smol botany balance ideas

[millichips]

hi! i've noticed botany is both overpowered for people that can use it properly, and very underperforming for newbies, i am here only to address the former problem.

here's a few ideas of OP stuff and how i'd address them:
1- Omnizine is too easy to obtain
why: currently it takes 3 to 5 minutes to get omnizine via light lotus plants, about 9 minutes with white weed, considering that its not only a very good heal chem but that botany combines it with every other heal chem available to them, its very, very strong.
how: make light lotus rarer / remove strange seeds from job rewards / increase stat requirements for white weed

2- Methamphetamine is too easy to obtain
why: it's by far botany's strongest stimulant, when combined with sugar, nicotine and nicotwaine, it makes you so stun resistant that you don't even lose your aggressive grab after suplexing someone, as well as being stupidly fast, impossible to shove to the ground, and getting stunned for 2.5 seconds at a time with a baton.
how: potency or endurance requirement for the robust asomna mutation.

and here's a few ideas of underperforming/useless  stuff and how i'd address them:
1- Quivering contusine is useless
why: with the removal of curare, this plant mutation now got Histamine, which causes some brute damage at low doses. this plant comes with salicylic acid by default which negates ALL of the damage that such low amount of histamine causes.
how: replace histamine with formaldehyde / atrazine / venom, this will change it back into dealing tox damage without having it be as overpowered as it was with curare.

2- Pentetic acid and CLF3 are insanely hard to obtain.
why: CLF3 does almost the exact same as phlogiston, except it takes 30 minutes longer to obtain.
the process of lowering the genome of smoldering radweed is excruciatingly hard, whereas phlog is just replanting a plant until you see it being fiery.
how: lowering the genome of radweed by 5 is enough to make it "obtainable" spending 20minutes instead of 30, about 8 less genome to make it actually usable in a reasonable timeframe.

other ideas:
1- Add more unique chemicals to strange seeds
why: this would give us a reason to go for rock, peeker, synthcat and etc. splices, maybe some base elements to make other fun chems!
how: stuff like giving carbon/fluorine/copper to certain rock mutations, oxygen from peekers, (regular) blood from synthcats.

2- Port-a-tray
why: please?
how: pleeeeeeeease?

3- Make drippers/pukers drip/puke whatever chemicals they would otherwise contain in their produce
why: it makes sense! so we can finally just deliver a puker that slowly floods medbay with synthflesh lol.
how: uhh.

and here's a few possibly unintended things/ bugs:
1- Ghost critters can use the plantmaster's full functionality as well a trays (including renaming seeds, splicing, infusing, planting seeds, harvesting seeds, carrying a produce satchel full of exploding tomatoes and gibbing someone)

2- The Blood chemical from blood oranges doesn't make carpet when combined with fungus
-- trust me this one is important

3- Tomato splice's water/potassium explosion:
the explosion currently works because tomatoes apparently mix their chemicals at the same time that they explode, but they don't release the chemicals. so water potassium works cuz the reaction alone is enough to have it go boom, but mixing napalm in a tomato / giving it phlogiston does absolutely nothing, imo it should release the chemicals inside the tomato as a puddle. (this still wouldnt ignite napalm on its own but it would still help)

thoughts, comment and additional ideas appreciated!
ideas by Millicent Hoffman and Gnomo Yuben.
thanks.

[UrsulaMejor]

you can extract and isolate the histamine with the reagent extractor. having a way to make histamine other than butchering wasps or getting it from farming chemical reactions with monkeys seems interesting to me.

[millichips]

you can extract and isolate the histamine with the reagent extractor. having a way to make histamine other than butchering wasps or getting it from farming chemical reactions with monkeys seems interesting to me.

we could do that in some other plant maybe, instead of specifically the one that also heals the brute that histamine causes

[RGBDeadSilent]

Being able to get histamine without jumping through hoops is nice, but as a kill chem histamine is useless. I suggest simply adding a new plant instead for histamine, like a poison ivy kinda thing.

I can agree with a bunch of the other ideas though. Nicotwaine super meth peanuts is insane, and some of the plants are such a nightmare to farm up too.

