Turbotany Test Merge Feedback Thread

Fri Apr 03, 2020 10:15 pm

Hey all!
So, first off, yeah... rocky start! There are several things that are still very, VERY broken and I'm working as fast and as diligently as possible to get them working and shipped. So lets try to keep the death threats minimal, gang.
I'm currently following all the issues on the tracker, but I understand that this broke several things, very quickly. Please have a tiny bit of patience, as this was a solo project and I lack the ability to work on this 24/7 without failing all my classes, mind you.

Also, if you were playing in the first few hours of the merge, do note that several critical issues were fixes in this PR here, but I understand that I likely didn't fix everything.

So, sorry for ruining hydroponics for a few minutes.

Original PR Link: https://github.com/tgstation/tgstation/pull/50001

trollbreeder · Sat Apr 04, 2020 6:40 am

I miss the plant gene manipulator.
Maybe you could keep it in the game but as a lategame techweb node (that needs advanced biotech, genetics research, and botany research), constructed by engineering or science.

Post by **oranges** » Sat Apr 04, 2020 7:53 am #553104

I encourage you to try the new system for a week or two, I think you'll find that it's different, but the gameplay loop is about the same.

JamalGinsberg · Sat Apr 04, 2020 9:47 am

I don't think anyone who used to be a botanist will keep playing botanist, losing the luxury of being able to do what ever you want to the plant very easily is too much for us

JamalGinsberg · Sat Apr 04, 2020 9:50 am

what pisses me off is that there isn't a way to remove and insert chems

deedubya · Post by **deedubya** » Sat Apr 04, 2020 12:11 pm #553134

Like usual, you could at least make an attempt to test locally and fix the obviously broken aspects of it before forcing it on players.

Matkingos · Post by **Matkingos** » Sat Apr 04, 2020 1:01 pm #553137

The Good: There's definitely room for potential with the new mechanics being introduced. I like being able to make modifications to plants after I have planted them via grafting which cuts down on growth times. The auto-grow function for trays is a very neat feature. I also like being able to flush out the fertilizer and add in a new one for quick reaction to situations. Cross breeding is a neat concept that can help make sure that all your plants have at least average stats. Instability could be a very good tool in keeping plants well, stable and ensuring that random mutations happen less often.

The Bad: Almost no control over anything in Botany. You're left to the cruel whims of RNJesus even more than before. No real way to pump up instability, fertilizers and crossbreeding cause instability to fall due to most seeds having instability values of 10 or fewer and crossbreeding being an averaging game. Mutagen kills the plants very quickly and basically make you have to babysit plants even more than old botany. I wish you could take more than one graft from a plant. Crossbreeding makes half your trays useless if you want to grow a good statted plant in isolation, as hydro is already jammed with plant trays, there is no real area to put an isolation growth area, you'd better call an interior designer if you want to use it in conjunction with drying racks, a loom, or bees.

The Very Bad: This PR has basically broken botany and should have been left to cook for a while longer in play-testing. You could have put out feelers to Botany players to play-test and experiment with the build, right now it's a busted mess and needs some serious un-fucking. Mutagen is basically a necessity now as it's the only way to actually get instability to reliably rise. The irrigation system for trays also broke as well as being able to tell at a glance if a tray has too much weeds/pests in them. So you basically have to guess now as mutagen is gonna give you a permanent red arrow.

How I would improve this: Bring back DNA manipulator and slash all of its max values in half. At T4 parts the max potency you could get shouldn't be 90 but lets say, 40 with a yield of 4. That way you still have to channel your inner gardener to grow high quality flora. DNA manipulator should only take plant grafts/samples instead of seeds, making it so that you HAVE to grow the plant to completion at least once. Each trait could have an instability level to it, much like genetics where if you cram too much shit into a plant it just wont work/plant will dissolve because you played God. Or just make it so the DNA manipulator can only remove traits from samples instead of add/remove at will, that way you can still choose what traits/chems you WANT to grow in a plant, but you have to be subtractive and cross breed very specialized plants in order to get the desired result. After choosing the traits/chems you want the DNA manipulator changes the sample into a seed that you can use grow the desired plant of choice. Taking grafts from a plant should count as a harvest, as well have an innate chance of failure, but should also be repeatable, as the micro of having to dig up/replant a plant to get a new graft is a pain in the ass.

Instability should also lower the chance of crossbreeding if it is low, and increase if high. This would allow botany players to grow plants side by side, and as long as the Stability levels are low, there is less risk of contamination.

I can go on with more ideas on instability and how it can be tied to mutation but I think I'll leave the wall of text for now.

Kassori · Post by **Kassori** » Sat Apr 04, 2020 5:20 pm #553177

I've only tried two rounds of botany since the update, so I expect a lot of the issues I'm having are just part of learning a new system. I'll start with the stuff I like, because those are the core features you added.
Breaking the cycle of spending the first 15-20 minutes every round gilding trays is definitely the best improvement and makes me not speed-run the first half of the shift.
Being able to add traits to an existing plant with grafts is also an interesting idea, being able to splice perennial growth onto a newly mutated plant could save a lot of time, or add electrical activity to a potato when those slowcaps finally finish growing.
The cross-pollination is pretty cool as well, I think it could be expanded with plants that offer some sort of adjacency bonus, like corn, squash and beans or something like a flytrap that could eat pests from nearby planters.

