I'm trying to start a drecko farm? What's a basic guide? It seems like a hassle to...

[skyhrg]

It seems like a hassle to
1) make a water lock
2) vacuum out the room
3) fill it with hydrogen
4) and maybe chlorine for the balm lillies

What is an easy farm I can use to get reed fiber?
And maybe later plastic?

(I know there are youtube videos online, but most of them seem more advanced)

[cswiger]

You don't need to bother with #1 & #2. You can't do #3 either, not and still grow the plants the dreckos need to eat. You can do #4, but you are better off using mealwood instead of balm lillies for your first drecko ranch so you get glossy drecko eggs.

[skyhrg]

So just hydrogen and mealwood, no chlorine?

[Bobucles]

Mealwood will encourage dreckos to evolve in to their glossy variant, which grows plastic. It's a handy mutation, much like many other critter variants. Dreckos can also be raised on lily balm, a handy plant that requires no resource upkeep to grow.

The tough part of dreckos, is that they require 2 different gases. The scales only grow while being in hydrogen, and the ground plants can't grow in hydrogen. Hydrogen will aggressively fill the top of any room, so don't put holes in the top of the room and add hydrogen from some source. It'll stay in the room pretty well. Mealwood is happy with oxygen, so simply keeping the colony pressurized will work well. Balm lily needs chlorine, which can be tricky to handle without a water lock.

The trick behind a water lock, is that gases can't move through a liquid. The liquid has priority for occupying tiles. Dupes can move through liquids. So make a pit which walls off gas, but is filled with water that dupes can crawl through. It shouldn't take too much experimentation. Or just google an ONI water lock, they are pretty simple to set up.

[some moron]

Seal off a room (with liquid lock or other) so that the gas levels don't change. Put hydrogen and CO2. (cause they will put out co2 anyway when wearing O2 mask, which would mess things up).

Grow mealworm and keep it cool in there, so they grow long hair. Don't harvest the meal worms.

You can put H2 in a gas tank then descontruct it, and that will leave bottles of gas, which you can then take into the cage and open. Or pipe it in.

[skyhrg]

Originally posted by some moron:

You can put H2 in a gas tank then descontruct it, and that will leave bottles of gas, which you can then take into the cage and open. Or pipe it in.

I did not know this. How do you "open" the bottles of gas? Or pipe in bottles of gas?

[Genryu_Strike]

Eh, no. Deconstructing Gas Reservoir releases content gasses into environment, not as Canister. But because of that, you can pipe needed gasses into Gas Reservoir in the Stable room.

As for sources of Hydrogen (and maybe Oxygen too?), you can pump it directly from your Electrolyzer. Heck, you can even let Electrolyzer run in Glossy Drecko's Stable to fill the space. Vacuuming the room first though.

[skyhrg]

Hmm

This is what I'm thinking:
No water lock.
Have sheering and grooming platform above with ladders leading up to it.
Have farm plots with mealwood with autoharvest off on the first floor.
Run electrolyzer to fill room with hydrogen and oxygen.

Would this work for a basic farm that gets me reed fiber and eventually plastic?

(I know there are advanced setups available on Youtube. But I want a simple one first.)

[XceptOne]

In my opinion the amount of produced shearables (reed fiber/plastic) in a normal ranch (grooming, food, 2 gases, max 8 dreckos) is absolutely not worth the hassle.
Meaning I usually don't bother with this kind of setup.

Instead I would recommend a setup like this:
A breeding ranch for egg production and a starvation ranch for shearable production.

The breeding ranch is a simple ranch with grooming station and food plants, where dreckos are kept happy and fed, so they will produces lots of eggs.
This ranch won't have a shearing station and therefore no need for hydrogen.

All produced eggs are then transported (usually via rails) into a small room with a shearing station and some conveyor stuff, that is completely filled with hydrogen.
The eggs will hatch here and the resulting dreckos won't be groomed or fed. They'll enter starving state after about 30 cycles and can be sheared in the meantime. They won't produce any eggs.
Being in hydrogen 100% of their time means a glossy drecko can be sheared every 3 cycles (up to 10 times) and a normal drecko every 6 cycles (about 5 times).

Once up and running the average population in a starvation ranch will be dozens of dreckos which leads to a massive amount of shearables produced, compared to which the amount of shearables that a breeder ranch could produce is neglectible!

