Guide To Roach Ranching ErisEn

Introduction

So, you want to roach ranch.
What does roach ranching get you?
Currently, you can get three main types of produce from roaches: Allies, Chemicals, and Food.

Allies

You can take any old roach into a locker and use them for a distraction, but that is not the best option; the real way to use roaches in combat is to tame them first.

To tame a normal roach, first entice the roach by showing it a potato in your active hand, and wait until the roach sniffs the potato; the roach has been primed.

Exception:

While a Kaiser roach will look like it is interested in a potato, the real plant to tame a Kaiser with is a Bluespace Tomato.

Once the roach is primed, DO NOT wait, as you have a limited time to continue before the roach will bite you; the next step is to enter the tile of the roach. Step onto the roach if it is not a Panzer roach, if it is crawl under the Panzer and then stand up; now click-drag yourself onto the Roach you are on the tile of. The roach will start bucking, and currently whether they succeed at bucking you off just is luck. If the roach does not buck you off, congratulations, it is now tamed and will not attack you; press the resist button to dismount from the roach.

If a tamed roach is grabbed by the tamer, the roach will cease motion and aggression; this is called "wrangling" the roach. There is no limit to how many tamers can tame one roach, but each rancher must tame the roach separately. With a tamed roach by your side, you can flank any enemy just by throwing a roach past it and rushing in to assist. Roaches behind can provide backup, although as a spaceman is not a roach any spaceman rancher will have to be wary of Gestrahlte spit; the capabilities of each roach variety are listed in the appendix of this article. Riding a roach into battle allows you to travel over railings, and even if you get paincritted as long as your roach is alive they will not have uncontested access to you, making mercy killing you more difficult for them to survive.

Food

Butchering roaches with a knife provides cuts of meat usable for food, how many cuts produced per type is detailed in the appendix of this article. Butchering requires Bio to do, and can be either very or somewhat messy. Additionally, Boiled Roach Eggs are a nutritious food produced with just roach eggs and water.

Chemicals

Roach Meats contain a variety of chemicals, the use of these chemicals generally is either to take them raw as a stimulant, to heat them to obtain elemental chems from the chems, or to create medicine using them as an ingredient. There is also Kakerlakenbier, which is made of 1 part Beer, 1 part Diplopterum, 1 part Welding Fuel, and 2 parts Water, used as a vagabond beer, and Kaiser Beer, which is made of 1 part Fuhrerole, 1 part Kaiseraurum, 2 parts Kakerlakenbier, and is a potent stimulant and drink, along with making roaches ignore your presence. Fuhrerole is a chem that makes any roach ignore you while present, but it is worse than useless for ranchers as a roach ignoring you cannot be tamed, and a tamed roach does not attack you whether you have fuhrerole or not. Blattedin is very useful for tamers as blattedin heals all types of roach if present and other than fuhrer and kaiser roaches, any roach can be revived once by the injection of blattedin; however it is a quite potent toxin in spacemen. Seligitillin heals brute damage while present, useful for clearing the damage roaches do to you before tamed, as long as you can remove the toxin damage dealt as a byproduct.

Ranching

We have gone over why you want to have roaches, but how do you get them? There are three ways: you can find live roaches in maint, you can find roach cubes in maint and then inject one with blood, and you can hatch Roachlings. When out of combat, roaches will eat nearby bodies in order to lay eggs, taking thirty seconds for roach or spider bodies, and five minutes for humans or monkeys. On finishing eating a human or monkey the number of eggs the roach that ate the body is able to lay is increased by a random number between four and six, and the body is destroyed, leaving only human remains, gibs, and any cruciform the human body may have beared. If the body was instead of a spider or roach, the number of eggs said roach is able to lay will increase by a random number between one and the amount of meat that the body would have given on butchering it. Roach Eggs will progress towards hatching into a Roachling when in either an open space or a Locker. When a Roach Egg hatches, it will become a Roachling with no affiliations other than the Roach faction, attacking any nearby non-roaches on sight. You can then tame the Roachling to have whatever form it grows into be tamed to you, potentially sparing you grievous harm. If a Roachling eats a body its form on maturing will be guaranteed to be a Fuhrer Roach, unless if it has eaten either a Fuhrer or Kaiser Roach; Roachlings are unable to lay eggs and rather using this process for them. If it has eaten a Fuhrer or Kaiser roach, the roachling has a 1% chance for every egg it would have otherwise laid to become a Kaiser roach.

