Farming bugs on ice sheet

Started by b0rsuk, May 20, 2016, 05:16:01 PM

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b0rsuk

I have an ice sheet colony which has just taken off - individual heated rooms, kitchen, hydroponics, around 1500 silver and a nice supply of resources. But I refuse to play it anymore - it's TOO EASY with the trade caravans dying, and not fun anymore when cargo mufallos die and you get all their stuff without earning it.

I wanted to try a bug farming strategy, can please someone else do this ? It goes like this:

1. You build your base in the open. Initially you adapt a pre-generated stone room, and build some steel walls around for extra isolation.
2.  You start mining operations, getting whatever resources you can.
3. When you find an area with thick rock roof, you build a room inside (again, airlock helps with isolation).
4. You put heaters in there, controlled by a remote switch and heat it up to more than -17*C
5. Eventually an infestation arrives. It spawns in the heated mountain room, because that's the only warm space with thick rock roof. Again, you must build your base in the open, or place only unheated rooms underground.
6. On Ice Sheet, all you need is to tone down your heaters. You want the bugs to die but hives to survive. I heard -50*C does the trick, it should be in the hive tooltip.

If it works - the beauty of it would be that it can't get out of control. All power failures exterminate the hives by default. Actually solar flares might be the biggest challenge. You'd need a stockpile of wood just in case, and calculating the number of campfires needed might be tricky (they're weaker than heaters). I wonder if you can eventually replace hydroponics this way...

Another complication might be designing the encosure in such way that bugs can't break the inner layer too quickly, causing the hive to freeze to death.

The ironic part is that as long as you build in the open, the hive would be the best protected part of your base. But mortar sieges are really not that dangerous, I used a single rifleman to harass a siege team having two survival rifles and one sniper rifle.

xrumblingcdsx

Ice sheet did get easier with this last update. So did Randy.

UnseenSpectacle

Sounds like a good strategy except I have found hives to be the more sensitive to cold temperatures than the bugs when I have been hit with infestation events on non-ice sheet maps. In fact, back when I tried to kill off a hive with just freezers, the hives died first followed by the megascarabs and spelopedes. I could never get the room cold enough to kill off the megaspiders via hypothermia. The megaspiders eventually died of starvation after they had eaten all the other frozen bug corpses. Unless hive temperature tolerance is somehow map dependent, I don't know how the bugs will die but the hives will survive in the proposed setup.

Damien Hart

Yeah, I've had similar experiences on a boreal forest map. Hives spawned before winter in an old mine, winter came and the hives died, but the bugs remained.

Unfortunately, low temps don't make for a sustainable bug farm.

b0rsuk

#4
I see :-(.  Sustainable bug farming isn't any better than in warmer biomes, unless you want to have a nuclear option in case of a solar flare.

But unsustainable farming should still be possible! Open bases in ice sheet can basically choose where the hive is going to spawn. Prepare a hive room and keep it warm as long as possible. Let them reproduce for a while, wait for the last reproduction and press the killswitch. You should get a large amount of meat and some jelly, and after the initial setup it's zero micromanagement. The worst case is they dig out prematurely and freeze their asses off. Or the heaters stop performing.

Instead of making profit every reproduction, it's every infestation.

If you're cheeky, spare a single hive by building a wall around it and keeping it heated. It would let you restart the reproduction process.

It would be interesting if hives had a certain temperature requirement for reproducing. Then you could keep a hive in stasis and turn it on/off as needed.

Damien Hart

Yeah, with bugs not having a max temp, temperature based farming isn't sustainable either way. Obviously, you can heat the room until spontaneous combustion occurs, but that deprives you of your loot.

You could try, given the space, setting up a large area full of columns and heat that to around -10 (scarabs have a min temp of 0C, so they'll be taken out, but for hives it's -20C). Set up your columns at about every third cell for redundancy so that the roof doesn't collapse when they take out one column. Then, it's just a matter of taking out the spiders/spelopedes and any excess hives, grabbing your loot, replacing any missing columns, and waiting for the next spawn.

That's my plan anyway, though I haven't tried it yet. I'd be interested to hear how your farming attempts go either way.

Vaporisor

Hot biome same tactics work.  Spawn room with coolers.  Switch to -100 when they dig too big :D
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