The cooling loop is integrated with the cabin’s water supply. Water used for daily needs also cools the cabin, providing permanent temperature control.

Note that the Luxury Barracks and Great Hall are provided purely for the crew’s well-being and are not part of the cooling system.

This Divergent ranch is split into three rooms to take advantage of the Sweetle–Grubgrub mutation mechanic.

Room 1 keeps a small population of Sweetles without providing any mutation conditions. Its only purpose is to produce regular Sweetle eggs and maintain a stable breeding population.

Room 2 also ranches Sweetles, but provides the conditions that encourage them to lay Grubgrub eggs. This is the main source of Grubgrubs for food production, since Sweetles reproduce much faster than Grubgrubs themselves.

Room 3 is the actual Grubgrub ranch. Grubgrub eggs produced elsewhere in the system are sent here to hatch and be raised.

Egg Sorting

Both Sweetles and Grubgrubs always have a chance to produce eggs of the other species. Because of this, a secondary sorting system is essential. All eggs are first sent to the critter replenishment area on their current floor. Any eggs that do not belong there are then sorted out and rerouted to the appropriate area: Sweetle eggs to the first floor and Grubgrub eggs to the second floor.

Lumb Harvesting

Rooms 2 and 3 contain Grubfruit Plants to provide the mutation conditions. Unfortunately, there is a somewhat unfinished interaction with these plants in the current version of the game. Once a Grubfruit Plant is pollinated, the game effectively treats the pollinated version as a "new" plant, which resets its harvest setting. Even if harvesting was manually disabled beforehand, Enable Harvest will be turned back on after pollination.

To solve this problem, wild Lumbs are introduced into Rooms 2 and 3. A locked Pneumatic Door blocks their path to the Grooming Station to keep them wild, while also preventing dupes from entering the ranch through that route. As a result, all harvesting is left to the Lumbs.

Automation

There is also a small piece of automation controlling critter delivery. A Buffer Gate delays the Pneumatic Doors used to introduce replacement Sweetles or Grubgrubs.

This creates a simple priority system: if a ranch needs both a replacement Divergent and a Lumb at the same time, the delay ensures that the Lumb enters the ranch first.

This is a Radbolt Rocket Spaceport built around a volcano tamer, designed to completely exhaust every resource POI on the star map. The tamer primarily handles the high-temperature materials brought back from space, particularly magma and molten iridium, with the resulting igneous rock fed into a Stone Hatch ranch above the volcano.

The Stone Hatches convert the igneous rock into coal, which is refined into refined carbon and fed into Diamond Presses to produce diamonds for Drillcones. This creates a resource loop around space mining: Volcano / Space Magma → Igneous Rock → Coal → Refined Carbon → Diamond → Drillcones → Space Mining.

A fuel-limited Research Reactor supplies the entire spaceport, providing radbolts for more than 20 Radbolt Engine rockets as well as the Diamond Presses. This is achieved by generating large amounts of nuclear waste, which serves as a concentrated radiation source for radbolt production.

The most important part of the automation is a Radbolt Reflector that distributes radbolts based on demand. Rocket refueling always takes priority: whenever any rocket in the spaceport needs fuel, the reflector is disabled and all radbolts are sent to the refueling line. Only after all rockets are fully fueled are radbolts redirected to the Diamond Presses, with the second press serving as a buffer. Once the primary press is sufficiently charged, the system switches back to the rocket line, and any excess radbolts that could pose a safety risk are simply redirected and fired into space. The reactor currently produces nearly 18,000 radbolts per cycle, so waste simply isn't a consideration here.

I'm still testing the full ranch, but I wanted to make a separate post explaining the core idea and the pathfinding mechanic behind it. Once the build passes long-term testing, I'll post it separately and refer back here for the details.

When pathfinding downward, voles prioritize landing on tiles diagonally below them at a 45° angle. Without a valid landing spot, they simply get stuck. I have no idea why this happens, but it does. This quirk can be used to create a one-way passage that only allows voles to travel upward. Combined with automation, this one-way passage allows Voles to move into a new room only after certain conditions are met.

In the current version, a vole at 10 happiness gains 39% reproduction per cycle. Its starting calories last roughly eight cycles before starvation, enough to lay two eggs without ever being fed. That's already enough for positive population growth. Once the vole lays its second egg, the automation can send the vole away, avoiding any further dupe labor or wasted brackene.

Why do this? In a traditional vole ranch, dupes can't distinguish old or no-longer-useful voles, so they'll keep grooming every one of them until they die. This design avoids that waste entirely: the youngest vole enters → lays two eggs → leaves → the next one enters. Rinse and repeat.

This system uses six Meteor Blasters to provide full coverage around the hexagonal map.

Each Meteor Blaster is aimed into space using an Intracosmic Blastshot. Once fired, the Blaster continuously watches that exact point in space. Whenever another meteor passes through the same location, the Blaster will automatically fire another Blastshot and destroy it—as long as it receives a green automation signal at that moment.

By assigning each Blaster to a different sector around the planet, the six together form a complete Meteor Defense Matrix that passively intercepts incoming meteors.

Initial Setup

A Radar is only needed during the initial setup.