[Vocalpocal]

you can extract and isolate the histamine with the reagent extractor. having a way to make histamine other than butchering wasps or getting it from farming chemical reactions with monkeys seems interesting to me.

First of all, botany already had a histamine plant: Omegaweed. Second,  extraction is horribly inefficient for botany, as it is a job of which greatest strength is in mass producing nuts/hotboxes. Quivering contusine was reduced from an apex deathbox material to a joke.

I do not think botany needs any real nerfs. The only thing I can really think of is making hotboxing just a bit harder for newer botanists, but I have no idea how could you do this in a fun and creative way.


Some rebalancing ideas though:
- Make lingblood (or blood in general) not as effective in making maneaters massive with infusion. Instead, give maneaters massive stats each time you feed them mobs (while they are growing and maybe a bit when they are out of the pot too)
- Reduce radweed GN from 40 (lol) to 30. Move Avocado to 40 so that you can (with great pain and effort) splice slurrypods with other plants
- Give hacked GardenGear vendors a double edged "Speed Growth chem", which can be used to infuse a seed. It would greatly increase the growth and maturation rate, setting it to 60 and 40 respectively BUT it would also give the seed "seedless strain" (and also deal exactly 100% seed damage). This way you could do at least something as a botanist when there is a nukie round, but the seedless strain and hard capping of stats would make it very inefficient in long run.
- For the love of god make clearing tray harder with drag and drop. An antag pest critter can just come in to botany at any time and instantly clear every single tray. This is also extremely infuriating as a botanist antagonist, where sec officer can just instantly clear a maneater tray. This is bullshit, considering that weeds such as Lashers require a lot of commitment to get rid of.

[Zonespace]

2- The Blood chemical from blood oranges doesn't make carpet when combined with fungus
-- trust me this one is important

This is because blood oranges have changeling blood, which is fundamentally different from normal blood, and thus unusable in standard chem recipes

[Lythine]

A few of my opinions:

Yeah, omnizine is too easy to get and it's a bit dumb how you can get it two different ways with one being far easier than the other. I don't like the idea of removing strange seeds from job rewards but replacing light lotus' chemical with some other fun thing sounds like a really nice solution. Wouldn't mind lifeweed becoming a bit harder too.

Wouldn't mind robust asomna becoming a bit harder to get.

As for quivering contusine, I'd rather it not have histamine. Histamine is already in omega weed and using quivering contusine for splicing is practically worthless due to it having a chem that heals the damage the histamine would deal. Curare was indeed far too good, but how about something like lipolicide? It could use a resprite too, it's sprite is the same as shivering contusine's.

The genome of radweed, fungus and slurrypods should be lowered. It's sad how they can't be spliced with normal plants without extreme dedication and luck.

It'd be awesome to have the misc strange seeds have their own chemicals! Additionally, strange seeds with unique procs (such as peeker, synthetic cat, plasma) currently break when they're dominant and spliced. They never become harvestable.

Also, can we please consider removing the ability to click-drag to clear trays? It's a bit cheap that you can remove an entire tray's contents in two seconds and makes it trivial to remove things like weeds that aren't meant to be easy to remove.

[Ikea]

I dont see the need to make meth from botany harder to get, considering meth production is literally one chemgroup, or just buy robust eez from a soda vendor for a few credits.

[UrsulaMejor]

saying that histamine is in omega weed is a bit ridiculous imo; who is going to spend 30 minutes grinding saltpetre for histamine??? especially when omega weed has way more interesting things in it, like bath salts, that make the histamine not even relevant.

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Also, can we please consider removing the ability to click-drag to clear trays? It's a bit cheap that you can remove an entire tray's contents in two seconds and makes it trivial to remove things like weeds that aren't meant to be easy to remove.

click dragging doesn't remove weeds, or isn't supposed to. you need to chainsaw them out.

---

Being able to get histamine without jumping through hoops is nice, but as a kill chem histamine is useless. 

I don't think it's useful to consider its application as a kill chem in this context. The point was to remove curare, not to replace it with another deadly poison.

