Farmer John's Chicken Ranch

[travin]

If you don't grow hay, chickens will wipe clean a pasture, eating grass at any stage of growth.

A solution that fixes both this problem and also random wild animals such as rats, hares and the like eating up the garden is to install the Fences and Floors mod by Pravus. Then the only things for the garden to worry about is placing a firefoam bomb in there for lightning strikes, and the occasional swarm of CropEaters.

And maybe putting a moat around a solar lamp to minimize damage from their continuous breakdowns. I stopped using those though, as they seem like a waste of labor.

Help me understand how a mod can fix the problem of overgrazing and why would I want that anyway?

For the record, my pastures are nearly always enclosed without mods, but that still won't prevent overgrazing. And random animals I hunt to minimize losses, pretty basic. It's a flock management:resource and security issue.

And how did we migrate from chickens to solar lamps and moats? Color me confused.

[AngleWyrm]

A chick grows to maturity in 3/10 of a year; 3/10 x 60 days = 18 days. If chicks eat the same as chickens, then they'll need 18 days of food to develop into an adult.
8 hay/day x 18 days = 144 hay.
144 hay x 1/24 haygrass/hay = 6 haygrass for each chick to grow to adulthood.

With an egg laying interval of 1 egg per 9/10 day they produce 10/9 eggs/day. So in a span of 18 days a breeding hen should produce 18 days x 10/9 eggs/day = 20 eggs. Once the whole production line is filled up, there should be 20 chicks maturing during every 18-day cycle for each breeding hen.

How much meat is that, and is it enough to feed a colonist?
20/18 chickens/day = 10/9 chickens/day.
23 meat/chicken x 10/9 chicken/day = 230/9 meat/day = 25 1/9 meat/day

If we made simple meals out of that:
230/9 meat/day x 1/10 simpleMeal/meat = 23/9 simpleMeals/day
each simpleMeal restores 85 saturation of hunger
85 saturation/simpleMeal x 23/9 simpleMeals/day = 1955/9 saturation/day = 217 2/9 saturation/day

So a rooster plus one breeding hen should be enough to feed two colonists on simple meals.
The haygrass support system for that is to place enough haygrass to feed
1 rooster + h/2 hens/colonist + 20h chicks
haygrass for roosters and hens is 10/3 haygrass/chicken, and haygrass for chicks is 6 haygrass/chick, so we can substitute those into the formula:
(10/3)1 + (10/3)1/2 + 6(20) haygrass/hen
10/3 haygrass+ 10/6 haygrass/colonist + 90 haygrass/colonist
10/3 haygrass + 91 2/3 haygrass/colonist

Test Cycle
A team of five colonists should require:
1 rooster and 3 hens.
10/3 + 5 x 91 2/3 = 461 2/3 haygrass, an area of about 21 x21 tiles.

Gonna go give it a try!

[travin]

A chick grows to maturity in 3/10 of a year; 3/10 x 60 days = 18 days. If chicks eat the same as chickens, then they'll need 18 days of food to develop into an adult.
8 hay/day x 18 days = 144 hay.
144 hay x 1/24 haygrass/hay = 6 haygrass for each chick to grow to adulthood.

I think I'm following, except I get lost trying to figure out how you calculated that a chick needs 8 hay/day x 18 days = 144 hay to reach adulthood and then reduce it to 6 hay to grow to adulthood. They can't possibly reach adult stage on 6 hay if they eat more than that a day, so please help me understand how you arrived at 6 hay in total. Where does the 1/24 reduction factor come from?  I'm clearly missing something. Thx.

Other than that I warn that your factoring on how many eggs will mature as a standard timeline can't happen  because of the bug pertaining to combining eggs in a stack.

[Hadien]

I'm currently running a self sustaining food system primarily on Hydroponic Rice, Hay, and Chicken eggs.

Now I aim for Lavish meals with at least 100 simple and Fine meals stocked, so each colonist (and prisoner, I treat them very well) live off of Lavish meals which is 20 rice + 4 eggs per day . In order to grow enough rice in Hydroponics, each colonist needs 2 Hydro bins of rice each (7 patches, last patch is crash crop). I tightly pack 20 bins per sunlamp in a 9x9 groups.

