Fully Automated Hatch Ranching

A step-by-step walkthrough for constructing simple, automated hatch ranches.

1. Introduction

Last updated 12/29/2022 for the Hot Shots Update - Build 535842

Also, please see my other guides for ranching divergents (sweetles & grubgrubs) and dreckos!

Ever since I discovered that you could ranch critters, hatches have become a core component of my ONI playstyle. Having an essentially infinite supply of coal (thus power) and barbecue (thus calories and morale) relatively early in the game seems too good to pass up. I rely on it so much that I always take a ranching dupe as one of my first three to get running as fast as possible.

Right up front I’ll say that this whole guide might be a solution in search of a problem. Before I started experimenting on my own I generally used the ‘Francis John’ stable design: two feeders, a bin for storage, and limited to no automation. In my colonies I’ve never had issues with dupe labor using that approach. I tend to have extra supplier / errand runner dupes in the main base, and my ranchers will chip in and haul goods once all the critters are groomed. Even so, I thought it’d be fun to automate as much as possible about the ranching process, ideally everything but the grooming.

I’m by no means the first to try this, and I’ve borrowed and built upon bits from several other designs. I like what I came up with, and I wanted to share my results in case it helps anyone else.

2. Objectives

I’ve seen a lot of other automated ranch designs that are quite good, but there was something about all of them that left me wanting something different. Many designs don’t try to automate repopulating the breeders at all, or rely on incubators or critter drop-offs to call a rancher when hatchlings are ready to join the herd. Designs that do automate repopulation (e.g. via critter droppers) would often glitch and allow too many hatches into the stable. The few that seemed to work perfectly, for example ‘pez dispenser’ designs, seemed overly complicated to build in-game.

Most designs appeared to be intended for mid game deployment, constructed all at once from scratch after your base was established. I wanted a design with a natural evolution from early game fully-manual ranching through partial automation to final stage full automation. For these reasons I decided to experiment on my own, using existing designs as inspiration. My design objectives are listed below:

Requirements

• Must be a “horizontal” stable
  
  • This is just personal preference. I’ve seen some amazing “vertical” designs, but I like to use the empty space for farming in the early game until meat gets going.
• Must automate all required resource delivery
  
  • Hatch Food (e.g. granite)
• Must automate all required resource extraction
  
  • Coal
    
  • Eggshells
    
  • Meat
• Must automate population maintenance to keep eight hatches in each stable
  
  • Removal of eggs
    
  • Addition of new breeding hatches when required (e.g. after natural death)
• Must not allow hatchlings into the breeding population
  
  • Hatchlings should grow to adulthood prior to being chosen as a new breeder or slaughtered for meat
• Must not use incubators (powered or unpowered) to manage eggs
  
  • Again just a personal preference. They take up a lot of room, a lot of power, and require dupes to interact with them. We’re aiming for full automation.

Goals / "Nice to Haves" (In approximate order of importance)

• Should minimize time between breeder death and replacement
  
  • i.e. should not wait 25 cycles for a new egg to hatch and grow to adulthood
• Should confine hatches to a small area (≤6 tiles) to expedite grooming
  
• Should be a scalable design pattern that can expand and work for any number of stables
  
• Should be relatively easy to build, no tricky order of operations or dupe pathing
  
• Should try to keep automation requirements reasonable (subjective, I know)

3. Mark II - What's New?

There were two major factors that drove me to rewriting this guide. The most important was an issue I discovered with the control room while working on my Divergent critter guide. When a stable is sending the "I need a critter" signal to the control room, the drowning trap door is closed to prevent critters from falling in and drowning. Unfortunately, where the sweeper was placed in the original design did not allow access to material in the pit while the door was closed. Once a ranch was fully populated and in steady state this was no big deal; the door would open again as soon as a new breeder fell into the stables. Unfortunately, when first filling your stables the door could stay closed for dozens of cycles, blocking access to the materials. This also caused meat to be stuck in the trap and rot quickly in the water, etc. I modified my Divergent ranch to allow sweeper access to the pit at all times, and wanted to update the hatch ranch with the same fix. The image below shows the new sweeper design, with access to every tile in the control room:


