Botanist

Basics of Botany

Hydroponics and the Botanists who work there are important to the station, especially on longer rounds. Botanists grow plants that the Chef can use for food. Without botany, the food choices will be limited. Botany can also be used for "FUN"

Your Area

Hydroponics is divided into two rooms. The big section is where you'll spend most of your time growing goods. Trays are available where you grow plants and two vending machines, one with seeds and the other with miscellaneous items such as nutrients and tools for your job. The bio-generator can be used to grind plants and produce things for the station. In tandem is the seed dispenser used to reproduce your product.

Plants require nutrients (fertilizer) and water to grow. They are also bothered by pests and weeds. (On S.P.L.U.R.T. the pests aren't as much of an issue.)

Trays come equipped with alerts that flash specific colors to tell you what's happening with your plant.

From left to right -

Green: Ready to harvest.
Red: Low health, caused by toxins/lack of nutrients/low water/end of lifespan.
Red (middle): High weed, pest or toxicity levels.
Yellow: Low nutrients.
Blue: Low water.

Tools that are of use in botany -

Plant Analyzer: Shows detailed plant statistics. Shows plant and tray chemical contents and production traits. (also works on crops and plant people)
Cultivator: Kills Weeds.
Plant Bag: Collects up to 50 items or 100 seeds from your harvest. Useful for moving those into the fridge or biogenerator.
Wrench: Used to move your trays around.
Hatchet: Chops tower-caps into planks, chops other things. This is also a robust tool that fits in pockets.
Spade: Removes and destroys plants in a tray.
All-In-One Grinder: This is how you extract reagents from plants - throw them in and hit the "grind" button.
Portable Seed Extractor: This can harvest and pick up plants and turn up to 100 plants into seeds. Less efficient than the machine.

Tools that require techs for use in botany -

Floral Somatoray: A gun that requires the botany tech in order to produce. It has 3 modes, which can increase plant yields, mutate a plant's stats, or mutate a plant's species. With a full charge, using it on a tray in close range can limit its mutations to a single product, but requires at least 20 plant endurance.

Plant growing 101

Take some seeds from the vendor and put them into the trays. Now, take a look at the tray with a plant analyzer. For now, you only need to pay attention to the bottom five stats - Water/Nutrition and Weeds/Toxic/Pest levels.

Now, fill a bucket from the water tank and grab fertilizer from the vending machine. You get rid of weeds with the cultivator and remove pests with pest spray. Chemistry can give you better chemicals for this, which will be explained later in the guide.

Some plants have a varied growth times, such as wheat growing faster while watermelons or apple trees take a little longer before you can harvest from them.

Once your tray flashes green, you're set to harvest. If you want to replicate the plant to continue growing more, just insert it into the seed extractor.

You can click seeds with a pen to change the name of the plant, the seed's description, or the plant's description. After planting in a hydroponics tray the tray updates with the name and description of the plant inside it.

Biogenerator

The Biogenerator makes items out of the nutriment in plants. As a rule of thumb: More nutriment = more biomass. Watermelons and pumpkins are commonly used due to their 20% nutriment boost trait.

To get biomass, grab a spare bucket and equip the machine with it, then use the plant bag to put fruits inside.

If you somehow run out of fertilizer in the vendors, remember you can produce more here. Reagents produced will be poured into the inserted bucket. You can also craft a whole bunch of useful items from the leather/cloth sheets the biogenerator can create.

DNA Extractor

The DNA extractor allows you to extract and modify seed stats and traits. This machine is what lets you become a Chemist on speed.

Floral Somatoray

R&D can research a non-lethal gun called a Floral Somatoray. It has three options: randomly increase yield, mutate the plant stats and force a species mutation. Print it from the service techfab after research. Please note, you will need to fire the gun at your plants to mutate them (The purple setting). So Fat-fingered characters beware.

