User:Nullaurelian/Guide To Botany ErisEN Draft

What is Botany

Botany is the care of plants on the CEV Eris. While these plants are mostly consumed for food, there are some that can be ground up for medicinal or recreational chemicals.

Basic Botany

To grow plants you will need the following:

• Seeds
• A bucket of water
• A tool with shoveling quality 10 or greater
• E-Z-Nutrient or another fertilizer chemical
• A patch of soil

Machine	Name	Description
	Soil Patch	You plant seeds here
	Seed Extractor	Convert crops into seeds
	Mega Seed Servitor	Seed vendor
	Nutrimax	Botany vendor

To grow the plants you will need to use a packet of seeds on an empty patch of soil. As the plant grows you may need to add water, fertilizer or remove weeds from the soil patch. You can find out what your plant needs to grow by examining it. Seeds, Fertilizers and tools can be found either in the public garden crates or from the Super Seed Servitor/Nutrimax Vending machines.

If there is a plant growing in a plot you don't want it in, you can kill the plant by attacking it, or by digging it up in the Aggressive stance.

When the plant finally matures, the plant icon should look like it has the crops on it. You can pick the fruits of your labors with you hands, or with a produce bag. Note that harvesting certain plants removes them from the tray. Luckily, the Seed Extractor machine can transmute one of your crops into multiple seeds for further planting.

Advanced Botany

Scientists and Agrolytes both have access to more advanced equipment to maximize the yields of their plants.

• Hydroponics Trays
• Lysis-Isolation Centrifuge
• Bioballistic Delivery System
• Plant Analyzer

Machine	Name	Description
	Hydroponics Tray	A more precise way to grow plants
	Lysis-Isolation Centrifuge	Extracts traits from a seed and saves to disk
	Bioballistic Delivery System	Applies donor seed trait from buffer

These tools, when properly used, can improve your crop yields by a noticeable margin.

Hydroponics

The hydroponics trays and the plant analyzer tool allow for a more fine-tuned approach to growing plants. By using a plant analyzer on a planted plot or tray, you can find out:

• What plant species is growing in the plot
• Ideal growing light
• Ideal temperature
• Relative Nutrient consumption
• Relative Water consumption

The hydroponics trays allow you to modify the plant's local environment by setting the tray's light level and sealing the tray with a lid to pump in air of a different temperature or composition.

Hydroponics trays also have a visual UI to allow the grower an at-a-glance update as to what the plant needs to thrive.

Indicator Light	Plant ...
Blinking Red	... needs to be weeded
Yellow	... needs additional nutrients
Blue	... needs additional water
Green	... is ready for harvest
Red	... is in poor health and may die if left unattended

Modified Crops

Each species of plant has attributes that can be spliced onto other species. These attributes are as follows:

Plant Characteristic	Effect
Vigour	How long the plant takes to mature and produce fruit. How much fruit it produces. Whether it can spread out of its tray (ie, vines).
Biochemistry	Which reagents the fruit contains; which gases the plant generates.
Fruit	Whether the fruit is juicy and will splatter when thrown; whether the plant has stinging spines and will inject its reagents into anyone coming in contact with it.
Diet	Whether the plant consumes gases in its environment; whether the plant is carnivorous (eats pests) or eats tray weeds; how much water and fertilizer it consumes.
Metabolism	Whether the plant requires water or fertilizer. Whether it alters the ambient temperature.
Environment	Plant's preferred temperature and light levels, and how much tolerance it has for changes in light level.
Atmosphere	The plant's tolerance for changes in temperature and pressure away from its preferred levels.
Output	Whether the plant produces electrical power or bioluminescent light.
Appearance	The "shape" of the plant. Also affects whether it can be harvested only once or multiple times.
Pigment	The color of the plant and its fruit; the color of any bioluminescence.
Special	The ability to teleport the thrower or target when thrown.

If you have a plant that you want to splice a particular attribute from, it can be placed into the Lysis-Isolation centrifuge and processed. Processing the seed consumes it but allows you to select a specific trait and save it to a blank data disk, up until the genetic structure is too damaged to be used.

This disk can then be ejected and loaded into the Bioballistic Delivery System, where the attribute data is loaded into the buffer.

Placing the recipient seed in the Bioballistic Delivery System, you can then apply the new attribute to the receiving seed. The donor attribute disk may be used an indefinite number of times.

