Giving botany a mutagen dispenser

[NecromancerAnne]

Bottom post of the previous page:

I mean if botany cannot produce anything at reasonable pace before a chem dispenser is provided than the current situation of 'tide for the dispenser every round' is going to continue whether change happens or not. It's not particularly hard to get into tech storage, easier on Box and Delta than Meta or Pubby (Pubby starts with some mutagen anyway), and isn't reliant on the department which currently suffers from a playerbase that takes the role to do literally nothing productive except blow themselves up. Since we don't punish people for wasting roles like that consistently we won't punish people for breaking into tech storage.

I guess this is the magical 'conflict' everyone talks about in effect. Yes I do like it when security sees fit to perma me for removing a wall or an engineer killing me for being in a room. Magical conflict there, I felt the immersion.

Obviously there is a core problem with botany's design that causes this problem. It's either the over effectiveness of various chems or the fact that chems are eaten en-masse to produce anything. I don't get why the core method of changing plants or mutations requires drowning plants in chems. That makes absolutely no sense from a functional standpoint and it means botany really does literally need a chem dispenser of its own to produce meaningful goods. I go through a whole dispenser just getting to Gaia and then Earthblood Eheat and that's on Saltpetre alone. Mutagen barely makes a dent. It's saltpetre that matters more.

Maybe we should look into having fertilizers be retained in the soil upon application (with negative effects for drowning the plants in a chem), applying their effects as changes to the plants over time so botany is still partly reliant on the chems but can make smaller amounts of the chems go further while slowing their productivity to however long mixing the chems into the fertilizer will take to alter the plants. At least then it makes more sense from a botanical standpoint.

[cacogen]

I'm going to quote mine even though it looks terrible and is a pain in the ass to read.

players must have become really retarded lately

even if the blumpkin strategy were written on a piece of paper that spawned in botany, it still wouldn't be a time efficient way of getting mutagen when you consider the length of the average /tg/station round

just set up your mutagen farm and put 1-2u of mutagen on your plant until you roll your desired stats, won't take long since you have infinite mutagen by now

it's entirely random. a random stat is changed, and it can go up or down by a small, random amount of points. it could take a very long time to get your desired stats using this technique.

that's how I earned a note for planting 100 potency 10 yield 1 production time shadowshrooms and made the whole station blackout station

it sounds like you got lucky both with mutations and with the amount of time you had that round

the gene machine I just use to keep good stats once I have them and to add chems/traits, having them upgraded is too much of a hassle and not needed

you can't keep good stats when the gene machine isn't upgraded because saved stats are downgraded to the point they aren't good anymore. this is why everyone uses wheat because it starts with a production speed of 1 which you can't get without an upgraded machine

I and many other bagilite officers have fun enforcing access restrictions to plant cucks and disposal their chem board after finding them tresspassing into tech storage

I have done this strategy tens of times and I've never had trouble from anyone. Engineers going past usually let me in and even the CE has. If no one is available the AI is always happy to help. Nobody reports you to security, nobody interferes. Nobody cares because they know it's harmless. Not sure why you'd play spitefully like this anyway (assuming you've ever actually done this).

all the energy they couldn't put to playing botanist on ez mode they use it to tide and make for a more engaging round

Not only is that a stupid thing to want for the game, it also doesn't happen. There are other, back-up methods of getting mutagen.

[WarbossLincoln]

I don't know if it's really necessary when there's a chem dispenser board in tech storage. The first thing I do as AI is go to tech storage and wait for the botanist to show up so he doesn't even have to order me to open it. Just order the AI to let you in, done. If both botanists are non-human then ask nicely and hope the AI player isn't a complete dick.

[legoscape]

Give botanists a mutagen dispenser you keep botanists in botany. Don't give a botanist a mutagen dispenser they go and pillage chemistry. It's a mutagen dispenser that should have been put in botany for a while now.

[wesoda25]

Just give botanists some intuitive, non meta strat at getting mutagen thats ingrained in the job. Saying “LOL STUPID NEW PLAYER TO BOTANY HOW COME YOU DONT KNOW AS MANY PEOPLE TO TELL YOU THINGS AS ME?” isnt a solution to the problem. A PR went up a while ago to allow botanists to create mutagen using their bio thingy, and thats not ideal but still better than what we have.

Code it in a way that at shift start, its easier to just ask chem (giving mutagen a huge amount of necessary biomass to generate, plants take a while to grow) but then at later stages they generate it themselves without shitty meta blumpkin strats. Its not toxins, there shouldn’t be a “hidden” meta to the job.

[actioninja]

Just give botanists some intuitive, non meta strat at getting mutagen thats ingrained in the job.

that is literally what mutagen shrooms/blumpkins are.
If a botanist doesn't understand the concept of premixing chems within plants then why should we coddle them even more.