Secondly, after multiple runs of building this ranch, especially post Spaced Out!, I realized that it takes a lot of rushing mechatronics skills and research to get to a half-functional state. The big impediment was the solid filter for sorting eggs, which in the first design was the very first upgrade from the fully-manual ranch. In Spaced Out! this tech requires 40 Applied Science research (400 radbolts) plus 30 Data Science research. This requires either launching a rocket to collect databanks, or analyzing 2-3 geysers (~10ea) and collecting a few more databanks from POIs around the map. Not to mention researching and building a virtual planetarium to use the databanks... it's really a whole lot of effort for one simple conveyor filter.

This improved build fixes both of the above, allowing you to delay solid filter research until much later, right before the ranch becomes fully automated. You'll still need to skill up a Mechatronics Engineer fairly early, but I feel like almost everyone does that anyway. You'll also have to crank out 200 radbolts (probably from a manual generator) to research the conveyor receptacle. But this design can get up and running in a productive way much earlier in the game.

Finally, in addition to the above, I wanted to rebaseline the guide and give it a general cleanup. There was a lot of clutter from previous build options that really wasn't necessary, particularly with everything for some of those options being tagged "this variant is no longer recommended", etc. I don't see a need to preserve the outdated designs, and by removing all that clutter I hope the guide is now simpler to follow.

4. Bottom Line Up Front - The Design

My design consists of a single control room paired with as many stable rooms as you need. The control room is a standard four tile height room that contains the automation logic and other infrastructure to support the stables. A single control room is built at the top of a stack of stables, and additional stables can be added at any time to the bottom of the stack. Each stable is 25x4 internally.

An example ranch with four stables could look something like this:

The Control Room

The control room consists of four chambers which I’ve labeled 1 through 4 in the screenshot below.

Chamber 1 - Warehouse

This area is simply storage for the hatch food. I tend to use granite for my stone hatches, but whatever you want to feed your hatches would be stored here and automatically delivered to the stables via the conveyor loader. The maximum storage with nine bins is 180,000 kg, which is 1,285 ‘hatch-cycles’ worth of food. With four stables of eight hatches each, that’s just over 40 cycles worth of food. Hatches eat a LOT, so it's going to take a lot of effort to keep the warehouse full.
Alternatively, you could create a smaller infinite granite storage here if you like, having dupes load granite via conveyor to a tile they cannot access, or you could ship in hatch food from a centralized warehouse elsewhere in your base, and this whole area can be repurposed. See section 6 for ideas on filling the empty space if you choose not to use the warehouse.

Once the control room is fully automated, I recommend that the door on the right of this chamber and the door on the right of chamber 4 be set with access restrictions to block all dupes from using them. This will prevent dupes from trying to do anything funny with the eggs, shells or meat produced in the core of the control room. It will also prevent dupes from getting trapped inside if the repopulation logic toggles some doors. In the early game the doors can be left open to allow dupes to collect resources until the conveyors take over. The door on the left of this room should always be left open, so dupes can restock the warehouse.

Chamber 2 - Hatchery and Resource Sorting

This is the core of the control room, where most of the action takes place. I’ve labeled three points of interest A, B and C.

Any coal, eggs, shells or meat produced in a stable will enter this chamber via conveyor and go directly to the solid filter straddling the two pits marked A and B. The filter will separate out one type of egg of your choice (I use stone hatches) and deposit them in the chute marked A. All other eggs, as well as coal, shells and meat, will be deposited in the chute marked B.

The design behind this room is fairly standard. Eggs deposited in A will incubate and eventually hatch, and the hatchlings will not be able to jump up out of the pit. They will be stuck until they reach adulthood and are able to jump up and out. Once adult hatches can jump out of A, they’ll be presented with one of two life-altering scenarios. If any of the stables require a new breeder, the mechanized door above B will be closed and door C will be open, allowing the hatch to exit this room. If all of the stables are full, the two doors will be as shown in the screenshot instead. This will cause the hatch to eventually path into pit B, colloquially known as an evolution chamber. Once inside, the critter detector closes the door above and the surface tension of the water floods the pit and drowns the hatch. This unlocks the hatch’s final evolutionary form, better known as meat. Once there are no more critters in the pit, the mechanized door re-opens, resetting the trap. Eggs of the non-selected type are also routed to this pit, where they will eventually hatch, triggering the critter detector and drowning the hatchlings before they can reach adulthood and jump out.

