You want to play botanist. I am sick and tired of bad botanists and griefers. Botany has a bad name. You want to change this? Good. Read up and you’ll ascend past chef slavery and start doing some real botany.
Item master list
Everything you’ll ever need for botany:
Essential botany items
- Plant Analyzer - Shows plant stats. Keep one handy.
- Cultivator - Removes weed.
- Spade - Removes the entire plant from the tray.
- Beaker - Holds up to 100 units of a chemical. Important for recipes due to size.
- Bluespace Beaker - Obtained later in the round. Holds 300 units. The ultimate beaker.
- Bucket - Holds 70 units. Looks different than a beaker. Still useful.
- Plant Bag - Holds a ton of plants, as well as seeds and plant disks.
- Portable Seed Extractor - A copy of the plant bag with an extra feature. Using the same tab you’d activate suit sensors on, you can activate seed extraction. This turns every plant inside this bag into a seed. Useful if out of power.
- Hatchet - Used for cutting wood, as well as for improvised combat. Robust as a throwing weapon.
- Plant Data Disk - Holds a plant stat or a plant trait. More on this later. Print them in the service lathe once botanical engineering is researched.
- Beekeeping items - The suit. The hive. The frames. The BEES. Ordered from cargo. More on this later.
Extremely useful items that aren't from botany
- Pen - Found on desks or in your PDA. Use it on seeds (not plants or trays) to permanently rename the seed or its descriptions. This persists when planted, harvested, and so on, unlike using other renaming methods.
- Spraycan - Printed in the autolathe. Spray your trays to differentiate different plants if they’re all the same plant type but use different traits or reagents. Extremely helpful.
- Toolbelt - Found in a crate in botany maints, in tool vendors, the roboticist’s room or engineering, as well as random maint locations. Get all of your tools in this roundstart, before the item below becomes available.
- Trashbag of Holding - From the service lathe, once advanced sanitation is researched. Nigh-infinite inventory space in your belt slot. Stacking. Holds all but the biggest items (typically only firesuit and eva suit won’t fit, hardsuits WILL).
- Standard tools - Put them in the toolbelt. If you can’t find a multitool, make one in the autolathe.
- RCD - Rapid Construction Device. Incredibly useful tool. Saves your life. Makes it easier. One’s in EVAs, more are in the deep Engineering vendor, for 150 credits, and after advanced engineering research, cargo and engi lathes have them.
- EVA suit, Fireman suit or any Hardsuit - Be safe and get one of these. Botany requires little movement, too, so speed loss shouldn’t bother you.
- Fire extinguisher - See above. Have one handy.
- Inducer -Get Science to print you one. Recharges your chem dispenser and APC in case of power outage too. Needs a battery.
- Syringe Gun - From medical, or their lathe once researched. Lets you deliver the chemicals from your plants to others easily. May instill paranoia even if you’re healing them en-masse, but definitely worth using.
Essential tider protection items (Great on LRP. Might get you shady looks or a (usually harmless) bwoink on MRP)
- Advanced Sunglasses or SecHUD glasses, to stop flashes.
- A bowman headset, usually from a sec locker, to stop flashbangs when combo’d with the above. Earmuffs as a budget variant if playing alone.
- Bare minimum weapons - A hatchet or two. A spear. A flash if you can get one from tech storage.
- Chemical defenses - Sprays with lube, water, capsaicin or other useful incapacitating chemicals. Use weed spray from your vendor in a chem dispenser to set it up.
Botanical Machines
You can construct these machines using boards from the service lathe, and parts from the autolathe (or upgraded variants from the science or engi lathe). They require botanical engineering before the boards can be printed.
- The Vendors - Two on some maps, four on others. They give you seeds, tools and fertilizers. As soon as you get a trashbag of holding, you actually want to empty their entire stock into one, in case they ever go alive from a hostile brand AI. Hacking the seed vendor unlocks important seeds.
- The Minor Botanical Chem Dispenser - Provides salteptre, unstable mutagen, and ammonia and diethylamine once upgraded with a femto manipulator.
- The Plant DNA Extractor - Placing seeds and a plant DNA disk into this allows you to destroy the seeds and either transfer a trait or stats. Stats are capped until upgraded, as such use it for traits only until this.
