I don’t see a lot of people main botanist one or too maybe but most of the time the botanist department is not very exciting or empty
is there a reason why not many people play botanist in spite it being one of the strongest departments to play?
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I play botanist sometimes (I have it the same prio has Atmos, Sci, medical)
I can think of a few reasons why its not favoured. While no one of these things is a deal breaker I think when combined it adds elements of frustration.
Firstly in alot of stations it has too many job openings for the number of trays you get, one of the best examples of this is Oasis where there is 12 trays, but 3 botanist jobs.
Secondly there is Mutagen RNG. Mutagen can fail to mutate a plant repeatedly all shift or give traits that can make being in botany uninhabbitable and even if your not using mutagen to avoid this situation chances are the other botanist(s) in the room will be using it.
Thirdly Swapping RNG. swabbing lets you move traits from one plant to another however what traits move is entirely random, you can have aloe without aloe, wheat without flour or cotton without fiber and all of these render the plant pointless for what you was going for and what your normally going for is 6-50 from swabbing with a cocoa plant.
Fourthly Plants are highly sensative to the enviroemtn unlike crew. Plants complain its to cold at 15c too hot at 20c bad pressure at 120kpa or 90kpa and if another gas is in the room it can complain about wrong gas enviroment all of which shares the weed alarm light despite most of these problems being nothing you can do.
Fifthly You lack alot of automany in what you can grow. In a fully staffed station Chems will want poppy, aloe, thistle, Deus kitchen will want whatever food they are making, usually tomartos, wheat, cotton and chilli sometimes the bar wants pineapples and lemons and Cargo often gets bounties for you growing banana’s, fruit, veg, lemons, limes, carrots, flowers. This leaves very little freedom in what your planting as most of the time your busy growing requests. So even if you wanted to grow steel caps and be a steel production botany you’d be preventing one person being able to do much at all (chef) and also harming medical supplys with your lack of herbs.
Sixithly alot of botany rooms are just poorly designed. Amber station is a great example of that
Where the trays are scattered everywhere and basically require a wrench to get the place sorted out and the machines are blocked by the tanks. another great example of bad designed botany is COG
Its trays, machines and vends start very spread out. it is by far the prettiest botany department love the look, however nearly every shift you get spaced from a metaor and that kills your plants very quickly.
Seventhly you dont have the same payoff reward as other roles in botany. What i mean by that is medbay you can see folks get better and walk out. Engineering you know when you’ve repaired a wall and Science you know you made that robot or device you make on the lathe or finished an artifact or done anom without killing someone. in botany you cant see the folks your herbs have made better or hear about how much folks loved your food. your isolated from the end result of your efforts.
Eightly alot of stations lack the tools needed to test your plants. With mutations and swabbing you dont know what your plants are and some stations dont even start you with a blender and a beaker to test it, in fact most stations lack at least the beaker making you have to source it from chems or the chef good example of this is box.
Ninthly sinks refill too slowly. On some stations like Core
One botnaits and easily manage all the bays on their own. however even if the player can run around and fill all the trays and keep the neutriants up the water inflow is too low from one sink on this station to allow all the bays to be running consistantly which is really frustrating when your trying to water your plants.
So yeah lots of little anoying things that add up, that being said I have the role as equal chances as other departments so it doesn’t bother me enough to make me not what to do botany.
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some people don’t like the RNG, and naomi’s got a very good point about the number of job slots often being too high for the number of trays. some lowpop stations struggle to fit a single botanist, yet have two slots!
i like botany, though. the gambling’s fun, even if it can get a bit grating and i have to ask for a beaker every round - it’s neat seeing what kinds of weird substances i can get a plant to contain.
Short answer is overworking and high clicks per minute
P.S. Why did the space botanist always carry a napkin?
Because they were just over-plant-ed with work on the space station!
sadly your pun(pun) flew over my head and missed like 90% of people’s attempts to throw away trash.
We need the plant analyzer or some other tools that simplify or explain what is happening as most of the botany actions have limited feedback.
Personally i think a machine is uneeded as we already have so many machines in our department, however if we could have a seed scanner built into our PDA’s much like how Medical have there health scanner PDA it would be a great quaility of life feature.
Having labellers work on seeds would also be really handy so you can say this 6-50 aloe has multi-harvest.
hand labelers do actually work on seeds! i use 'em a lot, particularly if i have multiple strains of the same plant with the same yield/potency. they’re very helpful pieces of equipment.