Xenobotany department

[FantasticFwoosh]

This is largely because i feel disillusioned with how easy the current system is, its a typical example of "we will make depth by adding a progression tree!" but then make it use a easily replacable reagent and endless back and fourth infighting over the plants and whether they should have mutations in the first place!

Xenobotany = Basically sister department to xenobiology, and deal with exotic and offworld plants via RnD methods, as well as being a laborotory into researching plants and how to develop their new forms.

It's very much based off VG's own version of advanced botany, their station runs fine with two "botany" departments to lighten the load and the gene editor is housed in this science based department. Because its in the experimentor room, variably there is less space to actually grow plants without making more boards so interdepartmental relations & botany asking for more plants, and to stop botanists just looting the place science is relatively secure.

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Key Equipment

> Herbicidiary Cataylst Synthesiser - A machine that creates new pesticides & plant afflicting reagents by combining mutagen & reagents together (from a limited amount of successful chemical combinations) that splits plant chems into 3 types (suppliment, toxin & mutator)

For example you can manufacture more EZ-grow from radium & nutriment in this machine, and robust harvest out of saltpetre & vitamins, but also some more unique and powerful chemicals too. Podpeople can be sustainably healed from a handful of the suppliments, as well as very easily killed by some of the potent toxins.

Certain plant mutations only react to relevant mutators, meaning that you must first create a ice mutator serum in order to get ice peppers, and subsequently it can also have different effect on weeds & pests. A very relevant point is that kudzu is very reactive to most of the chemicals made out of the machine and certain combinations can be made to steer towards certain kudzu traits rather than the Darwinian method.

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> Biomassive storage & dispenser - This lets you upload plants as to their current genetic standard and print them off for a 250% cost of their initial biomatter, subsequently you can feed it a lot of biomatter but it only prints plant seeds. Its initially the replacement for the experimentor since it is a wide machine, the incentive is to store mutated & found plants and then recover stock.

When plants are collected they can be exported via design disks from the BSD and added into the RND network, each plant also has its current traits, but re-uploading will set it to default. Upgrading the machine will make the storage of plant traits more correct, rather than a initial offset like the gene-editor also has at roundstart, but a inexhaustible supply of plants as long as there is enough material to feed into the machine and to keep it powered is a large benefit.

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So yes, scientists will be busybodying genetically altering plants and dispersing chemicals for botany and anybody elses benefit or detriment, and subsequently botany powergamers will need to do it our way or the highway, because without that inter-departmental interaction or taking the machinery elsewhere, they won't be able to be as needlessly destructive/helpful with their plants in a autonomous way.

Side ideas are to have a Viridian slime (offshoot from cerulean), that dispenses a guranteed on use strange seed mutator (with the caveat that the strange seeds own statistics might sink the plant's chances of survival) and to think about how science could inwardly contribute to the xenobotany project via donating plants gathered from silver slimes & chemistry assets needed for some crucial reagent mixtures. Obviously its important to mention that strange seeds will not yield anything when printed out of the machine, instead they will be default and empty.

It would be still possible to get a key mutator only otherwise accessible by the machine by using strange seeds even without the department there to help.

Give me a shout out of what you think of this idea, it'd be helpful.

[Professor Hangar]

Given the super-exotic plants Botany already has, and that the existing alien flora of Lavaland is being made compatible with it, thematically it doesn't seem like there's much interest in adding something completely different for xenobotany.

More Botany-Science collaboration opportunities might be a good idea, though.

[FantasticFwoosh]

May i redirect you to the second part of creating special mutation reagents in order to replace spamming mutagen for all of the plant mutations. Which in turn means that the days of stealing a dispenser for mutagen and unlimited are numbered, because more specialised but higher RNG if not totally guranteed reagents will take its place produced by xenobotany.

Without xenobotany you will never see killer tomatoes for instance, made out of a special mixture of stablised 'life' reagent and mutagen mixed together in the herb catalyst machine.

And if botany ever does go somewhere else, (aqua/seaweed-culture etc) we can follow it there. The perspective i see lavaland plants from in botany, is the ability to store their data remotely, recollect some unique chemicals from it for further plant chem mixtures and then allow a safe enviroment to experiment and mutate it, much like how scientists will be busy with samples from botany/garden trying to mutate those. By sufficiently gating the mutation inducement & also managing herbicides & fertilisers of varying effects we can run botany more efficiently.