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 |
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Mega Seed Servitor | Seed vendor |
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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