The sweeper in this room can reach the bottom of both A and B (even while the door is closed) and will extract coal, eggshells and meat. Each resource can be deposited into it's own dedicated conveyor loader (there is room for exactly three), to be routed wherever you need them.

Chamber 3 - Critter Separator

The only purpose of this room is to prevent multiple hatches from entering the dropper room at the same time, and help prevent "double dropping". If there is ever more than one critter in this room, door D is closed to prevent them from reaching the dropper room. Three tiles wide seemed to be the perfect amount to allow the sensors time to react and not catch the hatches in a closing door.

Chamber 4 - Critter Dropper

This is a fairly standard critter dropper, which allows hatches to fall through door E into the stables that require additional breeders. The specifics of the automation logic are described in the construction section.

5. Construction

The following sections describe how to build both the control room and the stables in a progressive fashion. The expectation is that you would begin the early game with a fully manual stable or two and an empty control room, then gradually build up to the final design.

- Early Ranching - Zero Automation

Early in the game the control room is not used at all, however its skeleton should be built along with your first two stables to ensure the space is reserved. Build it somewhere "high" so you have room to place another stable or two underneath as you grow. Note that the mechanized airlock in the control room should be set to ‘Open’ on initial construction, and all other doors can be left on their defaults.


A small amount of water needs to be put into the trap while there is room for a bottle emptier. I’ve read that too much water might prevent hatches from pathing into the trap, but I’ve tested with as much as 100 kg per tile (emptying a single 200 kg pitcher pump bottle into the trap) and that works well. You could save water by mopping up a 40-50g spill and emptying that bottle, it's up to you.

Finally, the bottom "stable" will not initially be used as a stable, but rather to handle egg removal before the Mechatronics and automation come online. As many regular stables as you like can be built in between the control room and this bottom floor, and towards the end of the build the bottom floor will convert to a regular stable.

- 1st Upgrade - Egg Removal

It is still very important to remove eggs from the stables as quickly as possible. This is because if eggs are left in a stable you will suffer from the ‘cramped’ debuff, preventing more eggs (and thus meat) from being produced.

My original design required a mechatronics engineer and the solid filter technology, which is locked behind both radbolts and data banks. This new design borrows from the "Eggspam" design by neroiscool to temporarily remove eggs using only a simple critter sensor.

The entire upgrade requires 60 refined metal per stable, 25 for the critter sensor, and 35 for 7 pieces of automation wire.


The critter sensor should be set to detect eggs only (uncheck critters) and send a green signal when greater than 0. As soon as an egg is laid the doors on the floor will open, dropping the egg, but not the hatches, to the floor below. If the floor below is a stable this will trigger that critter sensor, and the egg will continue to fall to the bottom floor. This is what it looks like in action:


Note that it is possible to install a drowning trap in the bottom floor, but I don't believe that is optimal this early for two reasons. First, in the early game you're likely to find 5-7 hatches from digging, but you'll want to fill up at least one and most likely 2 stables as soon as you can. This isn't just to get more barbecue production, but to increase the chances of stone hatch eggs from consuming sedimentary rock. Rather than drowning your first few hatchlings, I let the ranchers carry them back to stables above where they'll hopefully start making stone hatch eggs. This can be "automated" by setting priorities and auto-wrangling on the critter dropoffs.
Secondly, my design as shown allows the bottom floor to be converted to another standard stable at any time, and a new "bottom floor" can be built underneath it without disturbing operation of the ranch. If the bottom floor were a drowning pit it would be much more complicated to expand downwards in this way.

