User:FunnyMan3595/Reworked guide to hydroponics

This is a fork of the Guide to hydroponics specifically for FunnyMan's rework of it. If you're not using the rework, go back to the main guide.

Hydroponics and the Botanists who work there are important to the station, especially in longer rounds. Botanists grow plants that the Chef can use for food. Without Botany, the station will have to live off of beef jerky and space twinkies, or starve to death. Hydroponic plants are also useful for Science, Cargo, and the crew aside from food. Grinding plants to create biomass can be very useful for someone needing a snappy toolbelt or boots.

Service Department

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Service Roles

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Bartender •

Chef •

Botanist •

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Chaplain •

Mime •

Librarian •

Explorer

Service Guides

Guide to Food •

Guide to Drinks •

Hydroponics •

Station Economy •

Guide to the Library •

Space Exploration •

Service SOP

Return to Service Portal

Basics of Botany

Understanding your area

In Hydroponics, you'll find several types of useful devices:

• Hydroponics trays: Where you grow plants.
• MegaSeed Servitor: No-cost vending machine with seeds.
• NutriMax: No-cost vending machine with plant food and tools for your job.
• Seed extractor: Lets you get more seeds from your fully-grown plants, and can store seeds for easy access.
• Sinks and Water Tanks: You get water here. Both are effectively unlimited.
• SmartFridge: This is where you drop off your plants to be used. On some stations, you may only have one for the chef. On others, you may have one for public use as well.
• There are a few others, too, but we'll get to them later.

Plants require nutrient (plant food) and water to grow. They are also bothered by pests and weeds. Your trays come equipped with alerts that flash specific colors to tell you what's happening with your plant.

From left to right:

• Green: Ready to harvest.
• Red: Low health.
• Red: Weeds/pests/toxins.
• Yellow: Low nutrient.
• Blue: Low water.

Your basic tools are:

• Bucket: Use this to water your plants. Alt-click it to increase the amount moved with one click. 100 is the maximum useful dose, as it will fill a tray completely.
• EZ-Nutrient: Available in the NutriMax, simple nutrient for plants. 8 doses per bottle, one dose fills a tray.
• Robust Harvest: Available in the NutriMax, yield-boosting for plants. 8 doses per bottle, one dose fills a tray.
• Cultivator: Available in the NutriMax or your locker, removes weeds from a plant tray. Safe to use repeatedly.
• Pest spray: Available in the NutriMax, used to kill pests. Adds a small amount of toxins to the tray, which reduces over time or when water is added.
• Spade: Available in the NutriMax or some hydroponics crates, used to remove unwanted or dead plants from your trays.
• Plant Bag: Holds up to 40 plants or seeds. Can be used on a harvestable tray to collect automatically, to pick up plants on the floor, and to drop plants into the SmartFridge. Also works on seeds, and can drop them into the seed extractor.

Your First Harvest

First, find an empty tray. If the round has been going for a while, you may need to grab a Spade and clean one out for use, as weed- and mushroom-type plants can appear in trays with enough weeds growing in them.

Go to the MegaSeed Servitor and scroll down until you find Wheat Seeds. Wheat is most chefs' favorite crop, so getting some growing right away is never a bad idea. Plant the seed in your tray.

You may have some lights flashing at you already:

• If the middle red light is on, grab a cultivator, and use it on the tray. If it stays on, use pest spray until examining the tray no longer warns of tiny worms.
• If the fourth light, the brown one, is on, grab some EZ-Nutrient or Robust Harvest, use it in hand to open it, and use it on the tray.
• If the last light, blue, is on, grab a bucket, set it to transfer 100 at a time, use it on a sink or water tank to fill it with water, and use it on the tray.

You may need to do multiple of these.

Now we wait. If you want, you can use your plant analyzer to track its progress. It'll be ready to harvest when Plant Age reaches (Maturation speed + Production speed). As the plant grows, the lights may continue to come on. Keep handling them as before. The second light, red, will only come on if you don't take care of your plant well, and warns that the plant is low on health. Nothing you can do about that yet.

As long as you keep taking care of it, eventually, the leftmost light, green, will come on. This means your plant is ready to harvest. Grab a plant bag from the NutriMax and use it on the tray. If you click the tray without the bag, the plants will fall on the floor. Use a plant bag to pick them up soon. Plants on the floor will attract ants. The chef will be very unhappy if you give them plants covered in ants.

