Guide to Botany and Plants remake

A3STH3T1CS · Post by **A3STH3T1CS** » Wed Jun 01, 2016 4:55 pm #182815

It's trash, too cluttered, no real information besides what we need and it's all pressed together into a shitty format and the plant guide isn't even finished.

I'm thinking about reformatting the two pages and merging them within a collapsible section so it won't be a pain in the ass for newbies.

If anyone has any interest in helping me out, it would be great, thanks.

Post by **Armhulen** » Wed Jun 01, 2016 5:21 pm #182822

I can help out, but I don't want to put any misinformation. I need some stats.

I'll work on what I can now though, no worries

420weedscopes · Thu Jun 02, 2016 12:17 pm

i don't see what's wrong with the guide to plants
it is a table and it is very easy to read and to see what you're growing
it doesn't really need the hyper-detailed information in order to keep that ~*~*mystery game*~*~ feel still in
the guide to hydroponics needs a lot more love though

Post by **Armhulen** » Thu Jun 02, 2016 3:55 pm #183169

420weedscopes wrote:i don't see what's wrong with the guide to plants
it is a table and it is very easy to read and to see what you're growing
it doesn't really need the hyper-detailed information in order to keep that ~*~*mystery game*~*~ feel still in
the guide to hydroponics needs a lot more love though

The point I think is that one guide that had both would be better. I'll see if I *could* merge them and then we'll see.

Post by **Armhulen** » Thu Jun 02, 2016 4:10 pm #183178

yeah yeah double post

okay I did it, here's what I got

It's just a collapsed plant chart

it's also really big so thank god for spoilers

Spoiler:

A3STH3T1CS · Post by **A3STH3T1CS** » Thu Jun 02, 2016 5:13 pm #183190

No one cares about double posts also fucking beautiful, let's keep this up.

So what I did was that I went ahead and did was put the plant foldable in the guide to hydro and marked the plants guide for deletion.

Right about now I'm gonna find a way to shrink the guide to hydro enough so it can be a little more new botanist friendly.

Post by **Armhulen** » Thu Jun 02, 2016 5:40 pm #183193

Mackerel wrote:No one cares about double posts also fucking beautiful, let's keep this up.

So what I did was that I went ahead and did was put the plant foldable in the guide to hydro and marked the plants guide for deletion.

Right about now I'm gonna find a way to shrink the guide to hydro enough so it can be a little more new botanist friendly.

Okay, I'll be able to work on it in a few hours.

A3STH3T1CS · Post by **A3STH3T1CS** » Thu Jun 02, 2016 9:45 pm #183267

Armhulen wrote:
Mackerel wrote:No one cares about double posts also fucking beautiful, let's keep this up.

So what I did was that I went ahead and did was put the plant foldable in the guide to hydro and marked the plants guide for deletion.

Right about now I'm gonna find a way to shrink the guide to hydro enough so it can be a little more new botanist friendly.
Okay, I'll be able to work on it in a few hours.

Hit me up on IRC under Mackerel if you need to confirm something.

Post by **Armhulen** » Thu Jun 02, 2016 9:54 pm #183269

Mackerel wrote:snip

Okay, will do. Also i'll fix your deletion mark, you did it wrong. No worries
also, something for myself to note for later, the deletion template SUCKS.

Bob Dobbington · Fri Jun 03, 2016 12:17 am

Dope-ass plant chart!
I put together a guide to effective botany in the hopes that you can use it in your wiki project. It's mostly complete, I need to do the sections on kudzu and podpeople but I think it exposes a lot of the potential of the job.

Spoiler:

EDIT: Re-added whitespace

Post by **Armhulen** » Fri Jun 03, 2016 12:59 am #183332

Bob Dobbington wrote:Dope-ass plant chart!

