Botany proposal

[MilonPL]

This proposal aims to integrate botany into the kitchen/chef gameplay loop rather than making it a separate role. Botany doesn’t have much direction, and chef gameplay has its own issues. Food quality doesn’t really matter, and there’s almost always way too much food on the station.

This doesn’t fix that, but the goal here is to give chefs something more to do. Instead of botany being its own isolated thing, it’s getting folded into the kitchen as a side activity. Chefs will have a small hydroponics setup to grow ingredients, with a more streamlined system that keeps things engaging without taking over the role.

Chemistry could have their own hydroponic setups, or a chef could handle plants during slower hours and take orders from med. This also helps fix issues like botany not growing ingredients for the kitchen or there being no botanists at all.

[keronshb]

I personally have a different view for Botany. Some of it is from unused SS13 elements.

On SS13 there's steelcaps which allow you to make steelwood and durathread, which allows you to make durathread.
Though Botany really shouldn't be just about those 2 items, but they could help improve the station.

Wood > Steelwood could be an interesting progression. On Cit we had this as a prerequisite for training katanas/bokken.
Durathread was a huge direct upgrade to regular storage (not as much as a BOH but a significant increase) and it allowed for different upgrades to cloth items.

This does have some slight overlap with sci by improving the station, but it does take some of the workload off of sci and puts it to botany.

Another idea I had was like, add similar plants to steelwood and durathread. And botany could submit plants to sci to deconstruct/research so they could in turn make mutations easier or help unlock things.

[HTMLSystem]

I disagree with this. As someone who has tried to do botany/chems and be a chef/botanist it's a lot of multitasking. If you're not on your botanist game you're not gonna make any real progress. Food is going to be slow to make and so would chems. Having a dedicated role focused on making and mutating plants is the best way to go about it so every department can get the best plants they need for their work.

[HTMLSystem]

Also, with the problems you stated with botany (heavy RNG, no real progression (disagree)) this wouldn't fix anything but force chefs into the bitany gameplay loop that they might not want to take apart of.

[Ratonero500]

I feel like there is a niche of players that like the whole complex RNG based nature of botany as is, and for that they play botany, this feels like destroying a really good niche only for simplification.
i feel like other solutions to this problem with chefs being not that necessary would be better, one example could be the addition of moods and food affecting mood.
Another one could be making chefs a higher rank than botanist and give them access to botany, in their idle time they could head to botany to help with the plants.

[NoElkaTheGod]

"Remove botany" ahh proposal.

Yes, botany has some problems, but, as stated above, this PR is just oversimplificating things that won't even work that way. Growing plants is not "add the seeds, come back 10 minutes later and get the results", it is a complex process that requires constant monitoring, especialy so if mutagen is invloved.

[MozarteanChaos]

eh. i think i understand the motivation behind this, but i just can't agree with it. chefs don't generally sign up to be doing botany, and botanists don't sign up for cooking - anyone who enjoys botany will either have to join as a job they don't intend on fully engaging with, or convince the HoP and chef to let them mess about in what's left of hydroponics.

botany does have a pacing issue, but folding it into chef gameplay now creates the issue of there being too much to do - in my experience, a good chef shift will have me struggling to keep up with demand, constantly trying to cook more food to replace what's being eaten. having to manage plants on top of that would push it from the fun kind of stress to the... stressful kind of stress?

same goes for chem - i've had some shifts where i've had to be both the chemist and the botanist, and the end result was that i couldn't fully focus on either. it's difficult to get chems out while you're trying to keep an eye on your plants, and vice versa.

perhaps this can be helped by simplifying the whole thing a bit, as is proposed, but i think this is liable to make things worse for any lingering botany mains. mutating plants isn't viable when you have another job to do, and can't keep an eye on them to make sure they don't do anything crazy - but toning down the mutations to help with that is just going to make botany less interesting. there's less risk, and presumably less reward.