Hi everyone! Kiki here with a guide to help you learn botany!
First a disclaimer, This is my personal Botany preferance, Botany has MANY variances in how people go about planting. Im also having this guide sectioned to allow you to quickly find and hide things as i wish this guide to cover everything from just starting first shift to being a semi-pro finding your own way to do things.
Your job as botanist is to grow plants for the ship! While what plants you grow is ulitmately upto you various people will have requests and without your help these people will have a harder time doing their jobs.
Here is a quick list of who will ask you for things ordered by importance
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Chems - The most important Espically during a zombie outbreak where our plants can create Abuzol+ giving zombie immunity.
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Cargo - Cargo often has botany bounties they come in so many forms it would be impossible to get all of the plants up at the same time. The reason this is so high priotity is it gives you leverage to order things which is useful in advanced botany.
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Chef - Chef wants to make food. without you they cant really do much food at all, they can make do with vending and some chefs will grow there own food crops but if you have the free time I strongly reccomend setting 4 trays aside for them.
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Bartender - Rarely a bar tender might ask for something, normally pineapple, sometimes normal apples or a certain fruit they are out of juice for
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Crew - these are the lowest priotiy requests, mostly its requests for Weed or Banana’s though you can grow casual drugs or enable clowns they are not something you really need to do.
Now let us move onto the basics of your station.
Botany tools
These can be found either in your locker in the backroom or in the botany tools vending machine and some you start with on your belt.
Rake - Clears weeds
Shovel - removes plants
Clippers - Makes a copy of a planted plant dealing some damage to the plant and its seed, also one hits kudzu if used to attack (more on kudzu in mutagen section)
Bucket - Holds water to water plants or chems to use on plants.
Axe/Scythe - harvests plants you cant harvest with your bare hands. Axe can be put into your pocket while scythe cant but Scythe has a wider wide swing.
Seed Extractor - As long as your plant doesn’t have the seedless trait, gives you 1-3 seeds of the plant when you put in the harvested plant
Beaker - you normally dont have one at round start but its very handy to have one, ask the chef for a large one or take it from them (they have pleanty) or pop around to Sci and ask for a large beaker (its a starting tech in the protolathe) some stations are lucky enough to start with a box.
Sertile Swab - move traits from one plant to another. more on this later
Sertile swab despencer - Hold and press Z to get a swab, always found in your locker
Dropper - Moves 1-5u of a chem (more on chems later)
Syringe - Moves 5,10 or 15u of a chem (more on chems later)
Plant bag - 40 slot bag that can hold plants (1x2 or 20 per a bag) or Seeds (1x1 or 40 per a bag) can also be used on the floor to pick up all plants and seeds in a 1.5 tile radius and can keep your harvest safe from pesky mice
Botanist gloves - Allows you to swap a hallway light for a broken botany light saving you getting a janitor into your station.
Biogenerator - You can put spare plants into this to make Biomass, also lets you spend Biomas to produce some chems, drinks, objects or creatures such as cloth or Kobolds, spare biomass can be given to medical at the end of round to be used for cloning. Note when you want chemicals out of it you will need to insert a beaker
Getting to know your hydroponics bay
The Hydro bays have 5 lights in order left to right.
Green - This light means its time to harvest!
Red - This means the plant has poor health OR is getting old and wilted for old and wilted 2u of cryox will fix it, for poor health keep water and neutirants in the 90s and it should regenerate as long as the middle light is off and you dont clip it.
Orange - This means many things, normally it needs weeding, but it could also mean bad gas enviroment, bad tempature, to find out what Shift click, and read the colored text.
Yellow - 4th light is low neutrional valve, compost another plant into it to bring it up or use some of the free bottles of EZ Nutriant
Blue - Water light, means you have low water, hit it with 200u of water.
Stock plant traits
Plants have certain traits. these traits determine everything about what your growing, from does it have seeds to does this Aloe contain Aloe, the chem. All plants have some fixed traits when they are fresh seeds that are unaltered by mutation, the fixed traits are the potancy, Yeild and chems the plant starts with. For example Cocoa always has 6 Yeild, 1 potancy (6-1) when it is planted.