I put together a guide to effective botany in the hopes that you can use it in your wiki project. It's mostly complete, I need to do the sections on kudzu and podpeople but I think it exposes a lot of the potential of the job.
Spoiler:
You are the Botanist! As the botanist, your objective is to grow healthy and useful plants for the crew achieve mastery over space and time through plants and ascend to your rightful place as God-king/queen of the station. Effective botany technique, with a little luck and the cooperation of your stalwart fellow crewmembers, is capable of producing extremely powerful effects, including the highest-force melee weapon in space, debilitating lethal poisons, slips for days, mushrooms that can recharge x-ray lasers, and better heals and cloning than even the stuttering whores in Medbay can offer!
Hydro is a mostly self-contained department. Everything you need to grow plants starts in one of the two hydroponics vendors, and the plants in the vendor represent a healthy majority of all the plants it is possible to grow. The chef, for instance (who will be under the mistaken impression that your job is to provide him with corn and potatoes, as opposed to ambrosia deus and gatfruit) will be able to get along perfectly fine if you simply grow him normal plants from vendor seed.
Of course, no self-respecting botanist would do this. At the very least, run down to Assistant Garden (one exists on most NT-owned stations) and get seeds from whichever of the plants on the table there you want to grow. These plants will have a potency of 50, whereas plants from vendor seed typically have potency 10; this represents a fivefold increase in the reagent content (nutriment, other stuff depending on species) of the plant for free. Higher potency does not matter for most chef recipes, but it does for wheat, so make sure to seed at least the wheat from Assistant Garden, and while you’re at it seed one of the watermelons: watermelons are tied with pumpkins for the highest nutriment content per unit of potency per plant, so the 50 potency watermelons there are worth getting seeds for before someone shoves them in the biogenerator to make a toolbelt.
However, in order to truly unlock the power of Hydroponics, you’re gonna need a little bit of help from your friends. The effective botanist spends the start of the shift running around the station acquiring tools and unstable mutagen in quantity.
Mise en place: setting up an efficient Hydro bay
The first thing to do is acquire tools, metal, and glass. This is usually pretty easy to accomplish if you get there first; toolboxes can be had from the locker room and primary tool storage, and both metal and glass can be had at auxiliary tool storage or EVA. Since you don’t have maintenance access, you’ll have to figure out another way to get in. Usually, you can just follow an assistant in; the AI or the toolbox you just picked up can also get you in. Grab a multitool if one’s available. Strictly speaking, you only need the glass; but since you will probably need cooperation from Cargo, take a stack of metal as well.
Take the metal and glass to Cargo (or to the public autolathe, if you’re on one of the good stations) and trade it for seven large beakers in a cardboard box (and a multitool, if you didn’t grab one earlier). Make sure they’re large: small beakers are useless to you. If Cargo’s vacant, you have the same options you had earlier as far as getting in. This is also a good time to order a beekeeping starter crate and bee suits; bees increase the yield and potency of your plants and can also be weaponized.
Once you’ve got the beakers, head to Chemistry. Usually it’s a fairly simple task to trade one of the large beakers in the box to the chemist on duty in exchange for them filling the other beakers with unstable mutagen; if Chemistry is understaffed, have the AI or CMO let you in; if they’re uncooperative, try R&D for a portable chem dispenser or wait for an opportune moment and steal Chemistry’s chem dispenser. You need these huge quantities of unstable mutagen because plant mutations are essentially random; you need to be able to keep trying again until you have achieved satisfactory results. Once you’ve got the mutagen and tools, you’re ready to go: the last thing you need to do is head back to Hydro and hack both of your seed vendors. There are some extra things you can do, like having the chaplain bless your water tanks or setting up an apiary, but at this point you’re basically done. You can now grow every exotic plant save gatfruit, and you have enough mutagen to get those exotic mutations and maximize the potency, production, and yield of each one.
Plants: attributes, life cycle, genetics
The botanist is capable of growing a huge variety of plants, from the mundane to the exotic. Each plant can exist in one of three forms: as a seed, as a growing plant in a hydro tray or dirt plot, and as a vegetable or fruit produced by harvesting one of those growing plants. Seeds can be planted in trays and plots, those plants can be harvested to produce vegetables, and those vegetables can be put through a seed extractor to yield further seeds. Extracted seeds have the genetic attributes of the vegetables they were extracted from, plants in trays have the genes of the seed they sprouted from, and vegetables carry the genes of the plant they were harvested from. These genes define almost everything about the plant. Plant genes fall into two broad categories: genes like potency which almost all plants have, and genes like slippery skin which appear naturally only in a few plants.