As for chickens. to satisfy the lavish meal requirement you'd need 2 hens per colonist with as fast as their population boons its easy to have enough eggs. A chicken has a saturation of 0.25 and a hunger rate of 0.35. due to sleep cycles and how chickens tend to slightly overeat, its safe to assume that they can consume 0.5 nutrition a day ( its usually less but I'll just say 0.5 as it makes future math easy and pre-accounts for crash crops). So a full bail of 200 hay will sustain 20 chickens a day and on 100% fertile soil that means each chicken will need about 5 patches of Haygrass.  Also as far as I'm aware, chicks and rooster have the same stats with hens, just different audio and sprite files, so they'll all consume the same amount/day.

Blights, Solar Flares and Breakdowns happen frequenty enough for me that I typically gain an abundance of Eggs. but the great thing about eggs compared to other meats is its more space efficient and takes a full 2 weeks to spoil.

Normally I leave my roosters to pasture and my hens are left in a barn, but if the ratio of eggs:rice gets out of hand I'll either make kibble or force a quick chick population boom then promptly declare "operation day". sending all newborn chicks to the "Slaughterhouse" animal area (space in the freezer full of animal sleeping spots), assign all colonist as doctors and restrict them to the "Operation Day" Area (overlays the exact same space) and schedule all chicks to be euthanized. The process of manually assigning each chick to euthanize is tedious, but hearing the rapid message blips and getting massive medicine XP makes it worthwhile. The Restricting the colonist Area helps prevent them feeding the chicks and wasting medicine.

anywho, 2 Rice Hydros per colonist, 2 Hens per colonist, 5 haygrass patches per chicken and that should be self sustaining. and should leave a decent amount for stockpiling. Of course this is assuming year-round growing season (and cooking the inefficient Lavish Meals), adjust how you see fit of other biomes and meal goals. Also I typically don't like making kibble, less eggs for the colonist and kibble is far less space efficient., really its only done so that my colonist can train up in cooking

[AngleWyrm]

I think I'm following, except I get lost trying to figure out how you calculated that a chick needs 8 hay/day x 18 days = 144 hay to reach adulthood and then reduce it to 6 hay to grow to adulthood.

It's a lot of variables, sorry if it got confusing. The conversion is from how much hay they need to how much haygrass it takes to produce that hay. If each haygrass produces 24 hay/haygrass, then by flipping the fraction we can also say that's 1/24 haygrass/hay.

Doing that gives us a 'hay' on top of a fraction and a 'hay' on the bottom of a fraction so that they cancel out:
144 hay x 1/24 haygrass/hay = 144/24 haygrass = 6 haygrass

Also: Can you tell me more about this egg stack bug?

[Hans Lemurson]

You might want to double-check your numbers.  As far as I can tell, one tile of Haygrass takes 10 days to mature, and yields 18 hay.

[AngleWyrm]

Ok I'll double-check that next.

[makapse]

difficulties change the amount of resources from plants. Base builder gives twice that of extreme.

[travin]

It's a lot of variables, sorry if it got confusing. The conversion is from how much hay they need to how much haygrass it takes to produce that hay. If each haygrass produces 24 hay/haygrass, then by flipping the fraction we can also say that's 1/24 haygrass/hay.

Doing that gives us a 'hay' on top of a fraction and a 'hay' on the bottom of a fraction so that they cancel out:
144 hay x 1/24 haygrass/hay = 144/24 haygrass = 6 haygrass

Also: Can you tell me more about this egg stack bug?

OK, I get what you're saying. You're saying consumption of 8 haygrass/day translates into 6 tiles of haygrass in avg growing conditions, needs to be growing to support that chick into adulthood.

Hay, haygrass, hay/day, hay/haygrass... it's not clear which form and value you're talking about.

However, thinking about it terms of timeline of haygrass growth duration and chicken development time, that is merely a raw figure. It bears pointing out that unless your gameplay is wholely centered on micro-ing the agriculture to exactly coincide with a chicks development, the resource must already be available to support the chick prior to their hatching. And the growing 6 haygrass tiles is what's needed merely as a stock replacement quantity. The only thing missing in this equation is a timeline ranged projection requiring a crop to be sown and harvested in order to break even and avoid storage depletion and related negative impacts. My view is estimating production with at least a 50% overage is the only way to play. I'd venture at least 9 tiles of growing haygrass per chicken in staggered production is probably a reasonably comfortable margin.

As for the eggs stack bug, I believe it's listed in the exploit thread, but I'm not sure. Essentially, eggs of course deteriorate, mature and spoil at different rates. However when you put them in a stack, their condition gets averaged with the other eggs in the stack. So you can revive a "spoiled by temperature", speed or slow down the hatching process by combining it with other eggs in a stack with different conditions. I suspect this is why Tynan makes egg laying random and automatically forbids them, as a work around until he could get back to solving how to handle it properly. 