Refilling the breeder ranch with fresh dreckos can be done automatically by 'rescueing' the necessary amount of eggs before they are transported to the starvation ranch or manually (at earlier stages for example) by just grabbing a drecko from the starvation ranch and transporting it back to the breeder ranch.

Types of breeder ranches:
A: Normal dreckos in chlorine atmosphere eating balm lillies will result in almost 100% normal drecko eggs. This is actually the hardest type to set up, due to chlorine and temperature requirements. A clear advantage is that growing balm lillies doesn't cost any resources.

B: Glossy dreckos in oxygen atmosphere eating mealwood will result in almost 100% glossy drecko eggs.

C: Glossy dreckos in oxygen atmosphere eating bristle blossoms will result in about 65% glossy drecko eggs and 35% normal drecko eggs.

D: Normal dreckos in oxygen atmosphere eating mealwood will result in about 65% normal drecko eggs and 35% glossy drecko eggs.

The advantage of types B, C and D is that they work at room temperature in oxygen and can thus be built into the habitable part of a base without problems (and dupes can breathe there).

Using two smaller breeding ranches of either type A and B or C and D will result in a 50%/50% mix of both egg types.

I usually use breeder ranches with only 4-5 dreckos instead of 8. And even this produces way more fibers and plastic than I could ever use.

Personally I also think that this split setup is easier to set up than a well running all-in-one drecko ranch.
And of course the amount of produced meat, phosphorite and egg shells stays the same compared to the normal setup.


The only exception to this is of you only want to produce small amounts of reed fiber.
As pincha peppers can grow in hydrogen it is possible to build a standard ranch for normal dreckos in just hydrogen atmosphere.
The amount of produced reed fiber is still rather small this way (max. 2.6 fibers/cycle with 8 dreckos) but no extra steps are required.
The downside compared with a type A ranch plus starvation ranch is that this setup consumes resources to grow the pepper plants.
Though in this case it may be better to actually just grow a couple of reeds if available.

[skyhrg]

Originally posted by XceptOne:

D: Normal dreckos in oxygen atmosphere eating mealwood will result in about 65% normal drecko eggs and 35% glossy drecko eggs.

Wow man. Thanks a lot!
This sounds like the answer.

Is there any special way you like to fill the upper shearing rooms with hydrogen? Do you personally use water locks? Or just run an electrolyzer there?

I'm thinking about 2 dreckos in a normal room with grooming and mealwood in oxygen. And one or two shearing rooms above it filled with hydrogen.

Do you use airflow tiles?

[cswiger]

Originally posted by skyhrg:

Run electrolyzer to fill room with hydrogen and oxygen.

While this will work, you'd need to keep it shut off most of the time or it will overproduce.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2819981072

If you've got decent O2 pressure, just one vent for Hydrogen at the top with a little automation to control it will work fine. Otherwise, have a second vent for O2 in the room somewhere to keep the plants happy and to keep the H in a layer on the ceiling.

[XceptOne]

Originally posted by skyhrg:

Originally posted by XceptOne:

D: Normal dreckos in oxygen atmosphere eating mealwood will result in about 65% normal drecko eggs and 35% glossy drecko eggs.

Wow man. Thanks a lot!
This sounds like the answer.

Is there any special way you like to fill the upper shearing rooms with hydrogen? Do you personally use water locks? Or just run an electrolyzer there?

I'm thinking about 2 dreckos in a normal room with grooming and mealwood in oxygen. And one or two shearing rooms above it filled with hydrogen.

Do you use airflow tiles?

First off, a single shearing room will work for as many dreckos as you could ever produce.
I don't remember the exact values (haven't played in a while), but I think msy shearing room is usually filled with at least 40 dreckos or more.

I usually have a liquid lock (single droplet on a step) in front of the shearing room so no stray gasses can enter.
It is possible to do it without the liquid lock, if the room is already located in a hydrogen area and you can make sure no gases can go up there. It's a bit more complicated though.

Usually I start with an empty, vacuumed room.
Placing the liquid lock first allows to dig an area behind it that already is a vacuum. But just pumping everything out works too.
Then I pump some hydrogen from somewhere (jungle biome for example) into a canister filler, transport a hydrogen canister into that room and just empty it there (or use a canister emptier, but that's optional).