Of the genes shared by most plants, the three most worth paying attention to are potency, production and yield. Yield determines the number of vegetables received when you harvest the plant: it ranges from 0 to 10. External factors, like Robust Harvest, upgraded hydro trays, and bees, can also apply a yield multiplier: in this case you will receive more than one plant for every point of yield. Production measures the time between harvests. Note that this is independent of the maturation attribute, which sets the time between the planting of a seed and the beginning of the first production cycle. Maturation is intrinsic to the plant species and cannot be manipulated: production can be manipulated and ranges from 1-10 (although mutagen cannot mutate production below 2). The total time from planting to first harvest is thus the maturation time plus the production time: future harvests will only take the production time. Plants are either annuals, which die after being harvested once, or perennials, which can be harvested repeatedly as long as the plants are still alive. Potency can range from 0-100 and determines many attributes of the resulting plants: plants that contain reagents will contain more of those reagents at higher potencies, and species- or gene- specific effects typically scale with potency. So, for instance, 100 potency glowberries will glow brighter than 10 potency glowberries. High potency deathnettles will hit harder than low potency ones. High potency bananas will slip longer and so on. Potency genes are unique in that they
The genes which naturally appear only in certain plants fall into two categories: reagent genes and special attribute genes. Reagent genes specify a reagent and a percentage multiplier: for instance, the 50% fluorosulphuric acid gene found in deathnettle will add potency * 50% fluacid to each harvested vegetable. Most but not all plants contain nutriment: beyond that there is wide variation. All vegetables are reagent containers capable of holding up to 50 units. Reagent genes take effect in the order they are listed in the plant gene sequencer: once the vegetable is full, they will have no further effect. Special attribute genes are responsible for most, but not all, of the unique traits of different plant species. For instance, tomatoes burst on impact when thrown at a target, applying their reagents to it: this behavior is the result of the Liquid Contents special attribute gene. The Bioluminescence gene causes glowshrooms to emit light. Certain traits can work in tandem: for instance, Slippery Skin and Bluespace Activity on the same plant will cause anyone who slips on that plant to teleport a random distance away, scaling with potency; this occurs naturally in bluespace tomatoes.
A plant analyzer is in your apron at shift start, works on plants in seed, planted, or vegetable form, and displays basic genetic information for any plant you use it on. Most importantly, it will display the potency, yield, and production of each plant. However, a complete genetic analysis of the plant including reagent and attribute genes can only be achieved by the plant gene sequencer in the hydro backroom. This machine only works on seeds, but can display all of the plant’s genes, and can even save those genes to disk, destroying the seed sample. Genes saved on disk can be applied to an input seed, giving the botanist the ability to splice genes from one plant onto another. For instance, the 50% fluacid gene extractable from deathnettle can be applied to a tomato seed (with natural Liquid Contents trait) to create a formidable ranged weapon; on impact, the tomato will burst and apply potency/2 fluacid directly to the victim. Try it with blood tomatoes for a striking visual effect! Potency genes are special, and by default extracted potency genes are capped at 50 potency. Upgrading the sequencer can increase this cap to 95, but a far more achievable solution is to extract maximum yield and minimum production genes (using mutagen to create a plant with 10 yield and using wheat or tower cap seeds from the seed vendor to get the 1 production gene) and then apply those genes to plants which have already been mutated to maximum potency. In this way, you can guarantee maximum output with minimum effort and expenditure of mutagen. The reagent and attribute genes enable a large possibility space with many fun interactions. For instance, the components of the smoke chemical reaction are available as genes from different plants; they can be can be combined with such fun reagents as space lube, fluacid, bicaridine, or mushroom hallucinogen for highly effective reagent smoke mines which will, when harvested, produce 30 smoke reactions, each containing 50 units of reagent. Build a dirt plot in Central Primary Hallway, plant one of these, and get ready to reward natural assistant curiosity the way only Botany can!
Once you’ve understood all this, feeding and watering the plant is extremely simple by comparison. When at 0 nutrient or water, plants will take damage and eventually die: water and nutrient levels are shown by analyzing the plants. Plants in hydro trays will have a blue light come on when they dip below 10 water and a yellow light come on when they dip below 3 nutrient. If you’re using the above techniques, you’ll probably want to stick with Robust Harvest, although it’s possible to mix together Robust and other nutrients like ammonia or diethylamine to create really high quality plants. Left 4 Zed can also occasionally produce a species mutation at harvest time, but this is rare and extremely slow compared to direct mutation with mutagen. It’s also hard to beat the triple effective yield Robust Harvest offers, allowing 10 yield plants to produce 30 plants per harvest.
Mutagen: getting exotic plants and maximum stats with minimum effort
If you followed the setup portion of this guide, you should have around 500 units of unstable mutagen. Unstable mutagen can be applied to plants in the tray for a variety of different effects, depending on dose amount and random chance. Mutagen has three different dose thresholds: 1 unit, 2 units, and 5 units. When applied to the plant, each dose will have a different effect. 1 unit doses will cause most genetic stats of the plant to shift by a random amount. This will happen each time the plant is dosed with one unit of mutagen. 2 unit doses cause similar random stat shifts, but on average they will shift by twice as much as they would have with a 1 unit dose. 5 unit doses have the most complex effect:
• 10% chance of the plant dying instantly. Be sure to have a backup seed or vegetable in case this happens.
• 10% chance of mutation into a related species. This destroys the old plant and plants a new one.
• 15% chance of a 2u stat mutation.
• 15% chance of a 1u stat mutation.
• 20% chance of nothing. You get a message when this happens.
• 10% chance of weeds mutating. If weed level is less than 6, nothing happens, otherwise you get a random mutated weed. This mutation can produce liberty caps, destroying angel, kudzu, or deathnettle, and does not require the tray or plot to have a plant in it.
