PeakPerformance

Ever noticed how the bridge looks like it's eating ai upload ? Also, grey army

Even if we disregard everything else regarding botany, the killer tomatoes by themselves are actually pretty good. Sure they go down easily, but a couple of bites will break your bones pretty reliably, and, most importantly... you can make literally hundreds in minutes. What you're proposing with the squash mechanic is - imagine someone that could spawn hundreds of blob spores that could do pretty much any of the crazy stuff botany can do. AND they hurt when they bite ya. Could do phlog or lube smokes, tesliums arcs, it's ridiculous. Even by itself, straight up buffing killer tomatoes is a pretty bad idea - they're honestly decently strong already. Considering everything botany has on top of that ? Not in a million years, please.

Eleven elves sit at a table, what makes them a dozen ? The Twelf !

Ever had a lasagna stay in your fridge for two months and start to mutate its own ecosystem ? Could have something like that - unscrubbable stain is not handheld ? it could start mutating things, pop out beefed up and hostile ants/cockroaches, attracting feral cats maybe ? Not something too major, as custodial duty is very often performed by less experienced people and it'd be a bad idea to put too much strain on them, but it'd be interesting to have them as "lesser anomalies" that can actually have a small impact on the shift. Diseases would be good, too - gives both the janitor AND the virology extra, hopefully interesting, work !

I'd be very cautious handing out cqc - even without harm. It'd require more tweaks imho - as a single agressive grab is the absolute strongest form of stun - not even adrenals or any kinds of stimulants will get you out of it AFAIK. Yes, you can spam resist until you eventually break out and adrenal the stun away, but by that point you're already asleep and disarm spammed anyways. Doing any kind of antag stuff in medbay, in this example, is already asking to get lynched - having someone with cqc there too elevates the difficulty to a 100, and if the guy's even remotely validdy and robust it'll ruin many a rounds. I love the overall idea though - don't take me wrong !

I think it's important to know that strange objects, once discovered, can give random techs (except toxins and illegals) from levels two to five, and botany can provide a little more than just gaia/glowshrooms/caps if needed : bluespace = 5 (BS tomatoes - although I think it's the actual bluespace activity gene that gives it) Magnet = 5 (Chili ghost) biotech = 6 (gaia) material = 5 (gaia) programming = 5 (walkingmushroom) plasma = 6 (glowshroom) powerstorage = 6 (glowcaps) combat = 5 (deathnettle) most relevant being the deathnettle when a pesky captain would rather slap people with the chain

This post taught me how to do genetics well - now that I have a bit more experience I'd like to add to it : 1) for clarification, count any blocks above 800 after you've fed your monki all the UM, those are the ones that matter for your 24 bad mutations headcount. 2) I suggest using IVs to feed UM instead, three IVs are guarranteed to unlock all bad blocks, and it lets ya prep whatever you want while your subject soaks. 3) a dead patient will still mutate upon UM ingestion, and bodies do not process reagents or emit radiations (with the radioactive mutation or otherwize), making them easier to work with. 4) 1u of mutadone will reset your powers, don't eat the pills from the medivend whole - those are TWENTY units. Ask chemistry to grind em up into 1u pills for you. This will completely remove the need for you to wait for clean SE's while testing for powers. 5) Asking for a medibot from robotics will pretty much take away any need for potassium iodine/charcoal 6) About FINDING X-RAY, TK, No breath, Hulk, chameleon skin/cloak of shadows: always ALWAYS mark down "duds", and remember which of them you have activated while testing powers. Each of them might be one of those six "hidden" powers. These only have a chance to activate upon the block reaching DAC or higher.. and then have another chance to do so when another block activates. 6a) So if you try block 1, it's a dud, and then try block 2 and get, say, x-ray and heat res.. you know that heat res ALWAYS activates upon DAC, therefore 1 was a hidden x-ray. 6b) If you try block 1, dud, and block two gets you only x-ray, things get a little more complicated : X-ray could be in block 1 or 2, and either one could also potentially be another hidden power or a real dud. It's for these instance I always try to keep a maximum of a single dud inside of me, resetting my genes when I find a second one. In this example, the best thing to do would be to pull out block 1 or 2 from your clean SE, and inject yourself with it. If you inject yourself with a clean block 1 and x-ray goes away, congratulations, you know that x-ray was in block 1. 7) About ACTIVATING X-RAY, TK, No breath, Hulk, chameleon skin/cloak of shadows: There's a couple of ways to go about it : 7a) You could repeatedly activate/deactivate the block for the power you want, or activate it once and then repeatedly activate/deactivate a real dud until it activates - but this is prone to getting you defects on the side as we've seen in the OP that pulsing has a chance to activate bad mutations. 7b) You can keep printing block injectors for it- Inject yourself, eat 1u mutadone, inject yourself, repeat until done. Works well but can be kind of slow since printing injectors takes time. 7c) Lastly you can make a buffer with only whichever blocks you desire activated, and then use the "Transfer" function of your machine. This has a 100% chance to make your genetics makeup exactly the same as the saved buffer, at the cost of radiating you a little bit more. By continuously transfering between a clean and the desired SE, you can quickly and effectively activate whichever "hidden" power you desire.

