Apply robust harvest effect to current plant only and not offspring

[PolterTzi]

About the PR

Reworked the effects of Robust Harvest to be more temporary.
Now it gives a boost to the potency of the current plant that is no longer inherited by any offspring.
The boost is additive with the plant's base potency and any mutation it has, no longer limiting the combined potency.
Currently the maximum boost is 45.
The yield decrease from overdose has been made to affect YieldMod instead, making it also temporary.
The seedless effect from Robust Harvest has been removed.

Why / Balance

Arguably more realistic than just fertilising once and making all subsequent plants give overgrown crops.
The seedless trait is AFAIK largely meant to prevent the easy production of powerful plants, since this makes the resulting seeds no longer as potent, I hope it's fair to no longer use it for fertiliser.

This would make it somewhat easier to avoid getting seedless plants, at least for the less experimentative botanists, and keep plant "lineages" alive.
Conversely, it adds both a resource and work cost to keeping the plants potent by needing each new plant to be independently fertilised.
Hopefully that's a fair trade-off.
It also makes the effectiveness of fertiliser and mutations no longer dependent on each other, making it .

Technical details

Adds new fields to plantholdercomponent and producecomponent to store the potency boost and the potency of the produce.
The boost is added to the base potency of a plant when harvesting.
Robust Harvest now only increases the potency boost.
YeildMod has been replaced with a float for easier modification.

Media

The bottom tray has had 15u of Robust Harvest added to it.

• I have added screenshots/videos to this PR showcasing its changes ingame, or this PR does not require an ingame showcase

Breaking changes

The functions responsible for creating produce in the BotanySystem have been changed to take potency boost as an argument.
The name of Potency in SeedData was changed to BasePotency, reflecting the "inherited" potency, rather than increase caused by RH. If this breaks something, change the reference to the variable to whatever is appropriate in your scope.
YeildMod has been replaced with a float.

Changelog

🆑

• tweak: Robust Harvest no longer makes a plant's seeds more potent, but stacks independently with mutations for up to 45 additional potency at 15 units.
• tweak: Robust Harvest no longer makes plants seedless.

[GentleButter]

also whats arguably more realistic about this? I farm IRL and if you genetically modify a crop its seeds inherit the genetic modification smdh

"oh yeah if you pull the seeds from those big purple heirloom tomatoes you're actually just gonna get a regular tomato. obviously."

[Tayrtahn]

also whats arguably more realistic about this? I farm IRL and if you genetically modify a crop its seeds inherit the genetic modification smdh

Isn't Robust Harvest just fertilizer though? Feeding a plant shouldn't genetically modify it. My SS14 botany knowledge is limited, but isn't that supposed to be the role of unstable mutagen or Left 4 Zed?

Edit: looking at the wiki for tgstation, robust harvest is actually used to stabilize plant genetics and stop further mutations.

[PolterTzi]

I'd like to note, for the record, potency increases from mutation and crossbreeding are supposed to work as previously. This change is only meant to affect things that use the RobustHarvest effect.

[gitjubx]

you mean like rather from starting at 50 potency trying to get higher potency via mutation you now have to start from 5-15 potency at most from plant basis.....since robust doesnt carry potency over...add that to the clipping stuff have fun playing.....this not only doest avoid seedless plants at all , it even makes it harder to get stable higher potency without relying on a whole arsenal of chemicals... and seed production

[slarticodefast]

If I have understood your code changes correctly, robust harvest will still reduce the yield, which is genetic, while only giving a temporary potency bonus.

Robust harvest is capped at 50 potency. For higher values mutation is needed, so I do not think it is overpowered.

The yield decrease is already there to balance the higher amount of reagents. The total amount of reagents per harvest is only increased slightly. The main difference is that much less grinding is needed. I often see chemistry not use the medicinal plants botany provides because grinding them up would be too much work. With this PR this would become even worse.

You would need a huge amount of robust harvest to produce a reasonable amount of higher potency harvest. I don't think it is worth it for chemistry to make that only for a minor harvest reagent increase, when you could just harvest more plants instead.

All in all I think botany has recently been nerfed enough with the clipping changes. I used to play botanist a lot, but at the moment it is not so much fun and I generally see a lack of botany players. I hope this will change with the upcoming addition of the plant analyzer.

[PolterTzi]

If I have understood your code changes correctly, robust harvest will still reduce the yield, which is genetic, while only giving a temporary potency bonus.

Robust harvest is capped at 50 potency. For higher values mutation is needed, so I do not think it is overpowered.

If I understand the code right, the yield decrease is only when you add too much of the reagent and it still metabolises while the plant is maxed out.
Though I should probably rewrite that part as well, since it would be odd that one effect is temporary while the other is permanent.

[slarticodefast]

If I understand the code right, the yield decrease is only when you add too much of the reagent and it still metabolises while the plant is maxed out.

