All about Ranching Pufts

Basics

Pufts are flying critters that inhale gas and eventually excrete a solid after having inhaled enough.

They must be kept in at least somewhat pressurized in environments in order for them to actually be able to inhale enough gas to not starve. I have observed that something like 300g+ of pressure is enough for them to make due.

Warning: There is currently a still active bug in the game that has been reported to not allow pufts from actually inhaling enough gas to feed themselves, if the game is running on 3x speed. 2x & 1x is fine, however.

All Pufts will excrete 95% of the mass they consumed, with the exception of the Puft Prince excreting 10%.

Slime Pufts (the Yellow, tiger striped ones) will inhale 50 kg of Polluted Oxygen throughout the cycle and eventually excrete 47.5 kg of Slime.

Puft Princes (The Light Green, combed ones) will inhale 30 kg of either Polluted Oxygen, Chlorine, or Oxygen, and excrete 3 kg of Slime, Bleach Stone, or Oxylite respectively.

Squeaky Pufts (the Green, feathery ones) will inhale 30 kg of Chlorine and eventually excrete 28.5 kg of Bleach Stone.

Dense Pufts (The Blue, Rocky ones) will inhale 50 kg of Oxygen and eventually excrete 47.6 kg of Oxylite.

Breeding

Here is where it gets a little complicated. All Pufts have a mechanic in which their egg chances are dependent on whether or not they can sense a Puft Prince somewhere else in the vicinity.

If a puft of any kind does not sense that a prince is near them, then their egg chances will eventually steer towards 100% chance of laying a Puft Prince egg.

Slime Pufts can lay Slime puft, Squeaky puft, Dense puft, or Prince puft eggs, and when they are near a prince, all except for the Prince and Slime egg chances will rise.
Puft Princes can lay Slime puft and Prince puft eggs, and when they are near other princes, slime puft egg chances will rise.
Squeaky pufts can lay Squeaky puft, Slime puft and Prince puft eggs, and when they are near a prince, squeaky puft egg chances will rise.
Dense pufts can lay Dense puft, Slime puft or Prince puft eggs, and when they are near a prince, Dense puft egg chances will rise.

Diagram:

Dense, Squeaky, and Prince pufts can simply be fed by Oxygen for Dense, Chlorine for Squeaky, or Chlorine/Oxygen/Polluted oxygen for Prince Pufts. However, Slime pufts are a little complicated due to their need to inhale Polluted oxygen.

The common ways I believe there are to supply Slime pufts with polluted oxygen are either Morbs or Algae Terrariums.

Morbs
Morbs are a way to produce polluted oxygen that I am relatively uninformed on, and they are very strange creatures in mechanics. What one must know about them is that they spawn from full, not disabled, outhouses and they release 200g of Slimelung Polluted Oxygen if they feel that the pressure around them is below something like ~1kg. They cannot be wrangled and therefore need traps to be manually moved.

A method that I have observed to work for actually spawning the morbs is as depicted here.


All that it does is wait until a morb appears, opens both doors so that the morb is let out (and into the trap) as well as resetting the outhouse so another morb can spawn in roughly 2 cycles.

Once you've built the mechanism for actually making morbs, you can allow them to make polluted oxygen for your slime pufts using some kind of design like what is demonstrated here, where the morbs are in technically a seperate room to the pufts, in order to not disturb the critter counter of the actual puft ranch.

It is hard to tell due to morbs not producing more than 1kg of pressure in the room, but I believe that maxing out the critter dropoff for the morbs will allow for plenty enough polluted oxygen for 6 pufts. If it proves not to be enough, you could try to pressurize the bottom of the ranch (where the morbs are) with <1kg of carbon dioxide, so as to attempt to trick the morbs into producing more than they think they should.

Algae Terrariums
Algae Terrariums can be used to produce polluted water bottles which will then offgas their mass into polluted oxygen for Slime pufts to enjoy. An issue with Terrariums is that they also produce regular Oxygen. So optimally, one would be able to seperate the polluted water bottles from the terrariums and allow for a almost 100% polluted oxygen environment for the pufts.

