Community Botany QOL wants changes and ideas

contents

X-plant scanner built into PDA or some gene scanners like in frontier.
{changes can actually be sensed by visual and audio alone}

X-ADD MORE TRAYS {more can be obtained from science}

X-Upgradeable trays that automatically water themselves with faster growth speed and metabolism researchable upgradable by science
alongside the portable water tank and spray nozzle. {metabolism and growth speed unnecessary}

(Should help solve the problem of being unable to grow your own plants because everyone else needs you to grow theirs hopefully by being faster)

  • Trays upgradable to self-water themselves

  • Diethamine buff
    20% Chanse to change age 1.00 > 30% change age 1.00
    (i find diethamine effects to be a bit too slow because it would fail to age it up multiple times in a row unless you use it for base HP increase or lifespan then uhhhh ignore this)

  • Sedin redundant stat
    removal of the -2.00-health penalty
    (Considering you are only using 1u this damage is menial and pointless easily healed by anything this stat serves 0 purpose).

  • Lef4zed
    Mutation modifier 30% Chanse
    0.40>0.50
    (so, the numbers are more rounded).

X-Swabbing no long removes seeds {too Powerful}

  • anom berries mutateable from regular berries so science can get a steady supply of artifexium and also science now has a reason to visit you too

  • Expand industrial reagent grinder Capacity and add a magnet on it also add a magnet on the regular grinder

for things like temperature or pressure its best to call an atmospheric to give you a space heater and also fix your pressure

for water you can order more water in cargo


Notes:
okay I think these changes will be good this time I still do need more feedback please do not hesitate to do so in order to improve botany in gameplay.

Il add a x and a reason if it’s a bad change can be refuted to add it back
ill also add in some new ideas you can also add in your own ideas too place it in the reply and ill add it here

Some feedback here from an experienced botanist.

As much as I loathe the term ‘skill issue,’ I think it applies here. Botany is more than simply growing plants in trays, it’s a casino where you can either play it safe or risk it all for big prizes. Some of your proposed changes would take a lot of the guesswork and gambling elements out of Botany, and those are the things that make it fun, at least for me. Much as I love the plant scanner on Frontier, for example, I can determine most mutations purely by visual and audio clues by now. The only ones I can’t tell are gas-consumers (since they’re irrelevant unless Atmos is screwed) and ideal temp/pressure changes (which I would ignore anyway). As for more and faster trays, they’re not really needed once you know what you’re doing. I’ve already grown so many plants that I’ve broken the game engine in multiple ways. The more common problem I experience is having too many botanists for a station’s hydroponics room’s size (Hello Box) but with the expansion of ranching that’s less of a problem now. Knowing how to manage seedless plants is what separates okay botanists from good ones, and it’s knowing the strategies to make the most out of limited trays that separates the good botanists from the great ones. If you really need more trays you can just order them from Science.

The one point I agree with you in is Left-4-Zed, which I’ve used so rarely I don’t even know what it does. Mutagen is so much easier to get, and in volume too, that there’s just no reason to bother with L4Z. Unless… You know what, I know what I’m going to be doing with my next few shifts, thank you for the idea!

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this quite frankly is very over powered to a silly scale.

SO I get a 6-50 Cocoa (17u robust + Cocoa + Seedless now, 20% chance for 5-50)
Then I swab on Aloe plant once. Maybe I get 6-50 Aloe tree and it now has seeds again reguardless. or I do it with omizine or koi.

oh Damm ok ill just remove that beacuse we already have Sedin

Update! Figured out how L4Z works now, and I like it. Slept on it a bit long, even, though it does require a particular setup to get the most out of. It’s great for stretching mutagen supplies. There is one issue I could bring up, though - I feel the industrial reagent grinder isn’t ‘industrial’ enough. Its capacity is too low to be truly industrial, seeing how I can completely overwhelm its meager 400u capacity with relative ease even when I’m not making insane mutant plants with 100u of reagents per fruit. I’d like to see it at least have the capacity of a bluespace beaker or have some automated way of transferring the liquid in it into containers.

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Honestly i kinda wish it worked like the mail chute where if you used your bag on it, it just automatically ground everything inside it would also be cool if you could link (multi-tool) a chem master near it and the chems would automatically go into it. but that might be a bit strong even if it requires botany to make a chem master and indusitral grinder. I also wish it had a juice mode if i want to make alot of orange juice at once.

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SS14 botany on wizden servers is simply put unintuitive garbage. I don’t mean this as a critique of the code quality, since it all works as intended. Just that the way it is intended is really bad for the user.

Unless you heavily code-dive a new player has no chance to deduce in character what is actually going on. Every other job has easily accessible in character information. A cursory look at botany guides involves exact dosages and sometimes timing that was arrived at through reading the code itself, not through actual IC means, since there are no such means.

Players that invested heavily into memorizing how to code works will argue that the system is great and skill based, despite the only skill used being reading the codebase.

As to how to improve it, any change that lessens the randomness and obfuscation is a step in the right direction. Seeing precise stats and genes would be a good start.

3 Likes

Honestly I feel like botany needs to be completely reworked, because it just… isn’t.

It just isn’t ideal. It isn’t entirely simple either. It’s much more complicated than it needs to be.

Irony is I know of a bug on botany right now.

Botany is what you make it, You can just plant seeds from the vending machine harvest and give them out and folk and keep Chef, and Cargo happy and Chems disapointed but still okay. Its only when you start trying to produce the best that things start going wacky.