Can anyone help with Critter relocator issue?

[Jaggid Edje]

I'm quite new to the game, and have been trying to get critter relocators set up that move babies to the right room after their eggs hatch.

I have a room where all the eggs from all the different critters I'm raising get moved to. The relocator in that room though is set to only allow Nymphs, and auto-wrangle is enabled on it. When a grub grub hatches though, it isn't getting moved automatically to the room where I do have grub grubs set as allowed.

I also tried doing this with a room where I set the relocator to 0 allowed, thinking everything would just get moved once it hatches. But that doesn't work for me either.

I googled this problem, but I couldn't find anything specific to the exact issue I'm having. Based on what I read I feel like I'm doing it right. But I'm obviously not.

I'll give a steam point award to the first person smart enough to be able to tell me where I'm going wrong. I've mostly been playing through trial and error, the game has the complexity where that has actually been a lot of fun, but I give up on this particular issue.

[POWER WITHIN USER]

Some history.
Up until a couple patches ago, you couldn't wrangle airborne critters, so you'd use critter drop-offs which had a rancher call those pesky shinebugs so that you could move them into a room, far away from your barracks.
Unfortunately shinebug nymphs were ignored by drop-offs auto wrangle feature until they were adults, no idea if that is still the case nor if that applies to other juveniles (sweetles, hatches, pufts) as you could always manually wrangle them, and automatic delivery to ranches could already be handled by another building...
Thus, I recommend using incubators for handling eggs and newborn critters.

Even if unpowered they will hold an egg until it hatches then keep that juvenile critter for up to ~5 cycles. A duplicant will then take critters to a fish release/critter dropoff which has room for it, or the critter will exit the incubator on it's own when it reaches adulthood.

[Jaggid Edje]

Yah, the incubator automatic delivery is working great for me too. I was just hoping to be able to use the critter drop off points for surplus beyond what I am incubating. Anything above the room critter limits I have set go to a drowning chamber for meat.

[gtgiygus]

When you say "critter relocator" do you mean Critter Drop Off[oxygennotincluded.fandom.com]? I haven't played the latest critter update yet, and google isn't finding anything called a relocator, so I am assuming you have misnamed the Drop off.

If you do mean the drop off, then you have it backwards. The Drop Off isn't really good at automating how critters get moved around. Drop Offs just tell your dupes where to, get this, DROP THEM OFF after the critters have been wrangled. You still need you to set everything up before hand.

In order for your setup to work (one big baby room feeding to actual working Ranch rooms), you will need a few things:

1) The baby room needs to be an actual room with doors, ceilings, and floors, so the game actually understands that it is a separate area so it can tell how many critters are in the Baby room Critter Drop Off zone.

2) Check the box (set to allow) all the critters you have eggs/babies for, then set the limit of max critters to at least 1. This will mean at least one critter will always be left in the baby room, but w/e. Not having a check, or setting to zero, will probably mess the game logic up, but I can't say I have experimented much with this before.

3) Build an actual ranch that will be housing ONE critter type that you expect the baby room to feed to. Build another Drop Off in the ranch, check (allow) ONLY the baby and adult type critter. Set the number of max critters to 8, assuming you are building a run-of-the-mill default ranch of 96 tiles.

4) Set the actual ranch Drop Off priority HIGHER than the baby room drop off priority.

5) If the Critter Drop Offs with higher priority (the actual working ranches) get full (hit the number of allowed critters you set, which is 8 for this example), the system WILL STALL and all critters of that type will be left in your baby room until there is space at the real ranch.

Remember that an actual dupe has to have ranching prioritized to take the auto generated wrangle job for wrangling a baby in the baby room. Then a SEPARATE drop off job will be generated to move the wrangled critter to the actual working ranch. If those two jobs are not being preformed, make sure you have enough specialized dupe labor to make the move happen.

Good luck

[Jaggid Edje]

Originally posted by gtgiygus:

When you say "critter relocator" do you mean Critter Drop Off[oxygennotincluded.fandom.com]? I haven't played the latest critter update yet, and google isn't finding anything called a relocator, so I am assuming you have misnamed the Drop off.

If you do mean the drop off, then you have it backwards. The Drop Off isn't really good at automating how critters get moved around. Drop Offs just tell your dupes where to, get this, DROP THEM OFF after the critters have been wrangled. You still need you to set everything up before hand.

Yes, I meant the drop-off, I just got the name wrong.

But I'm not sure why you are saying they don't work to move critters around? Isn't that the whole point of the auto-wrangle setting? My understanding of how the auto-wrangle setting on them works is it should work to do what I'm trying to do.

If one room has a limit set of no more than 1 on the drop-off in that room, with auto-wrangle enabled, then it should move any excess above 1 to a room with a drop off with a limit not yet reached.

Thanks for all of your other tips. That's exactly what I have done so far, except for point 2.
My understanding is if a critter is in a room with auto-wrangle on and a critter hatches there for which the drop-off doesn't have them enabled, then it will auto-wrangle them simply because "they don't belong in the room". I read that in a few places.

My critters didn't seem to be getting moved automatically though, so perhaps you are totally right, and I have to actually set the drop-off to allow the specific critter types before it will auto-wrangle them. I'll try that.

[gtgiygus]

Originally posted by Jaggid Edje:

But I'm not sure why you are saying they don't work to move critters around? Isn't that the whole point of the auto-wrangle setting? My understanding of how the auto-wrangle setting on them works is it should work to do what I'm trying to do.

The way you wrote the first post made it sound like you expected the Drop Off to move the critters around themselves, like a sweeper bot or Auto-sweeper. The name confusion didn't help.

The point I was trying to get across (which may have been lost) is that the Drop Off will generate jobs, assuming all conditions are right, that your Dupes then have to take and perform themselves. Since the dupes are doing the work, it's not really "automated".

Screenshots would be the next step here if you can't get it working still.

[Jaggid Edje]

All good, I admit to having difficulty communicating with veterans when I'm just a newbie. I am still learning the game so can screw up the terminology. My apologies.

I think the issue is what the person in the first reply alluded to, that being that auto-wrangle doesn't work on babies for some reason. I got a reply to this same question just now over on reddit where someone said that as well.

He suggested using traps in the room where I want the babies removed from as a solution, albeit less than perfect one. I'm going to try that.

[cswiger]

What you probably want to do is set up an Incubator assigned to each type of critter that you want to ranch. These should be kept outside of the ranches themselves, and you can set their priority up a notch to 6 to make sure any empty Incubator gets refilled by a new egg before that egg gets turned into food instead.