• 10% chance of pests mutating. Again, if pest level is less than 6, nothing happens. Otherwise, three spiderlings are spawned. This can be done in an empty tray.
Since you can reliably extract yield genes, it will suffice to use 1u and 2u doses on any convenient plant until the yield is at 10, and then use the sequencer to extract that yield gene to disk. The seed vendor starts with tower cap seeds and wheat seeds, both of which can be used to extract a potency 1 gene. Once this preliminary work is done, you can max out any plant in the tray by using the small mutagen doses repeatedly until it reaches max potency, harvesting and extracting a seed, and then applying the yield and production genes to that seed and planting it.
The species and weed mutations provide the botanist access to exotic and powerful new types of plants. Killer tomatoes, deathnettles, ambrosia deus, bluespace tomatoes, and replica pods are all mutated from plants you can find in an ordinary hacked seed vendor. Once you have one of these species growing in a tray, all the above techniques can be applied, to create maxed out plants with very little additional investment of mutagen and time.
The most effective way to dispense these mutagen doses is with a standard fertilizer bottle, which can hold 50 units and dispense 1, 2, or 5. Some botanists use droppers, but these are only available in Medbay and are much slower since they must be refilled between each dose. Since you’ll likely be carrying fertilizer as well, it’s best to use a bottle of a fertilizer you don’t ordinarily use: for instance, if you use the above techniques to max out your plants, any random mutation will be harmful and you will want to use exclusively Robust Harvest to prevent random mutations at harvest time. You can therefore use a Left 4 Zed or EZ-Nutrient bottle to hold your mutagen. The large beakers can dispense 5 units, and are useful for achieving species or weed mutations, since that can take a lot of mutagen. Remember, you don’t need a plant in the tray to mutate weeds: it just needs to have weed levels of 6 or higher. Weed mutation is the only reliable source of kudzu available to the botanist.
Advanced techniques
The foregoing builds a solid foundation upon which the effective botanist has a lot of creative freedom. Applying one or more of the following techniques can enable the botanist to accomplish almost anything in a given shift.
Victory gardens: you can grow a garden anywhere
When dug up with a spade or shovel (available in the fertilizer vendor), a grass tile will produce a few clumps of sand. With high potency, high yield grass, you can produce an effectively infinite supply of grass tiles (use a harvested grass vegetable while standing on a pile of them to convert them all into stacks of up to 60 grass apiece), which you can continually plant and dig up on the same tile to create an arbitrarily large amount of sand [hotkeys really helps here, you want a stack of tiles in one hand, a spade in the other, and then click->switch hand->click->switch ad infinitum]. You can do the same thing you did with the grass and tiles with sand clumps and sandstone, so don’t sit there converting sand into sandstone one clump at a time like some complete and total scrub. A full stack of 60 grass tiles produces three full stacks of 50 sandstone plus some extras. This sandstone can be used to construct dirt plots, which are functionally identical to hydro trays with the following important differences: they start with 10 units of EZ-Nutrient fertilizer, they are not dense (you can walk through them), and they have no visible displays of plant condition, unlike the hydro trays. These dirt plots can be put anywhere you can stand, and can be planted with seeds which will produce plants exactly as if they were a tray. Put them in the hallways to quickly mass produce beneficial or harmful plants for the crew’s harm or benefit! Give the clown an exotic banana lounge with all three banana varieties! Punish shitcurity with a hallway full of slippery blue tomatoes!
Self-defense tomatoes: mastery of space and time through S. lycopersicum
Tomatoes and their mutant species are some of the most powerful plants in the botanist’s arsenal. All tomatoes except for blue tomatoes have the Liquid Contents trait, which bursts the tomato on impact, applying reagents. Reagents including fluacid, amantin, lexorin, uranium, and radium can be spliced in for a very effective ranged weapon. Blue tomatoes slip for as long as bananas and contain a Space Lube 20% reagent trait. Bluespace tomatoes evolve from blue tomatoes, and will randomly teleport anyone who slips on them or is impacted by one. A very powerful use of this is to mass produce bluespace tomatoes and keep 50 of them in a plant bag, allowing the botanist to blink past walls (even otherwise indestructible walls) or away from enemies at will, or teleport those same enemies away with slips or throws. Blood tomatoes produce gibs on impact and contain O- blood, making the consumption of blood tomatoes a much better way to restore lost blood than an IV bag. Killer tomatoes produce, well, killer tomatoes: huge, angry, violent tomatoes with a taste for the flesh of the living. Killer tomatoes are harvested dormant but can be awakened [click or Z in hand]. Repeatedly awaken and drop killer tomatoes out of a plant bag to create a devastating area denial weapon, but come to peace with the likelihood that the tomatoes will kill you first.
Kudzu: A noble and misunderstood plant
TODO: Kudzu breeding technique
Pod people: better living through photosynthesis
TODO: Podperson techniques
Miscellaneous
With an autolathe, you can grow metal and glass faster than any miner can mine it. Steelcaps (mutated from towercaps) produce logs which can be chopped apart into metal rods, and sandstone can be produced by the method for making dirt plots and then fed into the autolathe to produce glass sheets.
Bicaridine and Kelotane traits from ambrosia vulgaris can be spliced into ambrosia deus to create highly effective healing deus. Dry it in a drying rack, and then roll it into a joint or stuff it into a pipe, for a long-duration heal that’s almost as good as Fleshmend.