Containment

When ranching you generally want to keep your roaches safe from being splattered by a random spaceman and avoid roaches going out of reach... but how do you do that? First, how to protect against random spacemen: Reinforced Railings. To make a Reinforced Railing first make a standard railing, anchor it, and apply a Rod. Reinforced Railings block roach movement, projectiles, and laser beams while allowing for spacemen to move over by click-dragging themselves onto the railing and to move roaches over by either click-dragging them onto the railing or grabbing them and then clicking the railing. Reinforced Railings will not disable melee attacks going through them or projectiles taking the gaps in the corners so beware that. Now that Spacemen have to enter your ranch in order to fight your roaches and so will be far less brash in killing them, how do we avoid our Roaches leaving the ranch? To prevent Roaches leaving, we should know how and why they move. Roaches move through Burrows, a network where Vermin can move from one Burrow to the next without being exposed in the space between. Burrows are only able to exist next to a wall with a solid floor. If there are no burrows in an area and a roach grows a stage, then it will attempt to make a burrow, with it in an invisible state if under a floor tile and no Vermin has yet attempted to use it. Every so often Roaches will attempt to Migrate through nearby burrows, going to a random nearby burrow, which unless you have a large ranch is normally going to be far from the inside of your ranch. In order to prevent your roaches from escaping you thus must either prevent your roaches from being able to have burrows near them, lock them in a locker, or destroy all the burrows after they are made. The first option is a matter of good ranch design, and requires that all floors that would be near a wall are not solid, generally either being a hole or a catwalk. The second option will give backups for the ranch and does not require any maintenance for functioning, along with being fairly cheap... but disables ranching with those roaches entirely, which is not what a rancher should do with all the roaches they have. The third option is intensive, but also provides the most valued source of items for the typical Vagabond: Trash Piles. Burrows can be dug up with a shovel, trowel, or crowbar, reducing it to a fixable crack and providing a trash pile to clean up, or covered with metal, destroying the burrow but providing no trash. Cracks can be welded shut, destroying the burrow entirely- cracks are still able to be reopened by Vermin similarly to hidden Burrows.

Appendix

Kampfer:

The most common type of roach.

Produces two kampfer meat when butchered.

Jager:

Produces three Jager meat when butchered.

Deals a significant amount of damage, has a bit of armor penetration, has a little bit of damage soaking.

Panzer:

Produces four Panzer meat when butchered.

Deals a significant amount of damage and tanks a lot of damage, moves slower than other roaches.

Cannot be slipped.

Seuche:

Sprays Blattedin which can revive roaches and poisons spacemen that breathe it in.

Kraftwerk:

Produces aggressive swarms of nanite infested miniroaches on attacking, up to a limit of seven swarms.

Produces three kraftwerk meat on butchering.

Does not breathe.

Immune to pressure damage.

Immune to radiation, and has a little bit of armor against everything else.

Nanite infested miniroach clusters produced after taming will not attack you.

Nanite infested miniroach cluster

Deals minor damage, but comes in swarms.

Has no meat, but makes an oil splat when killed.

Is generally difficult to click, or causes you to click it on accident, with its large, hole ridden, and shifting sprite.

Is not tameable, instead requiring that it was produced by a tamed by you Kraftwerk to be tame to you.

Gestrahlte:

Produces three kampfer meat when butchered.

Is immune to radiation.

Keeps its distance and fires toxic and radioactive projectiles that do not hit roaches; if approached in melee range has a vomit special attack similar to its spit but worse.

Roachling:

Only has one meat, do not butcher if avoidable.

Will remain tamed even after growing up to a different roach type.

Fuhrer:

Can call reinforcements or retreat.

Has a lot of damage soaking capability.

Deals a lot of damage.

Is slow.

Cannot be revived.

Produces six fuhrer meat on butchering.

Cannot be slipped.

Kaiser:

Has a lot of damage soaking capability.

Deals a lot of damage.

Sprays Blattedin which can revive roaches and poisons spacemen that breathe it in.

If spacemen keep their distance will fire radioactive bile at them while chasing.

Has an extremely radioactive bile attack for melee range.

Can call reinforcements.

Is impossible to stun.

Produces fifteen Kaiser meat on butchering.

Cannot be revived.

Unbekkant

Teleports around.

Has crystals instead of typical flesh.

Its attacks are extremely armor piercing.

Appeared out of thin air, not a roachling...