A step-by-step walkthrough for constructing simple, automated divergent ranches. Also includes a compendium of research and statistics on the performance of divergent critters.
 
 

1. Introduction

I recently published a guide on ranching hatches – [steamcommunity.com] , and then decided to play my first swampy asteroid. I knew there wouldn’t be any hatches but I a*sumed I could ranch sweetles using the same strategies to provide food for the colony. While I wouldn’t have the infinite energy that comes from burning coal, I intended to use plug slugs to take over that role and I thought the sucrose from sweetles could jump start an early rocketry program.
 
 
It didn’t take me long to realize that my a*sumptions were quite flawed. Ranching sweetles (optimally) is quite different from ranching hatches. In addition, I found that there is far less information available online about the DLC critters, and some of what’s out there is not quite correct. I ran several hundred cycles of testing on divergent critters, plus their interactions with grubfruit, and I wanted to share what I’ve learned.
 
 
 

2. Objectives

The objectives for my divergent ranch were essentially the same as those for my earlier hatch ranches. Generally, I wanted to automate as much of the process of running the ranch as possible, so all the dupes have to worry about is grooming.
 
 
One difference was that hatches can eat just about anything, and can last for thousands of cycles on the basic rocks and minerals obtained from digging out your starting planet. Divergent critters require sulfur, and that comes in a far shorter supply. You should be able to dig plenty at the beginning of the game to get a ranch running, but eventually you’ll need a renewable source. Currently, that means either a taming a sulfur geyser, or building a sour gas boiler. The latter is generally an advanced late-game build, so I decided to see how much food a divergent ranch could generate from a single sulfur geyser.
 
 

Requirements

 

• Again just a personal preference. They take up a lot of room, a lot of power, and require dupes to interact with them. We’re aiming for full automation.

 

Goals / “Nice to Haves” (In approximate order of importance)

 

• i.e. should not wait the full ~19 (sweetle) or ~38 (grubgrub) cycles for a new egg to hatch and grow to adulthood

 
 
 

3. Background Research

Most readers can skip this section and jump straight into the ranch construction.

 
This section documents the tests I ran to understand divergent critter mechanics, fact check what little information I could find about them, and hopefully learn to optimize ranching them.
 
 
I’m documenting this information so other folks can potentially build upon it and come up with even better designs. If you’re just here to build a ranch that works, you don’t need any of this meta-info. But if you like game mechanics, or want to know why I made some of the decisions I did, please read on.
 
 
 

– Divergent Reproduction

For the most part, divergents reproduce according to the same rules as other “standard” critters in ONI. They do not have the ability to infinitely reproduce while glum like shine bugs and pacu. The only thing unique about divergents is that they are capable of producing eggs for two types of sub-species.
 
 
I won’t go into much detail as this is covered well in various other places (e.g. FANDOM Wiki – [fandom.com] ) but the term “divergent” refers to both sweetles and grubgrubs. Either critter can lay eggs of either type, with the chances of grubgrub eggs going up every time the critter tends to a Grubfruit plant.
 
 
I ran tests on different combinations of wild, tame, fed, starved, groomed (happy) and glum sweetles. The results should be the same for grubgrubs, and the highlights are shown below:
 

• The sweetle will produce two eggs and then starve to death around cycle 24, so this can perpetually increase the population.

The other item to note about these critters is the difference in their reproductive rates and meat production. Sweetles produce eggs almost twice as fast as grubgrubs (when happy), but live only half as long. Additionally, an expired sweetle only provides 1600 meat while a grubgrub is worth 4800. So any strategy for maximizing meat output should rely on ranching sweetles (double the egg production) and forcing them to produce grubgrub eggs (triple the meat).
 
 
Sweetles start with only a 2% chance of laying a grubgrub egg, and the only way to increase this is by having them tend to grubfruit plants. Thus, in order to maximize meat production, a divergent “ranch” really needs to be a hybrid grubfruit “farm” as well.
 
 
 

– Divergent Meat Production

One of the first experiments I ran was to compare the meat production from straight ranching divergents against hatches. I built three automated ranches in the style of my previous guide and filled one with eight hatches, one with eight sweetles and one with six grubgrubs. Grubgrubs require 16 tiles per critter so six is the maximum capacity of a 96 tile ranch. The following screenshot shows the latter two ranches, along with the frozen storage for preserving and counting all resources produced.
 
 

 
 
I ran the ranches for ~450 cycles, taking measurements along the way. In the end I removed the first ~100 cycles worth of data to ensure the remaining data reflected the long term stable output. It takes a ranch 20-45 cycles to produce its first meat, so I didn’t want the early meatless period weighing down the numbers. I also wanted to ensure that the counting duration spanned multiple critter lifetimes and replacements from eggs. The results I obtained are shown below:
 
 

 
 
The unstated unit in the screenshot is KCal/cycle after cooking the meat into barbecue. The hatch and sweetle data came out almost exactly as I expected, but the grubgrub data was significantly lower. I don’t believe anything went wrong with the test, given the setup and counting method was identical to the other two, so I likely made a mistake in predicting egg counts based on their reproduction rate?
 
 
In any case, it is clear that ranching divergent critters solely for meat is not nearly as effective as ranching hatches. Hatch ranches produce ~50% more KCal per cycle, so we’re going to have to combine divergents with farm crops to make up the difference.
 
 
 

– Grubfruit and Divergent Tending

Before I ran my own experiements I was able to get some great information from the following two posts:
 
zach123b – Sweetles and Grubgrubs
 
https://forums.kleientertainment.com/forums/topic/123942-sweetles-and-grubgrubs/ – [kleientertainment.com] 
 
MooChiChi – Divergents: The Solved Mystery
 
https://forums.kleientertainment.com/forums/topic/126611-divergents-the-solved-mystery/ – [kleientertainment.com] 
 
 
That information gave me a huge leg up and most of it I was able to verify with minimal testing. For example, some interesting observations:
 

• A single wild or starved divergent critter will detangle 10 spindly grubfruit plants, turning them into the more productive grubfruit plant, over the 8 cycle course of the plant’s growth. If you don’t care about getting growth bonuses, only detangling the plants, 1:10 is a great ratio.
• If you do care about getting growth bonuses, you either need to feed your divergents, or use a lot more of them. A single starved critter will only maintain the growth bonus on 1-1.5 plants per cycle. Assuming the ratio above, 7-8 starved critters should be able to maintain the bonus on 10 plants.

The one major area where my results did not match those above was in the number of plants tended to by a tame, happy and fed divergent.
 
 
The above guides said that a well fed divergent would keep the growth bonus on 6-7 plants but my early ranch designs were not matching that a*sumption. As such, I designed an experiment specifically to test this. I set up three automated stables, each with 20 grubfruit plants. In the first I put 3 grubgrubs, in the second I put 4, and in the third I put 5. The idea was that if each critter really can tend 6 or more plants, 3 should be able to provide the 50% growth bonus to at least 18 of the plants, and probably all 20 most of the time. Having a 4th divergent in the stable should provide little to no benefit but would ensure all 20 plants are always tended, and the 5th divergent should not make any difference at all since all plants are already tended 24/7.
 