What I am not so fond is that I feel like I have lost almost all control over what I grow. I'm also just as dependent, if not more so, on the chem dispenser to try to compensate for the loss of the DNA manipulator. Having to rely on RNG to craft a basic chemical mix in a plant, like adding banana juice to a sweet potato is kind of frustrating.
The auto-grow system seems super situational at best. If I get shot, poisoned, kidnapped, abducted, caught in scrubber flood, abducted, culted, jailed etc I can't really activate trays, and if the system can only handle a few trays, most of my stuff is going to die anyway. So getting inconvenienced for a few minutes can destroy large chunks of the work done that shift. I think this can be improved by having more passive ways of protecting the plants. Some ideas I've had were plants that give nutrients back to the tray while growing, so you can connect them and have a plant feed several, or that pest eating fly trap, so you could put those plants on auto-grow and they'd tend to adjacent ones. This would let you trade some of your trays and production capability to automate the process a bit more.

Id like to think the DNA manipulator still has a place in the game, as a late game tech and maybe in the pod man spawner, though that'd probably lead to cabbage patch kids defending their manipulator from thieving miners with homegrown magnums.

Also, RIP the speedrun

Spoiler:

CDranzer · Post by **CDranzer** » Sun Apr 05, 2020 4:57 am #553342

Right, so after playing for a couple of rounds, here are the two biggest issues that caught me off guard because they're counter intuitive:
One, the purity of a mix doesn't matter. All that matters is how much of a chemical is in the tray at the time of growth.
Two, the effects of instability aren't cumulative. Each 20-instability tier has a separate effect.
I had to dig through the source just to discover these things, and I'm not happy for having to do so.

The chemical factor is a little annoying because it means you have to be standing there making sure all your trays are 100% full all the time if you want the most growth. From a more creative standpoint, the mixes themselves are pretty damned uninspiring. I was hoping for more exotic fertilizers with more exotic traits, but it looks like it's just Left4Zed to pump instability and then it's back to good old Saltpetre and Diethylamine once you need your 100/10/1 crop.

I like that mutations are progressive over the life of the plant instead of being something that happens at maturity. I like that fertilizers are actually reagents now instead of trays just remembering the last thing you poured on them. I like that it's fairly easy to get decent crops even with the base fertilizers. The advanced chems still provide a practical use, but it's not as bad as it used to be. I also like that ambrosia farming is gone, though their power consumption seemed less than they should be. A way to get traits outside of strange seeds is nice.

From a technical standpoint, you have issues. The scanners don't give you tray stats unless the tray is empty. The seed processor doesn't keep track of instability. The UI on that thing really needs to get TGUI'd. I've yet to experiment with pollination, but I agree with the sentiment that there really isn't enough space to work with. Making meme crops was far too easy before, but now I have serious concerns about just how bad the RNG dependence is. Also, the code contains a comment which contains the phrase "you'll want to fix this before merge".

All in all, it's got some interesting ideas, but it's rough enough that merging it was probably a poor decision.

Might be better after a few weeks of bug fixes and features.

Kassori · Post by **Kassori** » Sun Apr 05, 2020 5:34 am #553347

After another two hour shift of constantly scrambling to keep the trays filled with nutrients, having yield spike down any time I increase potency and vice versa and finally finding a decent mix with another helpful botanist delving though the code, I can't say it was really fun or very rewarding, it seems like anything that increases instability or mutations just nuke the plant stats, the only really mutations and spreading I got we're unintentional while the ones I aimed to create failed. I realize that's not really actionable feedback so I'll try to elaborate.

I spent most of the shift running topping nutrient trays up, since it seems that the nutrients are more effective at higher volumes, while the volume of chemicals I was using was significantly less, I spent way more time just adding nutrients over and over and over and over. I think either the basic beakers in the plant trays should be larger or nutrient use should be slower.

The spreading of chemical traits seems super unreliable, I planted a potato with a banana tree on each side and a watermelon on the end, kept these plants up for over an hour, the watermelon and banana shared chemicals like crazy, the potato never got a single thing from the bananas in over an hour, all of these were in the same row so they ended up sharing very similar stats. I recommend randomizing the traits received from plant grafts and including their chemical traits as well, so you don't just get slippery skin from a banana graft every time, but sometimes the perennial growth, banana juice or potassium production. This would allow us to brute force specific plant mutations over several generations, at a cost too, with this, I might have to grow 5 banana seeds to finally cut a graft with that banana juice and then eventually densified chemicals on the next generation bit I could reliably get it rather than hoping that RNG decides to bless me. Is there a way to remove chemicals produced by a plant? Otherwise this makes producing specific chemicals in botany super tedious as well have to constantly purge other chemicals from ground plants and only get a small amount of what we want. Grinding 5 beakers of ambrosia, removing the 4 other drugs and being left with 75 units of omnizine is obnoxious.

The default room setup leads to cross pollination hell and it seems like having any trays at all next to each other isn't a good idea unless you intentionally want to cross pollinate between two plants, otherwise it seems incredibly detrimental, I foresee people being unintentionally poisoned with this new system since it isn't even obvious what chemicals a plant actually contains now since I'm not actually putting the traits in and I don't have a machine to show me the entire DNA sequence.

It would be incredibly useful to know have a book in botany that explained the effects of common chemicals used, of course it is a good idea to keep some things secret and leave optimal mixes to be discovered, but information like ammonia having a 10% chance to increase yield would be very helpful.

I hope this extra feedback has been helpful, I've had a bit of a rough time testing it so I only got one round done tonight, I'll do another tomorrow applying some of the things another botanist learned on nutrient mixes shift with me as well as separating all plants until I want cross pollination of specific traits. I'm hoping to learn a bit more about mutations, since I had no luck making a sweet potato tonight.

The0bserver · Post by **The0bserver** » Sun Apr 05, 2020 7:26 am #553364

Well, this has been a ride so far, hasn't it?