- 2nd Upgrade - Coal, Eggshells and Meat

This upgrade requires a minimum of 400 refined metal in each stable to build one auto-sweeper and one conveyor loader. These will carry all products produced in the stables (except eggs) to the control room.

Eventually you'll want to add another auto-sweeper and 1-3 more conveyor loaders (400-800 refined metal) to the control room to distribute these materials throughout your base. For now, your dupes can run in and grab the materials manually if you're short on metals.


The conveyor rail on the right runs straight down through all the stables, into the bottom room which will later become your final stable. The conveyor rails in the control room run straight up and out, then wherever you need the materials to go.

- 3rd Upgrade - Hatch Food Supply

This upgrade requires 400 refined metal to install an auto-sweeper and conveyor loader in the control room warehouse. The warehouse can hold up to 9 storage bins for hatch food, or you can also bring the food in from somewhere else in your base, if you don't want to store it in the warehouse.

Wherever the material comes from, the conveyor rail of hatch food runs straight down the right side of the stables to load the receptacles, which in turn are emptied by the previously-installed auto-sweeper to load the feeders.

- 4th Upgrade - Egg Sorting

Now we finally have to bite the bullet on researching solid filters. We can't automate repopulation until we have a way of sorting eggs, and once we're able to sort eggs we can convert the bottom floor to a regular stable. So this is the final preparation step before we get to full-blown automation.

If you prefer, you could skip this section and the next section entirely and still end up with a decent partially-automated ranch. In that case I would recommend installing a drowning trap in the bottom floor, and installing some incubators somewhere else in your base, e.g. the warehouse, or to the left of the bottom floor drowning trap. Unfortunately you can't install them in the empty space of a regular stable, or the hatches will still sense them and get the cramped debuff. With this approach ranchers can rescue the eggs you desire from the trap, bring them to an incubator to hatch, then carry them to a stable for repopulation. It's not "automated" from a dupe labor standpoint but it's hand's off for you. This was essentially the gold standard before crazy critter droppers and pez dispensers, and it still works great.

This upgrade requires 425 refined metal to convert the bottom floor (1 auto-sweeper, 1 conveyor loader and 1 critter sensor) plus 25 per stable for a NOT gate and some extra for a few automation wires. I'd expect it to be about 550 refined metal for an average ranch.


The solid filter must be set to the type of egg you would like to propogate, so in my case that's stone hatches. The conveyor rail up from the stables is rerouted to the white input, and the chosen egg will come out the orange output to the right, behind the auto-swpeer, and down to the floor beside the trap. All other materials will continue to be routed to the drowning pit through the green output.

Don't forget to allow eggs in each stable's conveyor loader, since they'll no longer be falling through the floors!

Finally, the original "Eggspam" automation wiring needs to be reworked for connection to the control room in the next step. We keep the critter detectors, but this time set them to send a green signal when the stable is full, i.e. when more than 7 critters are detected. This is the first part of the build that begins to diverge if you're building a mirror image ranch. From here on out I'll show automation overlays for both left-facing and right-facing ranches so you can build in either direction.


The “stable full” signal has two purposes in this build:

1. It connects to the mechanized airlock in the floor of the stable, keeping it open so dropped hatches can fall through to other stables below. If less than eight hatches are detected in this stable, the door is instead closed to collect any falling hatches.
   
2. It goes through an inverter and is connected with the same signal from all other stables, before routing up to the control room. Using OR gates to combine these signals is unnecessary, as a green signal from any stable will override the red signals from other stables. I refer to this inverted signal as the “breeder needed” signal, as if any stable is below 8 hatches it will trigger the control room to allow dispensing new breeders.

- 5th Upgrade - Repopulation

At this time your ranch is almost fully automated, with hatch food being delivered and all products removed and sorted for distribution. Depending on how many cycles have elapsed, you may not need to automate breeder repopulation for quite some time. Your first hatches won’t start dying until they reach 100 cycles of age, however you’ll want to complete this upgrade before then so you don’t face a population crash after cycle 100. You'll also want to be taking advantage of the meat that will otherwise wander around in the control room until you automate the drowning trap.

