Botany: glowing slurry infusion

[Scaltra]

Glowing slurry being omega_mutagen I always felt like it should have a much stronger presence in botany. Don't get me wrong, the tray chem isn't bad, but, strangely, it doesn't have an infusion. 

I had a few ideas for what to have the infusion do.

• Have it randomize the stats at a much higher amount ([Higher highs lower lows etc] just more procs per infusion of the same thing mutagen does on infusion) 
  

• Have it be guaranteed to proc a mutation or near-guaranteed This is what glowing slurry already essentially does. The only difference being this would require ten units and not require the plant to be planted. could help remove some of the tedium and RNG of trying to infuse mutagen into certain plant splice mixes that require mutation before planting. 
  

• Finally, what I want it to do would be a combination of all the listed ideas plus about a 50% chance of giving the seed the unstable gene trait. Dropping a mutagen bomb on the plant. giving it high random stat variation, mutating wildly in the plant tray between any plant mutations that plant may have if it hits the 50% as well as being a useful tool/risk for high stat rolls or forcing a mutation. 
  

I have added and tested all my ideas locally and seem to work fine with the code I have. Just wanted some feedback from some botany nerds and the like.
What values might be nice, general thoughts, etc. 

[Lord_earthfire]

We have talked about this on the discord before.

I overall like these changes. The unstable gene also adds a nice failure condition to balance out the almost guaranteed mutation. Overall, i like it.

[BadShot]

A use for slurry pods at any rate that isnt consume to mutate horribly. I'd be for it

[Decarcassor]

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 ?

[Lord_earthfire]

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.

[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
  

---

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.

[Lord_earthfire]

From my experience with mutagen splicing, i cannot really agree with a removing of seed spam in general. We know how shitty radweed mutation is and we got many plants that have similar mutation chances. Just raising the chances would make tray usage a nightmare. So you would to use two different multiplier for this.

Stat based mutation almost require to mutate on planting, since mutagen scrambles stats and can kick the plant out of the range (especially lifeweed with the 30-50 endurance requirement). Your suggested stable mutagen change would be required here.

My main concern comes for the rancher. The rancher requires some specific mutated plants to get started. Without a rebalance, you would simply delay the rancher by 5+ minutes. And if any job doesn't need a further delays, then it is the rancher.

Last but not least, many gimmicks of botany require multiple mutations, since many base chems are locked behind them. So without a rebalance of the mutation chances, you would simply just make 4 mutation splices move from.the 20 to the 40 minute mark. And botany is already a very secluded department already.

This is why i suggested gating certain "dead end" plants, like rainbow weed, tree mutations and rainbow melons, behind mutagen. It was meant as a simple to add buff to make botany more controllable. Adding this as a blanket would simply delay botany and rancher in general. And even my suggestion would spark a controversial discussion.

This sounds like a really big rebalance of botany that wpuld require many changes. I would suggest making a design doc to figure out what should be the scope of it and how the numbers should look.

But, if you micronize the changes it would work better. Ike firstly, add the omega slurry mutation improval. Then, instead of removing seed spam, add the possibility for plant mutation to be mutagen-only. This way, if players add new plant mutations into botany, they could decide to lock it behind mutagen/omega slurry. This wouldn't affect botaniy's current balance and would open up more variety for newly added plants.

[Decarcassor]

The way I see it you would need to change mutadone's effect on plants along with mutagen. Have mutagen be required to enable weird/unnatural mutations, but also allow mutadone to erase gene strains the same way it works on human genes.

With that in mind I think it would be fine to have glowing slurry as the super brute force mutagen that will guarantee a mutation but at the cost of heavy stats scrambling and gene lottery.

Also if mutagen is to become more important than it is now, it would be nice for botanists to have a way to grow it themselves.

[Scaltra]

From my experience with mutagen splicing, i cannot really agree with a removing of seed spam in general. We know how shitty radweed mutation is and we got many plants that have similar mutation chances. Just raising the chances would make tray usage a nightmare. So you would to use two different multiplier for this.

Stat based mutation almost require to mutate on planting, since mutagen scrambles stats and can kick the plant out of the range (especially lifeweed with the 30-50 endurance requirement). Your suggested stable mutagen change would be required here.

My main concern comes for the rancher. The rancher requires some specific mutated plants to get started. Without a rebalance, you would simply delay the rancher by 5+ minutes. And if any job doesn't need a further delays, then it is the rancher.