 
In theory, a planted grubfruit produces one fruit every 8 cycles. The fruit is then cooked into preserve, worth 2400 KCal. Thus the expected output of a single plant is 300 KCal/cycle. In order to measure the above ranches I calculated the total amount of KCal produced over several hundred cycles, which reveals the overall growth bonus being provided to the plants. If it’s less than the expected 50%, then not all plants were being tended all the time.
 
 
Here is what my test ranches looked like, plus the frozen storage for collecting and counting resources produced:
 
 

 
 
After over 300 cycles of running these ranches, the data collected does not match the expected 6-7 plants tended per critter.
 
 

 
 
In my control test, I didn’t quite obtain the expected 300 KCal/cycle from each plant. I suspect this is due to inefficiencies where once a plant is ready to harvest, a farmer has to run over from the other side of the map and get the fruit before the plant can start its growth cycle over again. Even so, I was only off by 3%, so I consider that a reasonable experimental error.
 
 
The 3 grubgrub farm on the other hand was only able to maintain an average 33% growth bonus to the plants, compared to the control group, as opposed to the expected 50%. While spot checking the plants it was common to see 6 to 8 at a time that were not showing the tending bonus. It is clear that the critters were not able to sustain the bonus on 6-7 plants each, but in my estimation the correct value is around 4.3-4.5 plants per divergent. Adding a 4th critter provided a substantial increase to the effectiveness of the tending, only furthering the point, and as expected the 5th critter provided almost no benefit, only ~2%.
 
 
It was curious that even with 5 critters, tending only 4 plants each, I only measured a 46% growth bonus compared to the theoretical 50%. I don’t have a perfect explanation for this, but I believe a portion of the difference is because of the large number of tests I was running simultaneously. I had 7 ranchers tending to 25 grooming stations around the map, and a commensurate number of critters running around dragging on framerates. There were sometimes short delays between when a critter’s grooming would wear off, and when a rancher could run across the map to groom it. For that short time, the critter would be glum and thus its tending rate would drop to the much lower default.
 
 
I believe these numbers are still representative of normal gameplay, since just like the fruit harvesting delays, there will naturally be delays between when a critter is ready for grooming and when a rancher shows up. I suspect the “real” values in the game code would align with each divergent maintaining full growth bonus on 4.5 plants. That said, from from a practical perspective I believe the in-game optimum is to tend no less than 5 plants per divergent critter. Having 6-7 plants per critter will reduce your preserve KCal output by 7-8%, but even that is worth it considering the sulfur cost of feeding additional critters. My rule of thumb is to keep a ratio of 5-7 plants per critter for optimal sulfur usage, even though the growth bonus will not be able to be sustained 100% of the time.
 
 
 

– Revisiting Meat Production

As is clear from the above, ranching divergent critters in combination with tending grubfruit will greatly increase the amount of meat produced, in addition to giving bonuses to the fruit production. I felt this topic was special enough to deserve its own subsection rather than bundle it in with the naïve approach to meat generation above.
 
 
For this test I set up two new automated ranches with 20 grubfruit plants and 5 divergent critters each. I ran them for over 300 cycles and then compared the total meat production to the earlier data.
 
 

 
 

Table Note 1

 
The eggs (and thus meat) produced from these two stables were mixed together, so I can only approximate which portion of the total was from sweetles and which was from grubgrubs. I know the total amount produced between the two was 7704.63 KCal BBQ / cycle, which is quite close to the 7794.65 I predicted (just over 1% difference), and pretty great for only 10 total critters. 10 hatches would produce a little under 6000 KCal, so we’re doing much better than that!
 
 
In the table, the “Measured” column is how I first chose to split the meat production, a*suming that my predicted values were close to correct. The total amount of meat produced adds up, and the sweetle and grubgrub measured values are within a percent or two of where I predicted they should be. That said, it bothered me that in my initial test with grubgrubs not tending to grubfruit, a much easier scenario to predict since egg rates are constant, my predictions were off by a whopping 13+%. In addition, in the earlier non-tending test, sweetles out-performed my prediction, so I didn’t feel comfortable a*suming that they would underperform in this test.
 
 
Just in case I made the same mistake in predicting grubgrub reproduction during this test as I did in the prior test, I decided to calculate rebalanced production numbers. These numbers reflect an a*sumption that the grubgrub performance would underperform my predictions by the same ~13% as before, and from there calculate what larger share of the total meat would have come from the sweetles instead. This rebalancing makes the sweetles outperform my predictions by ~6%, which isn’t much different than how they performed in the non-tending test, where they outperformed by almost 4%.
 
 
I believe that the real distribution of meat is somewhere in between the above values, and it’s quite likely that a tame, fed and happy sweetle will produce 1000 KCal/cycle when tending grubfruit. That’s exactly enough to feed one dupe, and 70% more output than a hatch! Grubgrubs tending grubfruit produce significantly less meat KCal per cycle than sweetles (~85% to 95% of a hatch) but are capable of boosting plant growth by 50% to make up additional calories. All in all these are pretty amazing critters!
 
 
 

– Sulfur Geysers

As stated in the objectives, I wanted to ensure that whatever ranch design I came up with was sustainable from a single sulfur geyser. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to find information online about the expected output of this type of geyser. Even the FANDOM Wiki – [fandom.com]  currently shows ‘?kg/s’.
 
 
I spawned and an*lyzed a couple dozen sulfur geysers and came up with the following information:
 

 
 
Most sulfur geysers I saw had a stated production of 4,000 to 6,000 g/s while active and erupting, but there were a few standouts. I had one absolute monster producing 17,000 g/s, double the value of the second highest producer! (sorry I lost that screenshot). Unfortunately, the stated production value on a geyser is only half the story. To determine its sustained kg/cycle you must account for the time periods it is inactive and not erupting. This uses the other metrics obtained when a dupe an*lyzes the geyser though field research. The formula for this is (Eruption sec / Total sec) * (Active Cycles / Total Cycles) * (g/s production) * (600 sec/cycle) / (1000 g/kg). As an example, the 17,000 g/s monster above was active 74.7 out of every 108.2 cycles, and erupted for 72 out of every 506 seconds. This gave a total of 1002.02 kg/cycle, only the fourth best geyser in my sample set.
 
 
From the above data it appears to me that ONI randomly generates sulfur geysers to produce between 700 and 1100 kg/cycle, averaging 900 kg/cycle. Since we don’t know the distribution we have to make a few a*sumptions. If the distribution were normal (i.e. a bell curve) then you’re more likely to find geysers around the center of that range. In fact, only ~16% of geysers would fall below ~800kg/cycle in a normal distribution. With some quick an*lysis I approximated the distribution and it appears to be uniform as opposed to normal. As such, any value in the range appears equally likely, as opposed to more likely to cluster around the center.
 
 

 
 
In my estimation, 87.5% of geysers should produce at least 750 kg/cycle, so that seems to be a reasonable target to aim for in the design. A single grubfruit plant requires 10 kg/cycle, so if your geyser comes up short of 750 kg/cycle, the removal of 1-3 plants would be an easy in-game modification. In reality, you’re likely to get closer to the average of 900 kg/cycle, but if I plan around that and come up ~20% short it could greatly affect a*sumptions of the design. It’s much easier to scale up to consume additional sulfur, and I don’t want my design to be completely hamstrung by a bad geyser roll, so we’ll target sustainability at 750 kg/cycle.
 
