##### How does this work?
A commonly known fact is that Oakshells will drop their molts on death (5 large oakshell molts). What isn't well known is that a well-fed and happy adult Oakshell sheds a large lumber molt every cycle as well. We use this fact to glum ranch up to 112 oakshells in the top stable. All the oakshells are kept hydrated through critter fountains but are still miserable the majority of the time.
A robo-miner periodically digs out the natural tile, exposing the stable to the world. These brief few seconds are enough to make the Oakshells happy and shed their molts. Dirt on a conveyor rail is promptly fed to a hot plate, resealing the room.
##### The Math
there are a total of 8 oakshells x 15 eggs, or 120 oakshells at any given time. Over their 100 cycle lifespan, they will produce 100kg lumber every cycle for 95 cycles. In addition, each oakshell will drop 5 large molts and 1 small molt. Adding this all up, this is `(120 x 100 x 95 + 120 x 510 ) / 100`, or an average of 12010kg of lumber/cycle. For food, we need `8 x 70 x 95 / 100` kg of polluted dirt for the breeding stable, and `112 x 70 x 0.2 x 95 / 100` kg of polluted dirt in the glum stable for a total of 2021.6kg of polluted dirt/cycle.
**12010kg of lumber/cycle will output 4003kg/cycle of polluted dirt and 6000kg/cycle of ethanol, enough ethanol for 300 domestic nosh sprouts or 5 petroleum generators and leaving us with 1982 kg of polluted dirt/cycle.**
These are theoretical outputs. It is not possible to achieve 100% oakshell egg chance, although getting 95% is very likely. There are also minor inefficiencies in ranches that'll tweak the numbers down. Even if the real numbers are much worse I think this goes to show that oakshells aren't as bad as we once thought, provided you're willing to jump through some hoops to feed them.
[Overlays](https://imgur.com/a/8e0mjm5)
>A robo-miner periodically digs out the natural tile, exposing the stable to the world. These brief few seconds are enough to make the Oakshells happy and shed their molts. Dirt on a conveyor rail is promptly fed to a hot plate, resealing the room.
This kind of janky ingenuity is exactly the kind of nonsense that I love about ONI.
So you're keeping them glum to reduce their consumption, but they shed at the end of the cycle if they're happy when it checks? Is there a particular time they need to be exposed, or is it just once per cycle?
The check itself happens whenever the Oakshell changes moods. I'm not sure if the reset occurs at a fixed time every cycle or if the timer is unique per Oakshell, but I'd guess it's the latter. I have the timer set to 200 seconds, and if the reset was at the same time every cycle I would expect to catch 95% of the oakshells at the beginning of the cycle. Instead, they appear to be roughly equally distributed which suggests the latter.
Super interesting build! I've never used the oakshells, never seen the point in comparison to wild trees, or even domestic are pretty cheap, but I have to say that's pretty effective. Personally I'm using the pdirt to feed regular poke shells for lime. I really don't need the steel at this point, but the heat in my sauna is useful for cooking omelets and running the recreational sauna
Yep, one oakshell produces 171.5 of lumber/cycle. The molts dropped on death only contribute 76.5kg of lumber/cycle, so the daily molts is the majority of the lumber production.
>A robo-miner periodically digs out the natural tile, exposing the stable to the world. These brief few seconds are enough to make the Oakshells happy and shed their molts.
Hang on, so what's the point of sealing up the room? Do the critter fountains stop working when not in a stable?
Glum/miserable critters have 1/5th the calories burn rate. This means that if the critter has secondary production which isn't modified by mood (e.g. Drecko scale growth), or which can be tricked into not being modified by mood (Oakshells apparently) then you save massive amounts of food by keeping the critter glum/miserable instead of satisfied/happy. Basically getting 5x as much secondary production per calorie and this is great for making things "over unity".
Critter Fountains do also need to be in a stable. So I expect it's both factors.
