/tg/Station 13

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IN OTHER NEWS:
Turbotany (This is the name we're going with for this because Arcane's Botany Experience sounds like a stoner rock album) version 1.2 is merged and will be live on servers shortly. Once you see the 400 MILE LONG CHANGELOG you'll know it's in.
And this time I had about 2 weeks to break everything ahead of time. Everything feels a lot fresher and cleaner, the gameplay completely changes at about the 10-15 minute mark, and a healthy dose of feedback and consideration was taken from here in the process.
Hop on and play a round when it's available and let me know how everything feels and sounds.

So I have played a good 8+ hours of the new botany and things seems to be functioning pretty well. I have been able to make a few pretty good things fairly quickly, like my laughter infused sweet potatoes that drive chefs to suicide from lack of business, a blood tomato when a slaughter demon requested it while running rampant, sparing my life. I am having a lot of plants die with just my mutagen/saltpeter/diethylamine mix, but I think I really just have to add some cryox or something into my mix.

The only real suggestion I have is to have a way to have a plant shear upgrade that gives a graft from a trait of your choice as a late game tech. The speed for cross pollination isn't too bad, but mix that with mutating a plant and you're spending 20 minutes on that one plant, worse if the plant has multiple stages of evolution or options, not so great for trying to be reactionary. Right now, the botany tech seems to get researched pretty late anyway, adding another tech for even better shears would put it into the position where it's only really researched in extended rounds or when botany gets a miracle chemical like godblood from a strange mutation, keeping it pretty balanced I think.

edit: yep, cryox was the key, its a miracle

add multiver to your mix

Alright, I spent a good few hours and reached peak botany and my main feedback is the absolute ABSOLUTE reliance on chemicals now especially chemicals made through a chem dispenser and this includes cryro, saltpeter, dith, mutagen. My round start habits haven't changed at all and a botanists reliance on the dispenser is even greater than before. I don't know if making botany not rely on the dispenser was just not possible or if you lied on the pr...i dunno.

I have not needed any chems outside of 90u mutagen from chemist at round start.

I tried a mutagen-less build with radium but this did not work since it killed all treated plants very quickly even with multiver, ash, water and diethylamine treatment.

Maybe i need to use 5u instead of 10u radium or mix it with cryox?

The experience so far has been pretty good. One concern i have is that maybe the default instability of cabbage should be reduced. It is a bit too easy to mass produce replica pods.

I also think the E-Z nutrient is a bit too powerful, it often seems to produce 100 / 10 plants on its own with little effort. I think this is fine for now, but i think a bit of this power should be transferred to a new advanced chemical, something you can scavenge for / produce on your own that is not produced from a dispenser / given for free.

can confirm ez nutriment is powerfull, i planted a bunch of fruits for cargo bounty in public botany once and out of six plants, four had 10 harvest

Kryson wrote:I have not needed any chems outside of 90u mutagen from chemist at round start.

I tried a mutagen-less build with radium but this did not work since it killed all treated plants very quickly even with multiver, ash, water and diethylamine treatment.

Maybe i need to use 5u instead of 10u radium or mix it with cryox?

The experience so far has been pretty good. One concern i have is that maybe the default instability of cabbage should be reduced. It is a bit too easy to mass produce replica pods.

I also think the E-Z nutrient is a bit too powerful, it often seems to produce 100 / 10 plants on its own with little effort. I think this is fine for now, but i think a bit of this power should be transferred to a new advanced chemical, something you can scavenge for / produce on your own that is not produced from a dispenser / given for free.

From the pr: Chemical dependence hydroponics is dead.

sounds like you rely on chemicals still

cybersaber101 wrote:sounds like you rely on chemicals still

I don't think relying on chems is bad as long as the dispenser doesn't come back as meta.

I make ash myself from paper and take multiver and cryox from public areas in medbay if i need it.

I might buy a bottle of ammonia from the vendor occasionally.

I don't really need any chemicals outside of mutagen, ez-nutrient and ash.

radium fucks your plants because it's double dipping negatives due to inheritance from uranium, not sure if that is intended.

Either way for chems like those you should not be putting in more than 1-2u ever because the mutation rolls don't scale with volume but the damage does.

Things I don't like:

1) Pest spray still turbofucks your plant unless you know to have ash/multiver/dieth onhand. Same goes for mutagen/radium/uranium,etc.
2) Still can't always get seeds out of the seed extractor even during quiet times on the station.
3) Gene shears don't often get researched early/at all, which means no salads for the chef.
4) Pollination is HELLISHLY tedious, with the problem being that many plants are not hardy enough to accept shearing even after getting tower cap grafts. Most plants require multiple shearings on top of that, and I shudder to think of the Omega Weed death plants that I used to make and how AWFUL it would be to try to accomplish that in the new system.

Things I do like:

1) New somatoray is easy to the point of being questionably OP.
2) EZ and Left 4 Zed have an actual use for once.
3) Being able to add perennial growth on the fly is nice.
4) Being able to modify genes on the fly is nice... When the plant is hardy enough to be sheared and is in that "Goldilocks zone of 20 instability"
5) Only needing a single beaker of saltpetre/mutagen for a round is REALLY nice.

the pest sprays need to be put into the chemmaster and bottled so you can do 1u increments instead of 5u.

After some more playing and refining my strategies i no longer need any chems from outside of the nutrimax.

I think this rework has been great so far since it got rid of chem spam which was tedious and gaia trays which felt cheap.

It is a bit harder to make super death plants which i think is a good thing.

The only thing i dislike is that you will never see the gene shears unless you constantly bug the HoP.

Lucky thing that medbay has like 100u of multiver in the open that no one ever uses

Kryson wrote:After some more playing and refining my strategies i no longer need any chems from outside of the nutrimax.

I think this rework has been great so far since it got rid of chem spam which was tedious and gaia trays which felt cheap.

It is a bit harder to make super death plants which i think is a good thing.

The only thing i dislike is that you will never see the gene shears unless you constantly bug the HoP.

Time to add a Chief Botanist

For the past few days now, I've been having a lot of grafts fail to actually have the traits of the plant I took them from. I've had this issue with red beets imparting densified chemicals and tomato grafts giving slippery skin in particular. Potato with their capacitive cell production isn't working on grafts either.

Don't know what broke, but I've been seeing the same. Seems that the only grafts I can do are for perennial growth, but I haven't done an in depth check on what other traits actually work.

Also, is there anything I can do about bees now ruining all my hard work outside of putting my experimental stuff in a separate room?