So, having done a bunch of testing in private server, and a few rather lengthy shifts with the new update, I've a few things I like, and a few things I rather dislike about the system as it is now.
The good:
1. I adore the reduced cost of reagents to get work done in the trays. It feels nice to put in some robust harvest, tend to other stuff, and see it actually reach high yields. Gets the chef off my back, gets me towards plants I actually want to be working on. Not having to constantly burn through 1000 units to get botany started *is* nice.
2.Trait Cutting is great. I actually don't hate it at all, being honest. Being able to just snip of P.growth and graft it onto a fresh plant is honestly a lot nicer than having to go do the table every single time I do something. I'm hoping in future, it'll let us touch traits we otherwise could not normally.

3. I like the idea of cross-pollination. I think it can lead to some rather ridiculous scenarios down the road, especially if botanists aren't careful.

4.I like how "nutrients" are applied now as well. Not having to constantly dump stuff to force results is nice, at least in cases where it comes to yield, plant health, and potency.

The Bad:
Mutations. Goodness, they're even more infuriating now than they were before, because you can't just force a result, dig it up, and then replant to try again. This isn't as much of a problem for one track plants, like Melons -> Holy Melons, but it's a massive issue with several plant families that people *will* want to grow. The biggest one that comes to my mind is weed, which has 4 potential results in its family. Getting Lifeweed was bad before, but now that you have to sit and wait for it to tick to 60, and then wait for it to actually hit a mutation just to see Cannabis suddenly turned into Rainbow Weed is soul crushing at best.

Cross-pollination, while fun as an idea, is dreadful as a player, at least in its current form. You can carefully craft every plant to have specific stats, and ensure only plants you want to have together are together, and then have the Chef come in and ruin it immediately because they are too lazy to use the biogen for their flour, so they just planted wheat right next to your carefully controlled trays. Now you're stuck with a medicine plant with nutriment, and wheat spiked with 30% omnizine, which while hilarious as an observer, is kinda actually awful for you, because the chef is then going to try and kill you for poisoning the food. If I might make a recommendation, to be less raw chaos, make cross pollination take place with bees, or with another tool we can get from the hydroponics. A balance needs to be struck between chance and control, being honest.

Bag bloat/trash bloat is kinda awful as a botanist now. Don't get me wrong, it was still pretty bad before, but it's worse now that we have to mix fertilizer *and* chems to get where we want to go faster. My bag ends up looking like a hoarder's bag by the end of the shift, with all of my botanical tools, my mix beakers, my fertilizer bottles, and specific seeds I want fast access to, because our plant bags no longer fit in our pockets or bags. A botany toolbelt might actually help with that, allowing us to stash our tools and fertilizer bottles onto our belt slot so we don't fill up our bags as fast, as well as a reduction in size, and capacity of our plant bags.

Micromanagement is on a rather ridiculous level now. It went from just waiting around too often, to now having to be in a mad frenzy when you have more than 5 plants growing at once trying to make sure every tray is happy, watered, fed the correct mix, had pest killer applied and the cultivator as well because your scanner nor examine no longer tells you what the levels of weed and pest are on the tray, and the red light is flashing for some reason and you just want to know what is going wrong with your Gaia so you just keep applying everything in a fervent hope it lives to harvest. As other people in the thread have suggested, doubling the starting capacity of the trays would be a godsend, or reducing the amount of reagents plants greedily suck down per cycle.

Science dependency: It's awful. Science has no legitimate reason to ever come around hydro, so we end up having to sit on our starter trays for goddamn ages, sometimes the entire shift, even when we ask politely for upgrades. This isn't so much a direct problem with the PR, as it is with general science players not giving a hoot about any other department but their own. However, it should be pointed out that upgrading hydro is now a rather expensive beast for all max parts. Comes out to about 32 BS Matter Bins on Box alone, as opposed to just the relative pittance it used to cost before, only needing to upgrade 3 machines. I think some way to either tie us directly into boosting science point gain, or making it so science needs specific items from us to attain some of their toys might be a good way to nudge Science into upgrading us for their own benefit.

I feel completely and utterly out of control when it comes to chemicals, which kinda reduces the fun of the department for me over-all. It does kinda kill me that I can't, if I so chose, hollow out a plant, and then add new chems to fill the void left by my tearing out of the chem producing genes. Making slip sleep injectors was kinda useful when getting chased, and now I have to blend it all by hand and hope that making a smoke grenade will work well enough. I know some solutions are in the pipeline, but I still worry it's going to be exceptionally sluggish. Emergency response is already pretty close to dead with botany, making it so we have to have a routine of plants we need to go for to ensure that if chem explodes, or cult breaks out, we have the tools on hand to fill in for said departments if we must. I feel like I'm also going to be railroaded into working towards Densified Chems every shift, just to make a mediocre chem mix that I am then going to have to spend time purifying just to make 3 patches of EB/Omni/Mannitol, which isn't a great feeling.

The Weird:
Kudzu is in a weird spot now. A really weird spot. Kudzu has control chems outside normal plant chems, that dictate specific stats on the plant, and using a few of them really completely and utterly throws the stats out with the bathwater. Most notably, Blood, if used in any capacity, instantly sets the tray to 30 potency, and absolutely turns it into a spider spewing disaster if you have mutagen left over from trying to generate the kudzu in the first place. When I last tried it on a test server, setting blood basically turned the tray into Pest Level 10, which triggered the crippled plant effect. I imagine we *might?* need to use the autogrow mode to prevent the pests from spawning, but it's still an uphill battle to retain max potency *and* the right production value. Amatoxin isn't a viable options, as it prefers to stick to the lower values, which is great for trying to grow it, but not great for trying to grow it, if you catch my meaning.

