Botanist

CIVILIAN DEPARTMENT
Botanist
Botanist	Difficulty: Easy to Medium Requirements: None Access Level: Hydroponics, Maintenance Additional Roleplay Access Level: None Supervisors: Captain, Head of Personnel Subordinates: None Responsibilities: Grow crops for the benefit of others, yourself, and/or the general crew, raise cute and adorable bees Guides: Guide to Botany, Chemicals, Chemistry

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Your personal Garden of Eden by the Bar.

Your personal Valley Forge biodome, above the Chapel.

Take a short trip around the block from the cafeteria, and you'll Hydroponics, your personal strip of green in a sea full of grey and purple.

Your personal corner of Eden, above the piece of heaven that is the Bar.

♫ Under the sea/In an octopus's garden under the shade ♫.

Your corner of Arcadia, a land of plenty by a land of friendly folks.

Welcome to hydroponics! This is the department of the station which is responsible for growing weed produce, medicinal plants, and other crap the rest of the crew will attempt to murder you for. Botanists can supply the chef with ingredients to make many in-demand dishes (e.g. pizza), the bartender with fruits/sugar for booze, medbay with various medicines, and the quartermasters with shit to sell so they can order more monkeys paint.

In an average round, most players expect hydroponics to simply grow weed and stay in their little cubbyhole. Because of this, botany is a great job for players new to the game; you get a weird green-blue jumpsuit and access to your own section of the station, and you can walk with a chainsaw without so much as a glance in your direction! Wow!

The Greenhouse

Your workspace comes equipped with the following stuff:

• Plant pots with status light meters. Feel free to move them to a more aesthetically pleasing formation, then use a wrench to fix them to the ground.

• A seed dispenser, which can be hacked to provide some especially interesting selections.

• A GardenGear vending machine, containing your standard equipment like produce satchels and plant formulas.

• A PlantMaster Mk3 machine, which can extract seeds from produce as well as infuse seeds or splice them.

• A reagent extractor, which can extract reagents from produce. Also has built-in storage tanks.

• A CheMaster 3000, used to turn extracted reagents into pills or bottles.

Making it Rain: Taking Care of your Plants

Every plant that isn't a weed needs water to live. Plain and simple. Any living plant in a pot will gradually use up its water supply. If the plant doesn't have enough water, it will slowly wither (LOSE HEALTH) and die; unhealthy plants will give worse harvests and cause the station to wonder why the hell they don't have enough tomatoes to churn out sick pizzas. Conveniently, there are water indicators on every pot! The indicators will decline as the plant gets dryer, blinking an ominous red when the soil is completely dry. Overwatering a plant will slow down its growth, and is indicated by a blinking blue indicator.

You can use the fertilizer in your compost bags to make your plants healthier. Extra compost can be manufactured by placing unwanted seeds and produce into the compost tank.

The plant pots have two other light indicators. The pot will blink red if the plant is dead or dying, either from age, maltreatment, or the presence of harmful elements. The pot will blink green if the plant is ready to be harvested. You can either click on the plant with an empty hand to dump all harvested items and seeds on the floor, or use a produce satchel on it to automatically fill it up with usable items.

Better Living through GMOs

Growing weed and banana peels not enough for you? Is your green thumb more a shade of... brown? Check out the technical shit you can do as a botanist!

Bee-keeping

No garden is complete without nature's own gardeners; the bees. A bee-filled hydroponics is a well run hydroponics.

My first bee

The first order of beesiness is to get your hands on a larva. At the start of each round, there is one bee box in hydroponics. The following steps will deploy it!

1. Pick up the bee box
2. Click the bee box to open the lid
3. Click it with your other hand to take the larva out
   • Optionally, use a pen on the larva to name it
4. Click the larva to wake it up

Congratulations, you are now a keeper of bees! Your new larva will wander around for a while and get used to your jungle of weed before it grows up to be a real bee.

In case you didn't already know, bees are pretty awesome. They like dancing and drinking nectar and making honey! Make sure to keep your bee happy. Things that will make your bee happy is talking to it and writing poems for it, dancing with it, petting it and feeding it the honey it produces. Bees also enjoy a tasty treat in the form of bee kibble! You can use its honey for a lot of stuff, but if your bee ends up starving because you put it all in your coffee, his blood will be on your hands.

My second, third and one-hundred-and-seventy-billionth bee

Further bees can be bought from the cargo bay. They come in honey production crates that only botanists can unlock. Quartermasters don't really get bees, but they get weed. Barter with them until they agree that honey production gear is the way of the future and a reasonable thing to spend the entire station's budget on. Then follow the same steps as with your first bee and you will soon have your own bee swarm. Bee swarms are pretty awesome. They dance and drink and make honey and stuff!

