Hydroponics Feedback

[ISaidNo]

Well no-one brought it to my attention, I just figured no-one was growing lemons and limes. Not like there's terribly much point.
Anyway what do you all think of the new stuff so far anyway? I'm still stumped on a new method/mechanism for splicing seeds, honestly.

[FrontlineAcrobat4]

yet another worthless post by rube potter

[Klayboxx]

There is no way to flush out toxic slurry from the trays so you're stuck with a useless tray after a slurry pod explodes before it's even able to be harvested.

Oh yeah, that's another problem. Slurry pods like to explode before you can harvest them.

Also, the different fertilizers seem to last forever, so you can just set up a system where you have specific fertilizers in different trays and use them systematically for what you want. This doesn't seem like the intended purpose, but I could be wrong.

[Val]

Well no-one brought it to my attention, I just figured no-one was growing lemons and limes. Not like there's terribly much point.
Anyway what do you all think of the new stuff so far anyway? I'm still stumped on a new method/mechanism for splicing seeds, honestly.

I never had that problem with the lemon-limes. They always were consistent when I grew them.

I just played a round or two with the new things and I find them to be excellent additions.

The new nutrient solutions work exactly as I had imagined them and I'm glad that they found place there. I can live with them this way, even if there's not a complete nutrition system.

The book that tells how to be a decent botanist was definitely a step in the right direction. It's simple and to the point while explaining everything in a straightforward fashion.

The seed packets are a nice touch too, if a little plain. Definitely better than the tiny-ass seed sprites anyway. A small suggestion may be to make them look nicer by including a small image of the crop a seed grows, but it's fine as-is.

I am digging the new hydroponics tubs and the fact that they can hold much more water now. Water concerns should be halved now, at the very least.

I haven't messed around with the gene manipulator as much, but I've seen some other players have a degree of success with it. Still, could be tweaked a bit more.

I have no other input on how seed splicing would work. I once suggested this of that:

• Seeds have a 50/50 chance to successfully splice. If they do not splice successfully one of two can happen:The spliced seed will not yield anything and be useless (You fail to harvest anything) or the spliced seed will only yield one of the things and have mix-mash genetics of the two seeds.
  
• If the spliced seeds successfully fuse, then we can see one of two things, each having an equal chance of happening: The plant will be able to grow both crops at the same time (The plant pot will show plant A/plant B and use the sprite of the alphabetically-successive plant) or you'll have a hybrid (grapple, synthmeatlon, corn-nuts, etc.)
  
• A note on the above: Only certain splices can successfully become hybrids. The rest will only result in dual harvests. How hybrids actually work, I'm not sure. Perhaps incorporating recipes would do the trick.
  
• Another, easier thing to do is to cross-pollinate seeds so that they take the genetics of the other seed while keeping their own species (transgenics.) This would be like crossing ghost chili with cannabis so that the cannabis has the traits of that ghost chili. Something like that.
  
• A secondary function to cross-pollination would be to somehow make the crossed seed have the reagents of the other seed's plant. An example would be a lime that contains bicaridine, or bananas loaded with psilocybin.
  
• No idea on what would happen when splicing strange seeds with any other seed. Or two seeds that are the same kind. Maybe different variety of man-eater? A melon-striped maneater would be a riot, for sure.

remove all plants except for cannabis, then we dont have to worry about all of these problems

Don't be surprised then, when the chef comes gunning for you with a butcher knife. Or if there's a mass radiation outbreak and the medbay runs out of dylovene. Then what?

There is no way to flush out toxic slurry from the trays so you're stuck with a useless tray after a slurry pod explodes before it's even able to be harvested.

Oh yeah, that's another problem. Slurry pods like to explode before you can harvest them.

Also, the different fertilizers seem to last forever, so you can just set up a system where you have specific fertilizers in different trays and use them systematically for what you want. This doesn't seem like the intended purpose, but I could be wrong.

Drag the pot onto yourself to empty it out. If that doesn't fix it, sounds like a bug.

The thing with slurrypods is that you have to harvest them quickly, otherwise they'll burst when you get near them. You pretty much have to stay on top of them if you want to avoid this.

I used a beaker to splash small amounts of nutrient onto crops and they seemed to work just fine. Because there isn't a full-fledged nutrition system, the nutrient solution you add into a tray will seemingly be in effect until you empty the tub out.

I'll have to test out whether you can have all of the nutrient solutions in one tray and have them all be in effect at once.

[Klayboxx]

Drag the pot onto yourself to empty it out. If that doesn't fix it, sounds like a bug.

The thing with slurrypods is that you have to harvest them quickly, otherwise they'll burst when you get near them. You pretty much have to stay on top of them if you want to avoid this.

I used a beaker to splash small amounts of nutrient onto crops and they seemed to work just fine. Because there isn't a full-fledged nutrition system, the nutrient solution you add into a tray will seemingly be in effect until you empty the tub out.

I'll have to test out whether you can have all of the nutrient solutions in one tray and have them all be in effect at once.

[/quote]

Didn't know you could actually empty them. Never mind that.