There are also unfixed traits, these are selected semi-randomly as far as i can tell and control things like, how fast it grows, and how long it lives. These traits can often be observed without external help such as a plant growing to maturity before other plants planted at the same time.
Manage your water
most departments start with a large water tank, that holds alot but not unlimiated water and a sink that is unlimited but fills up over time and hold only a certain ammount be. Sinks fill up slowly over time and can hold a full bucket. My advice is to have the bucket pre-filled and should you be in a situation where you need more water and the sink is dry use the tank.
Lastly for the basics; DO NOT SMOKE!! Even if you stick to the basics. One of the chems other botanists may use has a random chance to produce Plasma gas and Trit gas, if your smoking and that happens your entire deparment will go up in flame.
With those basics tending and growing basic plants should be easy. However while these make very simple plants alot of cooks and chems expect more. So let us move into Advanced botany.
Simple Chems
Chems in botany have all kinds of effects, the more you dig into chems the more and more complex Botany becomes, thats why I’ve split things up in this section Im putting simple chems which are chems that are easy to understand and explain and not linked with mutations.
Robust Harvest
You always start with 30u of robust harvest on your tool belt and normally you can find more robust harvest in your tool vending machine and sometimes your locker. Robust harvest is great for your plants. every 1u you add increases your plants potacy by 3. Plant potacy is used to determine how many chems is in a plant and how filling it is to eat.
A cocoa plant has a base of 1 potacy and it makes 1.04 Nutriants and 1.02 Vitamins, however when you apply 17 robust harvest you get a 50 potacy cocoa this gives 2 nutraits and 3 vitamins.
each chemical in a plant has different scaling and each plant has different starting points. but as you can see getting 50 on a plant can more than double the base plants chems.
two issues with robust harvest. One its hard for Chems to make so most wont make more and two if your potacy goes over 30 your plant will gain the seedless trait, see my section on Seedless plants for more about seedless.
For using robust I normally pour right from the bottle setting custom ammount to 15 for most plants and 17 for those with very low base potacy like watermelons and cocoa
Cryox
One of the more slept upon chems Cryox is extremely valuable in botany. What it does is make your plant age backwards and heals 5 damage, the highest healing of any chem. Cryox can take your plant all the way from Old and wilting to a Seed to be planted again, it also doesn’t take alot of the chem to do this and cryox is extremely easy for chems to make and every healing cryo chamber starts with two beakers of 50u and alot of CMO’s willing to hand it out with confusion.
So say you made a 50 potacy tomato plant for the chef, but after giving the chef a fair few tomatos its coming to the end of its life cycle the old and wilting alarm is lit up and its going to die soon. You only need 2u of Cryox to take it back to the point it was about to become an adult plant again, a simple 50u of cryox that med starts with can allow you to keep some plants around the whole shift.
Other handy uses is when you want to remove a plant but keep its seed about, such as if a bounty drops in and you need to make space or if you have to step out of botany for a little bit or if Atmos has gone bad and you dont want all your plants to die. for this 10u will normally do the trick though sometimes an extra 1-3 units are needed
One thing to be aware of is in a bucket it looks very much like water, so try to keep it in a glass beaker, label it with a label gun and point it out to the other botanists and try to keep it in a spot. If its used as if water, it’ll render the Hydro tray entirely unusable until all 200u of the chem have been asorbed by the tray… which takes about 7 minutes, fortunately if you do accidently put a seed in during that time i’ll just spit the seed back out fully healed…
For using Cryox I recomend using a Dropper for making old plants young and a Syringe for making mature plants seeds, and a dropper for making stage 2 plants Seeds (3-4u)
Dylovene
Heals the plant for 1 per a unit and removes 10 toxins from the soil, get this from chems if your looking to heal your plant without reseeding
EZ nutriant
This chem can be found in the same place as robust harvest each unit restores 2u to the plants nutraition value, ulitmately this is kind of useless as we can compost our plants into it normally for better effect. but still counts as a simple chem. Its main use is as part of making Left 4 Zed (mutagen chem). If you dont feel like composting some extra plants to restore your trays neutriants its a option from the vend just dont bother chems for more, or save it to make zed.