Next, alt-click the plant bag to open it, pull out one piece of wheat, and use it on the seed extractor. This will give you at least one seed, which you can plant to grow more wheat. If you get extras, use the plant bag to pick them up and store them in the seed extractor for later.

Finally, click the plant bag on the SmartFridge to let the chef use your wheat. Congratulations, you're a successful botanist!

Advanced Botany

The basics are usually enough to make the chef happy, but eventually, Science will come wanting plants for R&D, or someone will come wanting something from your biogenerator, or you'll get an advanced chef who asks for a plant you don't have.

Biogenerators

The biogenerator converts plant matter into biomass, which can be used to make useful products. All plants will produce at least a little biomass in the biogenerator, but watermelon and pumpkins and particularly good. Like the SmartFridge, you can dump plants into it with a plant bag. You can activate it to grind the plants into biomass. And, if you add some sort of container, you can convert that biomass to a long list of products, including more EZ-Nutrient and Robust Harvest if you run out.

DNA Extractor

This allows you to extract genes and stats from seeds. Very useful later on, but for now, we're just going to grab Perennial Growth.

1. Go to one of the botanist's lockers in the back and grab the box of plant data disks.
2. Load a disk into the machine along with a pack of cherry pits. (There are many other seeds you can use here, cherry is just an example.)
3. At the bottom, click the Extract button next to Perennial Growth, and agree to destroy the seed.
4. Take the disk out, use it in hand, and put it back. It should now be marked Read Only.
5. Put in another seed, like the wheat you were growing earlier.
6. Click Insert Gene from Disk near the top.
7. Take out your new seed and plant it.

Perennial growth means that when your plant is harvested, it doesn't go away, it keeps producing output. And, since it's already mature, it's faster than growing a new plant. Applying this to seeds is very useful.

Bees

Bees will double the output of your plants, heal them, reduce pests, and produce honey. On the downside, they like to sting you if you're not wearing a beekeeper's suit and hat. Fortunately, you get one of each when you order bees.

1. Go to Cargo open the Supply Ordering Console.
2. Select the Service Account, the Food and Livestock category, and click Order 1 next to the Beekeeping Starter Kit. The reason can just be "Botany". If you have coworkers, order Beekeeper Suits, too.
3. Go back to Hydroponics and wait. The HoP or Captain will have to approve using Service funds, and then Cargo will have to get it shipped from CC and sent to you.
4. Open your crate.
5. Put on the beekeeper suit and hat.
6. Put the queen into the apiary.
7. Put the three honey frames into the apiary.
8. (Optional) Ask the AI to put the Hydroponics doors on fast mode, to help keep the bees in.
9. Your bees will now automatically start appearing and visiting your plants.

Mutating Plant Species

Now, about those plants you don't have. Research wants 3-4 types of plants from you:

• Glowshrooms: You have the spores for this, but only two. Adding perennial growth to one is strongly recommended.
• Glowcaps: You'll need to mutate glowshrooms for these, but if you're unlucky, you could get shadowshrooms instead. It's 50/50, so it can take a while if you're very unlucky.
• Ambrosia Gaia: You'll need to mutate Ambrosia Vulgaris into Ambrosia Deus, and then mutate it again for Ambrosia Gaia. There are no wrong mutations in this one, but beware that Gaia is typically very vulnerable to weeds.
• Deathnettle: They won't always want this one, but you can get it by mutating Nettles. You'll need to get your MegaSeed Servitor Hacked for that, or wait for it to randomly appear on an empty tray with weeds.

More species mutations can be found in the big plant table at Guide to hydroponics#Plants.

In order to mutate a plant into another species, you'll need one of four things:

• Unstable Mutagen: Anyone with a chem dispenser can make this by combining Chlorine, Plasma, and Radium in equal amounts. Set your bucket to a transfer rate of 5 with alt-click, and then just click on the plant until it mutates into a different species.
• Radium: If you can't get UM, you can grind Glowshrooms in your grinder, isolate the Radium with the ChemMaster 3000, and apply it in doses of 10. This adds toxins, however, so be cautious. Remember that you can add water to dilute the toxins in the tray.
• Uranium: If mining's really on the ball, you can grab a few pieces of Uranium from the ORM and grind them. Works the same way as Radium, just less toxins, and no Phosphorus or Nutriment to separate it from.
  • Left 4 Zed: If this is your fertilizer, whenever the plant becomes ready for harvest, it has a chance to mutate into a different species. Bad news is, it caps your harvest at 1 unit. Swapping it out once the plant changes species is highly recommended.