- The Biogenerator - Place plants into it (using a plant bag or portable seed extractor for efficiency), then activate to turn into biomass. Produces many useful items, most notably monkey cubes and strange seeds! Needs a liquid container to work, even if the result is not liquid. The more nutriment a plant has the more it produces, but it is incredibly inefficient until upgraded to at least T3.
- The Grinder - Turns plants into their liquid reagent/chemical contents. Needs a beaker or similar holding unit.
- The ChemMaster - Separates chemicals from a holding unit and turns them into stuff. Surprisingly useful at times.
Other machines which you should get
- The (Full) Chem Dispenser - Lets you make Ammonia and Diethylamine roundstart. Say bye to shit yield and waiting times. Lets you make chemicals, for both fun and protection.
- The Cell Charger - Simple battery charging machine. Unwrench one and haul it to botany or ask science for a board and a capacitor and make one yourself. Might need it along with an inducer if you aren’t making batteries.
- The Smoke Machine - Lets you air out your chemicals, from plants or otherwise. Use it to spread good or prank the station, maybe even murder people if you’re an antagonist. It’s easy to disable though, only needs one button press.
The Fluff - things which exist but have no functional use beyond flavor and RP
- Disk Compartmentalizer - Stores your disks, but has no UI beyond a text list. Disgusting and useless.
- Dryer - Made using wood, which you can get from Tower Caps. Lets you dry plants, allowing you to smoke them later, offering no real utility beyond looking like a stoner.
- Barrels - Another wooden creation which lets you ferment plants to make booze. The bar and bartender exist.
- Loom - The third in the silly wooden trifecta - Lets you make clothes. Potentially durathread clothes, which are sturdy. A waste of time. The chance of durathread actually saving you is extremely low.
- Backpack water tank - Watering is not your concern for reasons which you’ll see below.
- And anything else
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Chemical use, Chem Dispenser rush & alternatives.
A big part of botany is using chemicals on plants. You literally want to dump them into the trays with the plants. Make sure to set the transfer amount properly by using the holder (a large beaker, usually) in your hand.
Minimum increment for all chemicals except for Unstable Mutagen is 50 units, I believe, and anything less won’t have an effect. Some chems only have a visible effect after two uses (or 100 units at once). To use 1 or 2 units, use the fertilizer bottles from your vendor. They allow the usage of such small amounts.
Chem Dispenser Rush
At the start of the round, you may want to get yourself a full chem dispenser in order to make a diethylamine recipe to buff yield. Make sure the dispenser has a good battery. There’s usually high capacity ones lying around.
To make the dispenser, you must use 5 iron to create a machine frame, 5 cable on it, wrench it down, place the chem dispenser board in it, then place two matter bins, a capacitor, a manipulator, a power cell, and some glass. After this screwdriver the frame to finish the dispenser. You can make it mobile by wrenching the finished dispenser, and it still fully works. Same goes for the minor one you start with too.
- You can get a dispenser by asking science to research biological technology, printing a board from the medical lathe and printing parts from the autolathe. This is tedious and relies on other people to help you, namely at least one member of science and medical, but it’s the only true MRP option.
- Alternatively, break into tech storage or hack into it. It has a chem dispenser board, and might have the parts for it too depending on the map. The rest is easy, just snag a battery and print parts from autolathe. You can do this on MRP too but you risk security, angry engineers or a bwoink (though again, it is usually harmless).
- You can simply ask for tech storage access. You’ll usually get it. You can even ask for medical and regular RnD access but you have a lesser chance of getting this one.
- Your worst possible option is stealing a dispenser from chemistry or breaking into departments to make parts, instead of tech storage. Note, however, that the engineering circuit printer can make a chem dispenser board, and their lathe has parts, so you might as well go there instead of harassing both sci and med.
Alternatives
There are means of getting past not having a chem dispenser, in case you don’t like that bit of gameplay or want to go “legit” until science and/or mining let you have a femto manipulator. You have no direct way of increasing plant yield without a dispenser, so here’s what ya do.
- Unstable Mutagen Spam - Keep using two units of mutagen on a plant until it has 10 yield, then upgrade its potency and speed using saltpetre normally.
- Tobacco Transfer - Grow Tobacco and use it for literally all of your plans. Tobacco has 10 yield from the start. Remember to stop mutations by using robust harvest. Remember to use a pen on seeds to rename it, lets things get confusing with just one plant type… That or use a spraycan on trays.