Sedin
Anti-Robust harvest, it hurts the plant and reduces its potacty by 3 per a unit and has a 20% chance to restore seeds to a plant. Niche usefulness if you really want a seed of a plant back but If you follow my Seedless plants section not needed.
Dietthylamine
This heals the plant by 0.1 and gives it 0.1 nutriants, has a 10% chance to extend the life span of the plant and a 20% chance to ahe up the plant one step and has a 10% chance to reduce mice attraction, Honestly I wouldn’t use it, could be useful after planting to try for an age up but considering the 10% odds, I think you’d be better not bothering chems.
Ammonia
This chem heals the plant for 0.5 per a unit a bit and restores 1 nutriants, its nice to have, but a bit of a pain for chems to get, I’d also skip this as there is other ways to heal plants.
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Seedless Plants
A plant with the seedless trait, gained either with mutation or Robust harvest, cant have its harvest used to make more seeds. This is where your clippers come in. Clip a plant and it’ll take damage and produce a seed. This seed is a percise copy of the plant it shares all its traits including the damage you just gave it, so if you have a plant that is seedless, or you dont know if it is or not clip it before harvest to be safe.
A Seedless plant normally dies out after 3 generations, each clip starts the new seed on slightly less health, on the 3rd generation clipping will kill the plant this is beacuse its taking damage to its ‘plant health’ every time you clip. however, should you wait till the plant is ready to harvest before clipping you can clip without giving damage to the seed. There are a few ways to heal the plant see healing plant damage.
Reproducing Seedless Plants
In my experiance Seedless places can be reproduced in 2 Ways
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Quick Clipping - If you take a clipping of a plant very shortly after it becomes stage 2 in its growth cycle you can take a second clipping at harvest. the window for this seems to be in a few seconds but will allow you to clip the same plant twice.
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Reseeding - If you wait till a plant came be clipped at its second stage of growth then hit it with 5u cryox it’ll return to a seed allowing you to clip again at the second adult cycle.
Restorin Seeds to Seedless plants
Personally I advise using reproduing seedless plants but. For this you need to use the Chem Sedin it will damage the plant by 2 per a unit, will reduce potacy by 3 and has a 1 in 5 chance of allowin you to restore seeds to your plant. this can allow you to make 47 potacy plants with seeds with a bit of luck.
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Healing Plant Health Damage
Delayed Harvest
Plants do heal slowly over time while above 90 on water and nutrition so making sure to keep keep the tanks fresh will heal them. by waiting until the bad health alarm stops to clip and harvest can allow you to keep a plant up at the cost of waiting.
Use chems
While waiting for healing takes time you can also use chems that specifically restore plant health. Ammonia, Dietylamine, Dylovene and Cryox all restore health. Dylo heals 1u without side effects Cryox heals more at 5 but will make it age backwards rapidly.
Reseeding with Cryox
A plant returned to the seed with cryox is restored to full health, This can be a great way to restore Clippings from other plants on their last generation, just use 2u right after planting and then put the seed back in good as new.
With those tips you should now be able to make great plants with 50 potacy for whatever plant you desire and keep it alive and even reproduce it this is enough to keep everyone happy. So now lets get onto The advanced stuff. Getting even more out of your plants now is entirely luck based though you can improve plant refinement slightly with industrial production making the plants themselves better will all come down to luck.
Industrial production
Chems often doesn’t have the time to get the chems out of the herbs your growing espically during a crisis, this is where you can step up.
Get the following items; Wrench, Multi-tool, Industial Grinder, Chem master 4000 and a bit of steel or a remote activator.
The industial grinder can have plants tossed into it and grind them instantly, it can hold 400u of chems before it starts overflowing and spilling out. It also starts turned off and needs connecting to a lever or a button or remote to turn on.