Conclusion:
There are things I genuinely like in this, but said things make me wish that I could just have all the good aspects of old botany, and all the good aspects of new botany put together, with the rest sent back for refinement or destruction. I came into this with the best mindset I could, and I still find myself wishing for a DNA manipulator to set things right, or a way to speed up the mutations so I can actually get where I want to be before there is no time left in the round to do so, be it by antagonist actions, or crew boredom. I feel too slowed down by the new systems to get anywhere effectively, and that feeling kinda really sucks. Used to be I could actually fix people up if med was not available, be it body count being too high, or med being destroyed, but now I can barely swing a good response in time, unless I set off for it from shift start. I hope that in the coming weeks we see more tweaks and add-ons that make the experience better, and that I can change my mind on things, but as we stand now, if it were a gun to my head, I'd probably choose old botany, even if it's slightly stale in some ways at this point. Genuinely though, thank you for at least caring about the department. It's nice to know it's not completely forgotten, and that people want to teach the system new tricks. And thank you for listening to feedback, as reactionary as some of it is bound to be.

Calomel · Post by **Calomel** » Tue Apr 07, 2020 12:16 pm #553729

Alright, I've played with botany a number of times to get a feel of these new mechanics. I don't think i can say much more than what has already been said, but I will try.
I see three main problems that until resolved, I can't aprove of these changes:

1. There are a lot of things that seem... broken. irrigation literally doesn't work (Water doesn't seem to spread to otehr plants even when connected.),
which really forces a lot of micromanaging with water.

2. There's no control: The DNA manipulator allowed me to get 3 discs, potency 50, yield 4 and perennial. These three were all i needed
to make a fuctional Botany (Wheat and plants for cook, bananas for clown, etc.). Now it's a process that is very uncontrollable, and that
requires a LOT more micromanaging and analyzing to get the same results. overall complexity for the sake of complexity.

3. There's no information: I can't tell you how many times I have mistaken the red middle alert for weeds or pests,
when it actually was just inestability. There needs to be a "unstable" alert that glows differently (maybe purple, since it's unique).
That, and the fact taht there's no way to tell what anything does, save for reading through the changelog of the update, which is
inconvenient. At least a paper note on hydroponics explaining what the new nutrients do and how stability works would have helped
inmensely.

Right now, it feels like some spiteful bully just took away our toys because we were having too much fun with them. I know it's not the case,
but I can understand how people can see it that way. thsi update needs to be added in its transparency and convenience, or people will
see it as a punishment.

Post by **Arcanemusic** » Wed Apr 08, 2020 1:26 am #553823

A few quick notes:

First off, thanks everyone whose put up feedback here or made issue reports in the last couple days. I'm checking here every other day, and I'm hanging out in the discord fairly often to take feedback and things for consideration.

I'm working on updating the Wiki as of last night, but it may take a few days to really get everything up to speed as there are several things that need to be outlined a bit better, and several mechanics that I want to make sure I get right in describing to prevent misinformation. Currently, Grafts and Crosspollination are listed, but I still need to update the page in regards to all the reagents changes, how mutations work now, etc. That banner is not wrong, and not everything is finalized as I work through feedback.

A tool for plant gene removal is being worked on this PR here. This includes a few small fixes, some code cleanup, as well as a feature to be able to remove plant genes (Including reagent genes!) once experimental tools is researched. For the record, I chose that over the botanical engineering node because I know it's a far more popular node for science to take, and I want players to have access to that on or around the 15-20 minute mark, while still enabling an 'early game' for botany to have to work around.
Among the things from this thread, this also fixes:
Crossbreeding now more reliably spreads its reagents around.
Trays are going to have a higher starting reagent capacity, to help decrease a bit of early game micromanagement. This, in combination with autogrow will hopefully help remove some tedium on growing critical, early-game plants.

Short list of fixes and things that could be easily managed or added in smaller, individual PRs:
* Adding the list of seed reagents to the plant analyzer, or to science goggles. With the DNA manipulator gone, there isn't a reliable way to tell what reagent genes the plant has without growing it and scanning the produce, or (Var Editing it) keeping exceptionally good mental track, which is a lot to ask for with plants containing 6-10 reagents total.
* Trash Management. It's something that was an issue even before this rework, but enabling plant grafts to fit inside plant bags, and smartfridges would be an exceptionally easy addition.
* Instability having an increasingly tiered effect, as opposed to jumping from one effect to another. Yeah... I'm not really sure this was a good idea on my part initially, but it would also mean more instability management would be necessary, and based on the amount of micromanagement already required, I may want to hold off on this change before going into the others.
* Adding new reagents with unique effects. One of the good things about how reagents are handled now, is that now ANYTHING can be a hydroponics reagent. The ease of developer use for making something effect plants is now much, MUCH easier, so old reagents can now get a hydroponics effect in as little as 4 lines of code, and new hydroponics specific reagents are equally easy to make and use.

Things I could look into doing but may need some help with to get it working perfectly:
* One of the original ideas thrown around in the original design docs was that crossbreeding could be used to help tailor what mutation a plant takes when grown, and for plants like weed or other variable plants, that could help provide more control without just having to gamble about what mutation to take. TECHNICALLY this has been an issue with hydroponics since before my changes, but at least with crossbreeding the framework would be in place to go about it properly.

Tlaltecuhtli · Wed Apr 08, 2020 6:28 am

make unstable plants have a chance to spawn evil plants that try to murder you

Thu Apr 09, 2020 6:57 am

Your PR mentioned removing chemical dependency but I still feel very dependent on the chemicals saltpeter, unstable mutagen and dith just as much as before so I grab a chem dispenser anyways.

Kassori · Post by **Kassori** » Thu Apr 09, 2020 5:27 pm #554169

After a solid week of playing around with this, I can say I've actually enjoyed the last few rounds I have played. I've been consistently able to cross pollinate banana juice into a sweet potatoes.

Only issue I've had since your newest update is that I can't seem to mutate basic plants anymore, I kept 6 plants at 100 potency for most of a shift, not a single mutation into a new species

I really appreciate you acting quickly on our feedback, I can safely say you didn't chase this botany main off.

