Botany Design Doc

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

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+# Core Concept
+
+Botany at its best is about rolling the dice then figuring out how to use what you get as best you can.  It embodies the design principle of chaos because every shift you’re working with a new set of random mutations.
+
+# Design Pillars
+
+## Pillar 1: Botany is a Provider
+
+The goal of the Botany department should be to provide for the station.  Food for the Kitchen, bounties for Cargo, and reagents for Chem.  Core progression for botany should give botany the tools to make this production faster and more productive.  Ideally botany, while being able to make use of \*some\* of their production, will need to give it to other departments to see the best use of it.  This means favoring making precursors over finished chemicals, bounties instead of raw sellables, and ingredients, not ready to eat food.
+
+Botany should feel at its best when getting special treats for other departments \- not when they squirrel away in their botany hole for 60 minutes then come out with a god plant.
+
+## Pillar 2: Gamba is King, Sometime a Jack Will Do
+
+Random mutations and luck based rolls should be better than their more consistent counterparts.  If you randomly get a chemical on a plant, it should be better than a plant which is guaranteed to have that chemical.  This encourages players to roll for better options and leads to asymmetric shifts where botany is producing different things in high quantities each shift.
+
+Skill expression should come from how you put together the various pieces you get.
+
+Most things should be possible in worse forms with relative consistency.  If the station needs omnizine, botany should be able to work towards and produce it \- just not at the same rate as if they get a lucky omnizine roll on something.
+
+## 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 maintenance on average, both in the initial investment to make the plant, and in ongoing work to tend to the plants
+
+This also means that gambling should focus more towards randomness on **WHAT** you get.  Ideally there are pros and cons to most outcomes, instead of randomly getting either a good outcome or a bad one.
+
+# Providing for the Station
+
+Botany 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 Botany provide valuable bounties for Cargo.  
+Don’t:  Let Botany grow pure money or plants that are as valuable as bounties without interacting with the bounty system.
+
+Do: Let Botany provide precursors to powerful but niche medicines and chemicals (Oppo, Cogni, etc).  
+Do: Let Botany provide larger quantities of basic medicines.  I.E. Plants that provide finished products for meds such as Bicardine, Derma, or Tricordizine.  
+Don’t: Let Botany provide finished products for more complex or high tier medicines: I.E. Plants shouldn’t provide Bruiz, Lace, Arith, Pyra.  
+Don’t:  Make Botany necessary for treatments to common issues.  I.E. making precursors necessary for all cryomeds that work on the dead.
+
+Do: Let Botany provide common foodstuff for the chef.  
+Don’t: Let Botany provide finished foods that can just be eaten raw.
+
+#  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 it 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.  In this case, unreliable RNG means something that’s relatively unlikely.  Having a 30% chance that you can repeatedly roll isn’t a problem \- 5 tries and it’s up to 85% chance of happening, 5 more and its 98%.  Instead it’s referring to things like a 1% chance of happening where you’d need to roll \~230 times to have a 90% chance of getting the thing.
+
+RNG should provide larger production, shortcuts to more refined chemicals, utility, and special treats.
+
+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.  Costs can be largely categorized as upfront vs ongoing as well as effort/attention vs resources.  Ideally acquiring new things requires an upfront cost, but increases to production, shortcuts, and other utility require ongoing costs.
+
+Upfront costs are those that are invested to create a seed or lineage of plants which will no longer require the cost to maintain.
+
+Ongoing costs are those that require consistent upkeep as long as you are using the plant to produce.
+
+A resource cost is one that requires chemicals, materials, or otherwise needs some sort of item to be spent.
+
+An effort cost is one that requires a certain amount of work or input on the part of some player.
+
+These can of course overlap.
+
+An example of an upfront resource cost would be a fertilizing chemical that permanently increases the production of a plant and all of its offspring.  An ongoing resource cost would be a plant that requires a chemical to keep it from dying.
+
+An upfront effort cost could look like the effort spent mutating a useful strain of a plant \- once you’ve mutated it, that lineage can be propagated without repeating the effort.
+
+An ongoing effort cost might look like needing to weed a plant once every 2 minutes to prevent it from kudzu’ing.  
+