Once on toss in the plants and use your bucket on it to extract the chems, drag and drop your bucket onto the chem master to empty it, then in the chem master you can filter for JUST the chemicals that chems need. using the beaker to take out the chems and into a empty bucket once full you can move it to chems.
Crosspolination with swabs! - Maximising without mutation.
This allows you to moves triats from one plant onto another. To do this take any stertile swab and use it on the plant who has traits you want and use it on a the other plant, it only moves some traits over and it has a chance to remove some traits as well entirely at random. you’ll need to test what you’ve made if your looking to maximise produce by grinding it in a reagent grinder and checking the desire chems still exist as making things like Aloe plant with no Aloe chemicals is entirely possible.
I would also like to point you to Cocoa it has the highest yeild in the game, combine it with percisely 17u Robust harvest and you have the highest base values for your harvest 6x50. Good luck hunting Chems 6-50!
Mutating your plants.
Mutating has many benafits from adding extra chems to boosting yeild and potacy to levels you cant normally get. making it so plants thay normally only give one lot of goods before you need to replant give endless harvests to having plants harvest themselves. Muta-mix can be added at any growth stage including ready to harvest
Chems important for Mutation
Unstable mutagen - also known as Muta this increases Mutation Level by 1 per a unit. get this from chems
Left for Zed - also known as Zed, this has a 30% chance to increase the mutation modifier by 0.4 but harms the plant for 0,5/u (you can make this with Ez+nutriant and a catalyst at chems, and we start with enough in our vend to make 90u, bring it to chems if you want some early on. we cna use make it in our biogenerator for 12u of biomass per a 10u of zed)
Dylo - Heals the plant for 1u per a unit and removes 10 toxins from the soil, get this from chems
Phalanximine - With 5u removes death trait (needle only) but also harms the plant for 30 and increases basin toxicity, get this from chems
The more Zed and Unstable muta you use on a plant the more crazy it will become, this allows us multiple ways to appoch mutating. There is a trade off; The more mutation chems you use the more crazy your plant will become, but the more likely you are to lose it. conversely if you play it safe and use small amounts of chems it can take a long time to roll into something like Deus or Koi for medical. it is this trade off between speed, and safety that leads to people taking various apporches, ultimately the way you do it is upto you but here is a start.
Safety brew
5 u mutagen, This muta only mix might make 1 crazy gas, get death trait or kudzu but with such low ammounts it’ll normally be okay. normally takes multiple-attempts to get what you want.
Chaos Brew
50u muta, 50u Zed, 50u Dylo. this mix is nearly 100% going to get kudzu, and death trait, make one gas and might switch gases to another as it processes over 150 seconds and equally has near 100% to get the mutated plant form as well as a rainbow of other chemicals have very high yeild and potacy increases. when death trait comes up be ready to inject with a needle 5u Phal and10u dylo (first needle) and then immidately put in a second needle of 15 dylo. it can get death trait multiple times.
Custom mixes
You can make your own mixes every bonaist has prefrences between safety and speed/chaos, remember max a tank can hold is 200u and it will process 1u every 3 seconds. Zed, Muta and Dylo in equal ammounts makes for a good strong foundation and Phal needs 5u to work and then you have to heal up the 30 damage.
Now when you mutate a plant the more muta/zed you have the more trait rolls its going to get. some traits are ‘exclusive’ you can only make 1 gas at a time, (but what gas can shift if you roll gas twice), some trait rolls cancel each other out. some traits are more common, and some more rare.
All Mutagen Traits I can recall
- make the plant make any chemical at random,
- make the plant change into another plant such as Water melons to Holymelons, or Soy beans to Koibeans,
- It can make it produce any gas or remove gas from the air,
- it can gain death trait never mature to stage 2 and just die,
- it can gain kudzu trait which will make it spawn weeds extremely rapidly that if not raked once a minute will spawn kudzu (killing your plant on the 2nd tick of kudzu)
- it can gain Auto harvest trait and will harvest itself
- it can gain multi-harvest allowing plants like onions or poppys that normally you can only harvest once to be harvested over and over like a tree
- it can gain the hard bark trait, meaning you need to harvest with your axe or scythe
- it can increase potacy, lose potacy, go to 1 or 44 potacy
- gain or lose 1 yeild
- It can gain or lose seedless
- It can increase lifespan, lower life span
- it can increase the time it takes to mature or reduce it
- it can make the plant glow in the dark
- it can make hydrobays Cognizined (as ghost role)
- It can make the plant immune to deaging
- it can make the plant immune to kudzu
- it can alter the plants heat tollerance up or down
- it can also have traits that I still dont know about
and Maybe more!