What can my bee do for me?

It's all about you, isn't it? Well, your bee pollinates plants. That probably makes them grow faster or something, probably. Much more importantly, bees are your ticket into honey-having. Honey takes on the chemical properties of the plant the bee was feeding from. This can lead to some rather interesting honey products.

The Ultimate Goal of Hydroponics

You'll need a screwdriver and a multitool to crack the seed machine to dispense cannabis seeds and thus make the annoying swarms of assistants happy forever. You can get these in either the Warehouse or Tool Storage, which is usually the closer of the two.

Screwdriver in hand, click on the seed dispenser and put it away. Grab your multitool and click on the machine with your free hand. Switch to the multitool and pulse the wires until you find the one that makes the white light turn on; this will add cannabis along with some other items to the vendor. (Nanotrasen, in all of its shitty glory, created a machine that doesn't require insulated gloves to hack. You should be glad.) Do as you normally would and when harvest time comes around, pick up a leaf and a piece of paper. Paper in hand, click on some dank to roll it up into a blunt. You're better than smoking that shit yourself (and making yourself useless the rest of the round), so loudly announce that you have blunts available and throw them at the assistants that show up at your door. Aim for the head. They will snap up your dank like hippies at Woodstock. Later, they will pass out in a maintenance shaft and be devoured by a changeling.

With the monkeys off your back, go have a chat with either the quartermaster or chef and see if any of them are actually working this round. Quartermasters can sell anything you grow for a profit, and the volume you can produce makes them very happy. Chefs very rapidly run out of cooking ingredients without some sort of resupply, so if a chef is being industrious he will absolutely love you.

Whomever you partner with, use them to fuel a fun gimmick. Like:

• A quartermaster can supply you with metal and medical syringes, so grow some plants that allow you to extract medicine, like commol for silver sulfadiazine and asomma for ephedrine. Get a decent amount of medicine grown, then use the metal to create a table outside your main door. Loudly announce that you've opened an 'all-natural medbay' and accuse 'that other medbay' of shooting people up with mind control drugs.
• A chef can supply you with pizzas of any topping, so open a pizza parlor where every order comes with a free blunt, so you can get the munchies and immediately get rid of them.
• Make as many mutant seeds as you can and spread the produce all over the station, just to see what happens if someone is dumb enough to try to eat the maximum potency mutant ghost chili pepper you grew.

Tipz 'n Trickz

• Your watering can can hold more than water! Give one to research! Water the damn floors! Fill it with welding fuel and pour it about the station--but be careful about potential ignition sources!

• In the rare event that every fire extinguisher has been bogarted, your chainsaw makes for a decent weapon. It's not very powerful, but it can stun the hell out of whoever is trying to make you dead. (You'll make them bleed like hell too! Dirty the station! Frustrate the shit out of the janitor!)

• If you've hacked the Seed Fabricator, you can grow grass. You can put them into a reagent extractor to obtain Grass Gro, and you can pour Grass Gro on tiles to replace those soulless steel floors with beautiful grass. Your fellow crew may love you for this. Or hate you for replacing their good carpets. Or barely even notice! In any case, it's fun to do while waiting for your weed to grow.

• You can roll a blunt from all sorts of herbs. It isn't limited to weed.

• Too many botanists and too few plant trays? Order some hydroponics starter crates from the quartermasters for more trays. Be sure to drag the hydroponics crate back to your place before opening it. The trays won't go back in the crate once it's been opened, and you don't want to drag them all around one at a time.

Botanist XP

Not only is making joints, taking care of your crops, finding strange plant mutations, and making interesting hybrid plants fun and good, but you also earn XP for it. More specifically, you earn XP for:

Action	XP Gain
Making a cigarette/joint.	1
Making a cigarette/joint using a blunt wrap.	2
Getting a regular-quality harvest. 30% chance of gaining XP for this action.	1
Getting a good-quality harvest ("looks like a good harvest" when harvesting). 30% chance of gaining XP for this action	2
Getting a high-quality harvest ("It's a bumper crop!"). 30% chance of gaining XP for this.	4
Splicing seeds XP given is (100-splice chance)/20 rounded e.g. 0 XP for 100% chance of success, 4 for 10%	0 to 4
Completing the "Make sure there are no cannabis plants..." objective.	50
Completing the "Have at least three mutant plants..." objective.	50

In case you were wondering, you get no XP for bad ("kind of a crappy harvest") harvests.