Fri Apr 10, 2020 12:09 am

@Kassori

Only issue I've had since your newest update is that I can't seem to mutate basic plants anymore, I kept 6 plants at 100 potency for most of a shift, not a single mutation into a new species

Well there's your problem. Plants have a chance to mutate their species between 60-79 instability. Above 80 is when they start to roll for new, random traits ala strange seeds.
Don't expect that to be the way things are though, I'm kinda deadset to making instability effects all roll into each other in the next big change.

Now, due to the whole "github situation" going on, I'll be a few days until I can make any changes to the code, so that means I can make a handful of code changes on my side for when we get the github back, but until then I actually get a chance to do some live playtesting and get a better feel about chemical dependance and mutation speed as it is right now. There's SEVERAL changes I'd like to get working and fixed up since I just learned our friends over on fulp just merged our botany too so I'm doing my best to get the wiki up to snuff.

See you all in like, 3 days. (Hit my up with all questions and feedback @Sir Knight Arcane on discord).

JamalGinsberg · Fri Apr 10, 2020 11:14 pm

Can you please answer this question, why did you decide that mutating a plant should take 20-40 minutes? Especially when half of the rounds last that long, open the hydroponics wiki and look throw the mutated plants, do they make you god? Are they super beneficial? No, so why is it such a tiresome and long process? Gatfruit takes 20-40 minutes to grow because the reward is huge, an infinite supply of revolvers, why do I have to wait the same time to get a blue tomato? Please make mutating instant, this is ridiculous

Post by **oranges** » Sat Apr 11, 2020 5:36 am #554498

The round is targetd at 60 minutes long, and you giving a range that's minimum is half the max of the entire range is rediculous lmao

Qustinnus · Post by **Qustinnus** » Sat Apr 11, 2020 11:27 am #554551

I think the real issue is that hydroponics is just very boring to do

JamalGinsberg · Sat Apr 11, 2020 6:26 pm

Qustinnus wrote:I think the real issue is that hydroponics is just very boring to do

The reality is that it was always boring to do, but at least before this change, you could get something out of it, you could make really robust healing plants, and plants that will inject you with morphine on impact, now, you can't do any of that, what they did would be like removing all of the loot from Lavaland, all of the Megafauna, all of the ruins and cool shit you can do there, and expect the miners to just get ores for the station for nothing in return, this is the current state of botany, you can't make anything cool anymore unless the rounds last for 2 hours literally

Cobby · Post by **Cobby** » Sat Apr 11, 2020 9:32 pm #554630

It's not very boring, it's just that for some people "fun" is equivalent to getting items that allow you to be the protagonist on either side of the spectrum:

1) Making items that rapidly heal people
2) Making weapons that rapidly kill people

Before the gene machine was introduced there were dedicated botanists (myself included), simply tending plants for hours was and is pretty relaxing without the meta undertones of being a bad botanist for not making super plants that have to leave huge marks on the station in some form. Heck we even had to make a box for the chefs roundstart so they could cook SOME stuff without botany help because people have been hyperfocused on this aspect of botany.

That said, it does stink that currently mutations are impossible to get but that's simply because of the current situation. Some of the mutations are pretty cool.

Post by **oranges** » Sat Apr 11, 2020 10:22 pm #554663

Within a month the powergamers will have moved on to another dept and we won't have to put up with their whining.

Kassori · Post by **Kassori** » Sun Apr 12, 2020 2:37 am #554785

Alrighty, so I still think something species mutations broke in the Gene Shears update. I did a few more rounds last night, this time I cultivated a cotton plant and harvested it at 67 instability, I made seeds and planted 6, I kept these between 65-75 for more than half an hour, I never got a single species mutation. I also never got any random traits from the plants that I had at 100 instability from a couple of days ago. Before the update on 4/7 I was easily mutating them, often accidentally, without a few minutes of being in that 60-79 range.

Post by **Arcanemusic** » Sun Apr 12, 2020 3:43 am #554797

Kassori wrote:Alrighty, so I still think something species mutations broke in the Gene Shears update. I did a few more rounds last night, this time I cultivated a cotton plant and harvested it at 67 instability, I made seeds and planted 6, I kept these between 65-75 for more than half an hour, I never got a single species mutation. I also never got any random traits from the plants that I had at 100 instability from a couple of days ago. Before the update on 4/7 I was easily mutating them, often accidentally, without a few minutes of being in that 60-79 range.

This is known and was previously fixed, but apparently was reverted by the gene shear PR, which is certainly frusterating. That said, rolling instability changes will fix this as soon as the git is back up. Sorry in advance for now.

cacogen · Post by **cacogen** » Sun Apr 12, 2020 10:04 am #554841

Cobby wrote:Before the gene machine was introduced there were dedicated botanists (myself included), simply tending plants for hours was and is pretty relaxing

oranges wrote:Within a month the powergamers will have moved on to another dept and we won't have to put up with their whining.

based

Calomel · Post by **Calomel** » Sun Apr 12, 2020 2:57 pm #554854

Personally, as long as a way to easily get Perennial and some Potency and Yield for the sake of providing kitchen, everything else is secondary. omnizine is still important for the possibility of reviving (With help from chaplain and chemistry), which is inaccesible otherwise. Omni takes a long process to amke, so it seems fair right now, if you really want to you can nerf onmizine, barely anyone uses it anyways.

Just for the love of Space law give us back irrigation. I never realized clicking each tray individually couild feel so incovenient.

