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.
Other tasks that are likely to come up is providing the Science Department's RnD with particular mutated plants, and cargo with certain rare seeds for profit. However, first and foremost are the Chef's needs.
To Cultivate
The MegaSeed Servitor gives you the seeds to start growing. There are 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. Plant the seeds in a tray and begin your cultivation journey.
When you've had a successful harvest, take your produce to the Chef and 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; attainable from the NutriMax vendor:
- 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 Medical Kit: Just in case you eat something nasty.
- Various chemicals to mutate or treat your plants with.
- Beekeeping Equipment: Allows you to cultivate beehives and produce honey for the chef/crew to enjoy.
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.
Useful Chemicals
There is an extensive expanded list of chemicals , but these are the most important ones:
- Saltpetre: Increases potency by 1 point per 2u used on the plant. Also had a chance to reduce production speed with each addition.
- Unstable Mutagen: Use it to mutate your plants. 2u is enough for stat mutations and a chance for a new trait, while 5u will give a chance for species mutation. The plants use the it immediately so you can keep adding it as quickly as you'd like.
- Diethylamine: Increases Yield by 1 for every 50 units added. This is counted per addition, so adding less than 50u at a time does nothing. Always add in multiples of 50u
- Ammonia: Increases yield by 1 for every 100 units added. needs to be added in multiples of 100u
- Robust Harvest: One of the 3 main fertilizers you get access to and the only one you should use once you have a steady supply of Mutagen. It increases yield by 30% and prevents random mutation from ruining your plants' stats. Doesn't increase the stat itself, just the harvested amount.
Helping other departments
Apart from cooking, plants are also useful for Research & Development, selling rare plants at Cargo, providing Medical department and chemists with ready-to-use reagents. Also, sometimes plants are needed for the DNA Vault station goal, in which case many different plants should be grown to be scanned.
Science
Scientists at R&D can use plants in the Destructive Analyzer to get tech levels. Notable plants that help in that are:
- Tomato (biotech=5)
- Bluespace Tomato (bluespace=5)
- Killer-Tomato (combat=5)
- Bluespace Banana (bluespace=5)
- Glowcap (powerstorage=6, plasmatech=4)
- Glowshroom (plasmatech=6)
- Shadowshroom (plasmatech=4, magnets=4)
- Walking Mushrooms (programming=5)
- Glow-Berry Bush (plasmatech=6)
- Gatfruit Tree (combat=6)
- Death Nettle (combat=5)
- Ghost Chili (magnets=5)
- Golden Apple (materials=5)
- Ambrosia Gaia (biotech=6, materials=5)
Cargo
Cargo Bay department can sell a number of rare plant seeds for supply points. Most of the mutated species of plants are considered rare. Plant analyzer tells you if a plant seed is rare and it rarity score when used on a growing plant or its products (if the plant is not rare, there is no corresponding line). Only one sample of a plant is needed to gain point, more is unnecessary. Points are awarded for two different things: discovering a rare plant and getting better potency for the rare plant. The more potency obtained, the better reward. This means that to sell plant samples for the most price, you should first ship the new plant with the poorest potency possible (first shipment does not reward for potency). Then you should sell the same plant but with as much potency as you can get since the subsequent shipment rewards scale based on the difference between the biggest potency shipped before.
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.