Critters Tier List! (ONI: Spaced Out!)

[@RoozleDoozle-9210]

For the wild pip planting, if you drop a piece of sand onto a flower pot, and let the pip plant it onto the sand, you can copy the settings of the flower pot and let crop plants be in flower pots so you aren’t limited by the space pip planting takes up while keeping them wild. It doesn’t work for plants that require liquids though.

[@jimmyli5059]

You can actually copy the settings in these flower pots with the plants to other flower pots, and these plants grow at domesticated speed without consuming fertilizer. This is why many people see this as an exploit and avoid using it.

[@RoozleDoozle-9210]

actually I’m pretty sure they only grow at wild speed, but they don’t consume ANY of the resources

[@andrehashimoto8056]

Longhair slickster seem to me to be the "Mid and Late Game Budget Abyss Bug", high Decor, can be used everywhere within the Living Quarters area, doesn't create any Byproducts, desirable or not, to "Polute" the decor of the living space, live for enough Cycles to be worth something in a sense, and that's it. Though they usually are undesirable because one Popping on a Normal Slickster means your Slickster ranch has COOLED TOO MUCH. Abyss Bugs are a Pain in the ass long game planning from Early game to Mid, IF your colony can upkeep the food to progress that Evolution all the way, then some more to feed them expensive and/or non-renewable materials as food to upkeep. Longhair Slicksters are the budget, no intense headache alternative of it, just pop one excess slickster on a ranch cool enough for a Longhair egg, then pop that sucker into the Living quarters and call it a day. That's all I can see why Longhair slicksters were made to be as they are.

[@yjk92]

I've done gulp fish cooling, then failed, ragequit, and started a new run. I think my issue was that I wanted to build a big pool because I was gonna put a lot of gulp fish in there, but then the pool need to be fully filled to the top where the fish are so that the fish aren't cramped, which means hundreds of tons of water that an aquatuner just couldn't cool down and my fish died. My advice is to start small and work yourself up to a bigger tank. And you probably already know the airflow tile trick to keep the polluted water and water separate; have the fish sit above an airflow tile, polluted water in the right of the airflow tile, then the fish takes that diagonally and produce water on the same tile as the fish. And the fish is stuck in that one tile using a mesh tile so the fish is always converting.

[@Hanmacx]

Gulb Fish can poop ice 😅

[@NatanStarke]

Sages are easily the best hatch, easier to keep, eat tons of otherwise near eternal polluted dirt from the ethanol distillers, you just have to hold some for pokeshells and some for composters

[@darcyayers8807]

Early game I put the shine bugs in the latrine to provide light and the radiation also kills the germs.

[@Tamizushi]

With regard to oakshell, an underused strategy is to use them as breeders for other variants. An oakshell in water will tend to lay sanishell. An oakshell in a dry ranch will tend to lay pokeshells. Yet, the critter will still shed their 100 kg of lumber per cycle. Since you are losing out the lumber from their offspring, they will be less efficient on a pdirt to sand basis: they end up at around 50% over their lifetime like other morphs. However, if you were gonna ranch pokeshells or sanishells anyway, it's almost certainly better to use oakshells as breeders for that juicy 50 kg of ethanol per cycle. Essentially, oakshells raised for oakshells will consume about 13 kg of pdirt and give 17.5 kg of sand, 32kg of water each cycle and 108 watts of net power. Oakshells raised in water or air will give cost at most 37 kg of pdirt per cycle and produce 17.5 kg of sand, 18.75 kg of pwater each cycle and 70 watts, plus an egg every 6 cycles. A pokeshell or a sanishell raised in their own element will cost 70 kg of pdirt for 35 kg of sand and an egg every 6 cycle, but no water and no power.