Oh, you are right. I always added 15u of RH, which is enough for increasing potency to 50 and sometimes reduced the yield depending on the base potency (somewhere from 1-25). But I think both changes either being temporary or permanent would be more consistent. Otherwise clipping yield would decrease over time.

I still think RH is currently underused. As a chemist I don't want to grind up plants the whole shift. But maybe this could be balanced by allowing more than 6 objects in the grinder at the same time.

[K-Dynamic]

Yeah robust harvest caps out potency at 50, and going above requires mutations that we could do

The thing is mutations are unpredictable and rather hell to keep track of (especially without plant scanner still); I personally wouldn't try mutating for higher potency beyond 50, let for lineage to retain any increased potency at all

Just consider the fact you're swapping out a consistent mechanic for more RNG, and getting mutagen itself can be rng depending on availability and mood of chemists

[PolterTzi]

why you gatta keep ruining botany bruv

It makes me feel powerful.

I'll be honest, I don't have the best design sense.

[gitjubx]

how about this then...let the default robust there as it is default but add the option to go from 50 to 100 potency temporary . Currently with the clipping stuf noone tries to increase beyond 50 potency because it just takes so much time and its not
really worth at the current state , a 50 potency deus gives only 2 omnizine around at 100 potency its just 3 omnizine , other chemicals might be more but you can still tweak it you need like 30u robust to get from 50 to 100 to increase demand of chemical when there is a dire situation to provide more chemicals but harder to use it if you dont have enought robust it might also not be a good designt but atleast its not a fully nerf but an addition

[gitjubx]

All in all I think botany has recently been nerfed enough with the clipping changes. I used to play botanist a lot, but at the moment it is not so much fun and I generally see a lack of botany players. I hope this will change with the upcoming addition of the plant analyzer.

since the clipping stuff came like half of the good botanist quit because it was no longer fun and removed lots of possibilitys you could do as botanist , it was overall terrible designt with seed health and stage 2 restriction since mostly kudzu destroys it befor you can clip or other issues while mutating or even keeping the most basic linage alive forcing you to either use tons of dylo ,resetting seed just with cryoxdone or grow tons of your own fertilizer plants in addition to hoarding seeds .....like if it would just consume a lot of water and nutriment from tray if you clip instead the other stuff...you atleast have to constantly also refillt trays with stuff but arent bound to do tons of micromanagment to make sure planst are healed all the time for more seed ect ect

[PolterTzi]

Ok, made some adjustments.
Now the effect is just a temporary additive bonus to the crop, independent of the base potency or any mutations.
This should at least make it easier to use alongside mutations.
So, if you can mutate a plant to 50 base potency, RH would still be able give an additional 45 (exact numbers may change).
Might need some balancing.

[slarticodefast]

So I did some math and testing for some common ingredients. In the following table I calculated the ingredient gain from 15u of RH which gives you a 45 potency bonus. This costs chemistry 5 nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium each to make.

name	chemical	potency divisor	amount at base potency	amount increase from RH
wheat	flour	20	5.25u	2.5u
cannabis	THC	10	3u	4.5u
ambrosia deus	omnizine	35	1.29u	1.29u
galaxy thistle	stellibinin	4	3.5u	11.25u
fly amanita	amatoxin	4	3.5u	11.25u
koibean	carpotoxin	30	1.17u	1.5u

In many cases is is easier and cheaper to simply harvest another plant than to use the new RH. I do not think it is worth it for chemistry to make RH for botany under these conditions. Potency would have to be completely rebalanced around this change.

You might also want to wait with balancing until this PR is merged since it changes how potency works.

Another problem I see is that the potency change is no longer directly communicated to the player. Previously this was done by clipping the plant and checking the seed. For temporary changes this is not possible.

Personally I would prefer if this change was not merged, even if balanced. While it would be more realistic, it is ok to sacrifice some realism for game design reasons.

[PolterTzi]

@slarticodefast
You make a good point. It should be balanced to be worthwhile to use.
I think I'm conceptually on a worthwhile track with this change, but it does indeed need balancing.

[Jezithyr]

Reopened since this author's repoban was in error. (The ban was made due to a misunderstood reference to the stonewall riots in an april fools PR)

[mehx3]

As a botanist main I don't get why people are mad at this change. After the clipping changes you couldn't use Robust anyway, if you were doing mutation and you want to be able to have the ability to get seeds from the mutated plant. Honestly, i wish seedless was completely removed, and yield was capped to 3 on default seeds and capped to 5 trough mutations. This would incentivize getting higher potency, instead of spamming plants, but this a different topic, probably. I wonder though - if you mutate plant to 44 potency, add Robust to get 89 "temporary" potency, and mutate potency again. Would it jump to 86/100 potency or 30/58 potency?