Botanical Chemicals
- Saltpetre - 3 Oxygen, 1 Potassium, 1 Nitrogen. Comes in the minor despenser premade. Increases production speed by 1 per 100 units. Also increases potency, easily giving the plant the maximum of 100 after a few uses.
- Ammonia - 3 Hydrogen, 1 Nitrogen. Unlocked in the minor dispenser with a femto manipulator. Increases Yield by 1 per 100 units.
- Diethylamine - 3 Hydrogen, 3 Ethanol, 1 Nitrogen (Really 1 Ammonia, 1 Ethanol). Unlocked in the minor dispenser with a femto manipulator. Increases yield by 1 per 50 units.
- Unstable Mutagen - 1 Chlorine, 1 Phosporous, 1 Radium. Comes premade. 1 unit changes plant stats slightly at random. 2 units changes stats with more variation. 5 units has a chance of mutating the plant into one of its potential mutations. Don’t drink this.
Fertilizers
Found in the nutrimax vendor. These alter how your plant grows and harvests.
- Left 4 Zed - Nigh-useless with the introduction of the minor dispenser with mutagen. Increases mutation chance per harvest at the cost of yield. Put the trait ‘Fungal Vitality’ in your plant to ensure at least 1 plant per harvest, if you want to use this thing for some reason.
- E-Z Nutriment - Balanced. Adds mutation chance, doesn’t hurt plant.
- Robust Harvest - Buffs yield separately from the plant’s actual stats. Stops all mutations. Your premier fertilizer which you should honestly just use on everything.
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Biogenerator & Strange Seeds, Food, Monkey Cubes, Exotic plants...
Your Biogenerator uses plants to produce biomass. The generator RESETS when upgraded, so use what you had in it first. This is the first machine you should get upgraded. It only needs one bin and one manipulator. This important machine has the following uses:
Biogenerator Produce
- Strange Seeds. - The most expensive option, only worth using with at least a tier 3 upgrade, if not tier 4. Strange seeds have completely random stats, random reagents, containing many exclusive options, and random traits, allowing you to get basically anything with enough spam.
- Monkey Cubes - Allows you to produce monkeys for the chef to slaughter, for the virologist to test his horrors on, or for slimes to eat in xenobiology. This last setup is particularly nasty, allowing incredible speed and spammability to the xenobiologist, who will likely be eternally indebted to you if you set up a little cube factory for him. You can read about this and other plant templates deeper in the guide.
- Milk - This helps the chef and barkeep and heals skeletons. Not a common request but a useful item nonetheless.
- Clothing Materials - Leather and Cloth can be used (literally, in your hand) to make clothes and bags and belts.
- Fertilizers - In case you ever run out.
Food - It’s not eating plants that feeds you, it’s eating their reagents. Sugar, Honey and Nutriment actually feed you. This helps prevent insanity and raises mood a bit, but don’t overfeed. You can eat a plant infinitely if none of its reagents are fattening. Great for healing chemicals.
Exotic plants - Xenobiology can use silver slimes to provide you with gatfruit - a plant which grows guns. This can also be found by miners in a lifebringer outpost on lavaland. Miners can also provide you with lavaland tobacco and shrooms. Lastly you can always order exotic seeds from cargo.
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Plant Traits & Abilities
Regular Traits - Any plant can have them, and DNA disks can let you transfer these to any amount of plants as soon as you get one.
- Bioluminescence - The plant glows. Has a stronger variant of the trait too.
- Bluespace Activity - The plant teleports people that are hit with it. Requres liquids contents and works with slippery skin.
- Capacitive Cell Production - Allows the plant to be used as a battery. Use cables on the harvested plant to convert it into one. Comes pre-charged.
- Electrical Activity - Boosts battery capacity. A maxed plant with this and CCP is like a bluespace battery. Charges up the eater, good for ethereals. Can shock when you eat or get splatted with the plant.
- Densified Chemicals - Doubles chemical capacity. Great on Omega Weed.
- Fire resistance - The plants won’t burn.
- Fungal Vitality - The plant doesn’t need water or light, and minimum yield is always 1. Quite useful overall.
- Weed Adaptation - The plant doesn’t need nutriments and ignores weed. Not as useful.
- Gaseous Decomposition - If the plant is splatted using liquid contents and/or slippery skin, it makes a radius around it fill with its contents in gas form.