 
 

4. Bottom Line Up Front – The Design

As in my guide for ranching hatches, my design consists of a single control room paired with as many stable rooms as you need. The control room is a standard four tile height room that contains the automation logic and other infrastructure to support the stables. A single control room is built at the top of a stack of stables, and additional stables can be added at any time to the bottom of the stack.
 
 
One major difference when farming divergent critters is that you must maintain a breeding stable for sweetles, that cannot be allowed to tend to grubfruit and thus will not produce grubgrub eggs (except 2% of the time). This is because only sweetles produce sucrose, which is required to cook grubfruit into preserve for 20% more KCal. My design therefore uses a single “sucrose stable” under the control room, followed by any desired number of “farming stables”.
 
 
An example ranch with two farming stables would look something like this:
 
 

 
 
The standard design is relatively large, with interior dimensions of each level at 25×4. After I finished, I decided to see how much I could shrink it while fitting the required automation circuits and providing a useful amount of KCal. I was just barely able to make it fit within the “standard” 16×4 room dimension, and this variant will be detailed in the guide as the “Mini” version.
 
 

 
 
 

– The Control Room

The control room consists of four chambers which I’ve labeled 1 through 4 in the screenshot below.
 
 

 
 
It is really two isolated and mirror-imaged control rooms, one for sweetles and one for grubgrubs. This will keep the two critters separate and allow automatic repopulation of sweetles in the sucrose stable while allowing you to choose which type of critter to drop into the farming stables. Any unused critters are evolved into meat.
 
 

Chambers 1 and 4 – Critter Droppers

 
These are fairly standard critter droppers, which allow divergents to fall through doors A and H into the stables that require more critters. The specifics of the automation logic are described in the construction section.
 
 

Chambers 2 and 3 – Hatcheries and Resource Sorting

 
This is the core of the control room, where most of the action takes place. I’ve labeled two points of interest C (also F) and D (also E).
 
 
Any eggs, shells, meat, fruit, sucrose, and optionally mud produced in a stable will enter this chamber via conveyor and be deposited at either chute D or E. Grubgrub eggs will be filtered out and sent to D while all other materials will be sent to E.
 
 
The design behind this room is fairly standard. Eggs deposited in D or E will incubate and eventually hatch, and the hatchlings will not be able to jump up out of the pit. They will be stuck until they reach adulthood and are able to jump up and out. Once adult critters can jump up, they’ll be presented with one of two life-altering scenarios. If any of the stables require a new critter, the mechanized door above C (or F) will be closed and door B (or G) will be open, allowing the critter to exit this room. If all of the stables are full, the two doors will be as shown in the screenshot instead. This will cause the hatch to eventually path into pit C (or F), colloquially known as an evolution chamber. Once inside, the critter detector closes the door above and the surface tension of the water floods the pit and drowns the critter. This unlocks their final evolutionary form, better known as meat. Once there are no more critters in the pit, the mechanized door re-opens, resetting the trap.
 
 
The sweepers in this room can reach the bottom of both C and F and will extract the meat. That and all other resources are deposited into one of the conveyor loaders, to be routed to your kitchen, industrial block, or wherever they are needed.
 
 
 

– The Sucrose Stable

The first stable below the control room is special in that it will eventually be the only stable producing sweetle eggs. In addition, if you use grubgrub to tend the farming stables, this will be the only stable producing sucrose. Sucrose is required to cook the resulting grubfruit, so it’s important to start with this stable.
 
 
The stable can be simple and traditional, left primarily empty or used for some other non-ranching purpose…
 
 

 
 
…or you can take advantage of the second critter dropper to make this a hybrid stable, turning the empty space into a partial farming stable:
 
 

 
 
The sweetles in the sucrose stable are not exposed to grubfruit, thus will produce sweetle eggs with 98% likelihood. All other (farming) stables will be tending grubfruit and eventually produce only grubgrub eggs. In addition, each sweetle in this stable will produce 10kg/cycle of sucrose, enough to cook 20 grubfruit plants’ worth of preserve.
 
 
Each of these sweetles will produce 12-13 sweetle eggs over their lifetime, one of which will eventually replace them. The others can be used to restock the farming stables, if you prefer tending with sweetles instead of grubgrub (e.g. for even more sucrose to support rocketry). Based on the research above, in most scenarios (excepting the “Maximum Meat Strategy” below) there is no reason to use more than 4 tending critters per farming stable. Thus each sweetle in the sucrose stable creates enough extra eggs to replenish sweetles for three full farming stables. Having 2-4 sweetles in this stable is more than sufficient to produce the sucrose and sweetle eggs necessary to run a ranch much larger than you’ll have sulfur to sustain.
 
 
 

– The Farming Stable

The farming stable is nothing special. It’s just a bunch of grubfruit plants (20 in the full size, 12 in the mini) with enough critters to properly tend them (4 in the full size, 2 in the mini). There is a grooming station and critter feeder to keep the critters fed and happy. Resources are swept away to the control room, and critters are replenished from the droppers when necessary.
 
 

 
 
Note that there is no need for a second critter feeder as shown, and that tile could be used for a 21st plant to maximize KCal output. I preferred the symmetrical look of the above, and the extra path for air exchange between levels, but if you’re going for full min/max you should grow another plant for ~5% more food.
 
 
 

5. Construction

The following sections describe how to build both the control room and the stables in a progressive fashion. The expectation is that you would begin the early game with a fully manual “sucrose stable” (ideally hybridized such that the empty space is used as a farming stable) and an empty control room, then gradually build up to the final design.
 
 
Note that the upgrades to not necessarily have to be installed in the order presented. You might choose to install sulfur delivery prior to resource extraction, for example. This was just a logical way to break the design up into smaller feature chunks that can be added whenever you have the appropriate research and materials.
 
 
 

– Early Ranching – Zero Automation

Early in the game the control room is not used at all, however its skeleton should be built along with your first stable to ensure the space is reserved. Note that both mechanized airlocks should be set to ‘Open’ on initial construction, and all pneumatic doors can be left on their defaults. I would also recommend putting water into the trap when first constructing it, rather than having to make room for a bottle emptier later.
 
 
Note that unlike my experiments with hatches, I’ve had lots of trouble with small amounts of water in a trap for divergent critters. With small amounts of water (e.g. 40g to 100g per tile) The trap will frequently “jam”. What I mean by this is all of the water will push into one tile, and the critter will hide in the other tile with the air pocket. They will eventually starve to death but that takes a long time and meanwhile no meat is being produced. I haven’t seen this issue with 100kg of water per tile, so I recommend emptying a full 200kg bottle from the pitcher pump into each trap.
 
 
After filling the trap with water, I recommend building a storage box and collecting any eggs you find on the map. You can either disallow eggs or deconstruct the box once they’re collected, and you’ll get a jump start on egg production for later.
 
 
I offer three different options on how to build your first stable, which is the sucrose stable. They’re all very similar, and at the beginning of the game there won’t be any difference between them. The design chosen now will only influence the maximum number of critters that can be in the stable later. I recommend reading through the entire construction section or checking the comparisons in the performance an*lysis section to determine which version suits you best.
 
 

Sucrose Stable Layout – Option 1 (Shared Stable)

 
The differentiating feature of this layout is that the sucrose stable is one contiguous 96 tile stable. This gives it more room for plants; it can hold 16 rather than the 12 of the other two options. The maximum number of critters it can contain is 6, a*suming at least one of those is a grubgrub. My recommendation for the final state of the build is three grubgrubs on the left for tending, and three sweetles on the right for sucrose production.
 