[gitjubx]

As a botanist main I don't get why people are mad at this change. After the clipping changes you couldn't use Robust anyway, if you were doing mutation and you want to be able to have the ability to get seeds from the mutated plant. Honestly, i wish seedless was completely removed, and yield was capped to 3 on default seeds and capped to 5 trough mutations. This would incentivize getting higher potency, instead of spamming plants, but this a different topic, probably. I wonder though - if you mutate plant to 44 potency, add Robust to get 89 "temporary" potency, and mutate potency again. Would it jump to 86/100 potency or 30/58 potency?

you clearly arent a main botanist , because else you would just heal the robusted plant to get more clippings via nutri/vita chemicals or dylo/cryo if the chemist supplies you...there was always a reason to use robust like just for ghalaxthistel and keep making 1-3 plants at 50 potency and clip and repeat since you got the vitamins/nutriment to keep the linage up while also getting more seeds.....and to your other question you would have 58 or 30 if it downgrades but i think if you have 44 it doesnt skip the 50 so it would just upgrade to 50 then afterwards 58 if another roll

[HandsomeTheEgg]

not dooming anything i will only say you will see afterwards whats gonna happen because i just wouldnt touch the basic stuff and rather add stuff onto it ( there are more comments than just you, and there was also some talk about it just not here ) just check the like/dislike to get an idea and its not taken into account the other talk thats not here about it ( i once said it would be good to add this maybe as extra chemical rather than to change how robust is working , so i am not fully against it )

[PolterTzi]

wouldnt merge this how it is and actually just make another chemical for it , mayority is against it but i guess that says nothing =) but the aftereffects will

At this point, I'll defer to whatever the maintainer decision ends up being. (not like I have many other options, really)
Making it into a new chem is certainly an interesting idea, but I feel like the current RobustHarvest parallel with something like this could make for a less than balanced combination.

[HandsomeTheEgg]

yea i mean of course it would need some balance like to prevent getting to high potency to quickly but to use it as alternative if you want tempo potency but also be able to extract seeds

[PolterTzi]

not dooming anything i will only say you will see afterwards whats gonna happen because i just wouldnt touch the basic stuff and rather add stuff onto it ( there are more comments than just you, and there was also some talk about it just not here ) just check the like/dislike to get an idea and its not taken into account the other talk thats not here about it ( i once said it would be good to add this maybe as extra chemical rather than to change how robust is working , so i am not fully against it )

I don't imagine this would entirely turn my case around, but I'd like to note the PR started off I would say worse than it is now, so while I certainly can't blame all of the negative reactions on that, I feel like that may have played a role.

[PolterTzi]

yea i mean of course it would need some balance like to prevent getting to high potency to quickly but to use it as alternative if you want tempo potency but also be able to extract seeds

It would certainly be an interesting alternative, though the issue would be to have it be both powerful enough to be viable and not be too powerful stacked with RH.

[HandsomeTheEgg]

yea it is better from what it started thats true but its still..well a mayor change for most botanist that isnt took well and maybe its aswell what you did befor that influenced these things now ( i mean not what you did but like how you did it)

[HandsomeTheEgg]

i only recomment not to rush it in the next 3 days like the priority indicate and take your time to look over it again and think about some stuff in the end your right , its the maintainer decision what will happen and we all have to go along with it

[PolterTzi]

yea it is better from what it started thats true but its still..well a mayor change for most botanist that isnt took well and maybe its aswell what you did befor that influenced these things now ( i mean not what you did but like how you did it)

I'd like to note, for the record, while the clipping nerf has my name on it, I only made it in response to and as a replacement for a previous nerf,. (and for that matter, based on someone else's idea)

[Partmedia]

Hi @PolterTzi , thanks for your original and continued work on this. I felt like this was a reasonable change to consider for Robust Harvest that address some of the balance issues currently around this. But seeing that folks are quite split on how mechanics in botany might work, I think this is a good candidate to design doc out and come to a decision on during the freeze.

I'm going to close this PR now. During the freeze there will be an opportunity for everyone who has a stake in botany to chip in on putting together a design doc should hopefully flesh out how botany should work in depth, and after the freeze we can decide whether or not to go forward for this.

To that end, please keep your branch available so that we can resurrect this after the freeze should we decide that this is the best way to move forward.

Thanks again for your work so far and sorry this didn't work out now.

[PolterTzi]

@Partmedia
Would it be appropriate now to ask for re-opening this PR?
Or should I try writing docs first and try to "push" this once those are finalised?

[Partmedia]

There you go.

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[PolterTzi]

Alright, this now has merge conflicts, was made ages ago and I haven't really kept up with the developments in the community.
I guess, unless and until stated otherwise, I'll just close this PR.
I'll leave the branch around, so the code itself shouldn't get lost if someone (me or otherwise) tries to revive this ancient curse.