Botanist

Your personal Garden of Eden.

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 Barman 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 have access to your own section of the station and you can walk around with a chainsaw without so much as a glance in your direction! Wow!

Hydroponics is located in the northeast end of the station. Botanists can be identified by their green jumpsuits.

The Greenhouse

Your workspace comes equipped with the following stuff:

• Plant pots with status light meters. They start unanchored, so feel free to move them to a more aesthetically pleasing formation. You can 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 the produce satchel, watering can, and chainsaw, as well as helpful chemicals like compost, weedkillers, and plant formula.

• A Plantmaster Mk3 machine, which can mutate seeds, extract seeds, and extract reagents from produce.

• A reagent extractor, which can also extract reagents, but also has built-in storage tanks.

Overflowing with Pubby Tears

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, grow faster, and produce more produce, but they will dry them out quicker. 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. Pick up the box, click it to open the lid, click it with your other hand to take the larva out, (optional) use a Pen on the larva to name it and finally click the larva to wake it up. Congratulations, you are now a keeper of bees! Your new larva will wander around for a while, getting used to the sight of your forest 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. That's pretty cool! Make sure to keep your bee happy. Happy bees are much better than angry bees. Things that will make your bee happy is talking to it and writing poems for it, dancing with it, petting it and feeding it honey. You can use the 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 came in honey production crates that only botanists can unlock. Quartermasters don't really understand bees, but they understand weed. Try to barter with them to convince them that using all their money on honey production gear is a terrific idea. Then follow the same steps as with your first bee and you will soon have your own swarm. Swarms are awesome. They dance and drink and make honey and stuff!

What can my bee do for me?

You, you, you. It's all about you, isn't it? Well, your bee will pollinate your plants. This probably makes them grow faster, probably. Bees also seem to leave some nectar in the plant pots, and that's got to be a good thing.

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 in the other end of the station, or Tool Storage just to the west.

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 gives you access to cannabis seeds. (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. A quartermaster can supply you with metal and medical syringes, so grow some plants that allow you to extract medicine like Bicaridine and Kelotane. 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. Or, if nobody's willing to work with you, 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 is capable of holding more than water! Give one to Research! Fill it with welding fuel! Go crazy and water the damn floors if you like (note, however, that watering the floor will probably lead to the Janitor being blamed and promptly spaced)!

• 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 whatever's 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 have a crowbar and access to space grass seeds, you can rip up the tile on the station and replace those soulless steel floors with grass. Your fellow crew may love you for this. Or you may get a beating. Either way, it's more fun than smoking your own weed and stammering on the floor the rest of the round. Optionally, keep a blunt in your pocket so you can start smoking it if you get a beating.

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. As a botanist, you can expect to see the following:

End the round with no cannabis products on the station
Just don't grow weed. If someone bothers you for it, tell them to go get drunk instead. Also, you may have to steal the Research Director's private weed stash and destroy it.

End the round with at least 3 mutant plants grown
Put some Mutriant 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.

Syndicate Shenanigans!

Well aren't you a lucky bastard! As a traitor Botanist, you can order two special things locked to your job class: deadly Maneater seeds and a meat-cleaving red chainsaw. This chainsaw, unlike the hedge trimmers in your lockers, is very, VERY powerful and it'll gib any dead body you hit. 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. If you're feeling silly, you can also order a FogMachine-3000 and fill it with your drug of choice, then hotbox the station.

Supplementary Video

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