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 (you'll never do this), and the Quartermaster's with shit to sell so they can order more monkeys. (You'll never do this either.) In truth, no one expects Hydroponics to do anything other than to grow weed and stay in their part of the station. 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 two doors south of the Bar. 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 Tech 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

If you were EXTREMELY SMART AND CLEVER and bum-rushed Tech Storage over the flood of assistants, congratulations! You're one step away from achieving the only damn thing the station demands of you.

You'll need a screwdriver and a multitool to crack the machine. 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. (NOTE: 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. Put that shit in your mouth and light it up with whatever you've got on hand. If all goes to plan, you'll pass out in a tunnel, only get eaten by a changeling.

Tipz 'n Trickz

Unlike the Chef and the Barman, you have the ability to get into Tech Storage. It's relatively close by and it's filled with all the shit you need to robust your way around the station. You don't have to do it, but it's recommended that you drop bricks and sprint there before everything's picked clean. You'll want a utility belt with the tools you'll need and an igniter, but if it's been picked over, don't fret! Grab some metal, glass, and wires. You can make what you need if the hordes have left you with those shitty analyzers no one ever uses.

Unlike the other parts of the station, Hydroponics is relatively quiet. You may get a smug Operative that might think it's a good idea to break in via space, but for the most part, nothing usually happens in the grow room. Take advantage of the quiet. Centcom moved the Bar and the Kitchen south of Hydroponics! You're going to have a hell of a lot more company now that everyone's getting shitfaced in the other room!

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, (or the very common event of you being too slow to grab one) 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.

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.