Praxis' Guide to Botany (For real this time)

[SkyPing]

 

Introduction

 

Welcome to Botany! This job is one of the most complicated beginner jobs available on the station, but one of the most rewarding to learn. This guide will go over the basics of Botany; how to grow plants, splice genes, and mutate stuff. This is not a guide step by step goes over everything you need to know or learn, but instead teaches you the basics so that you can have a better time experimenting with neat plants. I hope you enjoy!

 

 

Your job

 

“Grow Plants for the Food and Station”

 

Eh… The job description SAYS that, yes, but chances are you’ll spend very little time doing focusing on this, because of Botanists hidden job description

 

“Experiment with some really weird and fun plants and don’t get arrested”

 

Plants are surprisingly fun to dick around with, and you can do a LOT of really cool things by mutating plants and (creating freaks of nature) splicing together plant genes. For example

-Starting a walking mushroom fight club with the winners get to savagely eat the losers

-Re-enacting a NightVale episode by creating explosive LSD laced wheat

-Summon an army of Killer Tomatos (All named Frank)

-Crash the entire station (and the economy) via Money Trees

-Start your own Medbay and implement instant heal potatoes

 

Ooooor just get high off the Ambrosia, you fucking loser.

 

Now, I would LOVE to teach you all of this stuff, but I… really can’t, as I’m learning myself. In fact, that’s also the main reason why this guide was so delayed. Unlike my Chemistry guide, I am NOT a master in the field I’m writing this guide in, and as such I would constantly learn new information that made everything I wrote obsolete (This is about my third rewrite).

 

So what’s this guide going to focus on? Firstly, it’s going to focus on making your relationship with the chef SO much easier by implementing badass modifications into the chefs products. Secondly, it’ll introduce how you can begin modifying and mutating plants yourself!

 

However, first things first; we have to make sure our plants don’t die constantly. Assuming you’re entirely new to Botany, read on! If you have an idea how to maintain plants by yourself, skip to the Xenobiology section of the guide.

 

Part One: Keeping Your Plants Alive

 

First off, in order to maintain your plants, you have to…..Groooow your plants! *Gasps of astonishment from the crowd*. All of your seeds can be found in the Seed Vending Machine, and the first thing you’ll notice is damn, that’s a lot of things I can grow.

 

So what plants should I be growing? Firstly, try to limit yourself to maintaining only about 10-ish pods out of your potential 20-ish. The reason being is that if you try to grow too many plants at the same time, you are really quickly going to become overwhelmed. Here’s generally what’s good to grow.

 

3x Ambrosia Vulgaris, 3x Grass: *For smoking obviously* Reharvestable green stuff for your Biogenerator! All you need to know right now is that you can feed it leftover plants to be transferred into biomass, which in turn can be used to create neat stuff! Botany belts, Robust Harvest, even Monkey Cubes (Every job I do involves monkeys I swear to god)

 

1x Wheat, 1x Tomatoes: No matter what the chef is doing, they’re going to need wheat. Tomatoes are common ingredients too. But not only are these things good for the chef; they’re also prime candidates for learning about Gene Splicing! Don’t worry about genes for now, we’ll cover that later.

 

1x Whatever the chef asks for!: I mean, you’re growing food for them after all. At the beginning of the shift, ask them what they want grown. Most good chefs will have a list of desirable plants, but in the case of the ever common shitty chef (Or no chef), you’re on your own.

 

By default, if I don’t know what the chef wants or if we’re lacking on, I just grow Rice and Potatoes as well as the Wheat and Tomatoes I’m already growing; for if a chef joins halfway through the shift or something.

 

Awesome, so now you have a bunch of plants that are growing. Pat yourself on the back! Now you have to make sure they don’T FUCKING GET RUINED. So let’s grab the tools we’ll need to keep the plants A-OK.

 

Hatchet: To kill your plants!....Wait, something seems off here. But no, you need to carry an axe on you for a few reasons, we’ll go over them soon. Find them in the lockers

 

Mini-hoe: These things will remove any unwanted weeds without actually damaging your plant! Keep it on you at all times. Find them in the lockers

 

Plant Bag: Hold all of your plants in one convenient bag! The easiest way to move your plants to the fridge/biogenerator. You can get one from the Nutrimax machine. There’s a portable variety in the lockers, which basically means it’s just a belt that’s awkward to use. Plant bags are better.

 

Wirecutters: Click on a plant with these things and you get a seed sample. Which basically means a new pack of seeds. This means that you can fill up all of the tubs and then some with one seed packet if you keep getting seed samples from the plants. Insanely useful. In the hydroponics crate.