XP doesn't affect how much you get from harvests or anything. Rather, it's tracked by a global leaderboard and goes towards raising your Botanist job level.

Botanist Job Rewards

At certain job levels, you get certain rewards, which you access through the Check Job Rewards command, available through the Commands tab. The rewards include:

Name	Lvl. Req.	Icon	Description
Strange Seed	0		Grants an "strange seed" that grows into an alien plant, similar to the kind of seeds you sometimes find in off-station locations.
Golden Watering Can	3		Turns a watering can into a golden version! That also looks piss-yellow. Otherwise functions like a regular watering can, as the description hints at.
Blue Apron	5		Gives you a unique-looking blue apron that might look familiar if you play on other servers. It reduces chems absorbed from fluid puddles, clouds of smoke powder (but not propellant), and people splashing chems onto you somewhat.
Weed Watering Can	8		Turns a watering can into one with a drawing of leaf of a "certain plant", that is, cannabis--blaze it! As the description for the job reward says, it still acts like a regular watering can.
Rainbow Watering Can	10		Turns a watering can into one with that not only has a weed symbol but also a rainbow effect. It's unique that it's not simply flashing different colors, but it appears as though the color bands are traveling around the can. And it still functions like a normal, not-so-colorful watering can!
Senior Botanist Jumpsuit	15		Spawns a senior botanist's jumpsuit. Show your devotion to growing trees by wearing a jumpsuit that makes you look like one. (Even if you were growing the other kind of "tree".)
Antique Watering Can	20		Turns a watering can into one with the janky old watering can sprite from before Octbober 2020. It might be a relic of a past, but it still works like a modern watering can!

Crew Objectives

As a loyal crew member, you can sometimes be assigned some strictly optional objectives to keep yourself busy while you wait for something to happen. If you complete an objective by the end of the round, you'll get some bonus Spacebux and a fair amount of Botanist XP; the more objectives you complete, the more Spacebux and Botanist XP you get. You may also earn a Medal. As a botanist, you can expect to see the following:

Make sure there are no cannabis plants, seeds or products in Hydroponics at the end of the round.
Just don't grow weed. If someone bothers you for it, tell them to go get drunk instead. Although, this says nothing about growing weed in, say, the Bar or Medbay...

Completing this objective for the first time gives you the Reefer Madness medal. Aside from having an achievement that references a bizarre anti-marijuana film that's become a staple of stoner culture, there is sadly no reward associated with it.

Have at least three mutant plants alive at the end of the round.
Put some Mutagenic Formula in the pots along with your seeds. You'll eventually get a mutant plant. Grab the seeds from the harvest, or extract them from the plant. Plant the mutant seeds when the shuttle is called. Presuming nobody decides it'd be a great idea to bomb Hydroponics (what sort of weirdo does that), you should complete this objective trivially.

Completing this objective for the first time gives you the Bill Masen medal. There is unfortunately no reward associated with the medal, aside from whatever sort of pride or sense of accomplishment you get from having an achievement that references a post-apocalyptic science fiction story involving aggressive plants.

Antagonist Botanist

Antagonist botanists usually go under the radar, as the whole botany department is often completely ignored by security. Also you almost never get other antags interrupting your work, as they are too busy blowing up the station elsewhere. However, in order to get the most powerful stuff in botany - be it healing nuts which make you unstoppable killing machines, hotboxes straight from hell or big bulky man eaters - you require a lot of time. Time which you will not have if the station gets TTV'd hell and back and the shuttle is called. It might sound weird at first, but even as an antag you probably should send medbay some of your healing plants such as synthmeat, or something even better you manage to grow. Other antags might end the game way too soon for you, and with just a little bit of your help the station might not call the shuttle until you get to unleash your potential in full blossom. Just don't send them too much of the good stuff.

Syndicate Shenanigans!

Well aren't you a lucky bastard! As a traitor botanist, you can order several special things locked to your job class: deadly man-eater seeds, deadly Wasp grenades, a modified Radbow that shoots wasp eggs, highly invasive space kudzu seeds, a specially-designed hotbox lighter, and a organ-grinding red chainsaw. This chainsaw, unlike the hedge trimmers in your vending machines, is very, VERY powerful and it can gib bodies if they have a ton of damage and had all their organs removed. Man-eaters, unlike other Syndicate items, take time to cultivate, but with a little TLC, (and a lot of meat) they'll pop out of their pots to wreak havoc across the station.

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