Botany: glowing slurry infusion

[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.

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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.