[wesoda25]

How tf is it coddling. Not everyone knows whats in what, for a powergamer sure it’s necessary, not someone trying to help out the chef. I myself never bothered learning how to generate mutagen as botany since I used it to just grow stuff for chef (or myself if i am chef). We shouldn’t punish people who play the job for its supposedly intended purpose, and reward those who play it for worse reasons. But I guess thats “coddling”

[Kryson]

We should not make the departments self sufficient fortresses so that they can start power gaming without any effort.

[teepeepee]

Just give botanists some intuitive, non meta strat at getting mutagen thats ingrained in the job. Saying “LOL STUPID NEW PLAYER TO BOTANY HOW COME YOU DONT KNOW AS MANY PEOPLE TO TELL YOU THINGS AS ME?” isnt a solution to the problem. A PR went up a while ago to allow botanists to create mutagen using their bio thingy, and thats not ideal but still better than what we have.

Code it in a way that at shift start, its easier to just ask chem (giving mutagen a huge amount of necessary biomass to generate, plants take a while to grow) but then at later stages they generate it themselves without shitty meta blumpkin strats. Its not toxins, there shouldn’t be a “hidden” meta to the job.

do you call interacting with your senoir coworkers a meta strat? you don't need to read the knowledgebase discord thingy to know what plants have what chems in them, you don't even need to know much chemistry, all you know is you want mutagen so search for the recipe and then see if your plants have the ingredients
is checking the wiki powergaming?

[oranges]

it's frustrating that the chems were ever added and are now seen as indispensable.

They used to be a bonus, not required.

[cacogen]

I'm not sure why botany shouldn't be able to aim to maximise its output just like any other department. That pull request I made seemed to me like a happy medium between the current roundstart chem dispenser board metastrat and leaving your department to bug chemistry every couple of minutes, leaving your plants unattended. A problem with the biogenerator solution though is that it is still less desirable than getting the chem dispenser board.

As I've said earlier, using blumpkins and glowshrooms is a sound strategy to obtain mutagen that is obscure to newer players and takes ages just to get a steady supply of mutagen. And even with a chem dispenser built 3-4 minutes in, it still takes a long while to get enough gaia for self-sustaining trays and then to grow and modify whatever plants you're aiming at that round.

Botany is such an overlooked and underplayed department I'm surprised at the level of hostility towards giving it better access to chems.

[actioninja]

Botany is such an overlooked and underplayed department I'm surprised at the level of hostility towards giving it better access to chems.

Even after the removal of seperated chems botany is still one the single highest concentration places of overpowered bullshit in the game.

[confused rock]

yo what if we just port the botania mod from minecraft

yo what if some of us haven't played that mod and don't know what it do

what if I haven't ever used mutagen and don't know what it do

[Cobby]

There is nothing wrong with having obscure mechanics to newer players.

Newer players shouldn't be going to botany to churn out 0-100 or 100-0 plants to begin with. They'd be going to botany to make plants.

I don't think having mechanics that encourage veterans to teach newer players but also not made powerful because it's a veteran litmus test are bad to have.

[oranges]

botany is definitely not underplayed or overlooked either

[MisterPerson]

There is nothing wrong with having obscure mechanics to newer players.

Newer players shouldn't be going to botany to churn out 0-100 or 100-0 plants to begin with. They'd be going to botany to make plants.

I don't think having mechanics that encourage veterans to teach newer players but also not made powerful because it's a veteran litmus test are bad to have.

There's a bit of a difference between an "obscure mechanic" and "what the whole department is going to wind up being balanced around".

[Dr_bee]

Maybe add a ghetto way to get chlorine. that way all the botanist has to do is grow glowshrooms, grind them up, and add the ghetto chlorine to make mutagen. This would still bar botany mutagen production behind a decent grow time but not behind a chem dispenser. They might still want a chem dispenser for easy saltpeter and ammonia but the basic mutagen would be ghettoable.

The problem being what do you add for the chlorine? cleaning solution in maint?

[Tlaltecuhtli]

radium mutates plants with 10u you can use glowshrooms to unlock blumpkins
https://github.com/tgstation/tgstation/ ... cs.dm#L458

[Cobby]

There is nothing wrong with having obscure mechanics to newer players.

Newer players shouldn't be going to botany to churn out 0-100 or 100-0 plants to begin with. They'd be going to botany to make plants.

I don't think having mechanics that encourage veterans to teach newer players but also not made powerful because it's a veteran litmus test are bad to have.

There's a bit of a difference between an "obscure mechanic" and "what the whole department is going to wind up being balanced around".

Botany can grow plants with or without mutagen :^)

[Farquaar]

Why is this thread still active? Y'all are getting baited hard.

