User talk:ArdentSpark

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Welcome to the Ranch! As a Rancher, your job is to look after and breed various animals in the Ranch. Currently only Chickens are implemented for this, however others may be developed further down the line. With a little love and attention, the Rancher can harvest certain produce and items not available otherwise, and also providing an alternate way to producing chemicals and ore.

The Ranch

Your workspace is most of the time located directly attached to Botany, or very very close. Botanists do not have access to your exclusive chicken club, so if you need assistance feeding them, you may have to lock the door open if you plan on leaving for a long time. You do have access to Botany, as you require specific feeds for your chickens. You can either grow the plants yourself, or plead in despair as all of the trays are claimed for weed.

You have the following equipment available to you within Hydroponics and the ranch:

• Plant pots with status light meters. Feel free to move them to a more aesthetically pleasing formation, then use a wrench to fix them to the ground.

• A seed dispenser, which can be hacked to provide some especially interesting selections.

• A GardenGear vending machine, containing your standard equipment like produce satchels and plant formulas.

• A PlantMaster Mk3 machine, which can extract seeds from produce as well as infuse seeds or splice them.

• A reagent extractor, which can extract reagents from produce. Also has built-in storage tanks.

• A CheMaster 3000, used to turn extracted reagents into pills or bottles.

• Chicken Enclosures which are constructed out of Reinforced Railings, which prevent chickens from passing under them. Default Railings are bypassed by chickens.

• An Egg Incubator in each Enclosure, which after a short time will hatch the egg placed inside. This can be scanned, and constructed by the Mechanics team.

• A Nesting Box in each Enclosure, however unlike the Egg Incubator these can be dragged around, and purchased from a GardenGear.

Chickens

Bock, bock, chickens, feathered friends that, while tangential to your main agriculture duties, provide cluckloads of fun. Chickens provide plenty of eggs, and can also be butchered directly into chicken nuggets, if you're willing to do such a fowl act. All the chicken breeds can also provide unique eggs. But most importantly, they are cute and ex-hens-sively pettable!

Chickens are under what's called "closed source". That means that while you won't find much info about these feathered friends on the public GitHub, you're free to share info about them with others. Because of this there may be information yet undiscovered, or mechanical values that are yet to be determined. Why not experiment?

Getting Started

To start raising chickens, you first need to put an egg into the chicken egg incubator. Every map either has an incubator lying in Hydroponics somewhere, or a dedicated Ranch department room. As for eggs, one always spawns on each Egg Incubator expressly for chicken rearing. If you need more, it's usually easiest to ask for some from the Chef or order a Meat, Eggs, and Diary crate from Cargo. It's also possible to start with an egg as a trinket or even grow your own.

After sitting in an incubator, eggs become chicks. Chicks eventually grow up into either a hen or a rooster. Both can eventually die of old age.

Almost all the time, your chickens will grow up into hens. Hens occasionally lay eggs if there is an available nesting box around; there are some in the GardenGear, and the eggs should be cleared out every so often because hens do not like nesting boxes overcrowded with eggs. Eggs are an important ingredient in many dishes, and given that each egg can become a new hen, they are essentially a renewable, theoretically infinite source of eggs. Hens are quite passive; if you attack them, they tend to just try to run away.

Chicks can also become roosters, if--and only if--the egg in question came from an hen. That means you eggs you start with, eggs you get from the Kitchen, and other places won't give you roosters! Roosters don't lay eggs, but they do sit on eggs in nesting boxes, allowing them to hatch, with a high chance of passing on their genetics to the resulting chick. Roosters are also highly defensive; if you attack a chicken, all the roosters who witness it go after you, just like with Monkeys.

Chicken Tending

All the while, chickens need food to eat, specifically feed! To get feed, simply insert some sort of food, such as corn, into the chicken feed grinder. Then put the resulting feed on the floor. Different feeds may result in different chickens.

There's more to hunger than simply keeping your flock of fowl alive; keeping your chickens happy and well-fed has many benefits. Behaviour such as egg laying and hatching can be accelerated by keeping your chickens happy!