/tg/Station 13

So since xenobio is gonna get gutted. Heres my idea to save the best thing about it. Sentience Potions!

We all know about forbidden fruits in folklore that give you accursed knowledge. What better way to save a game mechanic then by giving it to botany. It can be a reagent in the golden fruit. Or its own mutation. You feed it to an animal and grant it accursed knowledge of good and evil! Which has the byproduct of sentience. Which it will either thank you for, or violently murder you for its new found awareness.

One of the most common complaints about xenobio is that its content should be shared with other departments. If you hate this your lame!!!! lame!!!

But what if I don't want the devs to notice how horrendously OP botany already is?

God, why give more stuff to botany?

They can already:

Make (almost) any chemical in existence, even ones chemists cant
Mass produce guns
Mass produce explosives (though seem kinda shit and mostly just very annoying more than dangerous ; the fact they're not that dangerous means botanists spam them all over the place every 5th round)
Bring people back to life from a vial of blood
Mass produce self/offensive(ranged too) teleporting stuff
Make hugely dangerous melee weapons.
Just shit the place up with kudzu/spikes/plants on the floor that inject you when you try walk over them.
I'm sure there's more

In between growing actual produce for the kitchen, I'm sure.

Botany's already pretty OP and has far more things it can do than any other department, give it to someone else

darn this game that changes design leads every 4 years so you must rework old stuff if you want it to still exist

Other ideas

1. Make sentience potions purchasable by cargo. Giving them something people actually want that isnt just guns and armor

2. Make it a genetics mutation that allows you to tap things with sentience, at a cost of clone damage and a hefty cooldown?

Sounds like a fine idea for a away ruin special-plant, if eating from the tree of knowledge somehow discarded your ghostrole status and forces you to leave lavaland indefintely. Head full of recipies but no opposable thumb to craft them with.

Botany is already going to be the next department to get the padded-walls treatment after xenobio and virology, mark my words

At that point the playerbase would be better off playing a text based game with the amount of content removed

I'd be on paradise though.

You'd think they'd learn that removing what's fun from a job and making it even more tedious makes the game less desirable to play.

Botany already got gutted when they removed separated chems. Please don't gut it again.