Guide to hydroponics: Difference between revisions

[[Hydroponics]] and the [[Botanist]]s 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!

Hydroponics area is divided into two rooms. The big southern section 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 smaller southern section has three lockers, crate with some tools, and some more equipment on the table.

* Wrench: Used to move your trays around.

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 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.

You can use a wrench on a tray to move it, then wrench it again.

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:

R&D can also make a wonderful thing called a Floral Somatoray. It has two options: increase yield and mutate the plant. In yield more, every time you fire it at the plant, there is a chance the yeild will increase. The chance becomes very small when you reach high levels, but it's very useful for low-yield plants. It can even raise yield from zero! In the mutate mode, it will always induce a normal stat mutation.

Replica pod is very special plant. It can be used to grow dead people back to life. It's rarely used, unless the cloning is destroyed. To clone someone, follow those simple steps:

If you grow a pod without any seeds, there's a chance that it will produce more than one seed.

There are three types of plants. The biggest category is "normal plants". Much lesser ones are mushrooms and weeds. They are a little different from the normal plants:

See [[Guide to plants]].

If you pick up the grass and use it (click on it in your hand), you will prepare the astroturf. Get a crowbat and remove some floor tiles, then put astroturf in their place. In addition to looking nice, it can be used to get some sand. Just dig it with your shovel and you'll get two piles. Now, pick the sand and use it. You will make a sandstone. Using three of them, you can make a soil plot, which is all like tray, except you can walk over it, and there are no lights. Sandstone has another use: you can build a door with 10.

You can also order additional hydroponics trays at cargo.

First you need to get some tower-caps, grown them and harvest them. You can then use hatchet (and some other things, but it's not important) on the logs to chop some planks. They have many uses: you can make chairs, tables, wooden floors and so on. An unique thing here is a drying rack. You can use it to dry a plant, and then smoke it. First, build a rack with 10 planks. Then, grab a plant you want to dry and put it in the rack. Give it a few seconds and it's done.

Note: you can dry ''any'' plant, and smoking it will give you all chemicals that were in it. You can smoke dried apples if you want, and get nutriment from them.

* Add some cable to a potato to make a potato battery.