Issues with vines

[Hugh-G-Rection]

Botany vines have a lot of general fuckery going on, and I would love to see them fixed or tweaked so they can be utilized properly.

BUG - Mech scythe ignores ligneous trait First of all there seems to be a bug where the mech scythe ignores the ligneous/wood trait completely. A vine with this gene has the text "Tough vine that cannot be cut easily", and a normal scythe takes three hits to break a single tile without affecting nearby tiles. The scythe module on a ripley however performs the exact same whether the vine has this gene or not, allowing a single mech to clear the whole vine in seconds. Since a mech is already immune to the vines, I don't see any balance issue in reducing the mech's scythe effect on strong vines.

BUG - Destroyed vines not dropping fruit Another weird issue is the consistency of dropping fruit from ripe tiles. Plant-b-gone always makes fruit drop, while beating the plant to death almost never drops anything. I would prefer the old style where vines dropped mature fruits automatically, which would give vines a use outside of :fun: and griff because they would be incredibly useful for large harvests. At the very least auto-harvesting could be an additional gene found in exotics.

BUG - Vines behavior can ignore plant stat numbers Honestly my biggest issue with vines is how inconsistent their growth behavior seems to be, regardless of stats. Different base seeds with the same genes will act very differently. Spent a while working on perfecting deadly vines during a nonantag round, the vines were incredibly fast and dangerous. The next round while antag I created seeds with the exact same genes across the board, then spliced a vine dev gene onto it, and it was so pathetically weak it barely grew 3 tiles out of it's tray. This shows me that vine behavior is either bugged, or is decided by an unknown factor not represented by any stats or genes that can be measured in game. The wiki also has zero information on what effects vines, so everything statwise has been from my own experimentation. Some seeds will create vines almost immediately on planting, while others will grow and mature and still need several minutes before vines appear. Some will rapidly spread out, attempting to fill a room before maturing, while others will only spread after initial tiles mature further. It feels like splicing the vine trait onto a non-vine seed will be weaker and slower than natural vines, despite having the same maturation time and appearing the same to the plant scanner. I'd really like it if we could figure out exactly what in our code is dictating vine behavior and find a better way of representing it in game and controlling it. At the very least I'd like the information so the wiki can be updated to represent it.

Being able to consistently create vines of certain types will help the role immensely, having slow weak vines that mature rapidly for incredibly fast harvests, or rapid deadly vines to make antag rounds more interesting and dynamic for the crew. And please don't shoot me down on the basis of vines becoming overpowered when plant-b-gone and goats still exist.

Edited for clarity because wow that's a lot of words

[Killette2]

I would prefer the old style where vines dropped mature fruits automatically

Even though I fought for this at one point, considering how large harvest can be we probably don't want that unless it has a 1/100 chance of happening per some cycle. Even with creeper vines which have a 81 (9x9 which is small in spess terms) tile growth area max this would end up extremely messy.

ignoring stat numbers

What more likely happened is that your vines "died". While they are still there, they will no longer do things like have their glowing function or grow/spread. Things that cause them to die are what would cause regular plants to die such as light levels or the environment(possibly?). I too encountered this and making the vine thrive in a normal environment seemed to be the fix. I will admit I haven't looked at vinecode in a very long time so I may be wrong.

[Hugh-G-Rection]

Any insight into the way vinecode works would be greatly appreciated, as my many attempts to learn to read spaghetti have been ~half-assed and drunken~ unsuccessful. As far as the vines being dead, I'm talking about fresh living plants planted in tandem with similar stats behaving very differently.
I'll do some more local testing tonight and maybe take some records.

[ghost]

I can't find anything that would cause vines to grab people from 3 tiles away and I can't reproduce this locally. More info is needed. Could it maybe be people standing next to the vine then moving away from it, resulting in a delayed grab somehow like the teletabling of old?

[ghost]

Also we've already had too many people fucking crashing the server by harvesting 4000 fruits and breaking a window. I sure as fuck don't want vines to do that AUTOMATICALLY.