Botanist

Your personal Garden of Eden.

So, You Signed Up Too Late to Be an Engineer

Welcome to Hydroponics! This is the department of the station which is responsible for growing produce, medicinal plants, and other crap the rest of the crew will 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 across the main hall from Medbay. Botanists can be identified by their green jumpsuits.

Farming 101

So, you want to start growing food? Here's what you should do (if you're not immediately making a bee-line to Tool Storage. You should be doing that.)

• Head over to the main hall to your right and grab the wrench. You'll need this for later.

• Pop open a locker and take notice of your supplies: each locker contains the following: a watering can, a green chainsaw, a produce satchel, a plant analyzer, three bags of compost, and one vial of weedkiller. Grab a bag of compost and your watering can and mosey back over to the grow room.
• If you haven't hacked the seed dispenser, (YOU REALLY SHOULD HAVE) pop out some seeds of your choice and get ready to grow. (Popular choices are chilis, tomatoes, synthmeat, and sugar. Stupid jerks tend to grow bananas, but you're better than that.)

• Remember that wrench? Centcom doesn't give two shits about Hydroponics, so they threw all the pots way around the room. Wrench in hand, click on a pot to bolt it out of the ground. Repeat this excruciating process until every pot is freed from their shackles. Move 'em to wherever you want and bolt 'em back down. Show upper management how it's really done!

• Plant your seeds. Easy enough. Preferably, you'll throw some compost into each pot to make the plants grow faster.

• Water as needed, harvest when able.

Congratulations!!! You're a Botanist!!!

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! WOW! The indicator has four colors it can flash.

• RED: Holy mother of fuck you're a bad botanist. Water this shit.
• YELLOW: Touch it up with a click of water and you're good to go.
• GREEN: Everything's good to go!
• BLUE: You're even worse than the guy who ignores his plants. Holy hell stop watering

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.

Better Plants through Science

Located directly south of the seed dispenser is the time waster that is the boon and bane of every Botanist in Centcom's employ: the Plant Gene Manipulator. With it, you can modify the genes of a seed to attempt to create a better plant. Place a seed (ONE SEED, two seeds screws up the interface for now) into the machine, select seed irradiation, and then pick a stat to try to improve. Be careful though! Every time you irradiate a seed, there's a chance that the seed will be destroyed. This chance increases as the seed is more irradiated and is certain if you irradiate it five times in a row.

The plant stats are as follows:
Maturation rate – Affects the time it takes for a plant to grow to maturity. Lower is better.
Production rate - Affects the time it takes for a plant to grow from maturity to harvest. Lower is better
Lifespan – Affects the number of harvests possible from a single plant. Higher is better.
Endurance – affects the amount of time a plant can live without water or with poison. Higher is better.
Potency – affects the amount of drug which can be extracted from a plant's harvest. Higher is better.

Irradiating seeds may also lead to mutant plants, which is why you're spending twenty minutes clicking on a sentence. When you think you've got something worthwhile, use a plant analyzer or your Botanist's PDA to scan the seeds for any unusual genes. (You'll know when you've done right. Or wrong.)

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 just north of your wing, or tool storage just to the south.

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. (Nanotransen, 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 chili pepper you grew.

Tipz 'n Trickz

• There are two machines in the main hallway that you may not use, but are of great interest. These are the Reagent Extractor and the Seed Extractor. Sometimes, you may grow something that has valuable chemicals inside of it! Use the Reagent Extractor to siphon out those chemicals and make sorry the dumbass Engineer that won't stop begging for you for dank.

• 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!

• 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.

End the round with at least 3 mutant plants grown
Use the Gene Plant Manipulator to get a seed up to level 4 radation. Spit it out of the machine and analyze it with your PDA. If your analyzer claims the seed is mutated, hold it in reserve. Get two more. Plant the 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 they'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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