Also never use oxygen masks in the shearing room, as they'll leak co2 into that room.
Only enter with atmo suits or unsuited dupes.

(I would rather use a four drecko breeder ranch, no idea how much 2 dreckos would actually produce, but I guess just try two of them anyway.)


I should have some pictures of the finished setup somewhere... let's see if I can find them.

Edit, pictures:
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3000481376
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3000481560
(Bottom of the picture, top left for the second breeding ranch)

The shearing room placement isn't ideal here, as it leaks quite a lot of heat (hatching dreckos in that room will generally keep the temperature at 40℃ and above).

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3000481963
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3000482133
(Breeders: top middle and bottom middle, left of the ladder; Shearing: far right next to the colony border)

As you can see, there is a single drop of liquid right before the upper part of the door leading into the shearing room. Dupes then need to step down(!) into the room (this prevents them breathing out into the room and thus ruining the atmosphere, if you don't use atmosuits).

Also keep in mind that all of this works much better when using conveyor rails and automation, though most things can be done manually.
The hardest part to do manually is getting the eggs into the shearing room using a automatic dispenser. You would need to make sure dupes cannot reach the dropped eggs, as they would just infintely put them back into the dispenser.
This room was designed to facilitate that, but it actually didn't work very well as meat could be dropped in an unreachable part, rot and offgas po2, thus ruining the atmosphere.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3000480598

One could devise some kind of critter dropper to drop hatched dreckos into the shearing room though (would need a critter sensor in addition to the dispenser and leave egg shells unreachable), but I don't have a picture of a good setup for this handy. (Maybe I'll remember next time I play, I do have somewhat of an itch to start a new colony... we'll see)

[skyhrg]

Originally posted by XceptOne:

I usually have a liquid lock (single droplet on a step) in front of the shearing room so no stray gasses can enter.

How do you do this?

Originally posted by XceptOne:

Then I pump some hydrogen from somewhere (jungle biome for example) into a canister filler, transport a hydrogen canister into that room and just empty it there (or use a canister emptier, but that's optional).

I've never heard of this either. I didn't know we could manually transport gas. I always used the gas pump. I can understand filiing a canister filler. But how do you actually transport canisters into different rooms and empty them either manually or with a canister emptier?

[some moron]

For me it is right click.
Sorry, no you cannot pipe in bottles. What I mean is pipe in the gas and a vent, but then you need a pressure sensor to turn off the vent when there is enough H2. But that can get a little tricky. I found it easier to manage by just carrying bottles over then right click,

In my current map, I just took an area where I found a glossy egg and made that area where they were living. into a ranch. It's not efficient, but I didn't have to do much. It's working to slowly produce plastic for me so probably I will have enough by the time I need it.

Because they want to be warm, you may need to also heat their enclosure, which then can heat your base. I recommend you just try to farm them where you find them just build a grroming station and boom it's a ranch.

For suits you can use their scales or the reeds, easier to use the reeds.

In the end, I recommend you do what I do, is just find a place where the dreckos are living already in the biome they prefer, simply build a liquid lock or equivalent, grooming station and shearer and boom you are done,

[some moron]

Originally posted by Genryu_Strike:

Eh, no. Deconstructing Gas Reservoir releases content gasses into environment, not as Canister. But because of that, you can pipe needed gasses into Gas Reservoir in the Stable room.

As for sources of Hydrogen (and maybe Oxygen too?), you can pump it directly from your Electrolyzer. Heck, you can even let Electrolyzer run in Glossy Drecko's Stable to fill the space. Vacuuming the room first though.

Oops okay I must be running a mod that leaves canisters upon deconstruction.

[some moron]

Originally posted by skyhrg:

Originally posted by XceptOne:

I usually have a liquid lock (single droplet on a step) in front of the shearing room so no stray gasses can enter.

How do you do this?

Originally posted by XceptOne:

Then I pump some hydrogen from somewhere (jungle biome for example) into a canister filler, transport a hydrogen canister into that room and just empty it there (or use a canister emptier, but that's optional).

I've never heard of this either. I didn't know we could manually transport gas. I always used the gas pump. I can understand filiing a canister filler. But how do you actually transport canisters into different rooms and empty them either manually or with a canister emptier?

Well if you specify the canister emptier for a type of gas AND you have canisters lying around, or a bottler available, then dupes will carry it as a task, like taking water to research station.