Maybe 2026 will be the Year of Clowning Around?
…Year of Pranxis? 🤔

This is meant to be read in the rushed cadence of a Ben Shapiro-style debate

Power. Once I get the infrastructure in place, my next step is going to be repairing that geothermal power plant that’s so far underground. My dupes will definitely appreciate not having to run on hamster wheels anymore. But before I do that, I’ll need to get a bit of plastic to make the turbines…

That’s why my next project is actively cooled farms and ranches. The bammoth’s plume squashes need ethanol, and I can distill that ethanol from flox’s wood. Polluted dirt is a byproduct of that distillation, so everyone should be all fed :)

That cooling and distillation is going to need a lot of

Make plenty of steel. In the meantime, I’m running out of polluted dirt to feed the breeders. Now that my base has warmed up, I’ve switched to plumbed bathrooms to save on labor time, but now I don’t have any polluted dirt production. These guys need to eat, and so do my dupes.

I’m still keeping it though, I like to watch the babies get pushed down the chute :)

Anyways, now I’ve got 3 breeder pokeshells and a whole bunch of starving ones. It’s been going for about 30 cycles or so, so the full molt rate is still about 70 cycles off. When the time comes, I’ll be able to

Loop for these critters.

After a while though, I realized the pokeshells in the pit weren’t aggressive. That’s when I realized my misunderstanding, and why a build like this wasn’t common. The pokeshells only protect their EGGS, the babies are fine. The whole chute idea is redundant.

I saw that another door can push the critters down if it closes on top of the critter. For some reason, a simple build for managing pokeshells like this wasn’t common enough for me to see on Google. I set up some automation for this to happen and my chute works like a charm. I had made the whole

Into a pit that all the aggressive pokeshells can starve in (and drop their molts) that my dupes aren’t allowed in to get hurt. When the first egg hatched, I realized the issue. Whenever a door opens, a critter won’t fall down if they’re standing on it, unless “pushed.” after some quick googling,

Remember that. I had an auto sweeper taking the eggs out of the room, but it was just dumping them into the room upstairs. For the first time, I set up long-term incubators. Nextdoor to the main stable, I put in a room with a door as the floor that should open and drop any delivered pokeshell spawn

Instead, which doesn’t produce the lime I need :( I ended up just putting a door over that water tile to keep them from walking into it.

With the stable solved, I needed a better solution for the roe. The thing about Pokeshells is that they will tern aggressive if they’re near their eggs.

The poor guys. To cool them off quicker than the small air exchange out of the stable, I put a few ice Tempshift plates into the pool. But now one of the tiles in the pool was water. For most critters this wouldn’t be a problem, but wading in water increases the chance of laying Sanishell roe

So I put in the order for that pool and got distracted with other things. When I finally got back to the stable, my pokeshells were too hot! I had forgotten to put in automation to stop the warming at a reasonable temperature. By the time I got it solved, they were at ~60 degrees C.

+2 reproduction per cycle, because ceres minor was far too cold. I decided to put in a pool of brine with a liquid tepidizer in it. Not only would that be a more energy efficient way to heat the place than a space heater, but I also thought it was more thematically appropriate for a crab.

And dropped it down in my nature reserve. I quickly got to work to put together a pokeshell stable, and soon enough it was tame. The problem though is that they don’t produce lime through metabolism, you only get it from their molts when they mature and when they die. My pokeshell was only getting

And not only were most of my crops wilted, but all of my bammoths had starved already. Luckily, my dupes seemed to be mostly managing making berry sludge from wild sleet wheat and the few pikeapples that were cold enough, so food wasn’t too urgent. Luckily, at some point I had printed a Pokeshell

The stables from crowding to really get the eggs flowing. Overall, I’d only gotten 110 kg of lime from eggshells in all that time.

With my oxygen problem solved for another 1000 cycles more or less, the next thing I needed to do was set up sustainable food production. My farms were overheating