Connect the Radar to an Automation Notifier. Whenever it detects an incoming meteor, manually aim one Meteor Blaster at that location. Repeat this until all six approach sectors around the planet have been registered.

Once every Blaster has locked onto its assigned position, the Radar is no longer needed and can be safely deconstructed. From that point onward, the entire defense system operates autonomously.

Automation

Meteors always reach the planet within the first 60 seconds after sunrise. However, an Intracosmic Blastshot requires about 63 seconds to travel from the Meteor Blaster to its target, so waiting until sunrise to fire is already too late.

Instead, the Blasters receive a brief green pulse shortly before nightfall on the previous cycle. This gives the Blastshot enough time to intercept the meteor before it reaches the planet.

An additional benefit of firing early is that the Radar won't repeatedly notify you about locations that have already been assigned. Once all six sectors have been calibrated, the Radar can be safely removed.

A pulse duration of 0.5–1% of a cycle is enough to fire exactly one Blastshot. Keeping the signal active for longer doesn't improve reliability—it only wastes electricity. With these settings, the complete defense network consumes only about 5 kJ per cycle.

EDIT: Before calibrating the Blasters, make sure your Space Scanner's Network Quality is at least 31%.

This design uses an extremely small amount of hydrogen to create a permanent deep-freeze environment for food storage. The biggest advantage of this approach is its simplicity. Once built, it requires no maintenance, allowing it to be integrated into any colony.

The idea relies on a game mechanic where heat exchange below a certain threshold is ignored. By filling the chamber with only a trace amount of hydrogen and cooling the gas inside the radiant gas pipe, preventing food spoilage without the need for a conventional cooling loop.

Edit:

A couple of additional tips:

1. At minimum, use steel for the radiant gas pipe. Any material with higher thermal conductivity will also work.

2. The less hydrogen, the better. I recommend keeping it below 20 mcg. The easiest way to achieve this is by repeatedly pausing and unpausing the game while watching the gas pump, until the chamber reaches the target amount of gas.

This module continuously produces liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen for hydrogen rockets. The theoretical liquid hydrogen production rate is around 2 kg/s, though the actual sustained output is somewhat lower depending on operating conditions. Realistically, very few colonies ever need this level of fuel production. I built it simply because I wanted a system that could support any future rocket demand without ever becoming a bottleneck.

One of the key features of the design is a dedicated pre-cooling stage. Before entering the liquefaction chamber, both hydrogen and oxygen are cooled to around −175°C, allowing the Aquatuners to focus almost entirely on the final phase change instead of removing heat from room-temperature gas. This keeps the liquefaction process running at maximum throughput.

The incoming oxygen supply is also managed automatically. Oxygen is prioritized for liquid oxygen production until the desired reserve has been reached. After that, the remaining room-temperature oxygen is automatically redirected to the astronaut module for life support.

Most of the automation is dedicated to controlling the gas and liquid shutoffs. The philosophy is simple: never leave anything inside the pipes. This prevents gas from liquefying inside gas pipes and avoids phase-change pipe damage, while ensuring any remaining LH₂ or LOX is returned to storage after refueling.

Liquid distribution is handled by a memory toggle. When a hydrogen rocket lands, the Rocket Port sends a green signal to the Set input, opening the liquid shutoff and supplying fuel to the rocket. A liquid element sensor at the end of each supply line detects when liquid hydrogen or liquid oxygen reaches the endpoint, confirming that the entire line has been filled. The sensor then sends a signal to the Reset input, closing the shutoff valve. Any remaining cryogenic liquid naturally drains back into the storage tanks, leaving the entire fueling network empty and ready for the next launch.

This is a general-purpose aquatic critter ranch that can be adapted to most aquatic species with little or no modification.

The core of this ranch is the one-way Drecko routing system.

Most of the time, the timer sensor keeps the pneumatic door closed. During this phase, the Dreckos remain inside the hydrogen chamber, where they regrow their scales.

When the timer turns green, the pneumatic door opens. By then, the Dreckos have usually been hungry for quite a while, so they all leave the hydrogen room together to eat. If their scales have fully regrown, a dupe will shear them at the Shearing Station while they're out.

Once the timer switches back and the door closes again, the sheared Dreckos return to the hydrogen chamber through the one-way door, where they begin regrowing their scales for the next cycle.

The entire ranch operates as a simple repeating loop: grow scales → eat → get sheared → return to hydrogen → repeat.

This high-pressure liquid setup pushes gas into a storage chamber and works with any gas vent. The recommended high-pressure liquid is crude oil, petroleum, or super coolant, with a target mass of around 1,500 kg.

For hot steam vents, I personally recommend using a super coolant. Otherwise, you will need to adjust the heat exchange structure or automation settings to prevent a phase change in the liquid.

Tested for 1,000 cycles and confirmed stable :)

The reef has also adopted a few outsiders, I think they fit in pretty well.

Hope you like them!

Please don't worry about meat spoilage.

From now on, we will always provide the freshest ingredients.

The initial design was a diamond press, but clearly that location isn't as 'safe' as I imagined.

Check this out if you hate complicated automation!

Pro tip: you don't actually need to do all this. The real way to get resin is to pay for the Prehistoric DLC.