Botany Rework Idea

[MisterTikva]

So, tons of people are not satisfied with the current state of botany. Mostly because it is too overpowered and can produce immense amounts of bullshit plants. And in my opinion it is also too shallow, if you are a good enough botanist you already know how to make everything and just end up grinding the buttons for 15-30 minutes to get something that nobody would use anyways. My idea is to make more like virology and link traits and stats into "genes". Those genes can be like: 200u chem capacity, -50 potency, +3 production speed, -3 yield etc. This way you need to balance those genes to get cool enogh effects without it taking 50 minutes to grow a single fruit. It should add more depth to the department and allow us to balance it properly without ruining it.

That's just an idea, i'm no coder or game designer.

[Qbopper]

I'm not familiar enough with botany to know what specifically is a problem with the department, but from the little I know this doesn't sound too bad

I'd need an actual botanist main to comment though

[MisterTikva]

I was a botany main before it got too boring for me.
And all you do is whack plants with mutagen to get a new species/100 potency, wait, press some buttons on the DNA Extractor, repeat untill you get your Holocaust Omega Weed.
The problem is that you get best everything if you just spend enough time and press enough buttons, basicaly RnD but nobody needs your stuff, your toys are pretty shitty and there's less of them.
EDIT: adden an actual comment

[ShadowDimentio]

So we've got chucklefucks on one side bitching that botany is too strong, and we've got chucklefucks on the other side bitching that botany is too weak. Somebody here is wrong.

(It's both of you)

[PKPenguin321]

last night i watched a plantperson from that lavaland ruin spawn 10000000000000 killer tomatoes and kill bubblegum in less than 10 seconds

[kevinz000]

Too bad science mains aren't allowed to touch botany :^)

[MisterTikva]

So we've got chucklefucks on one side bitching that botany is too strong, and we've got chucklefucks on the other side bitching that botany is too weak. Somebody here is wrong.

I'm not saying it's too weak, i'm saying it's too boring especially as a non-antag.

[ShadowDimentio]

No it isn't. Make healing stuff, benevolent kudzu, weapons for sec, bluespace tomatoes for teleporting about... The limits are your imagination.

[MisterTikva]

No it isn't. Make healing stuff, benevolent kudzu, weapons for sec, bluespace tomatoes for teleporting about... The limits are your imagination.

That sounds good on paper, but in my experience nobody wanted anything from me. Make some super nutritious/healing plant - nobody eats it, Make kundzu - get lynched, Make bluespace tomatoes - wew entertaimen for 2 minutes etc.,plus everybody just ignores botany. The other problem is that everything is extremely repetitive.

[ShadowDimentio]

As opposed to R&D, genetics, and virology? Not even a bit.

[Atlanta-Ned]

Just so long as glowshrooms get nerfed to shit.

[LifeReign]

This won't work. I do a great deal of viro and botany, and I'd say viro is even more shallow than botany is. Virology is 5-10 minutes of clicking, then waiting on uranium and gold from either mining or botany, then 2 minutes of clicking for the one helpful virus you make.

The glowshroom thing should hopefully go away after the color change to something less eye blinding and the potency/growth nerf. It seems to be the current meme grief, as I've seen people breaking into botany just to grow glowshrooms, breaking into the little alcove near the captain's room to get the glowshroom spawn there, and taking the glowshroom out of metastation maint. Hopefully it'll get old and people will find something else to do every round.

[MisterTikva]

This won't work. I do a great deal of viro and botany, and I'd say viro is even more shallow than botany is. Virology is 5-10 minutes of clicking, then waiting on uranium and gold from either mining or botany, then 2 minutes of clicking for the one helpful virus you make.

The glowshroom thing should hopefully go away after the color change to something less eye blinding and the potency/growth nerf. It seems to be the current meme grief, as I've seen people breaking into botany just to grow glowshrooms, breaking into the little alcove near the captain's room to get the glowshroom spawn there, and taking the glowshroom out of metastation maint. Hopefully it'll get old and people will find something else to do every round.

I'm not saying that we should get the genes out of thin air by using some substance on the plants, genes can be already present in standard plants and you just mix and match them or something. I'm just proposing the idea that you need to make choices and can't get the best fruit in existence that is also being produced at a rate of 40pcs/minute while being absolutely self-sustaining. We can have something like a gene that makes plants self-sustaining but redusces potency and yield or a gene that decreases production/maturation time, but in turn makes your plants more vulnerable to weeds and so on.

