Guide to Hydroponics

Welcome to Botany, sometimes also referred to as Hydroponics, and not to be confused with the Garden on the surface level. This is where a Botanist or two would reside to watch grass grow grow produce and synthesize useful tidbits with their biogenerator for the station to use. This guide will cover how to do all of that and more!

Hydroponics workplace


The hydroponics bay is located on the main floor south of medical, north of the kitchen, and south-east of the holodeck, pretty much situated around the middle of this floor. Connected here is a small table and pair of windoors that leads to the kitchen so that you and others may coordinate with the Chef. There is also a smartfridge to store your produce without having to worry about a cluttered mess of smelly vegetables lying on the table. Within the rest of your workplace, however, are many trays, some of which have been partitioned off to another section of the department for tighter synthesis and modification. Towards the entrance is a set of lockers with a few useful tools inside, including but not limited to a hoe, hatchet, plant satchel, plant analyzer, and a mister if buckets don't interest you. Near the isolated trays is your own slice of chemistry with a empty chem dispenser and ChemMaster. You also have empty cartridges you may wish to fill with what you can extract from your plants, as well as a reagent grinder to grind up anything you stuff inside. Below recaps all that's in your department:
 * Hydroponics Trays - These are the trays which you use to grow your plants and fungi in! They're water filled basins with LED sensors that light up to tell you about your plants.
 * MegaSeed Vendor - This stores the seeds for the various plants that can be grown.
 * NutriMax - A vending machine that dispenses the various chemicals/tools needed proper plant care.
 * Seed Extractor - A machine to carefully extract seeds from plant produce. Typically yields anywhere between two to seven seeds.
 * Water Tank, Sink and Bucket - These are for watering the plants.
 * ChemMaster 3000 - Used to separate chemicals from a reagent container into bottles. Now you can turn your tomatoes into ketchup!
 * Hoe and Hatchet - For weed removal and plant maintenance respectively.

Growing plants
Growing plants isn't all that hard, provided you know a few key things about maintaining them: water, nutrients, temperature, and lumens (light level). If all four of these are maintained, then you'll have no problem at all growing plants. Really, only the light level needs some attention, but for the most part, most plants outside of xenobotany will grow with the default lighting around the station. The other three variables can just have water and nutrients - respectively - chucked at the tray to keep it topped off, and it's unlikely temperature will change unless your garden spontaneously bursts into flames. In the event you're into min-maxing, we'll cover how to adjust a plant to proper light levels later. You can always check these variables, and even the plant's status, by examining the tray, which will probably look something like this:

That's a tray (#68).

Apples are growing here. Water: 100/100 Nutrient: 10/10 The tray's sensor suite is reporting a light level of 7.21463 lumens and a temperature of 293.152K.

Most sprites are pretty obvious as to what a plant is, but it's good to get familiar with the more alien plants as well. Besides looking at the plant and text, you'll also want to look at the tray itself, since it's able to provide important visual cues about what's going on via its lights. These lights, from left to right, are as follows:
 * Green Light: Ready for harvest - Click empty handed or with a plant satchel to harvest.
 * Blue Light: Low water - Click with a container that holds water to refill.
 * Yellow Light: Low nutrients - Click with container that holds nutrients (E-Z-Nutrient, Robust Harvest, etc.) to refill.
 * Red Light: Low health - Ensure the plant has water, sufficient nutrients, isn't ready for harvest, and weeds aren't growing. Kill off with hatchet if it's too much trouble.
 * Flashing Red Light: Weeds - Click with hoe to rid weeds, assuming it hasn't already taken over the tray.

Plant Chart Mouse over any white-box text to view that trait's corresponding gene for Xenobotany. Yi = Yield. Determines how many products per harvest. Ma = Maturation time. A lower number means faster maturation time. Pr = Produce time. A lower number means faster product growth. Po = Potency. Determines the amount of reagents, and strength of special effects.(Needs confirmation)

Plant Care and Maintenance
As mentioned above, plants can have a variety of issues affecting their growth if you're not tentative to their needs. What exactly does a plant need? Well, that depends on the plant! As a general rule fungus-type plants (reishi, chanterelle, plump helmet, fly amanita) only need nutrients, weed-type plants (nettles) only require water and true plants will require a mixture of both depending on their species. Nutrients (also called fertilizer) can be retrieved from the NutriMax - there are multiple types that each have their own effects, these will be covered later - and will vend in the form of a bottle, just pour some of this into the tray and examine your plant, once it's at a level the plant will be happy with, you're good! To water your plants, just take a bucket and fill it by clicking on a water tank or sink until you get a message that the bucket is full, then pour it into the tray until it's at a comfortable water level. Do note that the water level variable does not change the moment you fill it with water.

Along with nutrient and water, plants also have a requirement for light and temperature preferences too. All of the plants you'll be growing in hydroponics will thrive at a temperature of 293 kelvin, which is room temperature - don't worry about this! Light is still relevant to you however, and is measured in 'lumens', which demonstrate how much visible light is being emitted. While being at the wrong lumen level won't kill plants, correctly lighting their trays will make them grow faster and stay healthier overall. Use a plant analyzer on a seed or plant growing in a tray/mound to to determine how much light they need.

