Botanist
Superiors: Head of Personnel
Difficulty: Medium
Completion: 0%
Guides: Guide to Botany
Access: Hydroponics
Colloquial Names: Not defined
Botanists are the farmers of the station, and the main source of food once the kitchen runs out of food. Or, you could just grow some random crops instead of actually feeding people. Whichever one you feel like doing.
Like watching grass grow. Oh wait, it is watching grass grow
Despite Botanist being classed as Medium, it's currently one of the easiest roles. All you have to do is grab a seed packet from the vending machine inside Hydroponics, plant the seeds in a Hydroponics tray, and cultivate the crop when it needs it. The trays have lights that shine when they need something:
| Tray color | Meaning | What do |
|---|---|---|
| Green | ready to harvest | click to harvest |
| Red | weeds in the tray | take a gardening claw and remove the weeds |
| Blue | plants are thirsty | grab a bucket, fill it with water and dump it in the tray |
| orange | plants are hungry | use the bottle of nutriment from the dispenser. |
If the vending machine ever runs out of seeds, put some of your produce in the seed extractor or just ask Cargo to order some more. If you fail at your job and plants die, then use the gardening spade to dig them up.
Why aren't you playing Stardew valley then?
Even if many people think this job is more of a farm simulator rather than a true space station 13 role, the truth is that the biggest interaction the botanist has is with the Cook, and it's a complicated one. Also, a plasma incident is bad for the crops, so you are not just watching the plants grow, you are protecting them from the raising chaos of the station while they slowly develop into a fully grown plant, not just waiting for them to be harvested.
At the moment, the amount of things the botanist can do is limited. Grow apples to supplement the hunger for meat and grow wheat so the Cook can blend it into flour for burgers. When civil station life disintegrates, grow bananas and lay a minefield of peels around your turf to dissuade attackers. If you're an Antagonist, you should try to get your hands on some unstable mutagen to speed up the breeding process so you can acquire the fun plants like lemon-nades, gatfruit, and bluespace bananas.
The traitor botanist
Time to eschew the hippie crap; how do you best utilize the art of hydroponics to complete your nefarious traitor objectives?
if you are lucky and fast you have access to many horrifying things: bluespace bananas, gatfruit, and lemon-nades being your most powerful plants available currently. Unless you set up a secret garden it will be extremely obvious which horrors you're growing, but often no one really cares about botany. You can try to expedite the process by bribing the chemist for some mutagen.