There is nothing to add in each stable, as they were prepared in the previous step. We now need to build the control room automation and connect it to the signal from the stables.

The upgrade to the control room requires five critter sensors, five AND gates, one OR gate, three NOT gates, a filter gate, a buffer gate and approximately 50 pieces of automation wire. The total cost in refined metal should be just under 650.


As this automation circuit gets built the doors in the control room will start to open themselves or lock. The only door that could give you any trouble, depending on the order dupes choose to build things, is the door to the drowning trap. It will likely lock itself, blocking access to finish building the critter sensor or some automation wires in the pit. Simply set the door to Open if this happens, and once construction is complete set it back to Auto, or else change the settings on the critter sensor (if it got built) to temporarily force the door open.

From left to right, the settings on the critter sensors should be: Below 1 (in the drowning trap), Above 0, Above 1, Above 0, Below 2. For the mirror image build on the right those would be the same values but from right to left, starting in the drowning trap. The buffer gate should be set to 2-3s and the filter gate to 15-45s. The following image shows the completed automation wiring.


One note on the buffer and filter gate timings. Any automation elements with time settings are affected by your game speed. Something that works great set to 2s at 1x speed, would need to be set to 6s to maintain the same timing at 3x speed. The game does not auto-adjust your automation settings to be consistent when you change game speeds. This affects the game checking for critters stuck in doors to initiate the falling animation, and while 10-15s might be plenty of time on low speed, 45s might be required on high speed. I tend to play on high speed exclusively, so you can fiddle with the timing on these gates to suit your play speed. See the next section for detailed information on the gates' purpose.

- Explanation of Automation Logic

The automation circuit looks a bit complicated but most of that is because of how tightly it’s packed together. The whole thing only connects to four doors, which I’ll refer to as B, C, D and E from the original screenshot.

Door 'B' Logic - Drowning Trap

This door receives two signals through an AND gate, so it will only open when both conditions are true:

1. None of the stables are driving the “breeder needed” signal.
   
2. The critter detector in the drowning pit detects zero hatches.

If any stable drives the “breeder needed” signal, this door will close, preventing any hatches from falling in and drowning. Otherwise, if any hatches are detected in the trap the door will also close to drown them.

Door 'C' Logic - Escaping the Hatchery

This door receives two signals through an OR gate, so it will open when either condition is true.

The first condition is that any stable is driving the “breeder needed” signal. Just as that signal will force the drowning pit door to close, it will also force this door open, allowing hatches to exit the hatchery.

The second signal comes from an AND gate and requires both of the following conditions to open the hatchery door:

1. None of the stables are driving the “breeder needed” signal.
   
2. One or more hatches are detected in chamber 3
   
   • There is a 2-3 second buffer on this input, holding the signal true even after the hatch leaves the room. This is because the door space does not count as the room, and otherwise hatches may get stuck in the closing door when trying to exit. On a slower game speed you could try 1 second if the door is being held open too long and letting other hatches in.

It is common that when the control room is finished dropping hatches and all stables are full again, some hatches might remain in either chamber 3 or 4. Without the above logic, the lack of a “breeder needed” signal would lock door C, cutting off the hatches from returning to the hatchery, and thus the drowning pit. Eventually they would starve to death in chamber 3 or 4, and there is no auto-sweeper there to collect their meat. This would lead to spoilage, or require manual intervention by hauler dupes. By using the secondary conditions above, the hatchery door will remain open until all hatches have returned.

Note that the OR gate in this circuit cannot be removed and its inputs wired together as a single wire like we did for the “breeder needed” signals from the stables. This is because a loop would be created where the output of the AND gate would be connected to the input of the inverter, and the output of the inverter would be connected to the input of the AND gate, all on one wire. This causes the two gates to constantly toggle between on and off, so we use the OR gate to combine and isolate the signals.

Door 'D' Logic - Entering the Drop Room

This door receives three signals that all share the same wire, just like how the “breeder needed” signals from the stables were wired to the control room.