The plant analyzer is an important tool because it allows you to know what temperature, lumens, nutrient and water your plants need, as well as gives you general information on the plant's reagents (if any), and stats. The only stats that are relevant to you are a plants requirements and maturation time - these tell you what your plant needs to be healthy and how long it'll take to grow! As an example, an apple tree should be kept at room temperature, given four lumens, have roughly the same level of water for the duration of it's growth, and 10/10 nutrients at all times to be the healthiest it can be.

To set a plant's lumen level, all you have to do is alt-click (or, if you prefer, right click and choose Toggle-Tray-Lid) on the tray. This will lower the lid and turn on the lights to a level that you can set. Right-clicking a tray with a closed lid will give you the option to 'set lights', at which point you can select how many lumens you would like the tray to receive. Make sure you raise the lid when you go to harvest the plant, as you can't harvest from a closed tray. You can, however, pour water and nutrients into a tray while it's closed.

Now, what if your plant becomes infested with weeds - or worse, unhealthy! Don't fear, you're given (almost) all the tools you need to keep your plants in peak condition. If a tray becomes infested with weeds all you have to do is click on it with your gardening hoe, but what about if they become unhealthy? You have a couple options for improving their health all of which are liquid/chemical in nature, the most basic treatment however is nutriment (not to be confused with nutrients), which is found in all food stuffs, so start grinding up those pizzas or tomatoes and pouring the juice into your tray!

If your plants die they'll go an off-grey or brown color and have to be removed from the tray with a single click. Before re-planting, make sure you top up the tray's nutrients and water (lack of these probably killed the plant) and to click your hoe on the tray a few times to ensure there's no leftover weeds that took advantage of the dead plant. If you want or need to kill your plants - you can use your hatchet to hack it down after a few swings or you can spray Plant-B-Gone into the tray. Plant-B-Gone can be found in the botany lockers, but kills more slowly unless you spray a lot onto the plant.

If you didn't kill off your plants by now, you probably have a lot of produce on your hands! Go ahead and use your plant satchel on any trays with green lights, and load the bag into the kitchen smartfridge.

Advanced Hydroponics
Bedsides simply planting seeds and growing them, there are several other things you can do within hydroponics that will supplement your farming work. This includes becoming an apiarist, generating various items from plant-matter, and further propagating your plants.

Hydroponics Machines
Seed Extractor The seed storage only has a finite amount of seeds, three per plant type to be exact (barring Nifberries and Earthen-Roots), as such the seed extractor is used to gain more seeds. To use the seed extractor you must take a fully grown plant and click the extractor with it. Once placed in the seed extractor, the plant will be replaced with multiple packets of seeds of the same plant type. Using the seed extractor means you can have a virtually infinite supply of seeds, as long as you always have at least one of said fully grown plant. Make sure you don't let the chef use your last potato!

Biogenerator The biogenerator is a machine which takes fully grown plants and turns them into biomass. Biomass can then be converted into food, condiments, plant nutrients, and various leather products. To use the biogenerator just place a stock of grown plants into the machine and then open up the interface. Much like the smartfridge, you can use a plant satchel on the generator to dump plants into it instead of feeding it all in by hand. The interface will tell you how many biomass points are currently in the generator, and how much biomass various items will require to produce. An in-depth look into what you can produce will be covered in the Biogeneration section below.

ChemMaster 3000 A ChemMaster stolen from Chemistry that allows you to separate various individual reagents into other sections of the machine, which lets you make bottles or pills out of them. Of particular use would be the ability to grind up potatoes in your reagent grinder and making bottles of ketchup - or, perhaps, a condiment paste/sauce of some other fruit/vegetable.

Reagent Grinder An all-in-one grinder that you can throw stuff into to grind down into reagents. In particular, you'll want to toss plants and produce into it to grind down into nutrients and juice for medical or even the bar.

Biogeneration
The biogenerator is perhaps one of the greatest tools you'll be using to do more than just watching grass grow. Besides one useful feature of it being able to turn plants into meat (or at least a weird and smelly synthetic version of it), it can also make a number of other things with biomass. Below you'll find a list of what it can make.

Chemicals: Good and Bad
A variety of chemicals will have different effects on your plants if you inject them or pour them into a tray. Some of them will have beneficial effects such as healing them, increasing their nutrient count or making them more potent, but others will mutate, damage or kill your plants! The two primary chemicals a botanist should be concerned with however are ammonia and diethylamine.

Ammonia and diethylamine are both effective fertilizers, better than the three standard nutrients you have available to you in the Hydroponics Vending Machine. To get these chemicals however, you'll need to ask chemistry, as none is available to you at round start. If you're going to be growing a lot, these chemicals can be helpful. But if there's no chemists, a few other chemicals can also keep your plants healthy on top of using nutrients. Below is a chart of both beneficial, and harmful chemicals that interact with plants in various ways - some of them are blatantly obvious, while others may not be.