Botanist
Botanist
Superiors: Head of Personnel
Difficulty: Easy
Guides: Guide to Hydroponics
Access: Hydroponics
Duties: Grow plants, provide ingredients for the Chef. That's all.
Departmental Head
Head of Personnel
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As a Botanist, it's your job to grow stuff for the Chef to keep the crew fed. There are plenty of vegetables to grow, and if you're feeling adventurous, there are some other less edible plants to experiment growing with.
Another task that is likely to come up is providing the Science Department's RnD with particular mutated plants, but first and foremost are the Chef's needs.
Plants
For the full chart with plant types, what they look like, and what they do, please check out the Guide to Hydroponics.
Fertilizer Types
EZ-Grow: The cheapest fertilizer available, this will give minor mutations with each harvest. Avoid using it if you wish to keep your plants' stats.
Left-4-Zed: Provides heavier mutations than EZ-Grow and may mutate a plant into another type entirely. Will drop yield to 1, so change fertilizer once you are content with the stat changes.
Robust Harvest: The amount harvested increases dramatically. It also prevents stat mutations from happening on harvest; use this to keep your plant stats stable.
Seeds
The seed vendor gives you seeds to start growing. There's a couple of hidden seeds too if you get the tools to hack it, though you could also ask an engineer or scientist to hack it and they'll probably have the tools and knowledge to do it for you.
The Chef
Take your vegetables to the Chef, then have him cook them up! There are many different foods the chef can make from different foods you grow. Remember that if the Chef needs meat, the Biogenerator can make Monkey Cubes for this purpose.
Tools of the Trade
You get a few fun tools as a Botanist that will make your life easier when growing plants:
- Cultivator. This one is meant to claw, or perhaps filter, out weeds from the hydroponic trays. If weeds are allowed to grow, they will eventually kill your plant and take their place!
- Plant-B-Gone Spray bottle. Kills plants slowly and can be filled with other chemicals. Does minor toxin damage.
- Bucket. Fill these up and use them to water your trays.
Things you should get from the outside:
- Toxin Med kit. Just in case you eat something nasty.
- Various chemicals to mutate or treat your plants with.
Chemicals
Diethylamine is a much better fertilizer than the ones your Biogenerator can make, and Unstable Mutagen can cause some interesting plant variations.
Most chemicals can be requested from the Chemist. If you want to get on their good side, there may be some special plants you can give them to encourage cooperation.
Different chemicals do different things to your plants when injected. Feel free to experiment until you find a blend you like!
Pod Cloning
An almost-always-forgotten alternative to cloning. See the Guide to Hydroponics for more details. Handy if there are no cloning pods on the station for whatever reason.
Beekeeping
For more information about beekeeping, see Beekeeping.
Green Thumb, Bloody Hands 
A competent botanist makes for a terrifyingly effective antagonist by virtue of how plants can be modified in the DNA machine. If you have an easy objective, quickly rush out and get it out of the way, then head back and get your plants growing. If not, getting creative with your plants may provide a significant advantage, and in the meantime other antagonists may open opportunities to use them. Mix dangerous plant traits such as Liquid Contents and Gaseous Decomposition or Hypodermic Prickles with plants that produce poisons, and suddenly you have access to a deadly weapon that can incapacitate victims with ease. Such examples include acid smoke bombs and powerful contact-poison fruits. You can also adulterate some food; you have access to syringes in the NutriMax vendor that can serve this purpose. Just make sure your give it to the right person! Your leather gloves give no prints onto a crime scene, so Detectives will have their work cut out for them to pin anything on you in particular.
Botanists can also grow powerful medicines that keep them healthy against Security. Traitor Botanists in particular have access to Ambrosia Cruciatus, which features a high amount of bath salts production (useful for anti-stun or poisoning via overdose!), as well as a briefcase of bees. The briefcase full of bees works for a powerful unique traitor weapon, although the classic NOT THE BEES sound file will tell everyone that you're probably an agent.
Notably for Vampires, the Biogenerator can make monkeys to stave off hunger; this is useful when you're working on your perfect killer fruit.