I know slurrypods burst after they are ready to harvest, I'm talking they burst before they are even harvest-able. As it they either haven't even gotten big enough to see or they are still small lumps or even the large lump with no stem. I've sat next to one and spam clicked it just so I'd make sure It'd harvest and it still exploded.

[FrontlineAcrobat4]

remove all plants except for cannabis, then we dont have to worry about all of these problems

Don't be surprised then, when the chef comes gunning for you with a butcher knife. Or if there's a mass radiation outbreak and the medbay runs out of dylovene. Then what?

Who needs food and medicine when we have weed?

Moon Dawg says, "Relax my children, the weed will set us free."

Swedish Chef exclaims, "FOOCK YOU!"

[ISaidNo]

Ahh, see now this is the kind of feedback i'm looking for, a point-by-point analysis of each thing and what's good or bad about it.

The seed packets are a nice touch too, if a little plain. Definitely better than the tiny-ass seed sprites anyway. A small suggestion may be to make them look nicer by including a small image of the crop a seed grows, but it's fine as-is.

Well the way I coded the seed packets was that they have a generic icon, and then the game colors in the black around the packet with a color defined in the seed. Having a picture of a crop instead of the sprout on the packet would very much be possible but it'd kind of do the exact thing I wanted to avoid, of having a million different icons in the icon file!

I am digging the new hydroponics tubs and the fact that they can hold much more water now. Water concerns should be halved now, at the very least.

I may be reading you wrong here - do you mean they ARE halved right now, or they SHOULD be halved?

I haven't messed around with the gene manipulator as much, but I've seen some other players have a degree of success with it. Still, could be tweaked a bit more.

I was intending to do away with it completely in favor of a new method for splicing plants. The problem is I haven't thought of it yet. Like, the method of cross-pollination - how? Do you use a seed on an existing plant? Some new machine that mushes seeds together? I don't get it.

Seeds have a 50/50 chance to successfully splice.(and all following)

Idea I had was that the genes passed between seeds would just be the stat genes and gene strain mutations. Stuff like crop yield, species, and species-specific mutations like rainbow weed wouldn't be transmittable. But say you have a cannabis seed with drought resistance and excellent potency and you want to pass those to a Chili seed, you'd splice the two and get a chili seed with high potency and drought resistance, and hopefully whatever other good traits that both seeds possessed.
Clarks suggested a dominant/recessive gene system where dominance for genes are tracked, and the dominant one will always take precedence if the other is submissive, otherwise it'd be 50/50.
Again i'm not doing hybrid species plants like melongrapes or corntomatoes because it's too much work to account for all the hybrids.

There is no way to flush out toxic slurry from the trays so you're stuck with a useless tray after a slurry pod explodes before it's even able to be harvested.

Oh yeah, that's another problem. Slurry pods like to explode before you can harvest them.

Also, the different fertilizers seem to last forever, so you can just set up a system where you have specific fertilizers in different trays and use them systematically for what you want. This doesn't seem like the intended purpose, but I could be wrong.

You can do the drag-drop to clean out a pot altogether as was mentioned, but I may tweak slurrypods anyway.
As they are:
Slurrypods while present will add Toxic Slurry to the pot just by being in it. (removing this) When they reach harvestable maturity, they have a 5% chance every tick to burst, destroying themselves and poisoning pots and people within a 3 tile radius. I could add a further delay to this, though I may consider just making slurrypods much rarer in general or make them a special thing rather than a randomly growing weed.

[enforcer9]

Slurrypods while present will add Toxic Slurry to the pot just by being in it. (removing this) When they reach harvestable maturity, they have a 5% chance every tick to burst, destroying themselves and poisoning pots and people within a 3 tile radius. I could add a further delay to this, though I may consider just making slurrypods much rarer in general or make them a special thing rather than a randomly growing weed.

You can already make slurrypod seeds with hacked vendors, so removing them from the weed list would probably be the way to go.

Also, you should be able to do stuff with slurrypods besides eat them and vomit green. I was thinking that the chef could cook it similarly to a pufferfish. Give it a cooking time and heat that varies each round, and let the chef cook them in the oven by themselves. Whether the chef cooks it right or wrong would not affect the look/name of the dish. If the chef is incorrect in the time/heat, eating the dish would cause like 50 units of cyanide to form in your blood stream. If it is perfectly cooked, then it gives you some sort of probably overpowered boost.

[Klayboxx]

Slurrypods while present will add Toxic Slurry to the pot just by being in it. (removing this) When they reach harvestable maturity, they have a 5% chance every tick to burst, destroying themselves and poisoning pots and people within a 3 tile radius. I could add a further delay to this, though I may consider just making slurrypods much rarer in general or make them a special thing rather than a randomly growing weed.

You can already make slurrypod seeds with hacked vendors, so removing them from the weed list would probably be the way to go.