[Vocalpocal]

saying that histamine is in omega weed is a bit ridiculous imo; who is going to spend 30 minutes grinding saltpetre for histamine??? especially when omega weed has way more interesting things in it, like bath salts, that make the histamine not even relevant.

Or maybe, histamine is just completely useless? Who in their right mind would ever want to mass produce it, especially when it comes with salicylic? If you really really want bath salts in botany you could make Omegaweed, but omegaweed chems are not why you ever make omegaweed anyway.

Being able to get histamine without jumping through hoops is nice, but as a kill chem histamine is useless. 

I don't think it's useful to consider its application as a kill chem in this context. The point was to remove curare, not to replace it with another deadly poison.

Might as well remove Quivering Contusine mutation instead if you really want to spit on botanists. The skinpen effect was very abusable with beaker extraction. The chem was not completely over the top in hot boxes, which was its main use -- until people realized how OP it is to just extract and splash it (and it took only 6 hours for the "hotfix" to hit lmao).

But now since there are no skinpen cc chems in botany toxic grass is no longer a thing. And before you say "add super hairgrownium" I must remind you taht it eats a lot of plant potency in useless chems, is painfully slow to make and the recipe is 1u+1u+1u=3u, which easily fills mobs with superhairgrownium up to 330u cap before applying deathchems.



One more thing, which doesn't concern only botanists: Kudzu passive growth need a massive nerf, and Kudzumen in turn require a massive buff. The passive growth is insane and is extremely annoying to deal with. Kudzumen, on the other hand, are extremely helpless, slow and incapable of doing anything useful. Suggested kudzu things, which I might PR soon:

- Reduce kudzu passive growth by an extremely large margin, like 1/4th of what it is now
- Kudzu growth is quadrupled when there are kudzumen nearby
- Kudzumen now passively gain healing chem when standing on kudzu. "Kudzu spores" is a new chem which only affect kudzumen. It heals a bit o
- Kudzumen can use disarm intent (Why the hell is disarm intent disabled on kudzumen? It makes no sense, it is a peaceful way to defend your kudzu)
- Humans area capable of passing through kudzu like kudzumen are if both of their legs are Synth legs
- Synth Eyes allow you to see through thick kudzu
- Kudzu seed can now be loaded in an implanter. When Implanted, the mob turns into kudzuman upon death, with few kudzu tiles around it.

[UrsulaMejor]

we could do that in some other plant maybe, instead of specifically the one that also heals the brute that histamine causes

There's precedent for this. see: burning commol

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y'all also forget that histamine is the deadliest chemical on the station to peeps with certain traits

[Vocalpocal]

we could do that in some other plant maybe, instead of specifically the one that also heals the brute that histamine causes

There's precedent for this. see: burning commol

---

y'all also forget that histamine is the deadliest chemical on the station to peeps with certain traits

Commol is different because Silver Sulf touch effect applies only once when you enter the cloud of phlogiston (and even then it is capped at 10 units). And besides the burn easily outdamages petty petty silver sul, compared to histamine's RNG brute to constant salicylic brute heal. Histamine was an awful replacement plain and simple.

[Rilor]

we could do that in some other plant maybe, instead of specifically the one that also heals the brute that histamine causes

There's precedent for this. see: burning commol

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y'all also forget that histamine is the deadliest chemical on the station to peeps with certain traits

Does botany even have a way of knowing who has that trait and who doesnt? also it might also be a intresting idea to make it possible to have histamine in an ingredient in a more powerful poison that only needs chems botany can produce... Currare could be intresting and itd make it avalible to botanists still, just far harder depending on the ingredients

[millichips]

we could do that in some other plant maybe, instead of specifically the one that also heals the brute that histamine causes

There's precedent for this. see: burning commol

---

y'all also forget that histamine is the deadliest chemical on the station to peeps with certain traits

the phlog in burning commol heavily outdamages the silver sulf
the histamine doesn't cause even like an eight of the damage that salicylic heals

it'd be fine by me if it were ticking for a bunch of brute per lifecycle like commol would burn, but its probably easier to replace the histamine with something else lol

[Mouse]

Bring back curare and remove the skin penetration it never should have had IMO.

And make it require base stats to appear as a mutation so you can't get it out of the vendor.