This gives all your figures an over/under variable because you can't predict when they will actually hatch unless you micro the shit out of them.

And when I get a chance, I'll use your figures to discover how much spontaneous resource generation egg laying is actually producing. It's a great exploit.

[AngleWyrm]

Thanks for the detail on the egg stack bug, looks like they might form a bell curve around some average, unless the numbers bump up against a ceiling or floor.

On thinking about the hay to haygrass relationship, I agree that representing it in terms of haygrass/hay is both unintuitive and somewhat bizarre; I only did it that way as an in-between step to perform the mechanics of getting to how much haygrass it takes in a cycle. There's probably other ways to travel from hay to haygrass in math that might be more intuitive.

Since my current test involves a rather large 21x21 plot of haygrass, I've been planting it in stages; every day that goes by I get around three eggs and plant a block of about 20 tiles in support of the chicks that will come of it.

I haven't yet got any numbers on blight/Cropeaters or other disasters. I like the Pests mod because it changes the non-interactive blight disaster into something a player can work with. Probability/frequency of occurrance and how much they'll eat before being slain is a lot of chance variables, but it might be possible to make a generalization with a really wide spread.

[travin]

My mind is beginning to envision some useful infographics about all this. Don't know if I'll actually do them but it seems like a good idea.

[AngleWyrm]

Life on the Farm
This game is rich in detail, and so there are a lot of complications between theory and practice, something I rather like about it. This is an update on how my chicken farm colony is going so far.

Spring
The first week was dedicated to setting up camp for the colonists, so planting hay began on the 7th. I started with three hens and one rooster to feed five colonists, and so figuring it takes about 10/3 haygrass/chicken I planted a dozen haygrass to start.

Soon the eggs started rolling in, and I planted six haygrass for each in preparation for the coming chicks. In hindsight that may have been overkill, probably should just stick to the 10 haygrass per 3 chickens. Then CropEater pests descended on the field, and they consumed about 1/4 of the haygrass before we killed them off. So overkill turned out to be a good thing.

Towards the end of Spring I wound up with half a dozen fertile Cassawary eggs. Someone probably found them breeding in the wild and brought the eggs back. So I incorporated them in the egg count and built another block of haygrass for them. I found out they take longer to hatch, and the young Cassawaries are born wild. So I slaughtered them and waited for the chicken egg count to catch up before increasing the field. Another bit of extra hay.

Tamed a couple healthy Minions for trade, as they have a good price and I was ahead in the hay department.

At the end of Spring, the haygrass began to mature, and so I created a pen for the chickens to keep them out of the firing line and away from hungry wolves. Their diet switched from free-range grass to the supply of hay coming out of the field.

Summer
I made two mistakes:

• I didn't set my Colony Manager table priority high enough, so hunting and gathering wasn't taking place like it should
• I didn't have any recipes queued up that required only meat, and without gathering there were no veggies available yet

The result was an empty food cupboard, and so a colonist came along and ate the half dozen fertile eggs in the hatchery.

Tamed a wolf just before a bulk goods trader came by and bought my minions and wolf, an easy grand in Silver.

Mid-Summer the chicks began maturing, and off to the dining table they went. At this point I had about 300 haygrass growing in the fields.

It's now late-Summer, and my colonist population has recently grown to seven peeps, so I added an extra hen to cover the two new colonists. Also, the rate of egg laying wasn't as high as numbers would suggest, which may be due to breeding opportunities, so I added a second rooster to...Keep em lively

[travin]

Sounds good.

I've learned the hard way, more than once, to setup a collection zone of a couple of squares specifically for fertilized eggs, keep them forbidden and make pet zones that don't include it. Similar with my overage estimate for growing feed stocks, there's always a disaster you can't account for.

Good info on the cassowarys. I've steered clear of breeding them. But I'm curious about ostrich and the meat yields of their eggs considering their size. In real life I believe the are the quantity of something like 16 large chicken eggs.

[Hans Lemurson]

All eggs in RimWorld provide the same 0.25 nutrition.  If you want food proportional to their size, let them hatch and slaughter the cute little babies.

[AngleWyrm]

Fall
By mid-Fall it had become apparent that hay production was outstripping consumption, likely a failure to take into account the different amounts of time between hay and chick maturation rates. So I'm going to run another test and stick to the initial premise that 3 chick(ens) will need 10 haygrass. Test number two under way.