Increase splice success rates in Hydroponics

[Marquesas]

Hi;

I played around a bit with splicing today and realized I can achieve combinations through some tricks which I never though possible. The problem is though, that some of this fun stuff you can get is horribly horribly dependent on chance - one of them requires two 20% and one 10% chance splice (that alone is 0.2 * 0.2 * 0.1 = 0.004 = 0.4% success rate - on average, 250 tries), not to mention if you are shooting for a specific species out of this you have to keep your Ds and rs in check. All in all, today, for completing this specific splice I sat 40 minutes in Hydroponics running back and forth between the seed machine and staring at a white screen, with a chatbox full of red splice failed messages. Now in my humble opinion this adds nothing to the game. Most of the things which are good enough to be abused in Hydro are more or less publicly accessible. All in all I'd like you to consider raising the 10-20-30% chances in Hydro to (at least) a 40-50-60% level. I'm sure this change doesn't really ruin any kind of balance but it should make splicing more fun.

[Captain_Bravo]

Hydroponics is deceptively deep. If you have some spare time, spend a round just mapping out all of the different combinations for splicing. As it stands, if you work at it you can usually find something with a 30-40% chance that you can splice as an intermediate. Your first step should always be to fill a plant with Gro-Boost, so you can plant-harvest quickly for additional seeds. Once you know all the splice steps, you can usually find a way to connect any two plants with only a few steps, and at a decent success rate. Unless you're super unlucky, or just dumbly slamming seeds into the machine and *screaming in frustration, it normally won't take more than 20-25 minutes to splice whatever frankenplant you're going for.

That being said, I would definitely appreciate a second look at some of the splice rates. One of the herbs flat-out will not splice with other herbs, there's a few oddities in the vegetables, and there really needs to be a better fix for going Vegetable<>Fruit and Vegetable<>Herb. Maybe boost splice rates on eggplants and onions, to serve as better intermediates?

[ISaidNo]

Okay, a small primer on how splicing chances are calculated.
Each plant species has a variable called "Genome" which is used to track how similar two species are to one another. Generally two species from the same group (eg fruit, veg, herbs) will have genomes which are close to each other, and thus easier to splice.

When splicing, the formula for your chances is worked out like so:

Code:

1: Start Splicing Chance at 100%
2: Compare the genomes of the two seeds, subtract the lower one from the higher one
3: Multiply the sum of step 2 by 10, then subtract that from the splicing chance
4: If either seed has damage from infusing, subtract damage amount from splicing chance
5: Cap splicing chance between 0 and 100 to prevent bugs
6: Perform the check to see if splicing succeeds or not

So, an example.
You're trying to splice Weed (genome 2) with Synthmeat (genome 7).
You start with 100% splicing chance.
Subtract low genome from high genome: 7 - 2 = 5
Multiply that by 10: 5 * 10 = 50
Subtract that from the splicing chance: 100 - 50 = 50
Assuming you haven't damaged either seed with infusion, you have a 50/50 chance for this splice to succeed. That's not so good odds, of course. So how can we improve them?

When seeds are successfully spliced, the hybrid has a new genome which is the average of the two, calculated by adding the two plant's genomes together and then halving it. Assuming you successfully spliced Weed and Synthmeat, the new genome would be (from (2 + 7) / 2) 4.5.

What you need to do is chain. The genomes are generally done by group:
Herbs have very low genomes, grasses and veg are in the middle, and fruit has very high genomes. Alien plants and weeds have genomes that are all over the place. This isn't a general rule either, there are exceptions here and there! Commol has a genome that's more in the vegetable group than the herb group with it being a root rather than a leaf, for example.

I designed the system so that you would have to figure out breeding chains and whatnot in order to be able to pull off certain splices, since I didn't basically want you to have ridiculous Immortal High-Yield Honey Weed Medicine Melons without a bit of work. Any feedback would be appreciated though.

[TheRedScare]

As an avid botanist I like the current system. The difficulty makes it that more exciting when you finally splice the perfect plant your twisted mind desires. If it was made easier then I would lose interest a fair bit since its not a challenge and anyone can do it.

[Marquesas]

Well. Okay, we can actually close this thread, ISN just completely opened my eye on this subject so now I know how to approach it.

The explanation itself should probably be put on the wiki.

[Captain_Bravo]

Actually, there is one more thing I would suggest, as long as we're here. Is there any way we can make it so we can use "Infuse" to put chemicals into a plant's harvests? Like, infuse oranges with vodka to grow oranges that create screwdrivers when you eat them, or infuse styptic powder into grapes to make super-healing fruit. So far I've yet to successfully infuse a plant with a chemical, grow that seed into fruit, and have the fruit contain the chemical I infused it with. Would this be too hard to implement, or too broken in practice? It could really lead to a lot more fun in Botany.

[ISaidNo]

that seems like it would be too easy.
i do need to expand infusions a bit but i dont think ill be doing directly putting a chemical into the plant's produce

[Cogwerks]

Did you know: you can inject many foods already with a syringe

[Marquesas]

Okay, feedback time.
After extensively studying the splice rates and extrapolating all genome numbers from the initial data given by ISN, I have devised alternative paths of reaching Melon from starting point Cannabis; with the result of a Hybrid Cannabis seed.

One particular alternative path I tried (where no success rates are below 50%):
Cannabis -> Peanut -> Creeper -> Wheat -> Lettuce -> Banana -> Chili -> Melon
However, my in-game fucking around proved that this method is not a lot more effective than the original method I tried ((Cannabis + Wheat) + (Melon + Wheat)), in fact I spent even more time accomplishing the task.

Why is this? I am going to math this down to wheat, where the difference is already obvious.
The splice rate between Cannabis and Wheat is 20%.
The splice rates along the path to Wheat are 60%, 60% and 60%, which gives you a 21.6% chance of the splice to succeed.
This seems like a flat increase, yes? Wrong. As mentioned previously the goal is to achieve a Hybrid Cannabis seed, which means that with each splice what you need is a dominant seed to be yielded. I assume the chance for a seed's species gene to be dominant is 50% - which means at every successful splice we have a 50% chance to get a "good" seed. Assuming we splice with only regressive seeds on the other side, the resulting species will only have a 50% chance to be good if we get a regressive species seed. The calculation of this chance would be pretty complicated, but 25% is a good estimate for it. Adding together the two chances, we get that only 75% of the successful splices will actually yield an acceptable result - therefore the success chance for the intended action is 21.6% * 75% = 16.2%, lower than the super risky super luck based super chance thing. Obviously this all can be mitigated by planting the resulting seed, harvesting the cannabis plant and getting around 5 new seeds with rerolled dominance statistics.

Alternatively, another way to approach it is to head from Melon to Cannabis, where the only thing that matters is that we get an r seed in the last step before Cannabis. In this case, the splicing chance of a Melon seed with a Wheat seed is a flat 10% chance. The chances along the paths are 80%, 70%, 55% and 57.5% - or a path based success rate of 17.7%, a three-quarters increase compared to the original plan - and there are no species dominance stats to worry about all the way until the end, where you have to grow a single plant and harvest it for more seeds if it's dominant.

All in all, currently, I think this is fine as it is, but it requires a different approach - so I guess my original suggestion is mostly moot.

[mozi]

gregor mendel is weeping