Hatch

The Hatch is a nocturnal critter that colonies usually encounter during their first excavations. It eats a broad mix of minerals and some of the same foodstuffs that Duplicants can eat, and it converts that intake into coal. It also provides a small decor bonus of +10 in a short radius around itself, making it useful even before ranching becomes part of a colony’s economy.

Hatches hide during daylight by burrowing into natural tiles with a hardness rating of 20 or lower, including tiles marked as containing buried objects. Excavating the starting biome can expose hidden Hatches and speed up early ranching. When killed, a Hatch yields 2,000 g of meat, which cooks into barbecue as usual. A happy, well-kept Hatch lays an egg every 5.88 cycles, so a full ranch can be turned into either a steady meat supply or a source of eggs for omelettes and repopulation.

The Hatch’s diet and outputs make it one of the most flexible ranch critters in the game. Regular Hatches consume solids and transform them into coal at a 50% mass conversion rate; a common example is 140 kg of solids becoming 70 kg of coal. Because they will also eat some food, they can be fed with edible resources in a pinch, but food is an inefficient coal source for a ranch intended to support a Coal Generator. A Coal Generator consumes 600 kg of coal per cycle when running constantly, so a fully satisfied coal ranch needs careful scaling. Roughly 8.5 tame, happy Stone Hatches are needed to sustain one generator nonstop, and since a Stable holds at most 8 Hatches, a single Stable usually is not enough for continuous full-time power.

The Hatch family has several useful variants:

• Stone Hatch: prefers mineral materials such as Igneous Rock and can also consume some raw metals, producing coal in return. It is tougher than a normal Hatch and is often used for coal production.
• Smooth Hatch: eats metal ore and produces refined metal instead of coal. It refines 100 kg of ore into 75 kg of refined metal, making it a low-heat, no-power alternative to a Rock Crusher or Metal Refinery.
• Sage Hatch: prefers organic materials such as Polluted Dirt, slime, algae, and normal food. It converts consumed mass into coal at the highest rate among the variants, making it excellent for disposing of unwanted organics.
• Dry Hatch: eats solid carbon dioxide and produces Refined Carbon instead of coal. Its low-temperature requirements make ranching it much more specialized.

Practical ranching often focuses on which Hatch variant best matches a colony’s waste streams. Stone Hatches are ideal when a map has a Volcano, because cooled Magma can become Igneous Rock and be fed to them for a renewable coal supply. Smooth Hatches are best kept to a controlled number, since 3 to 4 can cover most early- and mid-game refined metal needs, and overbreeding them can drain ore reserves. Sage Hatches are excellent for turning spoiled food or excess organics into eggs, meat, and coal, but they are usually less efficient than Stone Hatches when minerals are abundant. When harvesting any of the tougher variants for meat, caution is advised, as they can badly injure or kill an unprepared Duplicant.