Hydroponics Design Doc

src/en/space-station-14/departments/service/hydroponics.md

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+# Core Concept
+
+Hydroponics is about pushing your luck and figuring out how to use what you get.  
+
+# Design Pillars
+
+## Pillar 1: Hydroponics is a Provider
+
+The moment to moment goals of the botanist is in providing for individuals across the station. They produce a wide variety of items, but few with any use to themselves. Lacking the ability to achieve their dreams on their own the botanist gives away what they make in exchange for what they want, masking their greed in a veil of generosity.
+
+With the tools they get from around the station, they'll attempt to sin against god inside their plant room, flying as close to the sun as they can.
+
+## Pillar 2: Gamba is King, Sometime a Jack Will Do
+
+Botanists are chasing the high of rolling something really cool. Getting that one crazy plant that let them do something cool as fuck. One more mutation and this could be perfect... or start a tritfire.  Well that's an issue for atmos anyways, mutagen in!
+
+With gambling you don't always hit.  Sometimes you gotta just use ol' reliable.  Slower.  More boring.  Doesn't explode.  But I guess it works for the bounty...
+
+
+## Pillar 3: Good Things Have Costs, No Perfect Plants
+
+Having an awesome plant that produces massive quantities of stuff is great. It should also require more work. Balancing these costs is the botanist's primary loop, trying to push the limits of how much they can handle to get the best results.
+
+
+# Core Progression
+
+Core progression for hydroponics should give them the tools to make their turnaround time on requests faster, their produce more potent, and the volatility of their plants higher.
+
+
+# Providing for the Station
+
+Hydroponics is in a unique role as a provider because it is ultimately a smaller service department.  So while it should be beneficial and helpful to the station, it rarely should feel required.  Shifts feel very bad when full departments like Cargo or Science are struggling to do their jobs.  This shouldn’t be the case with Botany \- at least for the more complex aspects.  Similarly, Botany should provide helpful additions to other departments:  It shouldn’t replace them.
+
+Do: Let Hydroponics provide valuable bounties for Cargo.  
+Don’t:  Let Hydroponics grow pure money or plants that are as valuable as bounties without interacting with the bounty system.
+
+Do: Let Hydroponics provide precursors to powerful but niche medicines and chemicals (Oppo, Cogni, etc).  
+Do: Let Hydroponics provide larger quantities of basic medicines.  I.E. Plants that provide finished products for meds such as Bicardine, Derma, or Tricordizine.  
+Don’t: Let Hydroponics provide finished products for more complex or high tier medicines: I.E. Plants shouldn’t provide Bruiz, Lace, Arith, Pyra.  
+Don’t:  Make Hydroponics necessary for treatments to common issues.  I.E. making precursors necessary for all cryomeds that work on the dead.
+
+Do: Let Hydroponics provide common foodstuff for the chef.  
+Don’t: Let Hydroponics provide finished foods that replace the need for the chef.
+
+#  Gambling vs. Consistent Methods
+
+Gambling with mutations is a core part of what makes Botany fun and interesting.  It creates a way to have a different experience every shift and serves as a fun puzzle for Botanists to explore.  It’s also important to keep RNG from being a source of frustration.
+
+Nothing that is essential to interact with significant portions of the game should be fully locked behind unreliable RNG.
+
+Do:  Have the highest production rates locked behind RNG.  
+Do:  Have finished chems locked behind RNG \- I.E. Cogni can be randomly mutated, but you can also grow the precursors consistently.  
+Do:  Have RNG provide a number of strange components which botanists can mix and match.
+
+Don’t:  Lock important things behind RNG \- i.e. All meds and food should be possible to make without RNG.
+
+# Costs
+
+Good things should come with a cost.  Upfront costs should be used like tokens in the slot machine, while ongoing costs should be more like maintainence on the rewards you get out of it.
+
+
+# Player Story
+
+A botanist starts out their shift by chatting with the chef and asking if there's anything they'd like or need.  After planting the chef's plants, the botanists heads out to talk to chemisty and ask for some chemicals necessary for mutating their plants.
+
+They get back to Hydroponics and a cargo tech comes by with a couple of bounty slips.  The botanist tell them they'll work on those, then requests that the cargo tech purchases them some rare and exotic seeds that can only be acquired off station.
+
+They then start working on their initial mutations, getting a couple of mutated plants.  One is making some nice chems for medbay, they take a sample and label it for use later.  Another has very high yield.  They crossbreed it into the plants for cargo so that they'll get all the produce necessary for the bounty from a single harvest.
+
+Their third plant catches their eye.  It has a precursor for omnizine. This means with some extra mutation it could provide actual omnizine, liquid immortality!  However, it's also producing plasma.
+
+They mutate it further.  It gets another mutation and now the plasma is tritium.  They could keep mutating, but now they're running the risk of it gaining a sparking mutation, causing the trit to spontaniously combust.  Do they risk it for the omnizine?  Reach out to atmos to set up containment to roll further?  Or just give up and try again?
+
+# Appearance
+
+Hydroponics is noisy.  There's always something growing on, buckets strewn across the floor, plants that they meant to put in the fridge but got put on the floor and forgotten while they dealt with a plant that needed watering.
+
+As plants get more volatile and dangerous, it should be visible.  Basic plants are light green, brown, lighter natural colors.  As they get more mutated, the colors should move darker, more exotic.  Purples, dark reds.
+
+# Roundflow
+