Other Notes

Autogrow Mode

On any non-dirt tray, ctrl-clicking it will give it a golden shine, activating autogrow. Now it will generate its own water, self-tend weed/pest removal, and consume less nutrients if the tray is upgraded, but at the cost of a large amount of power. This is good for high maintenance plants that require a lot of tending if you need to leave botany for a few moments. Autogrow also prevents species mutations, but does not prevent stat/trait/chem/Somatoray mutations.

This is great in combination with plants that have the Perennial Growth trait, if you can manage the power drain!

Upgraded trays can hold more nutrients, water, and will consume less nutrients every time chemicals are processed. This makes upgrades for individual trays much more valuable, especially when using difficult to produce chemicals.

If possible, growing glowcaps to power your APC can heavily offset the cost of using autogrow on a tray. You'll need a lot of power output in order to generate enough electricity to have all your trays on autogrow, so it's best to individually manage only 1-2 using this feature.

Automation with Plumbing

Plumbing allows the creation of several systems to assist you in your work. For example:

Feeding the trays reagents and possibly water, replacing the autogrow as long as there are reagents in input.
Creating an automated grinding and/or filtering system for harvests.

You will need fluid ducts , a plumbing constructor , and potentially a plunger. Those can be found in the Chemistry Lab, or constructed on the medical Techfab.

Connecting Trays

Hydroponics trays can be connected to plumbing pipe-networks and machinery.

The trays possess a pipe input facing southward, but you may rotate them by unwrenching the tray and alt-clicking it; simply remember to wrench it back in place. If you're using machinery, the red pipe is the input, while the blue one is the output.

You may add reagents to the pipe network using Inputs, fed manually using containers (beakers, bottles, ...). You may also produce some through plumbing machinery (e.g., synthesizers, grinders ) and link it to the network. A plumbing tank might be a useful addition.

Beware that using a plumbing system may fill the reagent tanks to the maximum, disallowing you from manually and individually adding reagents. Since the pipe input leads to the trays' reagent tanks before being sorted out, adding water to the network is nearly guaranteed to provoke said 'clogs.'

To add water to the network, you may transform one of the water tanks into a plumbing-compatible one, using iron sheets, or use a synthesizer configured on water production

Stats, reagents and traits

Three things determine how your plant will turn out: Their stats, reagents and traits.

Stats

Stats determine whether your plants are small and grow slowly, or are big and fast-growing.

Click expand to see what stats do:

Potency: The most important stat (0 to 100). This affects the amount of chemicals in the plant, though some have additional effects, such as stun length for bananas.

The amount of a reagent a plant will produce is reagent% x potency x plant capacity. Almost all plant have 100 capacity by default, so for example 10% nutriment in a 50 potency plant with 100 capacity will produce 5 units of nutriment.

Yield: How much product you get each harvest. Between 0 and 10. Pay attention to this, because if it drops to 0, you won't harvest anything.
Production Speed: How fast your plant reaches harvest. Between 1 and 10 -- the lower the faster. The plant has to wait (Production Speed) age cycles before each harvest.
Maturation Speed: Age cycles before the plant can start production. The first harvest will be (Maturation Speed + Production Speed).
Lifespan: When the age is above lifespan, the plant starts losing health. Between 10 and 100. Only important for plants with the Perennial Growth trait.
Age: Age of the plant. Only relevant in terms of the lifespan stat.
Endurance: Max health. Between 10 and 100.
Instability: The higher a plant's instability, the plant will passively recieve stat changes over time. Between 20-59, the plant will have it's stats mutate randomly. Above 60, but below 80, the plant will have a chance to mutate to one of it's possible mutations every time it ages. Above 80, the plant has a chance to gain random traits over time.
Weed growth rate: Determines how quickly weeds grow in the plant tray. Relevant above 0, but only relevant with high vulnerability value.
Weed vulnerability: The higher, the more easily a plant is overtaken by weeds. Only relevant with very high values.
Weeds: Reduces plant potency and yield. Remove with a cultivator.
Pests: Reduces plant potency and yield. Remove with chems like Pest-B-Gone
Toxicity: Hurts health. Can be reduced by overwatering the plant, which replaces water.

