My hatch farm runs out of food

[Vault Traveler]

I am about 800 cycles and my hatches have no sustainable food, they nearly eat all my dirt and sandstone. Pls help before they start eating my hair.

[POWER WITHIN USER]

Hatches are really good at turning lots of material into coal which is bad if you don't have enough to support them.

Fortunately you can feed them other inferior food types (not meal lice because you ran out of dirt) to essentially turn it all into eggs/barbeque.
You can and should also go with the variants, sage hatches eat pDirt while stone hatches will eat sedimentary/granite.

[Kyle]

The best thing to do with hatches long-term is honestly to switch off them as a food source. They need a sustainable source of rock, which is hard to get. A volcano won’t even support a single full stable.

That being said, the best way to transition is to feed regular hatches sedimentary rock, which will increase your odds of getting a stone hatch. They can eat WAY better sources of rock, with many tons available around the map. Once you have a stone hatch, I like to feed them igneous rock, since it’s less useful than granite as a building material. Unless you are playing for a very long time, this might be all you need for a meat source. There is a LOT of rock for stone hatches to eat on a map, it would take a while to run out of those.

For a more sustainable food source, something like Pips with wild arbor trees and drecko eating meal wood should be resource positive if done properly. You gain dirt, phosphorite, and meat, with potential for a lot of plastic from an evolution shearing room, all for no resource input but duplicant labor to groom. You just need to leave/make some natural tiles for the Pips (there are tricks to make them wherever you want) and get your hands on some AND arbor tree seeds, which takes a lot of luck on the base asteroid. Thimble Reed might work too, but it gets more complicated to get them enough wild plants in the room with how they plant seeds.

You could also switch to shove vole starvation ranching, but that’s a bit more complicated to set up. It is far easier to scale up once you have your first vole and their food source though. I have bad luck getting more Arbor Tree seeds from my ranches, I got lucky with the pod this last run.

[Vault Traveler]

Thanks, I probably switch food source.