[@Tamizushi]

With regard to puft princes, you only really need to mix them with puft if you are ranching squeaky pufts and dense pufts. If all you are after is the slime, then can have a separate breeder puft prince in its own ranch supporting up to 15 regular pufts. In my humble opinion, regular pufts are easily high A tier. That's because they are key to producing quiche. Quiche is a complex food to produce, having several parts to it, but it's also extremely resource efficient. It's the only +5 quality food to also give 20% protection against radiation. It also has the highest calory/weight of any food in the game, which means it will produce the most resin if fed to the resin tree. Essentially, a maximum of 93,000kcals of quiches can be fed to the tree per cycle for up to 465kg of resin Pufts can easily be fed by sublimating pdirt from ethanol distillation. You may decide to have 10 pufts per ranche, making them satisfied but not happy. This way negatively impact the rate at which they lay eggs, but they will produce more slime. Or alternatively, have a 6 pufts ranch but give them a critter condo instead of a grooming station, sacrificing a little bit of meat so save labor. The pufts produce slimes to grow duskcaps. Pips and floxes, the two most natural critters for wood production, are both decent sources of eggs and you can get the rest very efficiently from pacus. If your farmer is high enough level, then you usually get enough seeds from the duskcaps alone to feed your pacus, but if you don't have enough than you can fill the gap by distillating slime into algae. It's a good idea to expose your farm to radiation so you can slowly upgrade your plants to their exhuberant mutation, which will sacrifice their seed production but greatly improve the yield and also partly refund the pdirt you spent in the process. You will also get a tiny amount of pdirt from pacus when they eat. Algae distillation, along with burning ethanol in petroleum generators, produce enough pwater to grow domestic arbor trees with water surplus. Or floxes can easily get fed from drecko phosphorus. The last ingredient, lettuce, is only required in a very small amount. It can easily be grown wild or using a minuscute amount of bleach and salt water. So again, to my point, the whole production chain is complex, but also extremely efficient. Everything kinda feeds on itself. And pufts are at the very center of it. Depending on how much you optimize the process, 1 or 2 puff ranches are enough to completely saturate the resin tree, and also to produce more than enough +5 quality food for any colony your computer can handle.

[@Game_InSky]

I personally always dump all of my shove voles into a small enclosed metal room and wild 'ranch' them. They always lay one egg so I don't see the point in going through all the effort of taming them. Just let them sit there, out of the way, producing meat for basically no cost. The fact that they never feel crowded means that it is infinitely scaleable with the printing pod. Makes them upper A tier/low S tier imo.

[@erisia_gaming]

Yes this is true, leaving them alone and controlled is probably worthwhile and low effort.

[@wreckingangel]

I often use smog slugs in rockets, they don't need power and free up building space otherwise needed for pumps. Not as relevant in the late game when better rocket tech is unlocked but really nice for early rocket designs.

[@Redneck353]

Early game i like a sanishel in my water tank to filter the poison and it's quite effective, don't have to ranch it, just toss one in the pool and let it do it's job, way easier to set up then a chlorine chamber

[@Theyflower]

YES!!! SQUEAKY PUFT A TIER!!! i love them

[@stevewohlwend1010]

37:55 I was under the impression that shad have fairly small mouths *rimshot*

[@tyraelpl]

In the past morbs were use for huge ceramic production setups. Back then it wasnt as easy to get pO2. If you've been playing back then you know what i mean.

[@Redneck353]

I like my smooth hatches early game to avoid making a ruck crusher but it's only temporary for sure

[@Joakico]

In my playthrough I have a puft ranch, along with an algae distiller and a pacu ranch. It produces enough pacu fillet for surf n turf to feed my 13 duplicants.

[@nolan4339]

I wonder if a Gassy Moo ranch setup would be a good speedrun criteria.

[@erisia_gaming]

That is a very good point! I've noticed the Moo asteroid is a lot closer on some seeds than others.