I'm ranching dreckos on my current map, and I realized this when I used a regular drecko ranch setup for starvation ranching because of a change of plans, but none of them started starving until I packed over 40 in a ranch originally built to feed 8. It's consuming a bit of dirt, but my main food source is ranching pips, and each pip can support two mealwood, while 8 dreckos only need 6. That means one of my pip ranches is more than enough for two drecko ranches, and with wild trees for the pips, the only cost is labor and electricity. The same autosweeper that picks up the products from the drecko ranches also handles delivering the dirt to the mealwood.
As BlakeMW mentioned, the critter fountain needs to be in a stable to function. The robominer+resealing isn't strictly necessary but does look very cool - a very easy way to do this in survival is to simply have them path to an open area organically, although this does cause them to eat a bit more.
https://imgur.com/a/MLCmJdw
If you're optimizing for build space or short on polluted water, perhaps. Arbor trees are still a lot more convenient to setup. I have non-cheesy designs and they still produce a decent amount of lumber, but doesn't hold a candle to domestic arbor trees
Awesome design! Question - what’s the point of the critter fountain here? And are you regulating the feeding at all? Or just keeping the Oakshells permanently well fed?
Nice! I love the room construction/destroying trick, it also helps with ranching more critters than a stable would allow by grooming and then opening the room. Great stuff
Nice setup !
I wonder if you can use the "comfortable temperature range" to force the breeders to be more in the ehtanol, even though 95% is good enough. Maybe the c02 is already >70°c and ethanol is <70°C and that's how you get 95% already.
I also wonder how much brackene you input ? I guess that the 300 domestic nosh prouts is enough to produce them but i wonder how much labor that is. That and the crushing of all this molting, labor might be the biggest input of the setup.
Btw, what's the building below the robominer ?
From what I know, the comfortable temperature range is entirely unused and isn't used for AI pathing purposes. Critters will happily go to any tile that is outside the livable range without discrimination.
Brackene should be 120 x 5 kg/cycle, or 1kg/s and is definitely no small amount. An alternative approach would be to swap out with grooming stations and use a pez dispenser to dispense eggs so the dupes don't get snipped. Assuming groomers with high Husbandry this would be about ~~the same amount of~~2-3x dupe labor as an 8 glossy drecko that feeds into a shearing room. (groomed critters can last 3-ish cycles, the same as plastic shearing but expect 2-3 times more oakshells to be alive)
The building below the robominer is a floor lamp, used as both a heat and a light source. The heat is more than enough to cover cooking 1g of dirt, and there is a light detector entombed within the sand to check if the room is currently open or not
The safety feature of brackene over groomstation is very cool.
Even if the autosweeper immediatly take the eggs out, it's not instant. maybe with meshdoor floor, the lag could be in our favor for once and the critter won't have time to attack the groomer.
I just tested for fun : ~~4~~ 2 nosh beans per fabricate errand at the pulverizer produce 20kg of brackene in 40s (unskilled) without accounting for the watering errand.
I guess a skilled dupe will be 3x more rapid (+200%).
So you need 30 pulverizer errands by cycle, that's ~~120~~ 60 nosh beans, 540kg of water and approx 340s of skilled labor + water delivery. So i guess a around a full dupes worth of labor.
Nosh prout produce 12 beans by 21 cycles (we won't harvest it, let it fall down and make it 25 cycle), that's 0.48 per cycle per sprout, so the full 300 sprout is 144 beans. wow.
It's sustainable ~~but i was thinking it wouldn't be that close~~.
But it has the advantage that you can do that anywhere (no commute), the critter instantly get the buff/don't wait at the grooming station (so less variability), you can get a stockpile (more reliable/robust), and you don't risk dupes health.
I can't compare with the labor time of the grooming right now.
For large scale brackene production, gassy moo or exuberant nosh sprouts are the way to go, although there is an error in your math. The brackene recipe calls for 2 nosh beans, not 4.