The door input (circled) is connected to the outputs of the filter gate, the AND gate and the critter sensor. If any of those outputs is true the entire wire will turn green and the door will open, without the need of extra OR gates. If you're having trouble visualizing it in this picture, scroll up to the mirror image build, as that wiring is in my opinion a little clearer. I’ll go through all three of these inputs.

The critter sensor is set to Above 1, and ensures that this door remains open if there is ever more than one hatch in the drop room. This allows the extra hatches to escape back to the left, and helps prevent accidental “double drops”.

The filter gate’s output is an inverted signal from the Above 0 critter sensor in the drop room. “Not Above 0” is the same as saying “Equals 0”, so this signal will open the door when there are no hatches in the drop room, allowing more hatches to enter. The reason for the filter gate is that as soon as a hatch enters the dropper door E it is no longer technically in the drop room. Without a delay on the sensor signal, the door would open immediately, more hatches could rush in, and an accidental “double drop” could occur. I set the filter gate to 30-45s to give ample time for the hatch in the dropper door E to be pushed out of the room completely before reopening the drop room door. This will vary based on game speed and you may find 10-15s is enough at low speed.

The final input to the drop room door comes from the AND gate just above it. The logic of this gate is identical to the AND gate on door C, it requires both of the following conditions to open the door:

1. None of the stables are driving the “breeder needed” signal.
   
2. One or more hatches are detected in the drop room.

Just like before, this allows leftover hatches to escape the drop room and return left to the hatchery after all stables are full. The only difference is that this door does not require a buffer gate to prevent hatches from becoming stuck in the door. The natural state of this door is to open (after the filter time) after zero critters are detected in the room. So if a hatch does get stuck in the door, it will be released after a short time automatically.

Door 'E' Logic - Critter Dropper

This door receives three signals through two AND gates, so it will only open the door when all three conditions are true. Once the door is open a hatch in the drop room may path into the space of the open door. If the door is then closed, the hatch will be trapped and pushed out the bottom to fall into one of the stables below.

The three conditions required to open this door are:

1. At least one stable is asserting the “breeder needed” signal.
   
2. The Below 2 critter sensor is true
   
3. The Above 0 critter sensor is true

The combination of conditions 2 and 3 ensures that the dropper door can never be open unless there is exactly one hatch in the drop room. Once that one hatch paths into the open door it is no longer ‘in the room’, condition 3 will change to false, and the door will immediately close. Because of the logic on door D described above, no more hatches are allowed into the drop room while the filter gate counts down, allowing plenty of time to drop the trapped hatch and reset. These combined protections ensure that a “double drop” should never occur.

- Tidying Up

Once all the automation is installed, the bottom of the control room should be tiled over to complete the construction. This should be done in two steps, each tiling one layer across the bottom, to ensure dupes don’t get stuck or leave voids that require deconstruction. The screenshot shows the steps of the process

The only thing left to do now is add a bit of decor to the stables to keep your ranchers happy while they spend their days grooming critters. Unfortunately, the stable design doesn't have a single spare tile of space near the grooming station to put in any kind of plant pot or moulding. The good news is that all hatch breeds are worth +10 decor each, so eight of them will help to offset the negative decor from the machinery while they run around the grooming area. If you are using the 5-tile main corridor design, statues on each floor will help a lot, as three can be seen from each grooming station. In this case you should average around +50 decor while grooming.
To stretch it a little farther, you can replace the mechanized door floors from the Eggspam system with regular tiles. This will give a +16.5 decor bonus to each stable, or even more bonus with specialized tiles such metal and carpet.

6. Bonus Builds (All That Empty Space)

To be honest, I never really know what to do with all the empty space outside the grooming areas in the stables. I’ve experimented with a few ideas, but placing most other stations in the stable conflicts with the grooming station, removing the room tag and disabling grooming.

- Early Game Farming

In the early game when I’m first hollowing out the nearby area, I like to build the skeletons of 2-3 stables, and fill the empty space with planter boxes of mealwood. You can fit 19 mealwood per stable, which is 1 plant less than enough to feed 4 dupes each until the ranch starts producing meat. Note that you cannot install a farm station in a stable or it will disable the grooming station.