Post by **oranges** » Mon Apr 13, 2020 12:53 am #554912

readd irrigation but make it use the plumbing code

Shadowflame909 · Mon Apr 13, 2020 5:30 am

I once said that botany was the mad-lad of service. The service xenobio. All the wacky mutations they could pull out like nettle e-swords, bluespace tomatoes, lube tomatoes, revival by pod person, combustable lemons, blood tomatoes, rainbow weed, fly amanita, killer tomatoes, armored durathread clothes and worst of all the non-sentient blob kudzu! -

I don't really think I can say that anymore with how tedious and disengaging it is to go for mutations now compared to the slightly tedious but ultimately engaging (by force) powerfrenzy that was spamming mutagen until you got your uber plant and saltpetre to potency it up.

Honestly, it's still the same botany because the slow alt tab progression is still there. Just more powergamer stopgates. Understandably the chill job but it still has the same flaws that regular hydroponics has. Especially more so since that's basically all thats left.

It's boring man.

Tldr: Like Xenobio, engagement mainly stemmed from waiting for time to pass so you could get your uber neat cool prize toy. Prize toy is now harder to get here. Now the wait isn't so stimulating and exciting anymore.

Tldr 2: Only incentive botany gives to not alt-tab, is that if your alt-tabbed too long the plant dies. Base botany needs more engagement.

Post by **Armhulen** » Mon Apr 13, 2020 7:20 am #554960

Shadowflame909 wrote:I once said that botany was the mad-lad of service. The service xenobio. All the wacky mutations they could pull out like nettle e-swords, bluespace tomatoes, lube tomatoes, revival by pod person, combustable lemons, blood tomatoes, rainbow weed, fly amanita, killer tomatoes, armored durathread clothes and worst of all the non-sentient blob kudzu! -

I don't really think I can say that anymore with how tedious and disengaging it is to go for mutations now compared to the slightly tedious but ultimately engaging (by force) powerfrenzy that was spamming mutagen until you got your uber plant and saltpetre to potency it up.

Honestly, it's still the same botany because the slow alt tab progression is still there. Just more powergamer stopgates. Understandably the chill job but it still has the same flaws that regular hydroponics has. Especially more so since that's basically all thats left.

It's boring man.

Tldr: Like Xenobio, engagement mainly stemmed from waiting for time to pass so you could get your uber neat cool prize toy. Prize toy is now harder to get here. Now the wait isn't so stimulating and exciting anymore.

Tldr 2: Only incentive botany gives to not alt-tab, is that if your alt-tabbed too long the plant dies. Base botany needs more engagement.

If one of the big problems with xenobio was that it wasn't engaging the entire way through, it should be fixed by making botany fun at every step, not by skipping to the end extremely early. If more botany plants were USABLE, this job would be more consistently fun.

Post by **oranges** » Mon Apr 13, 2020 7:48 am #554962

I really hope shadowflame909 alt tabs from ss13 permanently

CDranzer · Post by **CDranzer** » Mon Apr 13, 2020 6:39 pm #555115

I dunno, I think there's some truth to what SF is saying. I think it's part of that entire general theme of not all jobs in SS13 having a real place or purpose. Botany is essentially one half of the food supply, but that was always incredibly secondary in practice. In my own designs I've often wondered if Botany shouldn't just be a sort of heavily automated sub-game for the chef, but that leads down a redesign rabbit hole. There was definitely an interesting sort of pseduo-chemistry game in old botany that's no longer present in any real usable manner, but presumably that's just a price we have to pay for.. whatever the end goal of this rework is.

cacogen · Post by **cacogen** » Tue Apr 14, 2020 7:40 am #555305

cook can just make his own plants lol

deedubya · Post by **deedubya** » Tue Apr 14, 2020 8:35 am #555322

oranges wrote:Within a month the powergamers will have moved on to another dept and we won't have to put up with their whining.

This is delusional. Actual powergamers don't play xenobio/botany. They want their checklist of gear yesterday, not a fuckin' hour into the round after half the station has exploded, nar'sie has been summoned, and the shuttle left half an hour ago.

cacogen · Post by **cacogen** » Tue Apr 14, 2020 8:48 am #555325

this is true. powergaming with botany takes patience, and this is something its critics have failed to take into account. while it is possible to make OP plants, how often does it actually happen?

Post by **oranges** » Tue Apr 14, 2020 9:21 am #555330

deedubya wrote:
oranges wrote:Within a month the powergamers will have moved on to another dept and we won't have to put up with their whining.
This is delusional. Actual powergamers don't play xenobio/botany. They want their checklist of gear yesterday, not a fuckin' hour into the round after half the station has exploded, nar'sie has been summoned, and the shuttle left half an hour ago.

speaking of things that need to move on

Shadowflame909 · Thu Apr 16, 2020 8:42 am

Live Feedback.

So..played it some more on a low pop MRP round.

In my attempt to mutate one plant, that being poppy into geranium for a cargo bounty. I did the old razzle-dazzle of going to chemistry and pouring mutagen on it.

The instability was slowing going up as the plant aged, and then it rapidly started wilting and died on me.

I'm like "What the crap" and I go on the wiki and see what I needed to do. Turns out you now have to shift between saving your plant and murdering it to mutate stuff now.

I go back to chemistry, make some cryoxadone, saltpetre, and mutagen and give it a second go.

This time I'm getting the hang of it, but seeing as how slow plant aging is, I've spent 40 minutes so far (I'm also counting how long it took to reach 60 stability.) and my plant still hasn't mutated. I wait 10 more minutes, and it turns out instability goes down as well...WHY.

You said in your PR description that this was supposed to reduce the amount of babying a botanist had to do, to keep their plant alive.

Was that only for the chef supply part of botany?

I'm now babying it even more and I'm asking the chemist for even more of his chems and time.

My plant is now at age 90, it's killing itself because its an old man plant now. Still hasn't mutated. Dumping and pumping cryo to keep it up, and adding in more unstable mutagen to bring it back into the mutation era after it's done killing itself.