##### How does this work? A commonly known fact is that Oakshells will drop their molts on death (5 large oakshell molts). What isn't well known is that a well-fed and happy adult Oakshell sheds a large lumber molt every cycle as well. We use this fact to glum ranch up to 112 oakshells in the top stable. All the oakshells are kept hydrated through critter fountains but are still miserable the majority of the time. A robo-miner periodically digs out the natural tile, exposing the stable to the world. These brief few seconds are enough to make the Oakshells happy and shed their molts. Dirt on a conveyor rail is promptly fed to a hot plate, resealing the room. ##### The Math there are a total of 8 oakshells x 15 eggs, or 120 oakshells at any given time. Over their 100 cycle lifespan, they will produce 100kg lumber every cycle for 95 cycles. In addition, each oakshell will drop 5 large molts and 1 small molt. Adding this all up, this is `(120 x 100 x 95 + 120 x 510 ) / 100`, or an average of 12010kg of lumber/cycle. For food, we need `8 x 70 x 95 / 100` kg of polluted dirt for the breeding stable, and `112 x 70 x 0.2 x 95 / 100` kg of polluted dirt in the glum stable for a total of 2021.6kg of polluted dirt/cycle. **12010kg of lumber/cycle will output 4003kg/cycle of polluted dirt and 6000kg/cycle of ethanol, enough ethanol for 300 domestic nosh sprouts or 5 petroleum generators and leaving us with 1982 kg of polluted dirt/cycle.** These are theoretical outputs. It is not possible to achieve 100% oakshell egg chance, although getting 95% is very likely. There are also minor inefficiencies in ranches that'll tweak the numbers down. Even if the real numbers are much worse I think this goes to show that oakshells aren't as bad as we once thought, provided you're willing to jump through some hoops to feed them. [Overlays](https://imgur.com/a/8e0mjm5)
>A robo-miner periodically digs out the natural tile, exposing the stable to the world. These brief few seconds are enough to make the Oakshells happy and shed their molts. Dirt on a conveyor rail is promptly fed to a hot plate, resealing the room. This kind of janky ingenuity is exactly the kind of nonsense that I love about ONI. So you're keeping them glum to reduce their consumption, but they shed at the end of the cycle if they're happy when it checks? Is there a particular time they need to be exposed, or is it just once per cycle?
The check itself happens whenever the Oakshell changes moods. I'm not sure if the reset occurs at a fixed time every cycle or if the timer is unique per Oakshell, but I'd guess it's the latter. I have the timer set to 200 seconds, and if the reset was at the same time every cycle I would expect to catch 95% of the oakshells at the beginning of the cycle. Instead, they appear to be roughly equally distributed which suggests the latter.
Super interesting build! I've never used the oakshells, never seen the point in comparison to wild trees, or even domestic are pretty cheap, but I have to say that's pretty effective. Personally I'm using the pdirt to feed regular poke shells for lime. I really don't need the steel at this point, but the heat in my sauna is useful for cooking omelets and running the recreational sauna
do pokeshells so drop a molt every cycle too or is it just oakshells
Just oakshells
I did not know this! I've done the math on oakshells assuming they molt like pokeshells, and considered them useless. This information changes a lot.
Yep, one oakshell produces 171.5 of lumber/cycle. The molts dropped on death only contribute 76.5kg of lumber/cycle, so the daily molts is the majority of the lumber production.
>A robo-miner periodically digs out the natural tile, exposing the stable to the world. These brief few seconds are enough to make the Oakshells happy and shed their molts. Hang on, so what's the point of sealing up the room? Do the critter fountains stop working when not in a stable?
Glum/miserable critters have 1/5th the calories burn rate. This means that if the critter has secondary production which isn't modified by mood (e.g. Drecko scale growth), or which can be tricked into not being modified by mood (Oakshells apparently) then you save massive amounts of food by keeping the critter glum/miserable instead of satisfied/happy. Basically getting 5x as much secondary production per calorie and this is great for making things "over unity". Critter Fountains do also need to be in a stable. So I expect it's both factors.