 

 
 

 
 
The downside of the single stable approach is that you cannot use two critter sensors to control the population of each side independently. The sweetles on the right side will be repopulated via sensor, but grubgrubs will have to be requested manually using a switch.
 
 

Sucrose Stable Layout – Option 2 (Split Stable [64/36])

 
Options 2 and 3 are both split stables, such that the left and right portions are enclosed and count as separate rooms. This allows the use of two critter sensors to automatically control the population on each side. Both have a left side of 64 tiles, which can hold 12 grubfruit and up to 4 grubgrubs. The difference is in the right side, where Option 2 provides 36 tiles for 3 sweetles, and Option 3 expands that to 48 tiles for 4 sweetles. I don’t see much reason to go above 3 sweetles in the sucrose stable, but I thought I’d show the option in case someone really wanted to push it. My recommendation for the final state of either of these options is two grubgrubs on the left for tending and three sweetles on the right for sucrose production.
 
 

 
 
This option is essentially identical to Option 3, it’s just a little more straightforward to build. The shipping and automation overlays are the same, so all future layouts will show only the Option 3 version. If you’re building this option simply follow the layouts for Option 3
 
 

Sucrose Stable Layout – Option 3 (Split Stable [64/48])

 
As above, there’s not much difference between this and Option 2. Initial construction is a little wonky, to allow the dupes access for running conveyor rails and automation wires later.
 
 
In my opinion, the only advantage of this option over Option 2 is a little protection against an accidental “double drop” from the control room. Since the automation circuitry on this divergent ranch is less resilient than that used in my hatch ranch, you will occasionally get a double drop. The regular stables are always underpopulated so an extra critter won’t impact them, it will just consume a little more sulfur, but the sucrose stable is run to maximum capacity (typically 3 sweetles) at all times. By building the 64/48 split variant and running the recommended 3 sweetles, a double sweetle drop will only bump you to 4 and not cause an overcrowded or glum situation.
 
 

 
 

 
 

Sucrose Stable Layout – The Mini Variant

 
This mini variant is great for smaller colonies, or if you want to strictly stick to a 16×4 base layout. It’s a “shared stable” like Option 1, providing 64 tiles total. This supports 7 grubfruit and up to 4 critters, a*suming one is a grubgrub. My recommendation for the final state of the build is one grubgrub on the left for tending, and three sweetles on the right for sucrose production.
 
 

 
 

 
 
Once you’ve delivered the initial sweetles to the left side, you can deconstruct the critter drop off and replace it with a feeder and a tile above the feeder. Only after those are built, you should deconstruct the original tile immediate above the door, which was keeping sweetles from jumping over the door.
 
 
Note that the images show an 8th farm tile in the bottom left corner. This can be helpful early game while trying to get food production up, especially on the mini ranch, but it is possible in any of the full size builds as well. Once you decide to add a farming stable below, that tile will be removed and a door put in its place to support the critter dropper.
 
 
 

– 1st Upgrade – Egg Removal

As soon as you acquire the mechanical engineering skill and the appropriate research, the first thing you’ll want to automate is extraction of eggs from the stables. This is primarily because if eggs are left in a stable you will suffer from the ‘cramped’ debuff, preventing more eggs (and thus meat) from being produced.
 
 
Once you have the research completed, this upgrade requires 1000 refined metal (800 for the mini variant) to build three auto-sweepers (two for the mini) and two conveyor loaders in the stable.
 
 
The loaders should be set to allow critter eggs, meat (for critters that die of old age), sucrose, grubfruit (spindly and regular) and eggshells (though those should never appear in a stable). You can optionally allow mud as well, which will be a byproduct of ranching grubgrubs and can be processed into dirt and water.
 
 
Don’t forget while installing the solid filter to set the egg types to be filtered. For the full size variants this should be set to grubgrub eggs, and for the mini variant it is instead sweetle eggs.
 
 

Stable Option 1 – Shared Stable

 
 

 
 

Stable Options 2 and 3 – Split Stables

 
 

 
 

The Mini Variant

 
 

 
 
 

– 2nd Upgrade – Resource Export

This upgrade requires 800 refined metal (600 for the mini version) to build two auto-sweepers (one for the mini) and two conveyor loaders in the control room. These are used to send all resources produced by the ranch to the appropriate locations in your base. There are no changes made to the stable rooms, so I’ll only show one full size and one mini.
 
 
Note in the closeup views of the auto-sweeper ranges that the two sweepers in the full size design can share access to a total of six conveyor loaders. I depict where two would go on the left, still reachable by the right sweeper, and two more would be in a mirror position on the right. The single sweeper in the mini variant can also reach six loaders. I typically only build two loaders and a*sign them as follows:
 

1. Grubfruit, Spindly grubfruit, Meat, Sucrose – Routed to my Kitchen
2. Eggshells, Grubfruit Seeds, and optionally Mud – Routed to an industrial processing block

If you want more granularity on your shipping, maybe to send seeds to a Pacu farm or sucrose to your rockets, the support for up to six loaders is very flexible. As long as you’re willing to combine at least two of the three edible items (grubfruit, spindly grubfruit and meat) onto one conveyor, all other products can be given a dedicated conveyor should you choose to do so.
 
 

Full Size Build

 
 

 
 

 
 

The Mini Variant

 
 

 
 

 
 
 

– 3rd Upgrade – Sulfur Delivery

This upgrade requires no refined metal, as we’re only installing conveyor receptacles to provide sulfur to the existing auto-sweepers. The sweepers will load sulfur into the critter feeders, as well as use it to fertilize the plants.
 
 
The conveyor rails are shown sticking out the bottom of the stable, as they will continue to run vertically through any additional farming stables that are added to the ranch. A source of sulfur (e.g. from a geyser) must be shipped in and connected to these rails. It doesn’t particularly matter where that connection is made, however if ONI gets confused about too many inputs and outputs on the bus you may have to add a conveyor bridge to force a travel direction.
 
 

Stable Option 1 – Shared Stable

 
 

 
 

Stable Options 2 and 3 – Split Stables

 
 

 
 

The Mini Variant

 
 

 
 
 

– 4th Upgrade – Repopulation

At this time your ranch is almost fully automated, with sulfur being delivered to feed both plants and critters, and all products removed and sorted for distribution. Depending on how many cycles have elapsed, you may not need to automate repopulation for a while, but note that sweetles only live 75 cycles as compared to 100 cycles for hatches. Many of the initial sweetles found in the wild will be 30-50 years old at the start so I recommend not delaying too long and risking a population crash.
 
 
The cost to upgrade either the standard size or mini variant is 575 refined metal, which covers 6 AND gates, 7 inverters, 2 filter gates, two timers, five critter sensors and a manual switch. In the split stables (Options 2 and 3) the manual switch and one of the inverters are substituted for another critter sensor and a buffer gate, respectively, at the same metal cost.
 