And with healing viro you don't need to think about spread and the crew curing your disease, you just slap the best sympthoms and call it a day. Proper virology is quite a bit deeper because you need to balance transmission, resistance and stage speed while trying to squeeze that necrosis sympthom in, the only problems for me with it are a lack of sympthom variety and the process of getting those sympthoms is a bit grindy. But again, RNG gives rounds atleast a bit more variety.

[Armhulen]

Just so long as glowshrooms get nerfed to shit.

((((((

[Dr_bee]

I actually have been thinking a lot about this.

Part of the problem is the self sufficiency and another is the lack of a cost to use the DNA machine, so I propose 3 things.

First, remove the auto-water/feed feature from ambrosia gaia. This completely trivializes one of the main interactions between botany and the science department as you no longer need science parts to make super hydroponics trays, it also takes a significant amount of the labor from the job.

I know a PR doing this was denied but I still think it would be an overall good choice, if you want autocare trays, ask RnD to upgrade them to have 500 water and 50 freaking fertilizer. In response to the nerf, have earthsblood heal genetic damage as well, making the plant still stupidly useful to have for its healing ability.

Second, Reduce the max amount of production speed and yield from the DNA machine based on the level of upgrade it has.

Right now you can simply pop a wheat seed for production speed 1 and a tobacco seed for yield 10 at roundstart. this takes no skill at all and allows for the insane increased production that botany can do.
Nerf it down to production 3 and yield 5 at roundstart, and have it increase to 1 and 10 with upgrades similar to how potency does. This chance would increase the amount of interaction between the science department and botany, and provide a nice time buffer to serious production of meme plants.

And finally and more controversially, add a currency requirement to using the DNA machine.

We have biogenerators already, why not have the DNA machine require a certain amount of biomass to do an operation. Have the biogenerators create blocks of biomass you feed into the DNA machine to use it, with costs increasing based on the amount of change you are going to make to the experimental seed.

This would encourage botany to produce foods with high nutriment values so they can biogenerate them for biomass, nutriment rich foods also benefit the chef, who can use those plants for his food.

All of these things help provide not only a sense of progression to botany but reward co-operation between departments. Hell, toss in selling biomass via cargo and we have 3 extra departments that get cool stuff from botany and not just medbay!

[Lazengann]

Botany doesn't need a nerf, it needs something to work towards that's more useful than deadly Omega Weed.

[LifeReign]

Everybody's just trying to find ways to make botany as tedious as possible, even for people who want to do helpful stuff. Actually, I'd argue that the more tedious you make botany, the less helpful stuff and the more griefing will come out of botany. Helpful botany requires multiple varieties of plants for the chef and for medication. Seriously, my apple recipe requires 10+ chems to make. Helpful botany will want to keep their plants maintained as they go out to do building projects, or want to donate plants to other departments that requires no botany tools to maintain.

Killer botany doesn't do any of that. The most dangerous stuff usually requires a single plant with a few traits, so the more tedious botany becomes, the more likely that the only thing worth making is a single griefplant.

Cargo already gets absurd points from plasma, the chef usually just deepfries stuff now (also tending a good garden with multiple varieties of plants for the chef is incredibly tedious without gaia), and medbay already has what it needs without botany.

How about instead of making botany godawful for anybody but people who want to murdergrief the crew, you improve what botany can do to be helpful? Right now, botany can provide research levels quite easily, but R&D never asks. The chef rarely asks for food. Cargo doesn't need the points from high potency seeds. Botany can make wood and grass tiles, but they can't make their own autismforts, because they can't make air.

[cedarbridge]

I'd honestly rather just see botany get more interesting foods and things to grow for eating purposes and less things to turn botany into a weaponized autism factory. While its true that the first lends itself more to "muh rp" since we haven't established a good food-related buffing system yet, the latter is just a cancerous mess. Its an administrative nightmare because we end up with with one department that[produces the equivalent of chem or cargo making grenades or guns, respectively, and tossing them out in the hallways. Only these guns come in every flavor of the rainbow and rarely if ever run out.

If you want to save botany from being full on retarded. Remove most of the really stupid genetic traits, give botany more interesting things they can make with chef/bartender input, and give some minor useful buffs to eating certain types or varied types of food. We could even toss an extra nerf on vending machine foods if we needed to, but I think those are already in a good enough spot.

tl:dr Make botany a job about eating food rather than throwing it.