Dealing with troublesome mutagen exclusive traits.
Kudzu
You can tell a kudzu plant by the fact it grows weeds extra rapidly (and gets a burst of weeds when you compost a plant into the tank) If the weed alarm is on you have seconds before kudzu spawns and nearly always kills the plant. you can manage it by rapidly raking it every few seconds but it is irrating and requires constant maintaince. though not dead, I would recomend killing it if you only used a few chems and raking it every 15 seconds should you used alot of chems or really need it around. Should kudzu sprout your clippers when used to attack kill a square of kudzu in one strike, as long as you dont let it get out of hand you should be able to deal with it solo, you can also use plant be gone from the vending machine to kill multiple tiles at once though if you hit plants you’ll harm them.
Death trait
This trait stops the plant from aging up after a long time it’ll have the poor health alarm go off and then it’ll die. You can remove this with 5u of the chemical Phalanxime but it will also poison doing 6 damage per a u of Phalanxime and as death trait stops it growing up using Cryox wont work, so Mix 5 Phal, 10 Dylo in the needle then put in a second needle of pure Dylo. This should undo the Phalanxime damage.
As a note the guidebook says use 4u of Phalanxime but on testing the dropper doesn’t seem to apply it correctly 4x1u didn’t work nor 5u directly from the dropper, so use the needle.
Plasma or Tritium traits
: Firstly; dont panic, secondly dont leave the room, Tirt and plasma both need a open flame to go off. assuming you have none in your department your safe. opening the door to the hallway and you might run into a smoker and start a fire. Notify Engineering, they will send atmos to either put in more scrubbers or yell at you to kill the strain, if it does light at all, run for your life. 3 scrubbers is normally enough to remove any ammount of gas made in a normal bay and as long as you dont smoke and it doesn’t light its safe to farm it, though it depends how much you want to deal with the worry. At extreme levels its also toxic, so might want to get a gasmask from engineering and a Can to breath off internals.
Frezon
: first sign of this gas will be the tempature alarm under the tank that has the plant in as the gas needs a built up to be visable, if your using low ammounts of chems just shovel it, better not to risk frezon even if alter tempature trait can also set it off. if you want to be sure look for plants next to it also havn’t their tempature alarms go off normally as the second tick. if not dealt with quickly the entire department will have blinking temapture lights all shift hiding weed presence, if a build up happens without you noticing the whole department will freeze. one scrubber is able to handle frezon itself but it cools the N2 and O2 in the air. so the after effects can last all shift. The best way to deal with this is Hacking your air alarm, screw driver and use wire cutters to cut ACC, (if you get the wrong wire use it again to fix it) and once you find ACC screw driver it shut so it looks like normal. now you control the air alarm! the air alarm set to panic and wait till 40kpa, then set fill till 350kpa then panic till about 90-100 when you can set auto filtered and it should fix it. If atmos come they can also space the room entirely vent it and refill to reset the tempature. If you get it early just get cargo to get you a space heter (350 spaceos very cheap they can get 5 at round start so if they say no bring up how cheap it is and they normally agree)
Mutation is a wild card, you never know what your getting every time you do it but hopefully these tips helped you safely handle all the worst botany can toss at you.
And that is the end of my guide. I’d like to give a special thanks to Riley Harrington who helped colab on the mutagen section of this guide and I hope you guys have fun with botany even if your playing it safe with non-muta or going wild.
Kiki Stardew - Salamander botanist, guide writen 4 Feb 2025 and last updated 5 Feb 2025