Spearmint

[Vocalpocal]

Botany plant which produces spear heads. These things have relatively low damage which scales a little bit with endurance, but the damage cap for spearheads should be at best as hard as wood. When you get hit by arrows or spears made of spearmint -- Or a % chance based on armor if you get thrown at by one -- it slowly injects you with the stuff spearmint had inside.

You can easily attach it to bamboo stalks to make arrows, or tree trunk to make spears. You no longer need to run all the way to the nanofab in mining!


Technical information for nerds
- Mint mutation (duh)
- Random mutation (no prequisites, 30% chance)
- Inherently no seeds like Aconite
- Is a weed (can only be harvested once even if it had Immortal Gene strain)
These limitations makes it very difficult to mass produce. Something you might have a satchel or two at best.

[Kotlol]

Does botany really need more ways to attack other players????

No... but I approve the pun.
It's already annoying enough when it's all of mining going spears. But now botany too?

If anything I recommend the spear mint to not be used as spears. But as consumable ammo? Sure.

[Lord_earthfire]

Does botany really need more ways to attack other players????

Every department, except maybe science, need more ways to attack other players (although mining seriously need more matsci stuff, usefull and hurtfull alike)

Antags being able to deviate from their methods brings variations into rounds.

I can see this especially see this plant being fun in gang or rev rounds.

[Vocalpocal]

Does botany really need more ways to attack other players????

As said above, variation is good. There are about 3-4 viable botany antagonist strats, 2 of which are borderline bug abuse and 1 is for traitor botanists only. The rest is gimmick at best and often not-unique to botany.

If anything I recommend the spear mint to not be used as spears. But as consumable ammo? Sure.

That reminds me the idea of making Peas have mutation for dried peas which could be loaded to Zipguns to make them peashooters! Fun

[Mouse]

spearheads have been removed from matsci (which incidentally prevents you from making a spear with the head and the shaft made out of the same material, which is dumb)

[Decarcassor]

Does botany really need more ways to attack other players????

Frankly yes. Because while botany has all sorts of gimmick "dangerous" plants, very few are good or practical.

And if anything botany need more random mutations that don't require infusions. Too many young bright eyed botanists pour mutagen on anything expecting something to happen, and are disapointed when they learn how many plants just don't have any mutations in addition to the ones who only work with infusions.

Now for the spearmint idea itself I'm a bit conflicted. Because it could be something pretty powerfull "balanced" by making it annoying to use, which I'm not fond of in general. Also it feels like it steps on the nettle gimmick territory a bit. We don't have a mutant variant of nettle either.

I do like the idea of botany made arrows and spear though. Some bamboo blowdart could be fun too.

[RelentlessGarbage]

I do like the idea of botany made arrows and spear though. Some bamboo blowdart could be fun too.

Before I joined Goon, I was under the impression that bamboo blowdarts were a *thing* already, and was disappointed to learn that they weren't. I wouldn't mind if we had some way of making blowdarts.

Spearmint itself is kind of a funny pun. I'd say having damage scale well with endurance (up to a point) would be a cool thing, and allowing spears and arrows to be made by botanists in-house rather than going to mat sci would be good. The limitations you proposed sound reasonable, since it'd mean that if you wanted to make a high-endurance spearmint, you'd have to infuse with a lot of space fungus after getting the mutation, or wait with space fungus in the tray for a long time. I would suggest that the damage of the spear heads should be allowed to be better than that of the chainsaws that Botany already starts with (given high enough endurance)...otherwise, there's little reason to make them, besides fighting critters. Might limit their ability to be tipped in chemicals, though, since that can get strong with some of the stuff botany has (like Phlog).

I might also limit their ability of the spearmint heads themselves to be used as throwing weapons, if only because throwing weapons that can be taken from a stack of 50 in a satchel are strong and botany already has some of those with tomato splices/seething tomatoes/George Melons.