clay.

[SKull]

Originally posted by Angpaur:

Originally posted by SKull:

The problem with sage hatches is that they can really only eat clay for a good return,

Sage hatches can't eat clay.

I thought they could. Well, in that case they are completely useless! But I was sure they could eat clay...Was that changed in EA?

[Shame]

Originally posted by SKull:

The problem with sage hatches is that they can really only eat clay for a good return, and I have other uses for that. The rest of their diet gives very poor return or is wasteful in other ways. Algae and slime have better uses, and foodstuffs don't weigh anything anyway, so doubling the mass of that is pointless.
The advantage of stone hatches is that they can eat all the minerals you would otherwise have no uses for other than building structures: Granite, igneous rock and obsidian. Regular hatches only eat sandstone that the stone hatches can't also eat, and both can eat sed rock. So 4-2 to the stone hatches when it comes to turning minerals into coal. And obviously you want to feed them minerals, since other things are far more useful as they are.
So from this ratio you know that you should at all times have twice as many stone hatches as regular hatches. I would add a modest stable of sage hatches only if I have abnormal amounts of clay.
Smooth hatches are interesting as a heat-free option to metal refinery/rock crusher. But since it really requires more dupe time to do as well, I have opted against smooth hatches now. It also wastes some ore I think. I would certainly have a limited number of them in a closed ranch if I were to have any. Stone hatches and regular hatches I will happily mass ranch in their hundreds. No shortage of minerals usually.

Wrong on so many levels in my case:

* First off, dirt is cheap to get if I have enough polluted water input from geysers and carbon skimmers. This is what I feed to my sage hatches and I have just found a cool slush geyser, so that works out nicely for me.

* Granite is best material for rock-based decor, in particular for regular tiles, which give a speed boost while also providing default decor, way better than carpetted floor that requires reed fibre and is better used as a ceiling tile rather than floor tile. Igneous rock is the best starting insulator, and no way in hell am I going to get enough ceramic near the beginning to have enough for all the insulated pipes and tiles that I will be using, pipes in particular if I am playing on Rime, which I do, because the high temperatures in Terra really piss me off. Obsidian with enough amount can be useful for taming volcanoes earlier on due to their high melting point. If anything, sedimentary and mafic rock are one of those random materials I cannot find a good use for; such small amounts of them and no great properties to speak of.

* Since I play on Rime, heat is something very much welcome for me as it stands. I will need cooling eventually, but for now, I just have a metal refinery running inside the main colony area, heating up near the area that will be used for farming pip-planted bristle berries.

Originally posted by SKull:

Originally posted by Angpaur:

Sage hatches can't eat clay.

I thought they could. Well, in that case they are completely useless! But I was sure they could eat clay...Was that changed in EA?

Completely useless? 100% mass output of coal, and you can just feed them dirt, how is that useless?

[SKull]

Dirt is more useful than minerals, end of story.

[Angpaur]

Have you played different asteroids then terra? For example on verdante you have abundance of dirt. You can also create lots of it, so it is the best choice then to feed it to sage hatches.

[Nellvan]

Add to this " have you ever played without farming ?" Dirt can be almost or even completely useless, except for feeding hatches. It all depends on what you do.

[Angpaur]

Originally posted by Nellvan:

Add to this " have you ever played without farming ?" Dirt can be almost or even completely useless, except for feeding hatches. It all depends on what you do.

Yep. That's true. I had not build a single farm in this run and just feed my dupes based on barbeque and cooked fish.

[Shame]

Double on what Angpaur said. The way you can just leave the fish in a single tile is extremely OP. Sometimes I even feel like having wild critters not require food is OP, in particular with the shove voles; no need to feed them anything, they just drop 16k calories of meat on their own every 100 cycles.

[Gamefever]

So just now putting in conveyor for coal to travel to me plants from the ranches.

It just occurred to me that I could set up loaders to specifically sort hatch eggs so that "sage" hatch eggs always got carried off to the kitchen....Same with normal hatch eggs.

I already have a system in place to check against max critters and send excess eggs off to the kitchen but it could easily go a step further to sort specific eggs.

So Stone Hatch has specific eggs it can give,
Stone ~65%
Hatch ~30%
Smooth~2%

So in a Stone Ranch,
Need a spot out of sweeper view for Stone Egg to sit, but still in ranch so it counts towards total stone population count. Only Stone eggs can be loaded into this loader that puts eggs on a track that either deposits them in the Stone Egg safety bin or routes the extra to the kitchen.

Another Loader is specifically for Hatch Eggs...This loader is fast tracked for the kitchen no stops.
So 1/3 of all eggs a Stone Hatch is going to lay goes direct for the kitchen for scrambled eggs.

Another Loader can be placed to deposit Smooth Hatch Eggs, which then tracks to a ranch for them gets counted and excess above 8 SmoothHatch/Eggs gets routed to the kitchen.

Ah I can do that with Conveyor Shut Offs!

So then I could if I wanted make scrambled or just let the eggs evolve in a specially prepared chamber next to the kitchen.

So I need 4 Loaders,
1) Coal
2) Egg Shell
3) Keep the critter count of specific population I want
4) Route eggs I dont want direct to the Kitchen
Optional Loader IF I want a specific next evolution of the species.

This keeps my counts and specific species in the Ranch rather than worrying about do I have this species or that species in that ranch.

Could just make a sorting room for the Coal and Lime....So I then have only 3 loaders in each ranch.

I have not implemented it yet but writing it down helps me, thanks for reading.