- Hypodermic Prickles - The plant stings. You may have to throw it for the effect. Works with liquid contents and slippery skin. It transfers some of its contents on hit, so it’s less effective the more use it sees per plant.
- Liquid Contents - The plant splats when thrown, spreading its chemical contents on the target. Combos with other traits.
- Slippery Skin The plant ruptures when stepped on. Combos with other traits.
- Perennial Growth A must-have trait that stops a plant from dying after a harvest.
- Separated Chemicals The plant’s chemicals only mix once it is thrown or slipped on or eaten or otherwise triggered. No more harvest explosions!
Unique Abilities - Abilities which require a unique type of plant. They can't be transferred and don't even show up on disks for that matter.
- Combustible Lemon - Gotten by mutating Lemon. These are weak grenade plants with a random timer. Be careful with these. They can still eventually do damage, and you’ll have lots of them, but they’re really bad grenades. Use liquid contents + separated chemicals on a plant to make a true grenade.
- Meatwheat - Gotten by mutating Wheat. Makes meat if used in hand. Give it to the chef.
- Egg-Plant - Same as above, but makes Eggs. Guess what you mutate to get it. Same use.
- Omega Weed - Gotten by mutating Cannabis. Huge chemical storage capacity of 420, or 840 with densified chemicals. Use for advanced, chunky mixing. A bluespace beaker holds 300 chems. This single plant can have 840 and is spammable. Let that sink in for a while.
- Bamboo - Mutate Sugarcane - use hatchet on the logs to get materials for traps and blowguns. Useful for self-defense in emergencies. Also useful for being an annoying griefer.
- Tower Caps - A regular plant and also a useful weed plant for once. You get logs from it. Use hatchet on logs to make planks. Use planks to construct things. Cargo often has a bounty for the logs.
- Holymelon - Mutate Melons. Defends against dark magic while you have it. Rush this super early, before Gaia even, if there’s a cult, and spread across the entire station. Modify so that it only makes holy water, thus making it a full anti-cult plant that doesn’t fatten. (You can also make a Holy Grenade plant with Separated Chemicals, Liquid Contents, this, and Potassium from Bananas. A rare case in which a destructive plant can be used for good.)
- Glowshroom - A regular plant - you can plant it (mostly) anywhere by using it. It gives off light and spreads, but people tend to dislike it. Good for no power scenarios. Benefits from Strong Bioluminescence.
- Durathread - Mutate Cotton - use produce on a loom (make a loom with wood) and you get material to make tough clothes out of.
- Carpet Grass and Fairy Grass - Mutate Grass - use to get carpet or grass tiles.
- Killer Tomato - Mutate Tomato - activate to make a dangerous mob. Yields meat when slain this way though, so could be useful for a non-antagonist as a meat source for chef, or just as self-defense, if you are a podman, since they do not attack those.
- Replica Pod - Regular Plant, but also gained from mutating Cabbage - Inject blood into the SEEDS and the person will revive as a Podperson if they’re dead when you harvest the plant. If they’re soulless or otherwise alive/playing something else, you will just get seeds back. Can be used to save headless people or as a preemptive measure. Maximum yield of 2, so these come slow…
- Walking Mushroom - Mutate Plump Helmets - Spawns “harmless” mobs if used that reproduce quickly if more than one is present.
- Ambrosia Gaia - Ah, the staple plant used for its earthsblood reagent, but it also has a secret ability - it always glows, even without bioluminescence!
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Ambrosia Gaia and Robust Harvest
The plant Ambrosia Gaia is a mutation of Ambrosia Deus, itself a mutation of Ambrosia Vulgaris - a starter plant.
Ambrosia gaia contains Earthsblood, a chemical which can make your trays stop requiring water, de-weeding and nutriments. It is essential to optimizing botany.
Simply use the plants (yes, the literal, harvested plants) on a tray enough times to turn it golden, thus signifying the upgrade. It requires four uses with a maxed out Gaia.
Once a tray is golden, the last fertilizer used on it lasts forever, so use Robust Harvest on each golden tray you make.
You have two options: Either to mutate or upgrade the Gaia to maximum stats and place robust harvest on it, making 13 produce, AKA 3 golden trays and one plant to turn into a seed, or you can immediately snag Earthsblood production from the Gaia using a disk, then place it on a better plant, like Wheat or Tobbaco. Gaia does not have perennial growth, so remember to put that on it if upgrading.