Unnatural selection and mutations

In addition to genetic hybridization, plants may also be mutated into special variants of themselves. Mutations may be induced by applying Unstable Mutagen to a plant, or Left 4 Zed. Note that mutant plants are often fragile and will need extra care.

Mysterious Plants

On occasion special mushrooms or plants may start growing from cracks in the floor or from burrows. These plants, or more specifically the mushrooms can generate chemicals not normally found in growable plants and can potentially make interesting genetic donors for your super plants. To harvest seeds from these plants, use a tool with a cutting attribute in a non-Aggressive stance to gather a sample of the plant. This sample can be used to grow a tamed version of the fungus for testing purposes.

Beekeeping

Enterprising botanists will also notice that it is possible to create bee hives to generate honey. Honey can be used in certain recipes while Beeswax can be used to craft candles. Further information can be found in this guide to beekeeping.

The List

SPOILER WARNING

This section contains a selected list of plant species available from the MegaSeed Servitor and possible mutations. This is not a complete list; some species have been left out deliberately to encourage players to play around rather than rush specific cultivars.

Plants List

Seed Packet	Plant Species	Chemicals	Mutates To	Notes
	Apple	Nutriment	Golden Apple, Poison Apple
	Ambrosia Vulgaris	Nutriment, Space Drugs, Kelotane, Bicardine, Toxin	Ambrosia Deus
	Banana	Banana Juice	-	Eating a banana gives you a banana peel
	Berry	Nutriment, Berry Juice	Glowberry, Poison Berry, Atroberry
	Cabbage	Nutriment	-
	Cocao	Nutriment, Coco	-	Yes, it is misspelled in game
	Carrot	Nutriment, Carrot Juice, Imidazoline	-
	Chanterelle	Nutriment	Plump Helmet, Reshi, Fly Amanita
	Cherry	Nutriment, Sugar, Cherry Jelly	-
	Chili	Nutriment, Capsaicin	Ice Chili
	Corn	Nutriment, Corn Oil	-	Eating corn leaves you a corn cob
	Eggplant	Nutriment	Egg Plant
	Grape	Nutriment, Sugar, Grape Juice	Green Grape
	Grass	Nutriment	-
	Lemon	Nutriment, Lemon Juice	-
	Lime	Nutriment, Lime Juice	-
	Orange	Nutriment, Orange Juice	-
	Peanut	Nutriment	-
	Plastellium	Plasticide	-
	Plump Helmets	Nutriment	Walking Mushroom
	Poppy	Nutriment, Bicardine	-
	Potato	Nutriment, Potato Juice	-	Roaches like potato
	Pumpkin	Nutriment	-
	Rice	Nutriment, Rice	-
	Soybean	Nutriment, Soymilk	-
	Sugarcane	Sugar	-
	Sunflower	-	-
	Tobacco	Nicotine	-	Cannot be made into cigarettes (yet)
	Tomato	Nutriment, Tomato Juice	Blue Tomato, Blood Tomato
	Tower Cap	Wood Pulp	-	Tower Cap fruit may be cut up into wood
	Watermelon	Nutriment, Watermelon Juice	-
	Wheat	Nutriment, Flour	-	Can be fed to Cows and Chickens
	White Beet	Nutriment, Sugar	-

Tips

• One of the biggest boosts to plant productivity is a Farming Robot: it can water, weed, fertilize and harvest plants.
  • Farmbots have terrible pathing AI: Agrolytes are recommended to have multiple bots or rearrange the trays to be more accessible.
• Buckets (and all containers) can have the transfer amount set via the dropdown menu. Setting the transfer amount to the full 200u will allow for you to 1-click refill a soil plot or hydroponics tray.
• Not satisfied with the options available in the Mega Seed Servitor? You can hack it to give you a wider range of seeds for planting. Do so at your own risk!
• Be careful when working with tunnel fungus. It may contain anything from potent healing chemicals to transformation toxins.
• Run out of fertilizer? Additional E-Z-Nutrient can be created from chemistry or from the Church Bioprinter. Certain other chemicals can also be used to feed your crops.
• Want to grow a modified crop in the public garden? Ask the Agrolyte or Moebius Science to modify seeds for you.
• Plant attributes require 10GQ of data storage, plan your disk purchases accordingly
• A seed created by sampling a plant can have a trait applied to it, regardless of it's previously modified status

Related Guides

• Guide to Chemistry
• List of Cooking Recipes