[LifeReign]

Chefs and bartenders don't often ask for stuff outside basic things. So that would basically be "let's remove botany"

[cedarbridge]

Chefs and bartenders don't often ask for stuff outside basic things. So that would basically be "let's remove botany"

Alternatively do the rest of my post and give asking for non-basic things worth doing.

[Dr_bee]

Everybody's just trying to find ways to make botany as tedious as possible, even for people who want to do helpful stuff...

The thing about fully upgraded hydroponics trays is they are almost as set and forget as ambrosia gaia trays, and they use an existing inter-departmental interaction instead of a special plant to make them obsolete. Try timing how long it takes for a fully upgraded tray to empty and you will see that my idea is not as bad as it sounds.

[LifeReign]

You can't plant a garden in dirt without gaia.

Also again: someone who wants to grief through botany doesn't care about set and forget: they're going to load up once and then they don't care about what happens to botany afterwards. Every bit of increased tedium affects helpful botanists far more than it affects antag botanists.

[oranges]

That's an unfortunate side effect, but the reality is there are usually more annoying people in <job> than there are helpful ones and unfortunately that usually leads to them annoying the general populace enough for a nerf pr to be made and go through.

edit:If I knew how to solve this problem convincingly I think I would be worth millions

the only solution I can suggest is that it becomes much harder to accquire and use bad traits and seeds, but I dont' know of lore friendly ways to work that into botany.

[Qbopper]

Yeah I think the issue isn't "botany is overpowered and stupid and dumb and shit" but "botany has too many griffable items that take too little effort to obtain"

[FantasticFwoosh]

Mutations are PR'd on meme value alone, then spiral out of control as people add, tweak and create griff functions for them.

You could remove the mutagen hard mutate function from unstable mutagen, and then give a seperate plant value of how readily the plant is willingly to mutate instead every time it is ready to harvest. Removing the mutation values from compost/chemicals but still the chance to roll the plants natural mutation stat (therefore the gene machine is technically still scaled and left4zed or other kinds of plant specialised chems are king)

> Dumps as much mutagen as possible to get gaia = never add nutrition/water again, ok scale back the mutagen to get my griff weapons now i can leave my plants alone indefinitely within thier life span = Adds max stats to everything with gene machine without effort for 10 of each griff weapon ever 1:30 minutes after harvest for a plant that will survive 20 mins without replanting

Or its a case that without mutagen the existing mutation 'tech tree' is too slow inside rounds that aren't extended. In which case you can directly remove the mutation system ALLTOGETHER and replace it with finding the griff/super useful seeds through another method (*COUGH COUGH XENOARCHEOLOGY*COUGH*EXPLORATION*COUGH*XENOBIO SILVER SLIMES*COUGH*) so that finding the seeds and shipping them to centcomm via cargo for points allows them to join the things you can order from centcomm, and griff plants are contributed to contraband.

- Traitor botany starter pack or botanist random bundle box = A source of gatfruit etc. rather than rare ruins or scientists pounding shit in the experimentor. QM's can export the seeds for quick cash and then burn the paper evidence to buy a item for themselves to emag open. etc. etc.

[Cobby]

The whole "make everything a trait" idea was, although logical, really dumb and should have been spread out instead of "PUT ALL THE THINGS INTO THE GENE MACHINE" [aka powergaming botanists' device of choice].

Also the people who main botany all know the plants that gave them the best stats /roundstart/ [I mean they're literally provided for them in the map and/or the vending machine seeds] so I mean it's pretty on par with RND at that point where you're just getting the genes from your inhouse machine, nabbing it [you have 2 more of the same seed], then applying that BEST STAT across EVERY SINGLE ONE OF YOUR PLANTS with NO DOWNSIDE WHATSOEVER.

[Remie Richards]

the more genes you put in a plant the more expensive it should be to add more genes to the plant (Idk what the cost would be though, biomatter?)

[Nabski]

[I mean they're literally provided for them in the map and/or the vending machine seeds]

Wheat
Tobacco
Tower Caps
Apples or anything with Perennial Growth

My suggestion on this is you have to insert a grown plant into the gene machine rather than seeds. That way you need to grow the plant first?

I like the idea of it requiring biomass to modify plants.

I personally hate how "effective" it is to grow mutagen blumpkins rather than try to work with chemistry. Double this because there are plenty more fun chemicals that can be used for growing, but you will never manage to get. Looking at you saltpeter.