Chem dispensers used to be extremely important for botany, so if you have an experienced coworker, they're likely to go try to get one. You can do that too if you like; it's useful, but not nearly as critical as it used to be.

Expert Botany

Understanding Stats

If you've used a plant analyzer on your plants, you've probably noticed that there are a whole bunch of stats listed. Of these there are 7 core stats and one intrinsic stat. The intrinsic stat is maturation speed. This stat is fixed for each type of plant, cannot be changed, and determines at what age the plant becomes "mature" and can start producing output.

The core stats are:

• Potency: How big the produce of the plant is, and how much usable chemicals it will contain.
• Yield: How many pieces of produce the plant will yield per harvest, before the boost of Robust Harvest or bees.
• Production speed: How many plant cycles it takes for the plant to produce. The first harvest will be ready at plant age (maturation speed + production speed), and for plants with perennial growth, each subsequent harvest will be (production speed) cycles after it was harvested.
• Endurance: How much health the plant has.
• Lifespan: How many cycles the plant will live naturally before losing health.
• Weed Growth Rate: How many units of weeds the plant will spawn at once.
• Weed Vulnerability: The percentage chance of the plant spawning weeds per plant cycle. If this fails, the tray itself may also spawn a small amount of weeds.

The ideal core stats would be 100 potency, 10 yield, 1 production speed, 100 endurance, 100 lifespan, 0 weed growth rate, 0 weed vulnerability. In practice, you'll generally want to focus on production speed first, yield and potency second, and mostly ignore the rest.

Statistical Improvement

To get good stats for your plants, your best friend is grass seeds, as they have an intrinsic maturation speed of 2, and a middling starting production speed of 5. Go ahead and plant all three of your starting grass seeds now, but this time, use Mutriment on two of them.

Mutriment causes your plants to scramble their stats a bit every time they become ready for harvest. When that happens, use your plant analyzer to scan them and see what changed. By picking and choosing the best plants to extract seeds from, you can use Mutriment to steadily get better and better plants. Meanwhile, you dig up the bad ones with a spade, and your best plant can grow with EZ-Nutrient or Robust Harvest, so that you can get more seeds with those same statistics.

Generally speaking, you'll want to have 3-5 plants growing when breeding stats. With less, it becomes more RNG-dependent. With more, you can get overwhelmed by trying to take care of and analyze all your plants.

As mentioned, you'll want to focus on production speed first. This decreases the time between generations, and speeds up your stat improvement. It's a matter of taste whether you want to insist on reaching and staying at production speed 1, or if you're willing to accept slower generations in exchange for a boost in other stats. The only hard rule is to keep yield from reaching 0. If it does, you'll get nothing out, and have to either dig up that plant or wait for it to randomly mutate more yield.

Super Improvement

If you're lucky, someone may drop off a floral somatoray for you. This useful "gun" has two modes.

1. Yield: This increases the plant's yield. More effective at low values, great for getting a plant off 0 yield.
2. Mutation: Causes the statistics of the tray to instantly mutate once, just like Mutriment does, but faster.

You'll need to stand back a bit from the tray, or you'll just whack it with the gun.

Copy and Paste

Once you have a set of stats you're happy with, collect a few seeds with identical stats. You'll need 5 normally, or less if Science have come by to upgrade your plant DNA manipulator.

1. Put the first seed in along with a blank plant data disk.
2. Press Extract All under the core stats, and accept the seed's destruction.
3. Keep extracting and watch the number in the popup go down as the percentage on the disk goes up.
4. When it no longer warns about needing multiple seeds, and the percentage vanishes, congratulations, you have a usable core stats disk. Remember to take it out and make it Read Only.
5. You can now use this disk to instantly upgrade any other kind of seed to the same core stats that you got with grass.

Self-sustaining Trays

The Ambrosia Gaia you made for Science has another use: making your trays self-sustaining. Simply add a few branches to your tray (with 100 potency, it takes 4), and watch it turn gold and glow.

Self-sustaining trays have several advantages:

• They do not need to be watered.
• They do not need to be fertilized.
• They do not need to be weeded, though exceptionally vulnerable plants can still get overtaken by weeds.
• They do not need to be rid of pests.
• They produce light.

They also have two drawbacks:

• They always contain EZ-Nutrient; using Mutriment, Robust Harvest, or Left 4 Zed on them does nothing.
• Bees cannot improve their yield.

In short, they make your life easier, but if you have the time to take care of a tray, you can get more out of a normal one.