It's great but do remember to space it out well, this is a lot of writing.

A3STH3T1CS · Post by **A3STH3T1CS** » Fri Jun 03, 2016 2:39 am #183362

that's way too much shit

420weedscopes · Thu Jun 09, 2016 1:18 pm

lookin fuckin great dudes good shit

also yes bob space it out you should be using Paragraphs

Bob Dobbington · Thu Jun 09, 2016 5:11 pm

The forum's eating up my whitespace and tabs. Yeah, I know paragraphs are kind of a thing in English writing.

Post by **Armhulen** » Thu Jun 09, 2016 7:45 pm #185218

Kudzu takes up too much space and i'm going to fix it

edit: done, lets see what else isn't good

A3STH3T1CS · Post by **A3STH3T1CS** » Fri Jun 10, 2016 12:42 am #185341

Arm, I went ahead and revised the entire "Your Tools" thing and renamed it "Your area"

Bob Dobbington wrote:The forum's eating up my whitespace and tabs. Yeah, I know paragraphs are kind of a thing in English writing.

A3STH3T1CS · Post by **A3STH3T1CS** » Fri Jun 10, 2016 3:12 am #185383

i also think i did a pretty good job at the aforementioned edit

so i'll take over the DNA description

arm could you go over the rest of the mess and consider what needs deleting

Post by **Armhulen** » Fri Jun 10, 2016 6:15 pm #185563

Sure, i'll take a look.

Okay, so heres what I found
Stat's is really confusing and says the same thing over and over, it could be redone and i'll prolly fix that first if that doesn't fall under DNA. [I left this to you, I guess that is mutations]
Chemicals just sucks. It could be made a lot more ordered. I can totally work on that [DONE]
We COULD split 'growing the plants and biogenerators' into two and add on to both. Optional. [DONE]
Why do we have "basics" there? Infact, a lot of the main headers are not needed or could be worded better. [DONE]
And I should fix Kudzu section, too. [DONE]
Remove degeneracy [DONE]

thank you Raz.

made a couple final edits but I think we're done here!

/tg/Station 13

Guide to Botany and Plants remake

Guide to Botany and Plants remake

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