Botany: glowing slurry infusion

[Scaltra]

As a botanist who avoid using mutagen I am very indifferent to this. There is still little incentive to use mutagen over planting multiple seeds, especially if you care about keeping your gene strains in check.

The only thing this would change, is making it less of a pain to get radweed seeds to mutate. But if the process damage them too much they will be harder or even impossible to splice for any possible harvest.

Mutagen would make more sense if natural mutations didn't exist or if some mutations could only happen with mutagen.

And even then, in an hypothetical world where mutagen was usefull I would have concerns about making glowing slurry just better mutagen. Because then what is the basic mutagen good for ?

I mean, glowing slurry requires a hacked seed dispenser and a slurrypod mutation to be avaible. Unstable mutagen is there from the get go. In the same vein we could ask why styptic powder does exist while synthflesh is just better in every regard. Giving us a better alternative with a higher opportunity cost is completely fine.

But i overall agree that infusing mutagen needs a serious buff. Like locking certain mutations behind the use of mutagen/slurry in trays and infusion. Like different colored berries and mutations locked behind stats could be created on your own, but e.g. most tree mutations, jelly beans, iron wheat, magic mushrooms, rainbow weed, blooming lashers and rainbow melons would be locked behind mutagen use. Would also thematically make sense to differentiate between "natural" mutation and "plants bein radioactive abominations".

This would be especially usefull since you then don't get your lifeweed or money trees destroyed by natural mutations. This would give mutagen use AND natural mutations different purposes.

But that is probably outside of the scope of what Scaltra wants to do.

Actually, I do quite like this idea, originally before my thumb decided to hit my back page hotkey I was going to agree that it wasn't in scope and that I had a similar idea for it but I probably didn't have the know-how to do so. However, I think I might do a much more simple yet similar change plus or minus a couple of things 

A few thoughts on what could be done plus or minus some of these

• Remove planting mutation chance in general and have stable, unstable, and omega_mutagen (glowing slurry) be the only way to mutate a plant
  

See if it would be possible to make mutagen and mutadone stat influence a sort of back-and-forth dance for stat boosting or subtracting. Depending on how hard it would be to code. either splits its buff and negative across the alleles, fully dumping some and fully raising others at entirely random. Or only raising dominant alleles but ruining recessive ones. (would probably need to make sure those are locked at 50/50 if that was the case)

• make mutadone raise negative stats by a lot more but not above zero maybe? As well as having the risk to force the commut of mutation blocker and (maybe splice blocker) because of more rigid DNA.
  

• Having stable mutagen do the least, maybe only causes plant commuts plus minor stat changes
  
• Have unstable mutagen cause plant-type mutations as well as moderate stat modification 
  
• Have glowing slurry do very large stat changes, cause unstable commut as well as doing the latter effects. 
  
  
  Maybe have some mutations and commuts locked behind glowing slurry infusions, some good, some bad. Also, tray chems for these would need to be changed up a bit too. My original idea was a lot more complicated and would have required a plant master mk3 change where you would infuse mutagens into specific alleles and would have a lot to do if they were dominant or not. Opening the gateway for more negative/ lower stat mutations and deliberate stat mutation. As well as specifically targeting plant type for mutations. That sounds like a coding nightmare through. Where this idea only sounds like that in one spot. Being if you can make the stat manipulation through mutagens work a specific way. If not could just have mutadone only be there for blocking mutations once you are at where you like but that sucks. I want mutagen and mutadone to play off each other and be a fun chaotic way to boost stats at huge risks. That or maybe mutadone can just be an eraser for all mutations. Can help get rid of commmuts that showed up that you didn't want or a mutation you didn't want. No clue how hard that would be to code though
  

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As a botanist who avoid using mutagen I am very indifferent to this. There is still little incentive to use mutagen over planting multiple seeds, especially if you care about keeping your gene strains in check.

The only thing this would change, is making it less of a pain to get radweed seeds to mutate. But if the process damage them too much they will be harder or even impossible to splice for any possible harvest.

Mutagen would make more sense if natural mutations didn't exist or if some mutations could only happen with mutagen.

And even then, in an hypothetical world where mutagen was usefull I would have concerns about making glowing slurry just better mutagen. Because then what is the basic mutagen good for ?

yeah, Spamming seed planting is strong, it is easily the most efficient method of getting mutations at little to no cost. Meanwhile, mutagen stuff feels even less consistent than planting at times at a far greater risk. There are plenty more niche mutations and things that glowing slurry in the suggested implementation could do it just isn't really...particularly amazing. I would love it just for the guaranteed chance of mutation because planting seeds over and over again is annoying and some mutations are less likely to show up through that. Delicious apples for example are a very low chance even when you get to the stat requirements. Only 10% if I recall. 

I agree with Lord earthfire though on the latter point especially. Glowing slurry is allowed to be better. I suspect your concern isn't that though, It is more about unstable mutagen just being completely useless as it normally is while glowing slurry would be decent but also not amazing even with the effort put in. Less so of glowing slurry being too good. See the other post I made in a reply to Lord earthfire maybe? I might end up doing that. 

DO KEEP IN MIND that I would also change the vendors to be able to dispense at least a decent starting amount of stable mutagen for people in garden gears if it is now a thing.