For the past couple days I have been figuring out xenobotany, and it has becoming increasingly obvious that genome mutations are incredibly RNG based, and the ones worth getting are very hard to get, even with an infinite supply of unstable mutagen, floral somatorays, and a mutation mod of 120. Since this makes for very tedious game play, its obvious why very few people actually work in xenoflora.
To make it more appealing, we can instead give the rare traits to rare mutated plants. We already have some plants with these traits, such as glowshrooms with bioluminescence and kudzu with spread 2, but kudzu is very hard to get and the other traits have no such plant. Plant mutations, while still RNG based, are much easier to actually perform, so all of the plant genomes should be given to the various mutated versions of plants.
For example, giving killer tomatoes carnivore 2 would make logical sense as they are killer tomatoes, and it would make actually getting the genome for splicing a much easier affair. The actual coding of this would also be trivial, simply a single line of code can add a genome to the plant.
https://github.com/ZomgPonies/Paradise/blob/master/code/modules/hydroponics/seed_datums.dm
The above can easily be worked into giving the various mutated plants the rarer genomes, and would make xenobotany much more fun. Instead of sitting by a plant tray dumping mutagen on it until it might eventually mutate the desired trait, we can follow a set path by getting the correct mutated plant and splicing the genome. In addition, the current method would also still be working, and is perfectly fine for mutating things like yield and potency.
