User:Kelenius
Basics
Hydroponics and the Botanists who work there are important people on the station, especially in longer rounds. Botanists grow plants, obviously. Without plants, the Chef cannot make many types of food. Without those types of food, the denizens of the station will either have to live off of beef jerky and space twinkies, or starve to death. Now that you understand why this is important, let's get started!
Your tools
Hydroponics area is divided into two rooms. The big area to the north is where you'll spend most of your time. It has trays where you grow plants, two vending machines, one with seeds and the other with everything else. There is also a seed extractor and a biogenerator. The small area to the south has three lockers, crate with some tools, and some more equipment on the table.
Plants require nutriment and water to grow. They are also bothered by pests and weeds. To check the plant, click on the tray. It will show you the levels of water and nutriment, and if there's too much pests/weeds. You will get a message like this:
Hydroponics Tray has Potato Plant planted.
The plant looks unhealthy.
Water: 78/100
Nutrient: 6/10
Hydroponics Tray is filled with weeds!
Hydroponics Tray is filled with tiny worms!
In addition to that, each tray has lights that tell you when a plant is not okay. From left to right:
- Green: Ready to harvest.
- Red: Low health.
- Red: Weeds/pests/toxins.
- Brown: Low nutriment.
- Blue: Low water.
Now that we know how to tell what a plant needs, it's time to plant some and then grab our tools. Take wheat, potato and grass seeds from the MegaSeed Servitor, and plant them in different pots. Next, gather some equipment.
- Bucket: Set transfer amount to 70 (right-click), fill it in the sink, pour it on the tray. Simple.
- Alternately, toss your backpack away and get a backpack water tank. It holds much more water.
- Mini-hoe: Removes the weeds from the tray.
- Plant analyzer: Shows detailed stats of a plant. Will be useful later. You should have it on you already.
- Plant bag: Used to collect plants on a tile. Holds up to 50. Get it from NutriVend.
- Screwdriver: Used to set up irrigation system.
Growing the plants
Now all you need to do is wait until your plants grow. Somewhere at the middle of their growth you might want to replace the current nutriment with Robust Harvest from NutriVend. Robust harvest doubles the plant's yeild, at the cost of not allowing any mutations. Once the plant is fully grown, the green light will start blinking. Get to the pot and click on the plant. When the potatoes and wheat grow, you remove them from the pot. Take one of each and put it into the Seed Extractor machine to get some seeds. Then take your plant bag and click on the tile with the plants. This will put everything into the bag. Now, click on the smartfridge with it to load it. The chef can access it, and will soon start making food.
The grass is a little different. First, you don't need to put it into the smartfridge - it's not for the chef, it's for our biogenerator. Take your bag and click on the pot with grass once it's ready to harvest - this puts growns into your bag. Time to set the biogenerator up. Don't forget to replant the wheat and potatoes. Put any extra seeds into the fridge.
Biogenerator
Biogenerator is a neat machine that can make items out of biomass. To get biomass, you need to put your plants inside. Hovewer, it needs a beaker to work. You can either go to Cargo and ask for a large beaker, or use a bucket. Either way, unload your bag into the machine, open its interface and process the plants. You should see that you now have some biomass. It's important that you can make nutriment here, for the time when your stock runs out. Grass is a pretty good plant for this: it grows quickly, quite tough, can be harvested multiple times, not needed for the chef and has other uses. You can recycle any plant, though if they don't have nutriment (e.g. bananas), the efficiency is very low.
Mutations and selection
Now that you've grown some food for the chef and some plants for generator, you can try to make your plants stronger. This is made by mutations. Use your plant analyzer on a growing plant. You should get something like this:
-Plant Age: 5
-Plant Endurance: 15
-Plant Lifespan: 25
-Plant Yield: 4
-Plant Production: 1
-Plant Potency: 5
-Weed level: 2/10
-Pest level: 3/10
-Toxicity level: 0/100
-Water level: 86/100
-Nutrition level: 7/10
You can also scan the growns:
- Plant type: Normal plant
- Potency: 5
- Yield: 4
- Maturation speed: 6
- Production speed: 1
- Endurance: 15
- Nutritional value: 1
- Other substances: 0
And seeds:
-Plant Endurance: 15
-Plant Lifespan: 25
-Species Discovery Value: 0
-Plant Yield: 4
-Plant Production: 1
-Plant Potency: 5
- Age: Simply shows how old is the plant.
- Endurance: Max health. Between 10 and 100. Not very useful, unless you leave your garden often.
- Lifespan: When the age is above lifespan, plant starts losing health. Between 10 and 100. Not important at all in plants that can only be harvested once, unless they die before harvest. Barely useful for the other ones, because you can always plant it again.
- Yeild: How much growns you get each harvest. Between 0 and 10. Pay attention to this, because if it drows to 0, things get pretty bad.
- Production: How fast it grows. Between 2 and 10, the lower the faster. Overall, not as useful. Most of the time, half of your trays is going to be empty anyway.
- Potency: The most imporant stat. Between 0 and 100. Basically, this determines plant power. Mostly affects amount of chemicals in the plant, though some have additional effects.
To change the stats, you need to mutate your plant. Keep in mind, that mutations are completely random. That's why you should plant several plants, mutate them, and then choose the one you like the most. To mutate the plant, you can use following methods:
First, E-Z nutriment makes the plant mutate every time it's ready to harvest. Left 4 Zed makes it mutate twice, but you'll have to replace the nutriment to actually harvest something! Nutriment has a very small chance to mutate the plant into a different specie.
You can speed up the process by asking the chemist for some unstable mutagen. Pour 5 units on your plant and prepare for...
- 10% chance of death of a plant. Never use mutagen without backup seeds.
- 10% chance of specie mutation.
- 15% chance of heavy stat mutation.
- 15% chance of normal stat mutation.
- 20% chance of nothing. You get a message when this happens.
- 10% chance of weeds mutating. If weed level is less than 5, nothing happens, otherwise you get a random mutated weed.
- 10% chance of pests mutating. Again, if pest level is less than 5, nothing happens. Otherwise, three spiderlings are spawned. Shout for security and try to explain why you didn't use pest spray to them.
Or pour 2 units for a guaranteed heavy stat mutation, or even 1 for a guaranteed normal stat mutation. You need a dropper for this.