So to end my feedback. Directed at Oranges: With the gene editor gone and botany being de-powered. Can we finally get a chem machine to spawn there at roundstart, please? The overreliance on the chem machine is real.

Directed at Arcane Music: Dude. I've spent exactly an hour watching and waiting for a plant to mutate, just a singular one and it didn't even mutate when I dragged it onto the shuttle and the round was over.

Overkill man. Speed up the mutation speed. This isn't fun at all.

Also make instability going down through a separate chemical, not automatically. The suffering.

TLDR: I spent 1 hour focused on mutating one plant with mutagen and Cryoxadone. It didn't mutate at instability 60+. It died on me once and nearly died several times.

Maybe Plant Age is the problem? Are mutations bugged? Maybe the wiki is wrong and the mutation range isn't 60-79? Maybe I'm just being trolled/vetted and mutations don't even exist anymore.

Actually at this rate with an hour's worth of playing mutation limbo. I think your code is just broken dude.

Wasted Round ID: 134855

BrianBackslide · Thu Apr 16, 2020 11:56 am

Not going to go into species mutations or trait/chem acquisition since those are confirmed broken at the moment.

So I want to like this change, I really do, but there's some severe problems with the implementation that I think need to be addressed first.
First, there's some bugs that seem to be cropping up that I've noticed

Spoiler:

Bugs aside, this rework does have potential, but there's some problems design-wise as well.

Spoiler:

Going by how the design is right now, and assuming that the EZ nutriment thing is intended, then I can finish making everything I'd ever need to make for the chef in about 15 minutes. That's a severe problem when shifts should last about 60 minutes and can easily stretch into the 2 hour mark on Manuel. If I'm a traitor Botanist, then I cannot do any of the more fun things with Botany such as poisoning the chef's food. Prior to the rework, I could remove all traits except the vitamin, then add multiver to make all the ingredients that the chef can use destroy the lungs while still tasting like their respective plant. Now, though, there's no way I can get that done before the chef has all the food they would ever need for a shift. I also cannot accomplish this surreptitiously. Hmm, the Botanist is growing Destroying Angels next to some Tomatoes... Hmmmmm...

Speaking of cross pollination, while it is fun to yell at the chef for putting his carrots next to my Glowshrooms, cross pollination is not intuitive. Take the perspective of a new player. They see botanist (which is marked as an easy job) and decide to roll as that for their first shift. Let's assume that there's no helpful players to guide them that shift, so they have to wikidive. Due to their inexperience, they allow some Reishi to grow next to their plants for the chef and, well, now the chef's food has potentially deadly amounts of morphine and multiver. Cue ahelps and the dreaded bwoinking. Even if this is an edge case and gets resolved without incident, is that the kind of first experience we want for what is supposed to be an "easy" job? Old Botany requred intent for these kinds of things to happen.

I'm also worried about the speed that Botanists can get something out. If there's a cult, you'd best hope you're playing on Pubby for the free Holymelon seeds or you're not going to be of any use. War Ops? Might as well use yourself as a shield, or just wait to die in Hydroponics. What I'm getting at is that Botanists have even LESS of a reason to leave their area since they're basically playing a separate game from the rest of the station, and this is coming from a Botanist player that is actually willing to go down to Lavaland and interact with the crew to an extent. I feel like I'm forced to stay in my department not to keep my plants alive, but to keep them growing in the direction I need them to grow.

EDIT: The seed extractor is also broken now. You can't retrieve your stored seeds from it.

Tlaltecuhtli · Thu Apr 16, 2020 2:01 pm

i cant look at code myself (github lol) but are there interactions with the plant gun?

Post by **Arcanemusic** » Thu Apr 16, 2020 8:37 pm #555906

Back at it again now that the git is almost slightly working again.
Here's the short list of changes I have on the next larger working patch of turbotany:

TURBOTANY PATCH NOTES 1.2: (For those wondering, 1.1 was the day one dlc patch after it got merged)
=============================================
* Irrigated plant trays are now working again, I think, at least for beakers of chems and for buckets of water.
* You can build single panes of glass between plant trays to prevent crosspollination, as a manual way to keep fucking chefs from planting corn next to your deathweed overkill mix (Rohesie helped me with the specifics on this one.)
Example:

* The floral somatoray uses uranium to make it like, actually workable, as well as can be used to lock down mutations in plants with multiple possible mutations (Weed, Wheat, Poppys), or can be fired to allow for species mutations in a new mode, "revolution". Locking down a mutation will reduce a plant's endurance, however, and cannot be done on plants with exceptionally weak endurance.
New Somatoray Mode:

* All trays start with 10u of Eznutrient, like the good old days before I 9-11'd everything.
* Instability has a rolling effect now, so a 100 instability plant can have it's stats, species, as well as random traits randomly rolled all at once, as opposed to being in separate tiers (This also fixes mutations).
* Plant reagents can be obtained by scanning the seeds with a plant analyzer.
* Aprons hold the new botany items, as well as food smartfridges.
* Botany can now produce a new, unique toolbelt called the botany belt for holding all their tools.
New Sprites:

* Mutagen no longer uses the base effect for toxin, instantly murdering plants all the time.
* To reduce potential chat spam, plant analyzers now have a toggle mode, between "stat" mode and "trait" mode, like the health analyzer, so you don't need to get flooded with chat info when all you really wanted was to check the yield and not get drowned out in every stat under the sun.
* Corrects that yes, randomized traits from stage 80+ instability can give you either physical traits or reagent traits.

The current branch it's on is here, while the git is down I'll see about getting something locally hosted over the weekend to do some play-testing while we wait on the github becoming fully operational again.

Specific Q&A Questions from above feedback:

plants can only be clipped with secateurs once.

Intended, Plants only get one graft per life, regardless of perennial growth.