[cacogen]

There is nothing wrong with having obscure mechanics to newer players.

Newer players shouldn't be going to botany to churn out 0-100 or 100-0 plants to begin with. They'd be going to botany to make plants.

I don't think having mechanics that encourage veterans to teach newer players but also not made powerful because it's a veteran litmus test are bad to have.

There's a bit of a difference between an "obscure mechanic" and "what the whole department is going to wind up being balanced around".

Botany can grow plants with or without mutagen :^)

>botany is the only department that access to the fun shit, the perks of the job, the reward for doing the work should be optional

[Cobby]

tfw there was a time people played botany because it was relaxing instead of a powerhouse.

[MisterPerson]

tfw there was a time people played botany because it was relaxing instead of a powerhouse.

tHiS iS tHe FuTuRe YoU cHoSe
YoU cOuLd HaVe StOpPeD tHiS
wHy DiDn'T yOu StOp ThIs?

[Cobby]

was looking for a slippery slope meme, this is not related byond the fact it uses slippery slope

[CreationPro]

i used to play botany just to grow the chef stuff so he could cook
good times

[adamkad1]

could be cool if they started with chem dispenser like lavaland pod people but only mutagen and saltpetre and maybe ammonia/diethylamine

[MMMiracles]

could be cool if they started with all the mutation seeds in their vendor like admin-spawned people but with only bluespace tomatoes and koibean and maybe some gatfruit/death-nettles

[cacogen]

could be cool if they started with chem dispenser like lavaland pod people but only mutagen and saltpetre and maybe ammonia/diethylamine

I tried to do something like this by adding them to the biogenerator with the other botany chemicals already there so you'd have to grow produce to get them (makes perfect sense) and then balanced it accordingly but it almost instantaneously got thumbed down by four people and MMMiracles got hostile about it. Then oranges closed it without explanation. He thought I was looking for a fight based on the PR's title but it was a joke because I knew how charged the issue is for reasons I don't understand.

So asking for a chem dispenser like in the seed vault is asking way too much with the current-- I don't know, oranges and four people mad at the idea of botany having a way to access the vast quantities of chemicals it needs to make fun shit that isn't leaving your plants untended and interrupting the chemist every couple of minutes. Which is ridiculous given the current meta is to just build your own chem dispenser anyway, something you can do roundstart in less than five minutes.

I wish I ever played other departments so I could have the perspective necessary to honestly compare the potential power of things like xenobio, chemistry or virology with botany. I don't think botany is more powerful than these.

[HiKewne]

Autistic botanist here answering the "I don't think you need a chem dispenser" as a botanist unless you're gonna powergame the chems" sorta question and point I keep seeing being made here:

At first i didn't think it either, I used to just plant a lot of a single crop and use lots of left-4-zed on them. Then I realized I could make my own mutagen by growing blumkins the same way, which made the process easier. After that, I found out that I can go ask chemistry for mutagen, which will make getting the blumkins even faster as I can mutate easier the pumpkins. But then, I found out that going out roundstart, ask the AI to let me inside the tech storage, get a board, get a battery, get some tools, and go ask sci or cargo to give me the rest of the components was even faster. I could finally start upgrading the trays by minute 16~18 and not have to wait until the 35 minute mark to start actually doing the shit i wanted.
And now you're gonna say "But you don't need to upgrade the trays!" Yes, I have to, because not all botanists will care about your plants, and you can't be there sitting there to babysit the plants, and you can't do literally any other thing that involves interacting with other players because you gotta be making sure your plants don't die while you're gone (Because they WILL die), or busy mixing traits together into the plant DNA. Sure, you can add fungal growth or weed adaptation to delay the time you have to spend tending to your plants, which means you have to also spend time adding that to every different plant and doesn't even half solve the problem when you want to do other stuff simultaneously, like growing stuff for the chef, the weed for the people, experimenting with whatever you have today in the strange seeds, maybe making some nice furniture, mixing chems together, and whatever other thing you wanna do. And considering that in average I end up finally upgrading the trays around the minute 22~26, its only about the 30 minute mark that I can, finally, completely start doing actual shit for the station simultaneously.

And please, PLEASE no "You can just not upgrade the trays", okay, yes, I could get literally something else done if I only focused in one thing for my own gains or for others, maybe two if we're being really generous, then wouldn't that reinforce that botanists stay inside botany doing no player interaction? The whole idea is to interact more with the players!

[Kryson]

And please, PLEASE no "You can just not upgrade the trays", okay, yes, I could get literally something else done if I only focused in one thing for my own gains or for others, maybe two if we're being really generous, then wouldn't that reinforce that botanists stay inside botany doing no player interaction? The whole idea is to interact more with the players!

Ask science or engineering to do it. Make some holocalls or PDA the RD and CE.