 

Buckets: BUCKETS BITCHES. You have a shit ton of them and they’re used to carry your water/unstable mutagen/robust harvest/whatever you want! They’re literally everywhere.

 

There are five indicators on the plant pods; and those indicators tell you about what’s happening to the plant. Let’s go over what each one means.

 

Green: The plants fully grown and ready to harvest! Just click it with your plant bag and they’ll automatically transfer inside. Clicking on it with your bare hands will cause the plants to fall onto the floor. You’ll notice that some plants disappear after harvesting and some stay put. The reason being is just that some plants are reharvsetable, meaning they can be harvested forever.

 

Through gene splicing, we can make all of our plants reharvestable, but until then we have to plant non-reharvestable plants such as wheat and rice all over again. All you have to do is toss a piece of the plant into the seed extractor, and you get three new seeds.

 

Static Red: That means your plants health is low. This is one of the most worrisome conditions, since you’ll have to identify what’s killing i-

 

OH WAIT, I’M A BIOCHEMISTRY GRADUATE WORKING FOR NANOTRASEN. I HAVE LITERALLY NO ETHICS, LET’S JUST KILL IT AND GET A NEW ONE.

 

Use your wire cutters on the plant to get a seed sample, then bash the plant with your hatchet until it dies. After that, all you have to do is swipe the old dead plant away and using your seed sample to get a brand new plant!

 

Flashing Red: That means we have some unwanted critters hanging out with our plant. They can either be weeds or pests. If you see any pods with the flashing red light, just use your mini-hoe on it. If that fails, run over to your Nutrimax machine and grab some pest-spray. They’re one time use canisters.

 

Yellow: That means that your plant is low on nutriment and will need fertilizer. The best one for you to use is Robust Harvest, because it increases your yield. You can find it in the nutrimax machine, but you can also get it from the Biogenerator.

 

Blue: Your plant needs water. Just grab a bucket, fill it up with water, and you’re done. Easy.

 

Aaaaand that’s about all you need to know about how to grow the plants. You could honestly stop reading the guide here and avoid getting into the deep stuff. You could just be a simple botanist growing plants for the chef. But reading ahead will make your life MUCH easier in the long run, as you learn techniques to make harvesting stuff less of a pain. Also, things get much more fun.

 

Part Two: Gene Splicing

 

In the top left corner of botany, you’ll see two intimidating machines. One’s called the Lysis-Isolation Centrifuge and the other is called the Bioballistic Delivery System. You probably have already seen these machines and thought “HAH, fuck that shit, too hard!”. And perhaps you looked it up on the wiki to figure out what they’re used for, only to find NO INFORMATION on them. So let’s go over what these machines do, because once you start getting into the depths of gene splicing, your life is going to get SO much easier.

 

Here is a list of genes and what they do.

 

Biochemistry: This gene carries the data of the chemicals inside of plants AND the plants potency. Amazing for making death plants flash bang apples NOTHING ILLEGAL WHATSOEVER. I recommend using Glowshrooms in order to extract the best potency (fucking 30, man.)

 

Output: This gene deals with Luminosity and Power Output for Potato Batteries. You might use them for glowshrooms, but besides that you probably won't be using it.

 

Atmosphere: This gene affects how much heat and pressure the plant can tolerate... Jesus Christ, you will never have to care about this.

 

Hardiness: This affects the plants tolerance to bugs, weeds, toxins, etc. A plant with a good Hardiness will live much longer.

 

Metabolism: Affects how much Nutrients and Water the plant will need (The Blue and Yellow indicators). Not something you're likely to mess with.

 

Vigour: Transfers over Production time, Maturation time, and Yield. A great gene to have if you want your plants to grow really fast (No more waiting 30+ minutes for your Strange Plants to grow)! I recommend taking Vigour from Wheat, due to it's low Maturation time and Production time.

 

Diet: Affects how quickly it drinks it's Nutrients and Water. Also decides if the plant is Carnivorous or not; so it can eat it's own pests.

 

Environment: Affects the... ideal heat and light conditions for the plants... Holy fucking shit that's boring.

 

Pigment: Affects what color the plant is. It sounds REALLY useless, but it's nice to have a color differentiation so that you know which apples are edible and which apples will set you on fire, blind you, and teleport you into the nearest wall.

 

Appearance: Affects what the plant looks like; for example a tree, stalks, etc. Sounds useless again, but it's how you can transfer reharvest onto your plants! No more having to fucking replant your wheat every 7 minutes! Take the appearance of apples, tomatoes, or weed, and you can make all of your plants naturally reharvest.