Earthsblood doubles as a potent healing chemical that also makes you spazzy and drugged for a bit. it also causes slight brain damage, which is cumulative over time. If you eat a truly massive amount of it, it can even turn you pacifist.
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Template Plants - Some Examples of What you can make. All Examples assume maximum stats on plants.
- Biogenerator Fuel - Get 20% nutriment from pumpkins, watermelons or pineapples. Place it into a small plant like wheat or tobacco and add perennial growth. Make four of these and your biogenerator will be at full capacity.
- Infinite Bluespace Batteries - Get electrical activity by mutating glowshrooms into glowcaps. Get capacitive cell production from potatoes. Place both in a plant to create an infinite generator of bluespace batteries, pre-charged. Just have cable ready. Give this to the roboticist, science, and maybe even engineering.
- Holy Grenades - Get potassium from bananas and holy water from holymelons. Get separated chemicals from strange seeds and liquid contents from tomatoes. Become the cult’s bane.
- Healing Plants - Place synthflesh production from strange seeds into a plant with liquid contents or even gaseous decomposition for easy heals. Other options include regenerative jelly, also from strange seeds, for a slower heal that has no overdose and heals anything, but is edible too. You can also use omnizine from Ambrosia Deus for a starter healer, as well as Godblood from Strange Seeds, which is just omnizine with a massive overdose cap that isn’t usually reached.
- Red Bull - Place flight potion from strange seeds along with a suitable (brute) healing chemical that isn’t synthflesh in a plant. Grind to create an actual liquid so the flight potion works, and hand out to crew.
- Supersoldier Serum - Combine Stimulants, Muscle Stimulants, Changeling Haste and Changeling Adrenaline, from strange seeds, with healing chemicals that offset their negative effects. You may need to use Omega Weed for the capacity of this huge chemical mix. This takes a while to make but its use and coolness is undisputable.
- Poison - There’s alot of poisons. Just jam them into the plant fam. Might need omega weed for huge mixes.
- And much more. Consult the chemical list. to come up with your own ideas.
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Antagonist Botanist Tierlist
- Fattening Chemicals +Mint Toxin - the forbidden technique . No one sees it coming. An incredibly badass and hilarious way to assassinate.
- Advanced Mutation Toxin - Eventually turns a person into a slime. Probably won’t be noticed, especially if other chemicals were present in a plant or food with this. Effective in a smoke machine, effective with Gaseous Decompostion too. Amazing way to secure your targets without even killing them.
- Bluespace Activity - Very little use during the round aside from emergency teleports of yourself or attackers, but a one-hit guaranteed kill (or stranding, anyway) on the escape shuttle unless your target gets very lucky. Just throw a Liquid Contents plant with this at someone and watch them get spaced. Bonus points for Blazaam or Bluespace Dust reagents, which teleport people randomly and can be found in plants too. Great if used with a smoke machine.
- Punji Sticks - Somewhat stealthy trap made with bamboo, which can completely fuck up someone’s day. Can claim ignorance unless seen planting it.
- Deadly Chemicals (using darts, syringe or a liquid contents plant) - If you had enough time, one hit is all you need. A classic. Obvious, though. Better use mute toxin.
- Chem Grenade Plants - Good for breaching or making chaos.
- Gatfruit - Due to how you get this, stealth is out of the question unless you have allies, and unless those allies are manning Xenobiology or off mining. Infinite guns is infinite guns though.
- Combustible Lemons - Garbage, but can be rushed and can cause serious damage by sheer volume.
- Killer Tomatoes - Can kill someone caught off-guard, but honestly it’s hard to see these as a serious threat unless you spawn hundreds of them. Also very obvious.
- Kudzu - Do not. Or do, if you just want the round to end. That’s something at least.
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What is Kudzu and what is it used for?
Kudzu is a special plant gained by using unstable mutagen on a tray with a big weed level. It creates a pod which can be used to get seeds, and the seeds can be planted to create the poor man’s blob. Kudzu has its own mutations which you can research and read about, and special means of getting it to mutate and grow stronger.
Kudzu has only one true use - Forcing shuttle calls. As an antagonist, placing a ton of kudzu all across the station will cause damage and force people to fight it instead of doing their jobs. It’s a great way to cut the round short.
The odds of Kudzu actually killing someone or completing your objecitves are incredibly low.
I do not advise or advocate its use.