Reagents/Content

This determines what chemicals are present in a grown plant - New reagents can be transferred between plants by extracting the traits and adding them to new seeds (via the DNA Extractor).

With a bit of creativity, you can mix your own mutagen, produce unique healing chemicals or turn tomatoes into napalm grenades. Solid Chemistry knowledge will help you out immensely.

Traits

Traits give your plants unique properties. There are plenty - Perennial Growth, for example, lets you harvest plants multiple times.

These can be transferred, just like reagents.

"Immutable" traits are unable to be removed via gene shears or grafted from any plant.

Likewise, "Essential" traits are unable to be removed via shears, but can be grafted in some cases.

List of traits:

Trait name	Properties
Bioluminescence	Causes the plant to glow, emitting light based of potency. Varieties include Shadow Emission, White Bioluminescence, Red Bioluminescence, Yellow Bioluminescence, Green Bioluminescence, Blue Bioluminescence, Purple Bioluminescence and Pink Bioluminescence.
Bluespace Activity	Gives the plant bluespace properties, making it teleport people hit if the plant has Liquid Contents, and on slip if it has Slippery Skin. Max radius is determined by potency.
Capacitive Cell Production	Plants with this trait can be made into batteries with the addition of wire. Electrical Activity increases the cell's maximum charge.
Carnivory	Makes the plant heal from pests instead of taking damage from them.
Densified Chemicals	Doubles the reagent capacity of the plant (usually from 100 to 200), which in turn doubles the amount of reagents produced.
Electrical Activity	Gives the plant electrical charge, making it recharge batteries (in hand, worn container or pocket) when eaten, depending on potency. It also has potency/5 %chance to electrocute on slip if it also has Slippery Skin and on hit if it has Liquid Contents.
Expansive Decomposition	--Unsure what this does fully, seems to make liquid content items shoot out a in slippery cloud that you can't see through when destroyed. If anyone knows exactly what this does, can they update this?--
Fire Resistance	Makes the seeds and produce fireproof.
Fungal Vitality	The plant acquires mushroom-like properties, removing the need for water and greatly reducing damage from lack of light. Minimum yield is always 1 and the tray can't be overtaken by weeds. This is a plant type, and is incompatible with other plant types.
Gaseous Decomposition	Plants with this trait emit a smoke cloud when squashed, spewing reagents everywhere. Requires Liquid Contents to be useful. Only available through Strange seeds, or high instability mutations.
Hypodermic Prickles	Plants with this trait will sting when thrown (or slipped on with Slippery Skin), transferring up to 20u (at 100 potency) of their chemicals to the target. Does not pierce hardsuits. Mutually exclusive with Liquid Contents trait.
Invasive Spreading	Plants with this trait will invade adjacent trays and destroy other plants growing there. Will not overwrite plants of the same species.
Liquid Contents	Causes the plant to squash when thrown or slipped on (Slippery Skin), applying the reagents inside on the target and destroying the plant. Mutually exclusive with Hypodermic Prickles and Prickly Adhesion traits.
Oculary Mimicry	The plant gains a pair of googly eyes.
Perennial Growth	Plants with this trait don't die on harvest (and can be harvested multiple times).
Slippery Skin	Causes the plant, or any products of the plant, to become slippery. The knockdown time is (Potency * 0.08), divided by 3 unless the plant has lube or is a banana. Maximum knockdown is 7 seconds. Triggers Hypodermic Prickes and Liquid Contents when combined with them.
Spore Emission	Emits the contents of the plants into the air. Showing as gas clouds with particulates. Will also match the colour of the chems inside the plant. (One of the more FUN traits)
Territorial
Weed Adaptation	The plant acquires weed-like properties, removing the need for nutrients. Plant growth doesn't get slowed by weeds and the tray can't be overtaken by them. This is a plant type, and is incompatible with other plant types.