I have devised a mechanism for exact purpose, of which you put on top of a puft ranch so it can drop the bottles into the ranch to feed the pufts.

The mechanism here is one made by me with the intention of allowing duplicants to empty the Algae Terrariums and as they walk away from them, the mechanical door below opens and allows the bottles to fall into the puft ranch below. If I remember correctly, the two algae terrariums are right about enough to sustain a full 6 slime puft ranch.

I should note that the pneumatic door is there for a reason so as to not allow any puft to escape while the polluted water bottles are being dropped.

Overall I only suggest using Algae terrariums if you have a surplus of water, and using morbs otherwise for the straightup free polluted oxygen.

Now, one must know how to put the mechanics discussed to work.

In order to ranch any kind of puft easily, both Prince puft and Slime pufts must be ranched as well, in order to lay different kinds of eggs that feed into each ranch.

What I mean is, to ranch Slime pufts, one needs a steady supply of Slime puft eggs, which can be acquired from a ranch of multiple Puft Princes. This works out well because a ranch of multiple Puft Princes will always lay Slime puft eggs, and Slime pufts without a prince will always lay Puft Prince eggs.

This exchange of eggs satisfies both Slime and Prince ranches while also producing a surplus of Prince eggs that can later be used to ranch the Squeaky and Dense pufts.

I advise that you keep a relatively low amount of Puft Princes since in my humble experience I have found that 3-4 puft princes are already enough to keep the other puft ranches well stocked.

An issue that prevents easily ranching special kinds of puft (squeaky, dense) is that the Critter Drop-off building counts all critters in the room instead of just the kinds of critters that have been checked off. If the critter drop-off only counted the critters that were included by the player, then one could simply make two of them, one for the special kind of puft, and one for puft princes. Unfortunately, this is not in the game, and therefore workarounds must be done in order to insert a puft prince into Special puft ranches.

Slime Ranching
Ranching only Slime pufts is Relatively easy. As discussed before, all one must do is make a ranch of Prince Pufts and Slime pufts separated from each other that feed eggs into each other. Something you might get stuck on is gathering enough Polluted Oxygen in order to feed the slime pufts. The easy ways to do this are either with Algae Terrariums, or Morbs, as stated above.

Bleach Stone / Oxylite Ranching
It gets a good bit complicated here due to the mechanisms that involve allowing the Squeaky/Dense pufts to sense a prince in their enclosure while also not really allowing the prince to move or partake in the same substances that the specialty pufts are. I will do my best to explain what I have came up with in a concise and understandable manner.

Here is a relatively standard Squeaky Puft ranch. The Squeaky pufts recognize the prince puft in the cage and therefore lay many squeaky puft eggs.
The way Prince Pufts are delivered here is by a load of 200s filter gates connected to a weight plate. Prince pufts will eventually excrete the solidified version of what they eat, which will trigger the weight plate and reset the timer to open the conveyor chute. If there is no prince puft, then in 2 cycles the weight plate will successfully trigger all filter gates and open the conveyor chute in order to place a prince puft egg, which will eventually hatch and the squeaky pufts will recognize as their prince. The more filter gates, the "safer" the contraption gets, as there is more time for the prince to excrete.
The notable shipping here is the red line. The red line is connected to the egg output of my slime puft ranch. This means that Prince eggs will convey through the prince cage and if the chute is open, deposit an egg. If the chute isn't open, then it goes into the incubator room with the rest of the eggs.

This way of ranching Squeaky/Dense pufts will unfortunately every 75 cycles leave the pufts will no prince for a good ~20 cycles including the time it takes for the prince to grow up after being hatched. However in practice, this would appear to be not enough time to disrupt the egg output of the specialty pufts.

I hope this guide was helpful and Please let me know in the comments if I missed anything or I should clarify something.