Also, you should be able to do stuff with slurrypods besides eat them and vomit green. I was thinking that the chef could cook it similarly to a pufferfish. Give it a cooking time and heat that varies each round, and let the chef cook them in the oven by themselves. Whether the chef cooks it right or wrong would not affect the look/name of the dish. If the chef is incorrect in the time/heat, eating the dish would cause like 50 units of cyanide to form in your blood stream. If it is perfectly cooked, then it gives you some sort of probably overpowered boost.

There is a ~secret~ recipe using the regular ones. I don't know about the omegas.

To ISaidNo;

The thing is that they burst even when they aren't at harvestable maturity. I am fully aware that they burst when they are harvestable, but sometimes they aren't even visable as decals because I had just put the seed in and they explode.

[Val]

I may be reading you wrong here - do you mean they ARE halved right now, or they SHOULD be halved?

I'm saying that they are halved right now, on account of tubs holding at least twice as much water as before. The water system works fine as it is at the moment. There's less of a concern to water everything as it once was, anyway.

I was intending to do away with it completely in favor of a new method for splicing plants. The problem is I haven't thought of it yet. Like, the method of cross-pollination - how? Do you use a seed on an existing plant? Some new machine that mushes seeds together? I don't get it.

I was thinking of something like the latter. Similar to the gene manipulator, but made with the express purpose to cross-pollinate and splice the seeds.

Idea I had was that the genes passed between seeds would just be the stat genes and gene strain mutations. Stuff like crop yield, species, and species-specific mutations like rainbow weed wouldn't be transmittable...

Yes, this is a lot of what I also had in mind when thinking of the splicing mechanic. Transgenic crops with beneficial traits from other seeds. Although the process of splicing would be tricky itself to where you'd have to get just those traits you want without messing everything else up.

Clarks suggested a dominant/recessive gene system where dominance for genes are tracked, and the dominant one will always take precedence if the other is submissive, otherwise it'd be 50/50.

I guess this could also work. I'm guessing the plant analyzer will come into play here. Or better yet, make a super plant analyzer machine (probably the same as the plant splicer) so you can figure out which genes do what and what's most likely to be passed onto the next generation or the seeds you want to splice.

I could add a further delay to this, though I may consider just making slurrypods much rarer in general or make them a special thing rather than a randomly growing weed.

I don't see a huge deal with slurry pods, but making them a greater threat would be interesting. In my opinion they should be rarer, but not much more rare than any of the existing dangerous weed types. If anything, fungus should be a bit more common.

Most of the dangers in hydroponics are directed towards the player in the form of lashers and radweed. The creeper is annoying to deal with, but the most it does is just prevent you from growing in that tub and spread into other ones, similar to kudzu...hmm.

[V12US]

Hi, I am hydrobot.

stages,
off.

Running around with a watering can sucks the joy out of hydroponics.

Alternatively, a Mist Generator that works the same way as the old chemist traitor's smoke machine, except it only works with water (automatically purges other substances).

When turned on (and filled with water), it will automatically water all plants/pots in the immediate area. Possibly also make things slippery and/or wet. Automated irrigation.

When E-Magged, it will no longer purge other substances. This gives botanists traitors the lite version of playing 'chemist traitor'.


I agree that having to manually water plants makes hydroponics a crappy job. It's like a really boring game of whack a mole.

[Anticheese]

What if hydroponics worked on a network of water pipes running from some maintenance sector (possibly above the warehouse?) to a bunch of nodes that tanks can be hooked up to directly for autowatering? The watering can can remain if the system breaks down, or if you want to grow pot on the go.

Obviously, it should be possible to poison the water supply with arbitrary chemicals.

[enforcer9]

What if hydroponics worked on a network of water pipes running from some maintenance sector (possibly above the warehouse?) to a bunch of nodes that tanks can be hooked up to directly for autowatering? The watering can can remain if the system breaks down, or if you want to grow pot on the go.

Obviously, it should be possible to poison the water supply with arbitrary chemicals.

I was thinking that water/gas pipes (like the ones in toxins) should be buildable with metal, along with connectors. connectors would be able to hook up to the water tank, and pipes could be wrenched onto the pots. That way, the botanists, could have the electricians be plumbers too while they hack their weed dispenser.

[ISaidNo]

How's the tidbits i've been throwing Hydro so far? I like to focus on convenience when I can since they're easy to code and also make the operation of things smoother.
It's odd going back and looking at my older code - the time delay on things like the seed extractor and reagent extractor just seemed like the "done thing" at the time but now they just come off as a stupid pointless time sink, considering the lag and all.

EDIT:
Oh yeah I forgot to mention something in the changelog: electricians can now scan and build plant pots.

[Klayboxx]

How's the tidbits i've been throwing Hydro so far? I like to focus on convenience when I can since they're easy to code and also make the operation of things smoother.
It's odd going back and looking at my older code - the time delay on things like the seed extractor and reagent extractor just seemed like the "done thing" at the time but now they just come off as a stupid pointless time sink, considering the lag and all.

EDIT:
Oh yeah I forgot to mention something in the changelog: electricians can now scan and build plant pots.

The changes are very nice and convenient to boot. I'm sure the process coud be refined further but as it is now it is moderately enjoyable to be a botanist.