A bold new era of hydroponics (Large department rework/update)

[ArcaneMusic]

Shoutout to skog for helping me fine tune a lot of the ideas for this as well as convincing me to do it anyway. Feel free to send me your adoration and glory (once this is actually balanced and tested out so I can work out the like 1000 little runtimes and bugs this will surely have.)

About The Pull Request

Lets Start with everything that DIDN'T change.
Plants still have all their unique qualities. That includes chems, traits, all that good stuff.
Plant stats have been unchanged, with an exception I'll bring up later.

Cool. Onto everything else.

Changes to hydroponics trays.

Trays now have a new feature that visually you may be very familiar with. By Ctrl Clicking a tray, it activates Autogrow. Autogrow uses a HEAVY amount of power per tray, but in return it automatically maintains the plant contained within, limited nutrient loss, adding a gradual amount of water per process, and keeps pests and weeds at bay. Ideally you would only be using this on high maintenance plants, or if you need to leave your department for a few minutes. Having all your trays on Autogrow is an excellent way to kill your APC cell in a matter of seconds, even on a robust power setup.

Trays no longer use **Nutrient Points.** Instead, each tray has an internal reagent holder that basically holds a beaker for your plant's nutrients. In exchange, the tray now determines the gradual stat changes of plants based on nutrients within that nutrient tank. That's right, no more dumping chemicals into the tray to reach 100 potency in a matter of minutes. You can, however, use reagent mixes in order to improve plant stats in a satisfying way. Still, with each tray having a default of 10 reagents maximum in the tank, it places a greater impetus on upgrading trays if want to really get the most of a specific chemical composition.

If you realize you need to change the nutrients in the tank, you can Alt Click to empty the whole tank at once.

Seed Changes

All plants now have a new stat, Instability. (It was originally titled stability so I'm changing it here but yes it is now called instability) Contrary to the name, the higher the stability of the plant, the more likely that your plant will see radical changes. Plants with a low stability will not see much difference, but as you go higher and higher you will start seeing the plant automatically mutate with harsher ramifications. At 60 Stability, the plant has a chance to automatically mutate it's species. At 80 Stability, assuming you can prevent the plant from mutating beforehand, the plant has a chance to receive random plant traits similar to strange seeds. That's right! You can now be free from the tyranny of the strange seed market!

Plants are now affected differently by pests and weeds. Instead of outright killing plants, they will instead heavily lower a plant's yield and potency instead. This also allows for plants that have been left for a few minutes to outright die far less than they were before, but at the same time encourage using autogrow when AFK within the department.

When growing a plant however, you have something new to consider. Plants will now pollinate adjacent seeds in trays, which will bleed off adjacent stats to other plants. Primarily, this affects your core stats. like potency, yield, also stability. If you have 2 plant with high and low potency, they'll bleed their stats off into each other as they grow. This allows for interesting mechanical gameplay between nutrient choices, stability, and adjacency. Some plants have naturally high stability that can bleed off of other plants (Corn, Wheat, and Weeds), while others have naturally low stability and can help bring plants back into a maintainable stability threshold if you just want to harvest the plant itself.

Pollination at high levels of stability can also cause the adjacent plants to receive chemical traits from each other. This allows for plants to share chemical traits without having an insane level of control afforded by the DNA manipulator. However, careful manipulation of plant reagents is difficult to do perfectly, and should be done carefully, as well as experimentally.

For a more controlled trait experience however, we have Plant Grafts. Plant grafts are obtained by using the new secateurs, or sheers, that comes with the botanist's default kit. When a plant is ready to harvest, you can cut off a plant graft, which carries several of the plant's stats and qualities with it. When transplanted, you can share the unique traits of several plants into a new host. These traits are mostly the physical traits you're most likely familiar with, like bio-luminescence, slippery skin, liquid contents, the works. You can also store plant grafts if there's a specific trait build you'd like to eventually get to. Since you need to fully grow a plant to graft it, the process of obtaining several unique traits for a plant will result in more types of plants needing to be grown as a result.

Alright, this leads up to what you're probably guessing. DNA manipulator for plants is dead. Even if it's really good, being able to Frankenstein a dozen different plants together without even growing half of them is kinda lame, you have to admit. The new trait and chemical controls are a bit more robust overall to compensate for this.

Why It's Good For The Game

Chemical dependence hydroponics is dead.
Genefreak maxed out stats plants are dead.
The Tyranny of Pests and Weeds killing plants for cooperating with the station is dead.
Ambrosia Gaia is now no longer the staple plant of hydroponics, as earthblood trays are dead.
Plant mutations are now easier to come by, and can be achieved within 2 plant generations assuming you're not crossbreeding and using readily available chems.
Chefs, and by extension bartenders, get a wider array of plant's each to work with.
Botanists are no longer required to acquire a chem dispenser at shift-start to acquire mutated plants.
Crosspollination, mutation, and grafting allows for a more interesting dynamic in improving plant stats, as opposed to just clicking buttons. It also rewards planning and developing system for growing plants.

Changelog

🆑
add: Plants can now Cross-Pollinate, via adjacency. This causes plant stats of average into each-other.
add: Plants now have a new stat, Instability. Instability allows for gradual mutations to a plant's stats at certain thresholds, and a chance of mutation, or gaining new random traits at even higher thresholds.
add: Plants can be grafted when ready to harvest, and grafts can be applied to plants in order to share unique traits, or share stat changes.
del: The Plant DNA Manipulator is dead. Long Live the DNA manipulator.
tweak: Hydroponics trays now have their own internal beaker for holding chemical reagents. As such, chemical affects on plants are gradual, and slowly alter seed stats over generations.
balance: Several chemicals are adjusted to match the new system. Experiment!
/:cl:

[optimumtact]

don't revert for 3 days

[Timonkeyn]

@optimumtact idiot

[Timonkeyn]

crap bad word sorry ToS

[ArcaneMusic]

For those following the comment chain on this PR, consider #50387 like, DLC for the original hydroponics PR.