 
The critter sensor on the bottom right side of the split stable should be set to send a green signal when above 2. For the shared (including mini) stable design, it should instead be set to above X+2, where X is the number of grubgrubs desired in the stable. These sensors produce a “stable full” signal which has two purposes:
 

1. If you decide to use sweetles to tend plants in the farm stables below, this will connect to a mechanized airlock in the floor of the stable, keeping it open so dropped sweetles can fall through to other stables below. If less than 3 critters are detected in this stable, the door is instead closed to capture any falling sweetles.
2. It goes through an inverter and is connected with the same inverted signal from all other stables, before routing up to the control room. Using OR gates to combine these signals is unnecessary, as a green signal from any stable will override the red signals from other stables. I refer to this inverted signal as the “critter needed” signal, as if any stable is below its threshold it will trigger the control room to allow dispensing new critters.

In the split stable designs, the critter sensor on the bottom left works the same way and should be set to send a green signal when “above X-1”, where X is the number of grubgrubs you would like tending in that stable. It is not possible in this design to tend the left side of the sucrose stable with sweetles, since those can only come from the critter dropper on the right side. The farming stables you’ll add later can be tended by your choice of grubgrubs or sweetles.
 
 
In the shared stable designs, both full size and mini, the bottom left side is instead controlled by a manual switch. Since the entire stable is one connected space it’s not possible to get different sensor readings for the left and right portions. Grubgrubs live for 150 cycles, so it will be an infrequent nuisance that you’ll notice you’re missing a grubgrub and have to toggle this switch to request one from the control room. You could optionally add an alarm to be triggered when the critter sensor drops below the desired count, allowing you to resolve the situation immediately. If not using such an alarm, you should be careful that in the meantime the sensor on the right might have already added an extra sweetle to the stable. Whenever using the manual switch to get a new grubgrub you should double check the overall critter count and manually reduce any extra sweetles on the other side of the stable.
 
 

Stable Option 1 – Shared Stable

 
 

 
 

 
 
In the control room, from left to right, the four critter sensors should be set to Above 0, Below 1, Below 1, Above 0. The timers and filter gates need to be set according to the game speed you tend to play on, or more specifically, the fastest speed you tend to play on. I am always either 3x speed or paused, so my timers are set to Green 10 and Red 30. On 1x speed that would equate to about Green 3 and Red 10, which is usually enough to drop a critter from the door. You may have to experiment to see what works for you, and longer red times help prevent accidental double drops. My filter gates are set to 30 seconds, and they should be set to match the red period on your timer. This is the main prevention against accidental double drops. If you’re using the buffer gate in the lower left (Options 2 and 3), the default setting of 5 seconds is fine, but it also works at 2 seconds if you feel 5 is too long.
 
 
Note that while building any of the 4 designs, it is likely that the doors above the drowning traps will seal closed before the critter sensor and/or automation wiring can be built in the pits. You’ll have to have a dupe change the doors to open to access the area and complete the build. Other doors may also lock closed, potentially trapping dupes inside the control room. Be prepared to issue open commands to release the dupes.
 
 

Stable Options 2 and 3 – Split Stables

 
As described above, the split stable options are identical to Option 1, except for two part substitutions in the bottom left. The manual switch and inverter are replaced with a critter sensor and buffer gate as shown.
 
 

 
 
Note that the buffer gate is optional, and I’ll describe its function in the next section on automation logic.
 
 
There is one other thing to be aware of during construction of the Option 3 stable. The inverter and a couple pieces of automation wiring are unreachable unless you deconstruct two tiles. I’ve indicated those two tiles in red in the screenshot. It’s a minor annoyance but in my opinion better than removing plants to come in from below with ladders.
 
 

 
 

The Mini Variant

 
 

 
 

 
 
As with the Option 3 build above, there is one minor issue with this construction that you might run into. In order to build one piece of automation wire, a dupe must stand inside the space occupied by the door indicated in the screenshot. This is no problem except that like the drowning trap doors, this door will likely lock closed as the automation circuit comes together. It’s simple to force it back open with a dupe and complete the construction, then switch it back to auto.
 
 

 
 
In the screenshot, there are supposed to be two tiles in the space to the left of the door. I did not deconstruct those, I just forgot to build them. Whether they are there or not does not affect this situation, the door must be open and the dupes will simply enter it from the top rather than the left.
 
 
 

– Explanation of Automation Logic

This is another one of those “If you don’t care why it works, feel free to skip ahead” type sections.

 
 

The Control Room

 
The logic of the automation circuit is essentially identical between all four designs, the mini variant just has everything packed closer together and requires more wire bridges. I’ll describe how the circuit controls doors A, B and C from the original screenshot, and the entire design is simply mirrored to control doors H, G and F, respectively.
 
 

 
 
Note that the automation is substantially simpler than that used in my hatch ranch guide. This is because an accidental double drop will generally not affect these stables, as they are almost alwayts run under maximum capacity. Over the course of 600-700 cycles of testing I saw 4-5 instances of double drops, but none of them caused overcrowding in the stables. The extra critter just consumes a little extra sulfur before I spot them and have the dupes help them with an overdue evolution.
 
 
Starting from the middle of the design and working out to the sides…
 
 

Door ‘C’ (and ‘F’) – The Drowning Traps

 
These doors receive two signals through an AND gate, so they will only open when both conditions are true:
 

1. None of the stables are driving the “critter needed” signal.
2. The critter detector in the drowning pit detects zero hatches.

If any stable drives the “breeder needed” signal, this door will close, preventing any hatches from falling in and drowning. Otherwise, if any hatches are detected in the trap the door will also close to drown them and produce meat.
 
 

Door ‘B’ (and ‘G’) – Entering the Drop Room

 
These doors also receive two signals through an AND gate, and will only open when both conditions are true:
 

1. At least one of the stables are driving the “critter needed” signal.
2. There are no critters already in the drop room.

As soon as a critter walks into the drop room through this open door, the critter sensor and inverter cause the signal to immediately go red, closing the door behind it. Once the critter enters the open dropper door (A or H) it is no longer technically “in” the dropper room, thus the critter sensor signal turns green. We don’t want these doors to immediately open and allow more critters in, so the filter delays the green signal by enough time to ensure the critter is dropped.
 
 

Door ‘A’ (and ‘H’) – The Critter Droppers

 
Like the other doors, these receive two signals through an AND gate, so they will only open when both conditions are true:
 

1. There is at least one critter in the dropper room
2. The timer circuit is outputting a green signal

The timer circuit alternates between green and red, opening and closing the dropper doors whenever a critter is in the dropper room. It’s entirely random whether the critter will path into the door while it is open, so it can take a few tries. Once it paths inside, the red portion of the timer keeps the door closed for long enough to ensure the critter is pushed through to a stable below.
 
 

Buffer Gates in the Stables

 
This gate should not exist in the design, and as stated previously it is entirely optional. The only reason it’s included is to prevent a behavior that I believe is a bug.
 
 
In my previous hatch ranching guide, the critter sensor in each stable was run directly to the inverter and mechanical airlock below it, and that approach works (for the most part) just as well when ranching divergents. The exception (and the “bug”) occurs each time a divergent tends a plant in the stable.
 