Last but not least, many gimmicks of botany require multiple mutations, since many base chems are locked behind them. So without a rebalance of the mutation chances, you would simply just make 4 mutation splices move from.the 20 to the 40 minute mark. And botany is already a very secluded department already.

This is why i suggested gating certain "dead end" plants, like rainbow weed, tree mutations and rainbow melons, behind mutagen. It was meant as a simple to add buff to make botany more controllable. Adding this as a blanket would simply delay botany and rancher in general. And even my suggestion would spark a controversial discussion.

This sounds like a really big rebalance of botany that wpuld require many changes. I would suggest making a design doc to figure out what should be the scope of it and how the numbers should look.

But, if you micronize the changes it would work better. Ike firstly, add the omega slurry mutation improval. Then, instead of removing seed spam, add the possibility for plant mutation to be mutagen-only. This way, if players add new plant mutations into botany, they could decide to lock it behind mutagen/omega slurry. This wouldn't affect botaniy's current balance and would open up more variety for newly added plants.

I think I might not have been very clear in what I was saying. In my proposed change every mutagen infusion whatever it is,  unstable, stable, or glowing slurry would be guaranteed to mutate the plant in this case. I would also change garden gear vendors to have stable mutagen for sale. This would entirely replace how we currently do mutations with spam planting and instead would have the player insert say corn into the plant master, infuse with any mutagen and the plant is now clear or peppercorn and you plant it. This would if anything cut down on time spent spam planting for a specific mutation. As for stat variation messing up your ability to force a mutation, that is a really good point maybe I would have stable mutagen infusions also mutate the plant and not just cause commuts (things like splice enabler). It is intended to be a pretty big change. I will probably want to buff their tray effects in some way as well. If anything this would be a buff to botany but mostly a QoL so my fingers hurt less from spam clicking seeds and removing them in one of the many ways we do. Ranching would also probably be fine. I will probably pull down my current PR for the glowing slurry change and work on this for however long it takes to make work nice and smooth. Better than the current meta for doing it anyway. If you want a sample of what it would probably be like you could go into the code at 

code/modules/hydroponics/Plant.dm line 189 is stable mutagen line 192 ->HYPnewmutationcheck(src,DNA,null,1,S) changing the 1 to a 10 or 100 if you want to be extra sure it always mutates. Probably easier to change unstable mutagen though considering it is already in botany. That would be the same string of code but you could also change HYPmutateDNA(DNA,2) to a 1 and it will mutate the stats less. 

Anyway, if I do this well and without problem, I see no reason this couldn't replace the janky spam planting methods we currently have with a more intuitive, consistent, and probably faster method overall to the point seed mutating on planting would be more of an annoyance. It is something I will be tweaking and messing with in my branch to test out the feel of it though.

---

The way I see it you would need to change mutadone's effect on plants along with mutagen. Have mutagen be required to enable weird/unnatural mutations, but also allow mutadone to erase gene strains the same way it works on human genes.

With that in mind I think it would be fine to have glowing slurry as the super brute force mutagen that will guarantee a mutation but at the cost of heavy stats scrambling and gene lottery.

Also if mutagen is to become more important than it is now, it would be nice for botanists to have a way to grow it themselves.

The current idea I am suggesting would remove seeds mutating from planting alone and would either require mutagen in the tray or an infusion of any mutagenic reagent. To balance that out I am suggesting that all mutagenic infusions, at least the main three, stable mutagen, unstable mutagen, and glowing slurry would always mutate the plant so if you infused it into a brand new commol seed you would always get the burning variant for example. I think this would be more intuitive and be a huge quality of life change for botany in general. In exchange for faster more consistent and easier mutations. I think it is a trade that will buff botany a bit and be a huge quality of life improvement. Going to test it on my branch and figure it all out till it feels good anyway. This is intended to be a big change to botany if I did do that. Honestly, at this point, I should just make a new forum post though as this isn't in the title, and inviting more people and their suggestions or thoughts could be nice.

[Lord_earthfire]

Oh, then i completely misunderstood you. I would be 100% guaranteing mutations with mutagen, depending on which mutagen is used. And if we have stable mutagen as the stat-mutation indrigend, this would go a long way.

Granted, there are some plants that should be given additional conditions to balance them out (radweed, meth-root) but maybe these will be fine by having glowing slurry as their counterpart.