Xenobotanist

The Department

Arguably one of the most dangerous places, Xenobotany deals with the growth, maintenance, study and splicing of plants.

The Machines

Inside your laboratory are several machines that you will need to learn to use in order to get anywhere.

Flora Data Disk

One of the primary tools you will use. Alone, it is not very useful - however, when used with the two below machines, it becomes the tool with which you will splice plants together to create the final target result of your choice. Should the disk hold data you do not find valuable, you can activate it to clear out it's content - and it will be good as new. Note that any gene data stored on a disk is perfectly preserved and never decays, regardless of how many time it is spliced into a plant.

Lysis-isolation Centrifuge

This machine, when a disk is inserted, is capable of completely extracting and sequencing the genetic code present in a plant's seed (or a mushroom's spore). Once that is done, you may load one specific gene onto the disk - after which it will automatically eject. Note, however, that a genetic sample is not stable - the more you extract from it, the more integrity it will lose, to the point where it will not be viable. Most plant genomes can usually survive two to three extractions before requiring a fresh sample.

Bioballistic Delivery System

One of the more useful machines, it allows you to inject a gene sequence directly into a viable plant seed, which will result in whichever traits the sample held to be transferred over. For instance - should you find the genetic enzyme that allows berries to grow in bushes, and inject it into a wheat seed, that seed will then be capable of growing bushes that are capable of growing wheat repeatedly.

However, a single seed can only take so much alteration - too much modification would render it sterile, dead. The machine will prevent this from happening, however - and will prevent you from altering a seed this far. Fresh seeds, extracted from fresh fruit, however, are fully stable regardless of how modified the parent seed was - and so it is possible to completely change a plant through an iterative process of modification and growth.

Seed Dispenser

Dispenses the base seeds needed for your job. Beware, however - it has limited stores, and so if you want to avoid running out of them, you should generate new ones out of existing fruit.

NutriMax

Contains the chemicals that you need/want to help manage your plants. Essentially identical to Hydroponics.

SmartFridge

Store your fruit here. Your seeds too, if you're lazy and don't care about seeing seed stats.

Biogenerator

A very useful machine. By feeding it your useless plant matter, you can generate all manners of items - from more nutriment to leather items to synthetic meat (for whichever purpose you could need it).

Seed Extractor

Self-explanatory. Give it a harvested plant and it will give you a few packets of seeds.

Getting Started

First, follow Guide_to_Hydroponics to get your plants growing.

Once that's done, there are three paths you may follow:

Splicing

Difficulty: Easy Variety: Low

The simplest. Using the plants available to you, you carefully craft the ultimate plant of your desire. The process is simple: grow a plant, get it's seeds, extract a gene using the Centrifuge mentioned above. Grow another different plant, take it's seeds and splice the first plant's gene in using the injection machine.