[oranges]

portable planters already exist, they freeze the plant as it is when you put it into it.

[LifeReign]

I feel that botany needs more interesting plants that don't cause harm and more ways to interact positively with the station. Right now, there are potential interactions with the chef, the bartender, chemistry, genetics, cargo, and R&D. However, the bartender usually doesn't need anything, and a lot of chefs just deepfry random garbage for food now. Cargo usually has more than enough points from plasma and crates.

For chemistry, botany can make carpotoxin, omnizine, and holy water. Carpotoxin is an ingredient for rezadone which is a good healing chem, while omnizine is a very weak all-heal that is an ingredient for strange reagent alongside holy water. I almost never see any of these requested.

Now for R&D: Botany can get R&D up to research level material 6 through golden apple, plasma 7 through glowberry/glowshroom, power 7 through glowcap, bluespace 6 through bluespace tomato/banana, bio 7 through gaia, combat 6 through death nettle, combat 7 through gatfruit (hah), emp 6 through ghost chili, and data 6 through walking mushrooms. However, most of these can also be acquired from mining, the traditional butt-buddy of R&D. The only research that is mostly unique to botany (not obtained from science or mining) is plasma 7 and power 7. Bio 7 can be obtained from botany somewhat faster than from xenobiology, so there's that, but it doesn't enable any R&D items. Plasma 7 is only used in the decloner, while power 7 has no use. In practice, botany doesn't often have much to offer R&D.

I feel that the lack of bartender and chef interaction is a player/RP issue, so those interactions probably don't need to be looked at here. Instead, cargo, chemistry, and R&D interactions show the most promise, especially as they are the roles that can offer botany things in return. Maybe chemistry could get more interesting chems from botany, cargo could get more bonuses from 100 potency exotic seed samples, and R&D could either get more levels from botany or could make more things at higher levels.

Unrelated to the rest: what if certain plants like space tobacco(which produces a chem that heals oxyloss and prevents suffocation) also produced oxygen gas under light to help refill vented areas of the station?

[Dr_bee]

I was thinking more, as I always do, and was wondering if adding more traits, but undesireable ones, Like random mutation or causing brute damage on harvest, would make botany a bit more interesting. This would mesh well with adding a biomatter cost to using the DNA manipulator as you could have a reason to use it besides making 100 potency meme plants.

Speaking of biomatter as a DNA manip cost, how would simply having all levels of modification open at roundstart being a thing, but have them cost incredably large amounts of biomatter. Biomatter costs would be reduced by RnD parts. This would give botany its own sense of progression by having a good stock of biomatter without being crippled by RnD not doing thier job.

[LifeReign]

Biomatter doesn't really matter right now, so giving biomatter a good use would be nice. Negative traits could be interesting, since genetics has its powers partially gated by genetic disabilities.

[cedarbridge]

I feel that the lack of bartender and chef interaction is a player/RP issue, so those interactions probably don't need to be looked at here. Instead, cargo, chemistry, and R&D interactions show the most promise, especially as they are the roles that can offer botany things in return. Maybe chemistry could get more interesting chems from botany, cargo could get more bonuses from 100 potency exotic seed samples, and R&D could either get more levels from botany or could make more things at higher levels.

This is actually the discussion we're having in the food and nutrition thread. Deepfrying definitely needs nerfing/changing and some diversity to food is going to go a long way to encouraging more chef/bartender interaction with botany. As it always should. Service right now as a department feels too disconnected.

[FantasticFwoosh]

Bartender & chef needs the botany to work much more than botany has ANY reliance on them. They basically kiss botany's ass all the time.

There is no penalty to not complying with service requests because while it provides buffs (not being slow from hunger, some helpful drinks & foods) the HOP doesn't oversee or enforce anything there so its mainly a collusion of independent projects, in which botanist have full power over what to make. Botany in itself has enough self sufficiency to be a entirely independent department.

- Implement livestock goof-farm using slime consoles to handle livestock, then divide botany & 'barnyard' to be the leading departments of "Agricultural" so that agricultural interacts with service = who get summary buff to what they vend out.

- Goof farm during its brief merge period was a success (except for the shitty ass clickbait chocobo 'raptors') and goof hinted he wanted to expand the system, metastation already has a small animal coop, the chef has a goat and more animals are orderable via cargo to get fresh stock.