 

Fruit: Affects if a fruit is stingy, juicy, or explosive. Yep. Explosive. If you get an explosive plant, using the fruit gene can make all of your plants explode. You're welcome.

 

Special: This only affects teleportation. Get bluespace tomatoes and now you can make everything be teleporting abominations of nature. Why the fuck am I telling you people this.

 

Let’s have some fun and make some simple modifications to some plants.

-You know how annoying it is to replant the wheat, rice, and potatoes? Let’s stop that all together by applying the reharvest gene!

-Wheat and Rices production speed, maturation speed, and yield are considerably better than those of Tomatoes, Potatoes, and most other plants, so you can go ahead and get the production gene from wheat and apply it to Everything

-If you hack the seed vendors and get nettles, you can then make all your plants spikey with the fruit gene Don’t do this.

-Order exotic seeds from cargo and get some illegal plants with weird ass chemicals inside them (Including green vomit, curare, and other weird things)

 

Part Three: Plant Mutations

 

So, you'll notice that quite a lot of the plants you can grow are decently boring. Carrots, wheat, tomatoes, grass.... none of these plants are particularly deadly, or explode violently, or will get you strange looks from passerby's. So where's all the cool stuff? Well, you toss a bunch of unstable chemicals onto your plants until they transform into something completely new (Obviously)! Take a look at the guide to plants.

 

http://nanotrasen.se/wiki/index.php/Guide_to_plants

 

Here is going to list all of the possible plants. Let's say we wanted to get Money Trees. First off, we need to plant a Lemon Seed, since Money Trees are mutated form Lemon Trees. I just realized that the guide to plants is incomplete... Regardless, let's get money trees! Get your lemon seeds.

 

Next step, we need to get buckets of Unstable Mutagen! Unstable Mutagen is a chemical that needs to be created in chem dispensers. Therefore, we to bug either the chemistry desk in medbay, or the scientists. Its generally easier to get Unstable Mutagen from the Med Chemists. Try to get around 3 buckets of the stuff.

 

Finally, pour twenty units of unstable mutagen onto your plant. There a random percent chance of the plant actually mutating; other times, the plant may get stat variations. Keep pouring unstable mutagen onto the plant until it finally mutates!

 

Credits

 

Thanks to Maxwell Edison, Gloria Leos, and E.V.E. for working with me and showing me various ways of working Botany

 

Also thanks to Mijhead (or NYMPH) for basically answering every single question I threw at him with surprising detail.

 

This guide doesn't cover everything, as I still have a lot to learn, but hey; now you can learn with me!

 

Edited April 30, 2016 by Guest

[NTSAM]

10/10 is actually best guide.

[Jamania]

This is pretty goddamn useful. Good work on this, Praxis.

[Keroman]

Just FYI the portable seed extractors in the lockers function EXACTLY like a plant bag except you can set them to seed extraction mode where they'll function like the full-size extractor except will return less seeds.

[SkyPing]

 

Did it. It's done. You can Botany now, congrats.

 

It doesn't cover everything; there are genes I don't talk about, different ways to fill the biogenerator, etc. But on the bright side, you can do the job much better.

 

If you have any cool improvements or corrections, reply them please!

 

The Mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell.

 

[FalseIncarnate]

 

Just want to point out that, while this is definitely a good looking guide, it is slightly out of date. Not by much, mostly the xenobotany stuff since we removed the gene masking on the machines.

 

However, a few suggestions on how to improve this guide even further would be to cover some of the different reagents you'll (want) to handle in hydroponics such as Left 4 Zed, Saltpeter, and Diethylamine. Also, Unstable Mutagen and Radium operate off of "thresholds", with different amounts having different effects and base success chances, so this might be something worth covering a bit more since I've seen countless botanists waste buckets of mutagen by pouring only 10u at a time trying to get a species shift and having no clue why it's not working.

 

Very thorough regardless though, feel free to hit me up if you need more info too, since I've done a lot of our hydroponics code.

 

[KasparoVv]

 

Grow shitloads of ridiculously fast-growing ultra-high potency megadank bomb kush, with one apple tree and a wheat plant to feed the zoo in the back and to satisfy the chef

 

if all else fails you can always dank fry the deep

 

[SkyPing]

 

*Scream

 

I'll contact you False when I get time to write.

 

I'm also almost ready to publish a Genetics guide, and I'm starting the RnD guide (Post nerf) soonish, when I get more experience. Watch for those!