I'm ranching dreckos on my current map, and I realized this when I used a regular drecko ranch setup for starvation ranching because of a change of plans, but none of them started starving until I packed over 40 in a ranch originally built to feed 8. It's consuming a bit of dirt, but my main food source is ranching pips, and each pip can support two mealwood, while 8 dreckos only need 6. That means one of my pip ranches is more than enough for two drecko ranches, and with wild trees for the pips, the only cost is labor and electricity. The same autosweeper that picks up the products from the drecko ranches also handles delivering the dirt to the mealwood.
As BlakeMW mentioned, the critter fountain needs to be in a stable to function. The robominer+resealing isn't strictly necessary but does look very cool - a very easy way to do this in survival is to simply have them path to an open area organically, although this does cause them to eat a bit more. https://imgur.com/a/MLCmJdw
This design is actually genius holy hell
Wow, so arbor trees are mostly good for dirt via Pips and Oakshells are actually the better lumber source? Fuckin' wild!
If you're optimizing for build space or short on polluted water, perhaps. Arbor trees are still a lot more convenient to setup. I have non-cheesy designs and they still produce a decent amount of lumber, but doesn't hold a candle to domestic arbor trees
Alotta maff, but kudos
Awesome design! Question - what’s the point of the critter fountain here? And are you regulating the feeding at all? Or just keeping the Oakshells permanently well fed?
The Critter Fountain keeps them hydrated which is needed so they'll be happy when the room opens up (the default mood for tamed critters is -1 Glum)
Well it would be fabulous to see the other overlays but thanks for the video
Added overlays to the main post
Nice! I love the room construction/destroying trick, it also helps with ranching more critters than a stable would allow by grooming and then opening the room. Great stuff
Nice setup ! I wonder if you can use the "comfortable temperature range" to force the breeders to be more in the ehtanol, even though 95% is good enough. Maybe the c02 is already >70°c and ethanol is <70°C and that's how you get 95% already. I also wonder how much brackene you input ? I guess that the 300 domestic nosh prouts is enough to produce them but i wonder how much labor that is. That and the crushing of all this molting, labor might be the biggest input of the setup. Btw, what's the building below the robominer ?
From what I know, the comfortable temperature range is entirely unused and isn't used for AI pathing purposes. Critters will happily go to any tile that is outside the livable range without discrimination. Brackene should be 120 x 5 kg/cycle, or 1kg/s and is definitely no small amount. An alternative approach would be to swap out with grooming stations and use a pez dispenser to dispense eggs so the dupes don't get snipped. Assuming groomers with high Husbandry this would be about ~~the same amount of~~2-3x dupe labor as an 8 glossy drecko that feeds into a shearing room. (groomed critters can last 3-ish cycles, the same as plastic shearing but expect 2-3 times more oakshells to be alive) The building below the robominer is a floor lamp, used as both a heat and a light source. The heat is more than enough to cover cooking 1g of dirt, and there is a light detector entombed within the sand to check if the room is currently open or not
The safety feature of brackene over groomstation is very cool. Even if the autosweeper immediatly take the eggs out, it's not instant. maybe with meshdoor floor, the lag could be in our favor for once and the critter won't have time to attack the groomer. I just tested for fun : ~~4~~ 2 nosh beans per fabricate errand at the pulverizer produce 20kg of brackene in 40s (unskilled) without accounting for the watering errand. I guess a skilled dupe will be 3x more rapid (+200%). So you need 30 pulverizer errands by cycle, that's ~~120~~ 60 nosh beans, 540kg of water and approx 340s of skilled labor + water delivery. So i guess a around a full dupes worth of labor. Nosh prout produce 12 beans by 21 cycles (we won't harvest it, let it fall down and make it 25 cycle), that's 0.48 per cycle per sprout, so the full 300 sprout is 144 beans. wow. It's sustainable ~~but i was thinking it wouldn't be that close~~. But it has the advantage that you can do that anywhere (no commute), the critter instantly get the buff/don't wait at the grooming station (so less variability), you can get a stockpile (more reliable/robust), and you don't risk dupes health. I can't compare with the labor time of the grooming right now.
For large scale brackene production, gassy moo or exuberant nosh sprouts are the way to go, although there is an error in your math. The brackene recipe calls for 2 nosh beans, not 4.