The secateurs and strange plants behave oddly. They only give the perennial growth trait, even if they may have bluespace activity, prickles, etc. Not sure if this is a bug or design since the wiki implies that it's arbitrary what plant gives what trait. (Bluespace Bananas won't give bluespace activity, but the Bluespace Tomatoes will)

Also intended, the trait obtained from a plant's graft is specific to the species, regardless of what traits it's been given, or has had taken away from it.

The seed extractor is also broken now. You can't retrieve your stored seeds from it.

Youuu probably played during one of the instant explosion testmerge rounds, didn't you? I talked with Goof about it and his instant explosions PR kills several "non-essential" subsystems when things blow up. Machines are one of those subsystems, so when I was playing a round to see how things were on live, I got that exact same "Oh shit" moment myself, and for once it wasn't my code, somehow. This affected hydroponics trays, as well as seed vendors to a degree.

Again, I appreciate everyone's patiance this past week while everything's been boiling over on the git, but I put in a good couple hours fine-tuning everything to look, feel, and hopefully play a bit better, but in the wise words of Todd "The god" Coward, Sometimes, things don't 'just work'. Still, this is looking and feeling a closer to the original design goal than before with these new changes I've got working, to hopefully return a bit more control to the department going into the midgame of a shift, even moreso perhaps than old botany afforded.

Neroloshsot · Thu Apr 16, 2020 11:59 pm

hello, thanks you for the fix, when will it be merged ?

CDranzer · Post by **CDranzer** » Fri Apr 17, 2020 4:03 am #556000

The potential asymmetry of the glass separators offends my autism, but that aside, looks like good features all around. Look forward to trying it out when it gets merged.
Do the lockers contain belts? Because if not, they probably should.

Kassori · Post by **Kassori** » Fri Apr 17, 2020 5:09 pm #556184

So, after filling the halls with piles of dirt and mass planting I discovered I can't turn the station into beautiful endless fields of poppies. I saw how you said new botany interactions with chemicals would be very simple to add, would it be possible to make a nutrient that slows plant metabolism and tanks the stats to the point that the plants can be decorative and require little maintenance? They shouldn't really produce anything of value to compensate.

Post by **Arcanemusic** » Sat Apr 18, 2020 2:06 pm #556383

Oh yeah, that would be simple enough. You'd just want the reagent to adjust all major stats except for maybe endurance, but since "on_hydroponics_react" also pulls the tray, you could easily adjust the plant's drain rate, although handling how it would reset itself upon loss the chem may take some forethought.

Post by **Arcanemusic** » Tue Apr 21, 2020 9:27 am #557416

IN OTHER NEWS:
Turbotany (This is the name we're going with for this because Arcane's Botany Experience sounds like a stoner rock album) version 1.2 is merged and will be live on servers shortly. Once you see the 400 MILE LONG CHANGELOG you'll know it's in.
And this time I had about 2 weeks to break everything ahead of time. Everything feels a lot fresher and cleaner, the gameplay completely changes at about the 10-15 minute mark, and a healthy dose of feedback and consideration was taken from here in the process.
Hop on and play a round when it's available and let me know how everything feels and sounds.

Kassori · Post by **Kassori** » Thu Apr 23, 2020 2:35 am #557759

So I have played a good 8+ hours of the new botany and things seems to be functioning pretty well. I have been able to make a few pretty good things fairly quickly, like my laughter infused sweet potatoes that drive chefs to suicide from lack of business, a blood tomato when a slaughter demon requested it while running rampant, sparing my life. I am having a lot of plants die with just my mutagen/saltpeter/diethylamine mix, but I think I really just have to add some cryox or something into my mix.

The only real suggestion I have is to have a way to have a plant shear upgrade that gives a graft from a trait of your choice as a late game tech. The speed for cross pollination isn't too bad, but mix that with mutating a plant and you're spending 20 minutes on that one plant, worse if the plant has multiple stages of evolution or options, not so great for trying to be reactionary. Right now, the botany tech seems to get researched pretty late anyway, adding another tech for even better shears would put it into the position where it's only really researched in extended rounds or when botany gets a miracle chemical like godblood from a strange mutation, keeping it pretty balanced I think.

edit: yep, cryox was the key, its a miracle

Cobby · Post by **Cobby** » Thu Apr 23, 2020 5:30 pm #557864

add multiver to your mix

Mon Apr 27, 2020 5:12 am

Alright, I spent a good few hours and reached peak botany and my main feedback is the absolute ABSOLUTE reliance on chemicals now especially chemicals made through a chem dispenser and this includes cryro, saltpeter, dith, mutagen. My round start habits haven't changed at all and a botanists reliance on the dispenser is even greater than before. I don't know if making botany not rely on the dispenser was just not possible or if you lied on the pr...i dunno.

Post by **Kryson** » Wed Apr 29, 2020 8:56 am #559853

I have not needed any chems outside of 90u mutagen from chemist at round start.

I tried a mutagen-less build with radium but this did not work since it killed all treated plants very quickly even with multiver, ash, water and diethylamine treatment.

Maybe i need to use 5u instead of 10u radium or mix it with cryox?

The experience so far has been pretty good. One concern i have is that maybe the default instability of cabbage should be reduced. It is a bit too easy to mass produce replica pods.

I also think the E-Z nutrient is a bit too powerful, it often seems to produce 100 / 10 plants on its own with little effort. I think this is fine for now, but i think a bit of this power should be transferred to a new advanced chemical, something you can scavenge for / produce on your own that is not produced from a dispenser / given for free.

Tlaltecuhtli · Wed Apr 29, 2020 9:38 am

can confirm ez nutriment is powerfull, i planted a bunch of fruits for cargo bounty in public botany once and out of six plants, four had 10 harvest