Hydroponics Tweaks and Adjustments

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Hydroponics is a surprisingly deep field that, unfortunately, is not usually exploited; a few people know unique splices and the good mutations, but aside from that, I never seen botany make any real headway or have any huge impact on the station (traitor or otherwise). Heck, one of the job specific traitor items for Botanist is just a blunt-force weapon, more or less that precisely discourages them from doing their job (growing stuff...and yes, I realize there's maneaters).

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-Building Endurance-

Currently, you can alter every single plant's individual stats quite reliable with potash, saltpetre, and ammonia. The problem is, however, is there's no way to reliable alter endurance; you have to just plain get lucky with mutagen or random pure luck (in combination with selective breeding) for this number to go up. You can boost the endurance of slurry pods, but the problem is, these don't play nice, at all, with splicing and other plants. Why is impacting endurance so important? A number of mutations are dependent on endurance, particularly lifeweed; lifeweed is almost never seen, ever, because it's incredibly hard to get the endurance stat to heighten to the appropriate level. Perhaps compost could raise endurance as well as plant health?

Wait, plant mutations are dependent on specific stats? The wiki says mutations have a small and completely random chance of becoming a mutated variant whenever planted or infused! Does this mean there's more reliable ways to get mutations than pumping unstable mutagen into a seed and checking for mutations after each infusion?

That might be a big part of the problem - I don't think it's any coincidence that the underused mechanics in the game are usually the ones that are poorly or confusingly documented, give very little feedback regarding what you're doing right or wrong, and still don't really offer all that much payoff for your troubles.