They have to be discovered to have their special tech levels

I think it'd be good to mention strange objects, too : Any strange object can have tech levels from 1 (or 2?) to 5, meaning that you should absolutely discover all the ones brought to rnd, check their tech levels, and you might get a couple of free 6s after you reached all fives.

chameleon stamped for all access, was bringing the gibtonte to evidence when the second announcement came through.. gave me a good laugh :D

Changelings can very much regrow limbs by transforming right now (either to another race, or potentially any transforms will do it, not 100% on the specifics, but transforming to another race will FOR SURE regrow all your limbs). I don't think it's by design, though, there's a lot of issues with transforming to another race in general.. and as much as some of the other issues are more like exploits that are not allowed, if you were to use this ability it'd HAVE to restrict your transformations until these issues are fixed.

Context : Omega weed is, by far, the most insane plant botany has access to : Not only does it have a whole slew of otherwize hard to get chemical, but it also has a snowflakey volume count for no other reason than to fit said chems, and the memes (volume = 420). This enables the creation of very potent stimulant mixes, as well as an absurd amount of chem stacking that really shouldn't be possible. In a world where stuns and chem stacking are king, this plant alone elevates botany to a whole other level. And all of this is accessible with as little as a cannabis seed, a bit of unstable mutagen, and a bit of luck. Here are the changes I'd like to propose, both for the plant's content, and its accessibility : Plant content : - Remove the snowflakey volume, bringing it on par with every other plants at 100 (leaving only Cherry Bombs to have a special volume). - Change all chems contained inside of Omega Weed from 15% to 5%. Not only does this accomodate for the previous change, this has two additional really positive effects : It makes using these plants as your source of stimulants harder to use, as you'll have to consume more in shorter intervals to keep yourself under their influence. More micromanagements while fighting means more fuck-ups, and more skill-checks. It messes up with a lot of synergies with other plants' traits, as most other chems are usually in the ranges of 15-20%, sometimes 10%, rarely less or more. Addiction is not the threat when you can produce an infinite amount of plants, OD is. This way, the range of chemicals you can add to the mix without impeding the base chems, and without making you od is much more limited. Accessibility : For this, I have two potential propositions, either : Cannabis evolves into lifeweed, deathweed, or rainbow weed. All of these "tier 2" cannabisses can either evolve into another tier 2, or Omega Weed. Finally, Omega weed can evolve (devolve) back into another tier 2 cannabis. This makes it so more work has to be put into achieving it initially, and it's more prone to bad RNG, especially if someone is just dunking UM and it evolves twice in quick succession. This, however, makes the amount of seeds in the vendor, and the delay caused by bad rng less relevant. Cannabis evolves into lifeweed or rainbow weed, and these two either evolve into death or omega weed. This is more aimed at forcing the botanist to dunk slightly more UM, than right now and harvesting at least a t2 cannabis before they can go ahead and safely achieve Omegas. It prevents them from pre-emptively planting a bunch of t1 cannabis to get extra seeds in case of bad luck, too. These two options will make omega weed more time and ressource intensive to reach, and coupled with the content rework would seriously dampen its power. These changes are also incredibly easy to implement, and hereby are attached modified hydroponics/grown/cannabis.dm pages, two versions for both accessibility options, for your review. All in all, I think these changes, would mean a lot in bringing the absurdity botany can reach down, without taking any of the other really fun stuff away. Sure there are still other plants and combinations of chems that are really powerful, but nothing as over the top as the I-never-go-down things you can make with the omegas currently, with little to no drawbacks. Cannabis suggestions1.txt Cannabis suggestions2.txt

What if addictions worked like amanitin : takes in consideration how many cycle the chem was present in the body, and applies addictions in relation to that. You were on meth for thirty minutes straight ? as soon as the chems leave your body you're hit by it. You drank a cup of coffee or had a smoke shiftsart ? Maybe in ten minutes you'll feel like you'll get the craving again. Rewards you from pacing yourself and makes a lot more sense compared to IRL addictions. Having more defined addiction tiers that could be capped depending on how much you consume could complement that pretty well. I assume this would take quite a bit of work though, not only code-wize but also thinking about how to rebalance every chem's addiction effects (Especially considering different metabolization rates, for example). My biggest, biggest gripe with the current system is the fact that even if your plant-based rollies have zero addictive chems, simply the fact of smoking will give you nicotine addiction. I realise that being addicted to the gesture of smoking is something very real, but it's extremely annoying to not be able to make any kind of healing (or pure CBD VIBE) smokies without ever being able to avoid addiction, especially since the addiction kicks in the moment the chems run out, which often doesn't match with when the rollie itself runs out.