Botany: mutagen, mutadone and QoL changes

[Scaltra]

while simultaneously making mutagen and mutadone something people want to use in botany

i don't know what's going on that makes you think people don't want to use these, for any capable botanist you'll easily be burning through both of these to get a nice set of gene strains on your desired plants. I personally get through several watering cans quite regularly. The reason you don't PLANT in mutagen is because it fucks up your plant stats, then just as you're about to harvest it it swaps species to something you don't want.

species rolling is basically free through planting, so perhaps it's worth adding an irradiation button to the plantmaster that simply damages a seed and rolls new species on it.

the main issue youll find with rebalancing is that everything uses unstable mutagen and RNG. I think the balance is fine right now, and editing the effects of the commonly used mutagens aren't going to improve things that much. Increasing the odds of new species on mutagen will make gene strain hunting harder.

mutadone is fine, it has its purpose (fix bad plant stats, including awkward ones caused by mutagen like -lifespan), there is a gene strain for handling passive mutation over time which is deliberately made more difficult to obtain. planting stuff in mutagen is just cheap infusion and should probably stay inferior to infusion.

nobody uses slurry or stable mutagen outside of slurry's secret use. if you really want to make it cool, make stable mutagen roll plant stats with an upwards bias & no chance for strain or species change. maybe make it negatively impact plant health. it's a pain in the butt for botanists to make so make it worth it as a god-fertiliser. Stable mutagen on round-start is a no go, unless you want every botanist to 3 copies of one person every round

Because of spam planting seeds until you get the gene strains or mutations you want seed-spam effectively removes the need for mutagen at all aside from something like radweed that needs to be mutated before splicing or planting. I haven't seen anyone who knew about spam planting ever using mutagen personally, it is just even more tedious and unpredictable. Still messes up stats on infusion, which is fine but it is just a hit or miss endeavor where you go through a bunch of mutagen infusing, either messing up the stats too much to care for it or the seed mutates in a decent amount of time and RNG was gentle. 

I would like a resource cost to mutating plants, not high but I think giving botanists more reasons to go to cargo is good for job relations. 

What about upping the mutation rate for different mutagens would make it harder to obtain gene strains?  I agree it might make it harder to get gene strains while avoiding mutations but that has always been a thing. I wouldn't mind having there be a specific chem we could use for causing gene strains to crop up though. Or maybe having it be a tray thing for mutagens. Although I rather like being about to get them through infusion. Planting them and putting in some mutagen and waiting for a gene strain to show up sounds even more tedious. If we did go that route 

I find that mutadone is boring and barely worth ever using even in its infusion.  its infusion is...okay and does increase lifespan if it is below 0 but lifespan is a mostly dead stat either made obsolete by making something immortal or by just replanting the plant(of course maturation rate plays a role in that part but). Lifespan does even less for some plants over others because they are limited in harvests in code to normally only a single harvest. Lifespan isn't a very important stat because of ways to circumvent it when it matters and when it doesn't matter it just doesn't. In tray...gosh mutadone in the tray so so so awful. Mutadone in the tray can shunt the plant back down to its baby stage on its proc and just makes plants take so much longer to grow for what? balancing stats that are probably already all above positive because of all the other plant-increasing chems you either spiked the water with or put in the tray. 

Don't even get me started on plant homeopathy though. 

I want tray chems to be more of a passive buff or something temporary and only in the tray. Whereas infusion has always been about permanent change in plants at the higher cost of reagents and only being able to do it so much, so quickly. 

Making stable mutagen have positive weight would be interesting, at first I thought thematically it would be strange but stable mutagen could be thought of as more direct so I can get behind that. I do think if that is the case it especially shouldn't be in at the start though. I was thinking having stable mutagen already ready could be a cool thing for botanists (in gimmicks and the like) but I think you are right with that part. I always underestimate people's ability to just use the crap out of something if it starts premade. That being said it isn't hard for botanists to get it, the only thing they would need to make it that they can't make/get themselves is lithium. More chem requests sound sick.

I do think it would be nice if there was a specific way to get gene strains if that is a thing some people want to do without mutating the plant as well. Maybe stable mutagen can still do that for people who want that as an option without mutating the plant itself. Just changing stats and adding gene strains

I used to use glowing slurry for mutating plants when I really wanted them to just mutate. It has a tray effect that guarantees mutation when it rolls, unlike the others. So I would wait for it to mature, put in a tiny bit, and then harvest it when it mutated. That being said, it is all just made practically pointless because of spam planting existing.

I forgot to mention, I do think the balance in botany right now is fine in terms of this. I don't hate playing it or anything like that. I just think spam planting is Something that turns off a lot of people with its tedious repetitive nature and the alternative being not nearly as fast or efficient. I just want a less tedious and more intuitive way to go about obtaining mutations than spam planting and I think changing mutagenic-related reagents to be a bit better to compensate would be pretty cool.