[@Redneck353]

smog slugs are a free vacum tool too but have to be patient

[@shyzunk]

I dont understand how people dont use plug slugs. Generally as soon as I get to stem turbine tech and space travel, all my bigger colonies tend to run on plug slugs with a central launching planetoid with metal volcanoes launching metal where needed and there is always a huge metal surplus even while fully feeding them. Its not the only energy source for a late game colony, but having a 4800W income from 3 slugs each night definitely provides a massive free buffer until you have insane power needs, and you still get extra hydrogen you can use during the day. I think shinebugs are getting a slight nerf to their light generation utility on the new map. You can have infinite light from lumen quartz and currently it is portable so you can just drop one into your bathroom and bam, never again worry about bugs flying all over and dying. Right now, the ice map is mostly closed circles and I cant think of much useful interaction with other contents, except I think I like the idea of having separate heated ethanol pools with oakshells as wood now has plenty of new uses as well as there being a new CO2 burning process for cold temperatures to sustain more ethanol distilleries at a discount - without having to have slicksters early on, or needing carbon scrubbers or giant oxyfern fields via pips. The new Alveos eat Co2 so quickly I mostly run out of it when I try to produce oxylite... The frozen map so far seems to be somewhat energy poor, so any extra ethanol is a huge help.

[@Joakico]

Because they eat a lot. A single plug slug eats 60 Kg/cycle. A regular metal volcano produces around 300g/s along all active/dormant periods, which is 180 kg/cycle. So you need almost 3 metal volcanoes to feed a single plug slug ranch. Sure it will give you almost 13k W but you can get a lot better by using a petroleum boiler with a single minor volcanoe and three oil wells. This will net you around 10k watts along with a excess pwater, a LOT of CO2 for mass ranching slickers which in return give you a lot more meat and power than using a metal volcano for power.

[@erisia_gaming]

The key is the ease of initial access and using the semi-starvation trick to get 800W per Slug out with only a small amount of Refined Metal feeding.

[@taragnor]

They're okay early game, but generally later on you'll be doing a lot with your metals so you don't want to feed it to plug slugs when you have essentially near-infinite power with petroleum or nuclear. Power generation really isn't a big problem for me. I typically just use the petroleum for plastic and power. I use radbolt engines for the rockets up until hydrogen power.

[@shyzunk]

Interestingly, on the frosty planet, there tend to be no volcanoes unless added by traits. So no boilers, unless I want to build big on third or fourth planetoid. Petroleum generation thus requires multiple dupe input for a long while plugs only use ranching. And I swim in hundreds of tons of metals despite feeding them full amounts :-D

[@NatanStarke]

​@@shyzunki sacrifice useless metals to them " ref copper being one of them". Theyre very strong early i like to ranch only 1 or 2 of them and thats it for all my early needs.

[@Raye938]

I feel like smooth hatches should be higher specifically because there were two conflicting pieces of logic putting them in C tier. First was ore is finite so it would be wasted while also metal volcanoes get you more metal than you will ever use. If you've got metal volcanoes then feeding them ore is just free food for your dupes with little labor/heat/energy.

[@erisia_gaming]

The Volcanoes give you Refined Metal, not Metal Ore, which is used to build some different things. Granted, you can build most of them out of Steel, but that's not usually necessary unless you run out of Metal Ore.

[@IMortage]

Smooth hatches arent supposed to skip refineries. They're supposed to skip rock crushers. If you're slow to start refineries, they are a source of early metals.

[@Bzhydack]

How can you put Morb so low, there is very easy way to have tons of them vias constantly enabled and disabled outhouse on mechanized airlock. After I set this up, my entire base run on oxygen produced that way, for little power and some filtration medium. And Im able to feed 4 Puft ranches as well! Easily A tier critter.

[@erisia_gaming]

For me it's mostly performance related. Each individual Morb produces so little on a per-critter basis that any base I made that relies on Morbs would get laggy faster than usual and be less enjoyable in general. If performance wasn't important they would definitely be higher; as you say, it's literally free resources.

[@games-wz7sz]

I swear there is an achievement to get to the diamond bug

[@erisia_gaming]

Sadly not! I hope they add it some day.

[@許博翔-w9o]

If sponge slug can pump the lava It can be more more useful😢

[@miravlix]

While I use critters all the time and love them, I also feel like they are a bit of a n00b trap, there is better ways to get the output. Only solid item is meat, but I can make food in better ways without meat.