 
For some reason, while tending a plant, the divergent critter “disappears” from the stable, at least from the viewpoint of the critter sensor. If there were 4 critters, the sensor now thinks there are 3, for just a fraction of a second. Once the tending action is complete the critter reappears and the proper count is restored. This lasts long enough to toggle the “need a critter” signal to the control room, and cause the doors in both the stable and the control room to cycle open or closed and back again. Given how frequently critters tend to plants (several times per cycle, per critter) I found it extremely annoying having my doors constantly cycling because the sensors thought critters had disappeared, then reappeared. The buffer gates block the transition of the critter sensor, unless it continues to report a missing critter for 5 seconds (default setting). This can even be lowered to 2 seconds on 3x game speed and still prevent the undesired behavior.
 
 
I never tested more than a few cycles without these buffer gates, but I suspect that many problems could otherwise arise from this “bug”. For example a critter in mid-drop could be intercepted by another stable between the control room and the destination, if a critter in that stable tends a plant at just the wrong time and causes the door to cycle, stopping the critter’s fall. Even without testing for potential problems, the constant door cycling was too much for me, so a little refined metal was worth the peace of mind.
 
 
 

– Tidying Up

Once all the automation is installed, the bottom of the control room should be tiled over to complete the construction. Be careful that dupes don’t get stuck or leave voids that require deconstruction. I recommend building one layer at a time from the bottom up.
 
 
The only thing left to do then is add a bit of decor to the stables to keep your ranchers happy while they spend their days grooming critters. If you are using the 5-tile main corridor design shown in all the screenshots, then placing statues on each floor landing will go a long way towards maximizing decor. The grooming station closest to corridor can “see” three statues through the pneumatic doors, and the other grooming station gets small bonuses from the nearby plants.
 
 
Unfortunately, the mini variant doesn’t have a single available space for decor items, other than pixel packs, and the Option 1 build isn’t much better. With the latter, you can put a hanging plant to the left of the left-side grooming station, a piece of crown moulding to the right above it, and a second piece of crown moulding to the left above the right side grooming station. Besides those three items, the only option is pixel packs.
 
 
The Option 2 and 3 stables fare significantly better, due to the empty space between the two grooming stations. That space can be filled with statues, portraits, hanging plants, or whatever else you desire, and these stables will easily be able to maximize decor.
 
 
 

– Adding Farming Stables

Eventually, you’ll want to grow your colony beyond what the starting “sucrose stable” can provide food for. At that time it is easy to expand the ranch stack downwards with additional farming stables. The farming stables are the same layout regardless of which sucrose stable option you built, so there are only the standard size and mini variants.
 
 

Farming Stable – Standard Size

 
The standard size farming stable supports up to 20 grubfruit plants, and is 96 tiles in size to support up to 6 grubgrubs or 8 sweetles. The three sweepers and two conveyor loaders require a combined 1000 refined metal to construct.
 
 

 
 
I recommended planting 5 or 6 plants at a time and dropping a single grubgrub to tend them, which will provide food for 2.5 or 3 dupes. This way you don’t have to install all of the sweepers, loaders, etc. at once either. The critter sensor should be set to “Above X-1”, where X is the number of critters you want tending the plants. I recommend using 4 grubgrubs to tend the 20 plants, and a full stable with that complement will feed over 10.5 dupes.
 
 
Note that the second critter feeder is installed only for a symmetrical look, and can be replaced with another farm tile and grubfruit plant.
 
 
The shipping and automation overlays are shown below:
 
 

 
 

 
 
The sulfur conveyors extend straight down through the farming stable, just to the left of each conveyor receptacle and loader. In this case I was inputting sulfur from the upper right. Each conveyor loader sends a conveyor rail down to the floor tiles, then right (bridging over the sulfur rail) and finally up into the solid filter in the sucrose stable (bridging the sulfur rail again). The bottom of the two vertical bridges may be unnecessary, but it does force a direction on the rail to prevent ONI from getting confused.
 
 
The automation overlay is simply an extension of the “need a critter” signal from the previous stables.
 
 

Farming Stable – Mini Size

 
The mini size stable supports up to 12 grubfruit plants, and is 63 tiles in size to support up to 3 grubgrubs or 5 sweetles. If for some reason you really wanted 4 grubgrubs in the room, which requires 64 tiles, you could move one of the pneumatic doors a tile out (giving 65), or replace it with two regular tiles, one placed in line with the other doors and one placed one tile diagonally to the outside (giving 64).
 
 

 
 
You can plant the grubfruit 6 at a time and drop a single grubgrub to feed them, which will just barely provide enough food for 3 dupes. The critter sensor should be set to “Above X-1”, where X is the number of critters you want tending the plants. I recommend using 2 grubgrubs to tend the 12 plants, and a full stable with that complement will feed just over 6 dupes.
 
 
The shipping and automation overlays are shown below:
 
 

 
 

 
 
Like the standard size version, the sulfur rail extends down through each farming stable, just to the left of the receptacles. The conveyor loaders have a simpler route, only having to jump the sulfur rail once, and travel up to the solid filter in the sucrose stable.
 
 
As with the standard size design, the automation only extends the “need a critter” signal into the new stables.
 
 

Farming Stable – Variations

 
The designs above a*sume all plants will be tended by grubgrubs, since that is a slightly more optimal KCal output from the combined meat and fruit using the plant to critter ratios I recommended. It is entirely possible to do all tending with sweetles instead (except for the left-hand portion of the sucrose stable), and even to mix some layers of grubgrubs with some layers of sweetles. Tending with sweetles only will provide a far higher ratio of meat to grubfruit, but the overall KCal output will be ~10% less.
 
 
In order to populate a stable with sweetles instead of grubgrubs, the mechanical airlock door and the critter sensor that controls it (and sends the “critter needed” signal) must be moved to the opposite side of the stable (right, in this case). In order to accommodate this, the grooming station is moved one tile left, and a new farm tile is installed on the far left where the door and critter sensor are currently shown in the screenshots.
 
 
In order to mix some layers of each critter type, the layers which do not want grubgrubs should install a pneumatic door as the left most tile, and the airlock and critter sensor on the right. Vice versa, install a pneumatic door on the right most tile and the airlock and sensor on the left if that stable doesn’t want sweetles. This ensures that any critters dropped will pa*s straight through the pneumatic doors to whatever stable requested them. This also eliminates space for one farm tile, since the pictured designs a*sume drops will only happen on one side, so the other side can be blocked by a farm tile. Mixing critters in this way isn’t a particularly useful design, but it might look cool or support an RP playstyle to mix or alternate stables.
 
 
It is not recommended to mix critter types within a single stable, ie: 3 grubgrubs and 3 sweetles. You would have to trigger the control room from both sides at once when a critter was needed, and would have no control over which critter type was dropped each time. You would also be far more likely to experience double drops and potential overcrowding. Finally, while I didn’t test it myself, it is believed in the forums that the tending bonuses do not stack, for what little the 5% extra sweetle bonus might be worth. It’s possible they could even overwrite each other, causing a 50% grubgrub bonus to be replaced with a 5% sweetle bonus. It could be fun and chaotic to run fully mixed stables, but if you’re looking for a predictable food supply it’s not recommended.
 
 
 

6. Performance Analysis

This section details what you should expect from your new ranch. How many KCal each plant will produce when tended and cooked into preserve, how many dupes you could feed by adding a new stable, how efficient you are being with your limited amount of sulfur, etc.
 
 
Essentially, this provides the information necessary to plan your construction to suit any number of dupes as your colony grows, as well as to fully mix/max a divergent ranch.
 
