danno wrote:Every time I see botany it's just worse and worse
even with the nerf, it's just not enough.
botany is cancer
it practically only exists now to cause problems in the community. all I see botanists do is be huge pricks to everyone on the station, whether antag or not. this sucks. this sucks hard.
Plants are effectively being used as tools by implementing the greif tools of R&D with chemistry, i mean a good botanist can be self sufficient but it now carries the same problem as R&D. If you split it up into 'Nations' botany could go solo after 15 mins of intensive botany work and getting some mutagen blumpkins.
This is why i think my suggestion on the new hydroponics on planetstation is good, because the concept is that you're given a small range of plants, but you have to work to fill in the blanks yourself (its a bit like xenobio where it needs to get more depth otherwise you are just gating plants behind a accessibility/time barrier) but would work because you're not given the obvious. And the rest of the plant seeds providing you dont seed some of the food produce are found elsewhere in ruins or the wild.
- Remove Gaia, this is my biggest theorycrafting complaint as R&D can upgrade the trays so you can load in loads of water & chems and just leave it rather than pop down a Gaia leaf and walk away. Either that or make gaia expire after a certain amount of time and reset the tray to full water & nutrients.
- Revise the plant mobs (plantpeople/killer tomatoes/pine trees that spawn from life reagent/kudzu/spiderling spam) as being rarer, perhaps moving them away from botany because plant traits mean that these archaic (before plant traits were even a thing) grief tools just became one of a arsenal.
spamming spiderlings/purple spiders is greif and has no reason to do it since you can't 'ranch spiders for meat/other' , pine trees are a shitty strong force charge at your face mob, We already know podpeople abuse killer tomatoes plant factions to use them as simplemob attack dogs, without more depth kudzu is a grieftool and a simple mob antagonist
- Remove the pod people (and pod plant), people see this as a direct upgrade within botany and its not rare
Infinite free revives that actually turn you into something better than a base human! So simple a monkeyed partner botanist can do it.
- Without cargo, food on planetstation would be reliant on killing monsters/animals or hydro so there is upped responsibility, on the station food isn't rare at all, and plants are a optimal alternative but not a nessecary one when you can order pizza from cargo, self cannibalise each other & eat monkey steaks forever.
- Without hydro or a very active team of hunting crew, we could bring back health affecting starvation & kill off people via malnutrition, creating a drive for botany to make plants in order to give to the kitchen or crew in bulk. Nobody eats junk food anyway, and i wouldnt think the planetstation has junk food vendors.