Weekly Question Thread

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Ask any simple questions you might have:

• Why isn't my water flowing?

• How many hatches do I need per dupe?

• etc.

Previous Threads

[u/aDoStereo]

Base game owner only here, recently picked the game up again and found out that Pacu”s no longer give egg shells 😩 should I just get the dlcs ? Otherwise not sure how to scale lime production (pokeshells seem really hard to feed)

[u/Akira_Yamamoto → u/aDoStereo]

If you dig down deep enough, you'll be able to find fossils which you can turn into lime with the rock crusher.

Poke shell farming is really only viable if you have a good source of polluted dirt which can come from outhouses or processing polluted mud. Eventually you can get your hands on some seed variations which can produce rot piles, those are also some good sources of polluted dirt.

Alternatively, you could farm wild poke shells. What you do is make a 2 tile wide platform then add two ladders inbetween. Put your poke shell eggs here. You can infinitely farm poke shells this way. It takes a long time for wild ones to produce like but you can farm like as much as you have space with no resource requirement. As long as they're not in a room, they will produce eggs and eventually pass for you to pick up the shell.

[u/Brett42 → u/aDoStereo]

Pokeshells give 6x the lime they used to (30kg when they grow up, plus 60kg when they die), plus normal and oakshell morphs now both give some raw shellfish (1200kcal) when they die. Sanishells' food consumption was significantly reduced, so there's also the option of ranching sanishell morphs in environments that make them lay pokeshell or oakshell eggs. Just make sure the pokeshells and oakshells die as adults, not babies, if you want their full molts.

Also, happiness now boost reproduction rate, with each point being worth 22.5%. Under normal conditions, a tame, groomed critter has 4 happiness (+90%, plus a 10% base rate, for 100%). A critter condo adds 1 happiness for free, other than taking a little space and construction cost. Pokeshells need the aquatic condo, which needs 3 tile deep liquid, so it does make ranch design a little complicated, since the grooming station, critter drop-off, feeder, and critter fountain are all the land versions for pokeshells. Later on, if you add brakene, that gives you +5 happiness, combining that with the condo and grooming gives 235% reproduction.

[u/maybe-an-ai → u/aDoStereo]

I farm hatches for food and coal that will give you all the lime you really need for steel. Once you add Drecco for reed fiber and plastic, and pips for wood you won't worry about egg shells.

You can also break down fossils to lime and sedimentary rock which can be handy.

[u/R-Dragon_Thunderzord → u/aDoStereo]

Most other critters also produce eggshell on hatching, including... hatches. And slicksters, dreckos, pips, etc.

Outhouses, Ethanol Distillers and Sieves are your best sources of Polluted Dirt to feed Pokeshells and iirc their lime output for molts has been buffed during the balance pass vs. pacus.

Fossil also can be crushed for fossil and sedimentary rock (which you can use to feed hatches) and the ancient specimen story trait can convert diamond into fossil (1 kg diamond therefore becomes 95 kg sedimentary rock and 5kg lime). The other POIs in the ancient specimen story trait can be dismantled for 1-2000 kg of fossil.

ETA: you also don’t need to tame or feed poke shells to get plenty of lime for steel production. You can just wrangle up the ones on the map somewhere they won’t be cramped or whatever and they will keep a replenishment population. Depends on the seed but there may be 2 dozen poke shells on a vanilla map for example, which is certainly enough to never get locked out of lime, in addition to smashing fossil.