 
 

– “Short Term” vs. “Long Term” KCals

I felt this was an important topic to discuss prior to getting into the expected output of each stable. In particular, in the early game, you’re going to set up a sucrose stable with 6-8 plants and 6-8 sweetles that you discover on the map. 8 cycles later the plants will make their first fruit, and you’ll have plenty of sucrose to cook it into preserves. It’s quick and reliable high quality food!
 
 
As you obtain more seeds, you’ll expand to the full 12-16 plants, “finishing” the stable. If you look in the section below you’ll see that a finished sucrose stable can feed 9 (Option 1 Shared), 7 (Options 2-3 Split) or 4 (mini variant) dupes. That sounds pretty good, but if you try to scale your population to those numbers right away you’ll find your colony starving to death.
 
 
The key is that these ranches take time to begin producing at their optimal values. For one, there is a significant delay before you will obtain your first KCal from meat. After setting up a stable you should see your first eggs in 5-6 cycles, your first hatchling around cycle 22 and your first meat around cycle 27. You’ll be halfway to your 4th full harvest of fruit by then, and the first round of meat adds only ~10,000 KCal to your stockpile (2-3 cycles worth of food for a 3-4 dupe colony). This delay on obtaining meat is about 2 cycles shorter than it would be for hatches, but once hatches do start producing meat the output ramps up more rapidly than divergents. Hatches are worth double the meat, initially, after all.
 
 
This leads into to the other factor which is that early on almost all of the eggs will be sweetles, worth only 1600 meat. Once a grubgrub egg appears, worth 4800 meat, it will take 33 cycles to incubate, and around 38 cycles to evolve into meat. However, the first few grubgrubs, which you might not see for 50 cycles or more after building the ranch, are much better off being dropped into your stable to begin tending plants. Killing them for the bonus meat at this early stage will only slow down your progress towards the long-term KCal output you’re looking for.
 
 
I briefly touched on it above, but using grubgrubs to tend your plants will greatly shift the ratio of KCal produced away from meat and towards fruit (sweetles produce far for meat long term, at the expense of fruit). In addition, the total KCal produced by a stable tended by grubgrubs (meat and fruit combined) will go up ~10% compared to tending with sweetles. Another advantage is that fruit takes much longer to spoil, a*suming you’re cooking it into preserves. This is very helpful before you obtain an infinite frozen storage setup in your kitchen.
 
 
Specifically, with no refrigeration or sterile atmosphere, BBQ will only last 4 cycles while grubfruit preserve will last 33. A simple CO2 pit, still without any refrigeration, bumps those numbers to 5.5 cycles and 50 cycles, respectively. Losing food to spoilage in the early game can be a killer, so producing as much preserve as possible provides a substantial buffer against that threat.
 
 
For these reasons, in the sections below I identify what I call the “short term” and “long term” KCal outputs of each stable variant. The short term numbers a*sume that the only calories produced are from fruit (zero meat produced), which will be true for almost 30 cycles anyway. This is a worst case number for the early game, or when just constructing a new stable. For a few dozen cycles after 30, the KCal output would gradually increase towards the long term number, as you start getting grubgrub bonuses on plants and obtain more grubgrub eggs worth more meat. I don’t have an exact crossover point, but I would suspect that around the second generation of grubgrub hatchlings, somewhere around 80-100 cycles from initial construction, the full long term KCal output will be stabilized. I measured the long term numbers after several hundred cycles of running the ranches, by removing the first ~100 cycles from the data.
 
 
 

– KCal production per Stable

Standard Version

 

Sucrose Stables

 
When building the initial sucrose stable I a*sume you won’t be able to find 12-16 grubfruit seeds immediately on the map. Instead I a*sume you can find 2-3 groups of 3-4 wild sweetles, and 2-3 wild grubfruit near each of those groups. You’ll want 6-8 sweetles and 6-8 grubfruit seeds to get started.
 
 
The tables below show the stats for an initial construction with half the plants, then a full stable tended by sweetles, and work their way up to a fully populated stable tended by grubgrubs. Note that during the transition to grubgrubs I a*sume you will allow mixed tending of the plants. In other words, when you finally have a grubgrub ready to put in the stable, I don’t a*sume you’ll purge all sweetles currently doing the tending. You may have to cull a couple to remain below the population limit, but otherwise they can stick around and die of old age, to maximize additional grubgrub egg production. This period of mixed critters will be very temporary, as you’ll recall that unlike the farm stables, the “hybrid farm” portion of these sucrose stables cannot be repopulated with sweetles using my design. Once the initial lot of sweetles dies, naturally or otherwise, the control room will repopulate them with grubgrubs.
 
 

 
 
A few observations about these options:
 

• Notice that the short term KCal / Cycle goes up each time you expand the stable, but the long term number bounces around at the beginning. Specifically the 2nd row in the table looks like amazing production, why not just leave the stable alone at that point? This is because at that moment you have a maximum population of sweetles tending grubfruit, but that is not sustainable. The sweetles will die and be replaced by grubgrubs long before that KCal number is realized. However, look below under the “Maximum Meat Strategy” heading for how this knowledge can be applied to min/max your farm stables in the future.
• Options 1 and 2 produce enough sucrose to sustain two farm stables below them, while Option 3 provides enough sucrose to sustain a third farm stable. You almost surely won’t have enough sulfur to worry about that, but it’s a consideration.
• Speaking of sulfur, Option 2 (and Option 3, if you remove the 4th sucrose sweetle) requires the least amount of sulfur to run, saving the precious commodity for your farm stables which are more efficient in terms of food production per sulfur.
• Option 1 is the most efficient with the sulfur it does use (though still much less than a farm stable) and the extra plants provide far more short term KCal, important to keep early game food numbers up.

 
Assuming an Option 2 sucrose stable with two completed farming stables, you would be able to feed 28 dupes at a cost of 880 sulfur. That’s just below the “average” production of a sulfur geyser, and a bit above our target of 750. Scaling the second farming stable down to match the available sulfur is a trivial concern, just maintain a ratio of 5-7 plants per grubgrub.
 
 

Farming Stables

 
Similar to the above, I don’t a*sume you’ll always fully populate a new farming stable right off the bat. Even if you have the extra grubgrubs and seeds, you might not need a full stable’s worth of food production all at once. The following tables show populating the stables 25% (1 critter and 5 plants) at a time, so you can plan your expansion as your colony grows.
 
 

 
 
A few observations about these options:
 

• In the recommended ratio of 5 plants to a divergent, grubgrubs produce ~10% more overall KCal than sweetles, as mentioned at various points in this guide
• Much more importantly, grubgrubs produce over 40% more short term KCal due to their bonus to fruit production vs. the sweetles focus on producing long term meat.
• Sweetles on the other hand are slightly more efficient consumers of sulfur

 

The Mini Variant

 

Sucrose Stable

 
Unlike the standard size build, the mini variant only supports 7 plants, so I’ll a*sume you have enough seeds to construct it all at once. The only future upgrade comes once your first grubgrub is ready to replace the tending sweetles.
 
 

 
 
In comparison to the standard size build, the sucrose stable generates enough sucrose to sustain 4 farming stables. All together that would provide enough food for 28 dupes and cost 880 sulfur, exactly the same output. The bottom stable can be scaled back or eliminated to match the sulfur level available from your geyser. This version’s small size makes it a slower starter early game, but it scales up just the same and finishes well.
 