Once you’re swimming in barbecue the planter boxes can be deleted, but then I’m back to not knowing what to fill the space with. One thing I used to do before I came up with an infinite storage and distribution system was fill the area with storage bins set to collect (almost) everything. The stables would then become the core of my in-base storage.

- Showers and/or Coal Plant

Since showers still don’t have their own room bonus, they’re a good option to throw into at least one stable. There’s plenty of room to install a closed loop water sieve with a few thimble reeds to dispose of the sewage overflow. You can even fit an auto-sweeper and storage bin to refill the sand if you like.

An option that goes fairly well with showers is an early coal plant. While not technically a "power plant" room (installing a power control station disables the grooming station), it’s simple to feed the coal from the stables through chutes to some auto-sweepers and coal generators for automated power production. A single auto-sweeper can keep three coal plants fueled, with plenty of room to install a transformer or two, a smart battery, and/or a carbon skimmer. The 1800W produced is more than enough to run the entire ranch stack (assuming no incubators) in addition to the carbon skimmer and sieve.

The carbon skimmer pairs well with the sieve for the showers, cycling water on the same loop, and if you decide to do this you’ll want the coal generators to be on your bottom stable in the stack. You'll also want to make the floor tiles solid to collect CO2 rather than the airflow tiles I usually use between floors. The generators produce a lot of CO2 and heat which I’d typically prefer to locate outside the base (and couple with a power control station for 50% more output). Even so, especially in the early game, three generators, a carbon skimmer and a battery could work well until you get a proper power plant running.

- Gymnasium

Gyms seem to pair perfectly with stables, killing two birds with one stone. Like showers, there's no separate room bonus for gyms, so you're not losing out like you would with farms or power generators. I also always felt like gyms were a waste in the central hub of the base where you want close access to bedrooms, bathrooms, kitchen, dining, etc. So sticking hamster wheels in the "wasted" space of a stable with some art for high decor is an excellent combination in my opinion.

7. Summary

At the end of the day we built a fully automated hatch ranch that at least in my testing does not suffer from “double drop” when repopulating breeders. The construction process and required automation are both relatively simple, so it shouldn’t be difficult to build up to this in a survival playthrough.

Food for the hatches is delivered automatically, and all byproducts are extracted and sorted for distribution around the base. All your dupes have to do is groom the hatches and make sure the warehouse of hatch food doesn’t go empty. With smart storage bins you could even set up an alert if the warehouse gets low, and you'd have several dozen cycles to deal with the issue.

There are a lot of other partially and fully automated ranch builds out there, so this isn’t technically anything new or unique. I gave myself a set of design constraints to fit my playstyle and I like the design I came up with, but there are other designs available that accomplish essentially the same thing.

8. Thank You!

Thank you for reading this guide and I hope you found something worthwhile to take away from it!

I also want to thank several other designers whose ranches inspired me to create my own. I borrowed and tweaked elements from some of these designs while others simply saved me time by working through alternate approaches so that I didn’t have to.

Francis John - Hatch Ranching Tutorial Nuggets

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BUD71i3fvOA

B4dz0k - High Efficiency Hatch Farm

https://www.reddit.com/r/Oxygennotincluded/comments/eovzdn/high_efficiency_hatch_farm/

Beowulf2010 - Pez Dispenser Meets Air Mailing

https://forums.kleientertainment.com/forums/topic/113102-hatch-stable-pez-dispenser-meets-air-mailing/

Rkr87 - Perhaps the Most Over-engineered Hatch Ranch Ever?

https://www.reddit.com/r/Oxygennotincluded/comments/q6p6fi/perhaps_the_most_overengineered_hatch_ranch_ever/

Mullematsch - Automatically Fill Your Ranches

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CE9sSYxXB50

neroissocool (refined by azul_delta) - Eggspam

https://www.reddit.com/r/Oxygennotincluded/comments/w4mmwb/eggspam/
https://imgur.com/a/esCY1dN

This last one is a bit different of a thank you. Twitch and Youtube streamer erisia_gaming recently found this guide and featured my build on his stream. It was a great opportunity to watch someone build this in a real playthrough. While I was super excited to see my design featured, watching him build in real time highlighted some areas of the guide that could be confusing. In particular there were some inconsistencies in the screenshots between older and newer designs that could be tricky when trying to follow along and manage a colony simultaneously.

