Botany 1

Klovnstation design document

Current status

Botany is a department with a lot of potential that is unfortunately quite limited in its current state. So far botany can serve either service or medical, with an edge case of loosing killer tomatoes when nukies arrive.

Mutations are also quite difficult to spot and ascertain, which further worsens the status of more specific mutations like gas requirement – instead of bothering to try every single gas in the game you just shovel the damn thing up 99% of the time.

Rationale of improvement

Departmental interaction is the name of the game here. Botany should be able to move beyond a glorified alternate chem provider to a department that actually has some round moving potential.

Requested changes

Quality of life I’ve seen a plant scanner on frontier station (never got a chance to use it) but we need something like that on Klovnstation as well. Proper mutation detection and being able to tell the stats apart is very important. If the scanner on frontier does all this, we might be able to just port it.

There are also absolutely no internal (in-game) guides to actual robust botany. The guidebook/wiki could definitely use at the very least a cut down rewrite of the Fern guide so that, say, omnizine is somewhat attainable for the average botanist.

Additional interaction with the station Atmos interplay Gas production buffs would allow atmos to actually seriously consider botany as a source of gas. Being able to only synthesise some gases as the product of a plant’s metabolism would also be very interesting.

Plant thermomachines who would set a gas to a certain temperature based on, say, the current potency level are also a secondary idea we may want to implement.

(very difficult) Proper plant genetics Proper plant genetics (factoriogenetics) with tuneable constants would massively improve the sandbox nature of the department. Even the specific departmental use cases of botany would benefit, creating fine levers with which you could tune plants to a specific usecase.

Rapid plant construction This is a somewhat more complex idea, but plants could prove to be a terrific aid for engi. Of course, due to its possibly disruptive nature, the more aggressive building tools would have to be locked behind pretty serious work.

A form of vine would be planted and harvested into one of many building gadgets (with mutations switching between them). My ideas so far are as follows:

• Breach repair vine

This is quite self explanatory: you use the breach repair growth lattice, activate the vine (some sort of activation mechanism would have to be implemented) and throw it near a breach – it would extend the grid it is on in, say, a circular radius of 4 (perhaps we use potency/yield here). This would quickly repair breaches with vine plating, upon which you could then rebuild the station.

• Wall/barricade vine

The wall/barricade vines would be slightly more complex. First, you would place down small (1x1) growth conduits on the tiles that you want the vine to grow on. Then, you would activate and place the vine down on one of the growth conduits, from where it would proceed to crawl all the tiles that have conduits up to a maximum of, say, 8 for walls and 12 for barricades (perhaps we use potency/yield here). This would allow for very rapid and cheap construction.

An illustrative picture of the concept:

• Power vine

A charged SMES (possibly advanced SMES) capacity wise (perhaps we use potency/yield here) with an alternate sprite that connects to any wire type and cannot be recharged. This, in say a rather bulky 2x4 „flatpack“ form, would provide a useful emergency power source for any department. This ties into the „emergency management“ theme of the vines.

• Light vine

Perhaps this could be particularly cheap? An immobile floodlight that could run off of its non-rechargeable internal battery or maybe even off of LV wire.

• Scrubber vine

Last but not least, an immobile, one-use portascrubber. Its speed and capacity could be modulated by potency and yield too.

Tile botany Tile botany is an idea where a blob/kudzu-like tile plant spreads itself on a layer (subfloor/table/wall). Each tile of the plant could use a similar mutation system to already existing planter plants, too. Contrary to say kudzu or the blob this would be a desirable thing that botany could use and shape to its needs. Here are some suggestions that I have thought of.

• Photosynthesis and space botany

Plumbing is coming soon, and everyone is always hungry for more chemicals. Botany could plant in space and have said plants generate various chemicals. I propose a blob-like system where resource conduits (into which you dump chems or whatnot) provide chemicals to the plant tiles to transmute and output at exit nodes (material silo code could help here).

Space botany could also be able to, after some work, create automatic high-powered solar panel equivalents for engi interplay. More space activity is already desired, so this would only serve to help and would also possibly pave the way a no-chemical-generator plumbing system.

• Various combat plants

Electroplants that deliver jolts to those standing on them when powered, healplants which slowly soothe you with chemicals when you stand on them, blockshrubs which expand to a difficult-to-pass 3x3 thicket when hit with gunfire, the ideas are endless. Of course, we can’t go too nuts.

Mycelium Dark areas can now grow a mycelium, which can yield either positive effects (generating power, glowing (in a way that doesn’t stop mycelium spread), speeding up those who walk on it) or negative ones (think heating the area up, emitting poisonous gases, creating radiation).

This mycelium can either be managed and mutated by botany, who has to identify all the mushroom cultures inside the mycelium and then feed the ones it wants to win (with various chemicals) or exterminated with a combination of light and manual eradication.

Mushroom God We can add some sort of way for players to become one with the mycelium. Perhaps a random ghost role chance of creating a sentient mycelium „core“ that transforms its mycelium to a kind of soft blob, and can both see and influence (to some degree) its own mushroom cultures and bestow „blessings“ upon tiders (think biological armor with a removal doafter that self damages you or an unremovable mushroom claw).

This mushroom God would play a supportive role in the round, mostly directing all the random self-antagging crew to some goal that it would receive.

Projected results of this change

Botany has more things to do. Mycelium outbreaks and various tile botany projects keep botanists on their toes or at least away from sitting in their department 24/7. Engineering interplay helps fix engi content drought in at least some minor way. This does not introduce any sort of huge new thing in particular, but it makes for a good improvement of a department that could use some.