 

Farming Stables

 
The farming stables, being roughly half the size as the standard version, are a*sumed to be constructed in halves rather than quarters.
 
 

 
 
Overall, the mini variant is marginally less sulfur efficient, potentially due to running 6 plants per divergent instead of 5, thus producing slightly less fruit per plant. As shown above, however, it’s not enough to make an in-game difference in the number of dupes fed.
 
 
 

– Maximum Meat Strategy – Taking it to 11!

The above section described the ‘recommended’ approach of maintaining a 5-7 plants per divergent critter ratio, and showed that in that scenario grubgrub tending will provide more KCal, both short term and long term.
 
 
However, there was an anomaly (reference the second line of the Option 1 sucrose stable) where a stable that ignores the recommended ratio and runs a full population of sweetles actually produces more food. This is because sweetles produce an insane amount of meat over the long term, and you can fit 8 of them in a stable compared to only 6 grubgrubs. The bonus to fruit production from the grubgrubs simply can’t compete with two additional meat machines in a sweetle stable.
 
 
With this information, it becomes clear that the best late-game strategy is to tend all farming stables with sweetles, and maximize the population of each stable. Ideally you might start by following the regular advice and tending with grubgrubs for the boost to short term KCal. Once your food situation is under control, it’s a simple modification to the farm stables to switch the dropper door to the opposite side and repopulate with sweetles as grubgrubs die off. Eventually you can increase the setting on the critter sensor to maintain a maximum population, rather than the recommended ratio, and as long as you have enough sulfur each stable will produce far more total food going forward.
 
 
The results of running max population sweetle stables are shown below for both standard and mini variants, and the same strategy using 6 grubgrubs is shown for comparison.
 
 

Standard Version

 
 

 
 

Mini Variant

 
 

 
 
Clearly using this strategy with grubgrubs does not pay off. They consume a lot of sulfur and the resulting stables are even less sulfur efficient than those using the recommended tending ratios above. Grubgrubs are designed to maximize fruit production, so this “max meat” approach is counterproductive.
 
 
The max population sweetle stables, on the other hand, set new records for sulfur efficiency. They consume a lot of sulfur, but they’re quite a bit better at converting it into KCal if you have cycles to wait on meat.
 
 

Min Maxing KCal / Cycle

 
The most extreme implementation of this strategy would be to not use your sucrose stable as a hybrid farm at all and put all your sulfur into max population sweetle farming stables. You only need a few sweetles in the sucrose stable to produce dozens of eggs to keep the farming stables repopulated. Then you would leave the rest of the space empty (or repurpose it for something else) rather than wasting sulfur on the less efficient farming.
 
 
A standard sized setup like this with an “empty” sucrose stable (besides the 3 sweetles) and two “max meat” farming stables would be able to feed 28.7 dupes for exactly 750 sulfur, much less than the 880 sulfur required with the recommended ratios above. With a more average geyser you could add half of a third farming stable and feed a total of 35 dupes for 930 sulfur.
 
 
The mini variant does about the same, with an “empty” sucrose stable (again with 3 sweetles) and three “max meat” farming stables able to feed 26.5 dupes for only 690 sulfur. Scaling to a more average geyser’s output, a fourth “max meat” farming stable would require 910 sulfur and just barely feed the same 35 dupes.
 
 
Note that with twice as many sweetles in the maximum population (standard size) farming stables, you may need to add a sweetle or two to the sucrose stable to keep a sufficient egg supply to repopulate them all. Newly hatched sweetles will produce a few sweetle eggs as well before their grubgrub egg chance gets higher, but since the sucrose stable is otherwise “empty” you can go all the way to 8 sweetles for more eggs as long as you have sulfur available. Just remember that a sweetle in the farming stable produces almost 3x as much food as a sweetle in the sucrose stable while consuming the same amount of sulfur, so you only want as many as necessary to sustain egg production.
 
 

Less Extreme Tweaking

 
There is one other situation where this strategy can come in handy. If you’ve decided to tend plants with sweetles instead of grubgrubs, it generally makes sense to allow existing stables to increase population above the recommended ratios before building a whole new stable for only a couple sweetles. You might for example let a stable grow to max population and then build a new stable to split the sweetles 4 and 4. In the meantime you’d be saving sulfur by not feeding additional plants in the new stable with so few critters to tend them.
 
 
You might also find that you don’t need 20 plants per (standard size) stable in a sweetle tending scenario, since most of your calories are coming from meat. The plants are only there to force production of grubgrub eggs, and 8 sweetles could probably get by with tending 14 or 16 plants instead of 20. I have not thoroughly tested this concept to see how many plants a sweetle must tend to maximize the chances of grubfruit eggs, but every less plant in the stable is 10 sulfur that can be reinvested in more sweetles for large KCal gains.
 
 
 

7. Summary

Well, this turned into a very long guide! Hopefully with this information you can plan your own divergent critter ranches, and determine the right mix of critters and plants to provide a stable food supply for any number of dupes.
 
 
As far as I know this is currently the most complete collection of information on divergent critters, but even I didn’t test everything. I really hope other folks will come along and build upon this information, and create even better designs for optimizing the production of divergents.
 
 
Examples of areas in which this work could be expanded include:
 

• I did very little testing on wild critters and did not include any of the results in this guide. You cannot increase the population of wild critters, they lay exactly one egg to replace themselves, so scaling up to feed dozens of dupes seemed challenging.
   
   
   
• One idea I had involved taming exactly 1 sweetle to grow a tame population with and following the guide above. Meanwhile all the wild sweetles would eventually replace themselves with grubgrubs if exposed to grubfruit plants, and those wild grubgrubs could be a*signed to a farm with fertilizer. This would stretch the available sulfur much further since the wild critters don’t need to be fed, but it felt like too much micromanagement and an extremely slow start on food production.

I even had a crazy idea for a multi-stage ranch that has only one stable with grubfruit plants. The idea would be to introduce 8 sweetles, leave them to tend the plants for some number of cycles, and once their grubgrub egg change is high enough, move them to another stable with no plants, where they will continue to produce grubgrub eggs. The original stable would get 8 new sweetles and the cycle would repeat. I haven’t given a lot of thought to the automation of such a ranch, but I believe there’s still some room to squeeze out sulfur efficiency with sweetles and the “maximum meat” strategy.
 
 
 

8. Thank You!

Thank you for reading this guide and I hope you found something worthwhile to take away from it!
 
 
I also want to thank a few other folks whose research saved me a bunch of time. It’s far easier to verify someone else’s results than to build confidence in your own results from nothing. Both of these posts were mentioned above but I wanted to mention them again here with a thank you.
 
 

zach123b – Sweetles and Grubgrubs

 
https://forums.kleientertainment.com/forums/topic/123942-sweetles-and-grubgrubs/ – [kleientertainment.com] 
 
 

MooChiChi – Divergents: The Solved Mystery

 
https://forums.kleientertainment.com/forums/topic/126611-divergents-the-solved-mystery/ – [kleientertainment.com] 
 
 

 
 
Here we come to an end for Oxygen Not Included Automated Divergent Ranches – Objectives + Statistics hope you enjoy it. If you think we forget something to include or we should make an update to the post let us know via comment, and we will fix it asap! Thanks and have a great day!