With the Hot Shots update I've corrected almost all of the screenshots in the guide to reflect the latest design. There are still a few images where e.g. an automation overlay might have a background tile or two in the wrong place, but anything related to the pictured overlay is correct. In any case, I wanted to thank erisia_gaming for featuring my build and helping point out these points of potential confusion.

erisia_gaming - Real-time construction video!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ahJPflvP048

[Dark Lord Anubis]

@Magialisk ah then it seems like I either misunderstood what someone said on the forums or what seems more likly considering the context of what they wrote and when they wrote it, they themselves had information that was incorrect in that the forcing solution is a new requirement. Good to know. :D I've played this game for a long long loooong time (well before DLC) but I've almost always gone with a non creature dropper design.

[Magialisk]

@DarkLordAnubis hatches would never just fall through open doors on their own, they could always stand on them. You have to force them through with another door on top, which is why there are 2 vertical doors. Once they've started a falling animation, however, an open door won't stop them, they'll go through as many as there are until they hit something solid. If the mechanic changed then yeah this design and basically every critter dropper design would be busted :(

[Dark Lord Anubis]

@HaZe @Magilisk I'm noticing that as well. That the Hatches now walk on the vertical trap doors. From what I understand, the changed the mechanic a bit so a hatch won't automatically just fall though the door. A shame, I just spend an entire game building this particular design for the first time only to learn this fact now. lol Although it seems like a slight modification to the design can solve the issue by forcing a Hatch through a door somehow? idk need to look into it more.

[Magialisk]

@Haze I'm not aware of any behavior changes recently, but it's always possible. The most likely situation in days past is that you put too much water in the trap. Critters won't enter a flooded tile, because they don't want to drown. You only need a tiny drop of water in there. Otherwise it could just be random pathing. They don't "fall" into the trap, they choose to walk in. So they might just be choosing different random tiles to walk to, including above the door. You could check their pathing options to confirm whether they're able to choose the trap as a destination, and if so it's just up to luck.

[HaZe]

The design seems to be running perfectly minus one part. Once the critters grow up and the mech door is open for the drowning trap, the hatches just stand on the open door and dont fall into the trap. Has behavior changed recently or is there something else wrong?

[Magialisk]

Overengineered is the perfect word, and as an IRL engineer I'll take it as a compliment :) The goals and requirements were clearly stated up front, and this was the logic required to meet them all at that time. Giving up on some of them could have greatly simplified things. Notice too that this was over 3 years ago. At that time there wasn't anything like this that "just worked". Most critter dropper designs would fail regularly, so similar to my "fail safe" electrolyzer guide (which is also horribly inefficient today) this was a design that you could just build and forget about. Frankly I'm surprised it still works after so many ranching patches, but sometimes if you're lucky that's what overengineering will get you. Thanks for your interest!

[caseyas435943]

That's a lot of automation. Way over done. Oh it works but wow talk about a classic ONI build which is way over engineered to do something very easy. which is ranch. It looks cool thou.

[Magialisk]

@Lupi that looks great! Thank you for reporting back that everything still works in the latest patch. I don't plan on updating the guide anytime soon, but I might update the date and version in the header so people know it's still working.

[Lupi]

https://i.imgur.com/NYAFjAU.jpeg

And we're done with all ranches full. All the sages already died off, just have a couple more regulars then it will all be stones.

Trying to domesticate most critters this playthough, so now onto learning the next while this gives me the BBQ supply to maintain the dupes.

[Lupi]

Waited about 5.5 cycles after hatching and then watched him hop down into the top ranch (only bottom one was at max). To test the door sensors for the lower levels moved critters around so they were inverted (max at top and not bottom) and the doors opened as expected. Looks like in current patch environment everything still works as designed.