Egg Farming

[Mr. Night]

So each time i play i try to focus on a new thing. Today im trying to get alot of farms running smoothly. So my question is, what is the logic that dictates eggs? I want to only crack eggs that have under X incubation AND i want to always keep 1 egg of each kind (well minus a few varieties but thats easy to do). so how do i always keep 1 egg naturally hatching without manually telling the crackers to add a extra one to the que all the time? i want to do it "forever" but leave one with < X% while the hatches are still laying.

[Trigger Zero]

automation, incubators, and shipping rails.

There's no way to tell any system incubation %, but you can use automation to prioritize picking up eggs and taking them through an incubation room. If #eggs in incubation room is below 1 you can tell automation to drop the egg and a sweeper arm to put the egg in the incubator. You can fully automate this where dupes aren't allowed into the room if you don't want the eggs lullabied. If you do then they need access.

If the # of eggs in the room is above 1 then shipping can send the eggs into a separate egg chamber where dupes cannot access but a sweeper arm can, and then can supply the eggs to the cracker.

My hatch farm design is set up mainly for meat farming, but you can do the same thing for egg production instead.

I need to hop into my game to snag a screenshot of the automation and I can post it.

[Mr. Night]

ive never gotten far enough into auto sweepers and shipping rails so im not sure exactly how they work.

i just want them to hatch naturally, not bothering with a incubator at this point (havent gotten to plastics yet and im running a very minimal power system as im still kind of early and just aiming for learning a new aspect)

sure a screenshot is always nice :)

[cswiger]

Have an incubator running for each species that you are ranching, and give those a higher priority than your egg cracker in the kitchen. The incubators will keep at least one egg available, and usually once you get going there will be a few stray young ones around as well.

You can then set your egg cracker to "forever" and not worry about numbers of eggs left over.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2323407110
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2323407302

[Mr. Night]

That makes sense for the incubator to have a higher priority. im a bit space constrained atm but that is definatly a solution i think would be good. just a matter of working towards it.

wow you got alot of automation going on there. care to help me understand a bit of what you got going on with the pressure plate at the incubators? is it telling it to resupply the incubator or something else?

[cswiger]

The idea is that the power to the incubator goes off after the egg has been sung to and is "lullabied". The eggs hatch just as rapidly, but doesn't use up nearly as much power as just running the incubators without automation.

A rancher standing at the incubator fires off the pressure plate; the filter gate waits for a default of 5 seconds, so someone running past doesn't trip it. That resets the SR memory latch, which turns off the incubator via a buffer gate. Set that to about 7 seconds, so your ranchers have time to finish singing before the power goes off.

There's a cycle timer at the top which turns everything back on once a day in the morning.

[Mr. Night]

oh interesting ive never heard that term before and im not very familiar with incubators as i dont usually bother. just letting things hatch naturally

[cswiger]

It speeds up eggs hatching by 5x, useful for quickly breeding up your ranches to capacity. You can either make omelettes with the extra eggs from there, or keep hatching more for meat => BBQ.

That usually results in enough food that meal lice is not needed, which frees up all of the mealwood plants to be feed to dreckos to get glossy dreckos. The normal dreckos then get moved to balm lily ranches instead.

[Trigger Zero]

Here, this is my design I made specifically for the least amount of dupe interaction possible. No delivering eggs or babies, you can adjust settings to keep cranking out if you want more, and you can ship eggs straight to kitchen and dupes aren't allowed to mess with them.

https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/697324757443412038/788936818456133652/Hatch_Farm_V3.png

forgot to add incubator automation shuts down between lullabies, clock censors are not reliable, as you don't know when a dupe actually lullabied or not, when the egg was delivered can also affect those times.

Also vertical allows for automatic dropping back into the ranch and saves floor space, and less time waiting for critter travel while rancher waits at grooming station.

[Mr. Night]

jeeze those are nice complex. ill get there some point but i usually put the game down once i get over the early/mid game hump then forget where im at and start over XD right now im dealing with heat with no cold biome.

[Trigger Zero]

Originally posted by Mr. Night:

jeeze those are nice complex. ill get there some point but i usually put the game down once i get over the early/mid game hump then forget where im at and start over XD right now im dealing with heat with no cold biome.

I used to do that, too. Restartinitis. Still do whenever I decide I want to improve a version of some system. "Rebuild? naaahhh. Restart!"

For heat late early game, I slap an aquatuner down inside some slime biome polluted water pool a bit away from base and set automation for a base cooling loop. It really lasts a LONG time until you can get a proper steam chamber setup going with steam turbines.

[cswiger]

You almost have to play a map through once to know how you should have played the map. :-)

[Mr. Night]

thanks thats exactly what i had done nemisis lol and i was at the point my crops where JUST starting to fail from heat. i had to red alert twice to get them to finish the loop and now i got all the polluted water i could scrounge up circling endlessly dumping the heat into a cold pool in the base thats being cooled by dumping its heat to that tuner. mind you "all the polluted water i could scrounge up" is like 15 full pipes worth so its not alot yet. better get making more dupes.

yea that makes sense CS. just my attention span keeps failing me

[caseyas435943]

Seems like a lot of work for a lesser food than BBQ.

Unpowered 1 incubator for every 5 critters. Keeps the population from dying out.

Then it's 2 hatches for each Dupe. So 24 hatches is 12 Dupes of food.

If there are hatches on your map you can easily be on full BBQ at cycle 100 baring something unforeseen happening. So unless your base getting over 70c food is not a problem. But if you base gets over 70c you have a huge problem anyway. So....

[Mr. Night]

the reason i didnt have a incubator yet was i have no access to plastics yet. and minimal power.

and i had very little space so i only had a tiny space to get hatches farming.

[cswiger]

Incubators just need 200kg of refined metal, same as a Smart Battery.
Their main cost is power, if you keep them running 100% of the time.

But as @casey notes, they can still be useful even unpowered, since they will still hold on to an egg and keep it from being an omelette. Using automation lets you get the egg hatching speedup but only use 10% or so of the power.