Botany potency effects

[Roomba]

I know the crowd here isn't very receptive to ideas from other codebases, but what the heck, botany hasn't gotten very much in the way of new stuff since forever.

Here, potency is more or less an indicator of how much of X chemical/s a plant contains. On other codebases, high potency has additional features - a super high potency banana produces a peel that stuns a person almost as long as a stun baton, a super low potency one barely even stuns them. The plant that you can stab people with hits incredibly hard with high potency and barely tickles with low potency, etc. It also affects how big/small the sprite of the plant is, although I don't know if that feature would be as well-received here - it'd be harder to hide peanuts containing several hundred units of toxin as ordinary peanuts, for instance.

I always thought this would be a fun feature on goon. Some ideas off the top of my head:

-synthlimbs: Affects how strong they are/how fast you move, etc.

-Money tree: affects how much money you can grow. I think this was already supposed to be a feature, but no one ever got around to implementing it.

-Lashers: affects how hard and how often they hit people.

-Radweed: affects the size and area of the radiation burst.

-Creeper: affects how fast it spreads, allows it to spread over walls/floors. Maybe not to the extent of kudzu, though.

-Slurrypod: affects the size of the area covered in glowing slurry if it's allowed to burst.

-Rainbow Melon: affects how hard it hits when you throw them at someone.

-Exploding tomatoes: affects explosion size. Maybe cap out at welding-fuel pipe mob or so?

-Banana: See above. Honestly, I just want that particular feature.

I admit that I'm having trouble thinking of stuff for the more ordinary plants/veggies, so any ideas would be appreciated. If there's some coding reason why this can't be implemented, maybe have some of these available as high-potency mutations.

[Noah Buttes]

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I could've sworn tomatoes already scaled with potency, but they apparently don't according to the code.

[Haprenti]

- Garlic : flavor text for being near someone having eaten a potent garlic, the radius of this effect depending on potency

- Carrots : turns your skin slightly orange if you eat a lot of normal carrots ; the more potent the carrots are, the less you need to eat to become fully orange

Regular plants like avocados or strawberries could start producing other chemicals after reaching a potency threshold. Not necessarily useful chemicals, maybe just gimmick ones, not available using only chemistry like super beta-carotene for carrots for the easiest example.

[Grifflez]

- Bananas: Negative potency produces rotten bananas (basically a mutation strain) that contain dirty syringes and razor blades when eaten. The peels cause people to slip and smash their heads against the ground, instead of just the harmless fun of slipping. Very, very, very small chance to be cluwned when eating rotten bananas.

[Vitatroll]

I'm not gonna say botany is lacking in stuff to do. It's pretty versatile, with elements of heal, harm, and ham all rolled in to one giant doobie. Still, it hasn't received new 'goals' in forever. Potency threshold effects would be a good addition.

[UmmonTL]

I like the ideas, only problem in my opinion is that raising one value on the plant is currently a pretty mindless task. Get tons of the right reagent, keep infusing and adding to the plants until the value is high enough. It would be great if the splicing system could do something here, maybe some plants could have naturally high potency/endurance/etc. and splicing those with the plant you actually want the value on would be faster than infusion and additives. Come to think of it I never checked if certain plants do have higher attributes than others.

Edit: With some plants I would go a different route from just using potency. For example with the slurrypod I would make it so higher endurance creates a bigger splash (can sustain higher pressure) but it takes longer to burst. Higher maturation rate then speeds up the burst and potency affects the amount of the reagent that you get hit with.

[Roomba]

Maybe having some of these effects be dependent on other values would be interesting, but I don't think it should be deliberately built up as obtuse from the ground up. The fun comes from taking relatively simple systems and seeing what kind of emergent behavior results, like scattering several hundred zero-potency banana peels over the floor so people are constantly slipping with no stun whatsoever. If you make it too complex right off the bat, you end up with something like pathology, a crippled mess that gathers dust most rounds because no one ever felt like hammering it into a workable state.

[Erev]

Actually Pathology is quite workable. The only problems are a lack of beneficial symptoms and an issue where symptoms sometimes fire like crazy and other times not at all - even when compared from the same strain of the same disease.

[misto]

normal tree: growing normal trees of sufficient potency should produce stronger and stronger wood planks, that can be build into ever stronger barricade walls that need dozens, hundreds of hits to break down, or which can burn longer and hotter in a furnace

[UmmonTL]

normal tree: growing normal trees of sufficient potency should produce stronger and stronger wood planks, that can be build into ever stronger barricade walls that need dozens, hundreds of hits to break down, or which can burn longer and hotter in a furnace

ooh, I like the idea of getting a hotter burn. Though I would guess that depends on the furnace code? Still the idea of botany growing some sort of engine superfuel would be quite interesting for the hellburn experiments in engineering. There at least you have a department that can endlessly consume resources during the round.
Edit: It might be horrible for the station if botany can mass-produce some sort of hellfuel.

[misto]

Edit: It might be horrible for the station if botany can mass-produce some sort of hellfuel.

other departments get to do things that are horrible for the station all the time

[Grek]

Actually Pathology is quite workable. The only problems are a lack of beneficial symptoms and an issue where symptoms sometimes fire like crazy and other times not at all - even when compared from the same strain of the same disease.

I could never figure it out