Botanist

Cogmap2Cogmap1DestinyClarionOshanAtlasManta

Your personal Garden of Eden by the Bar.

Your personal Valley Forge biodome, above the Chapel.

Your personal Valley Forge biodome, opposite the Catering Dome.

File:ClarionHydroponics.png

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.

Under the sea
O, under the sea
Portside, left of the Rising Tide bar
Botany's the place for you and me!.

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 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.

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. The following steps will deploy it!

 Pick up the bee box
 Click the bee box 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
 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. 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 epinephrine. 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 for space grass seeds, you can click on floor tiles with those seeds in your hand 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.

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 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...

End the round with at least 3 mutant plants grown
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.

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 man-eater seeds and a meat-cleaving red chainsaw. This chainsaw, unlike the hedge trimmers in your vending machines, 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.

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