We could use an upgraded plant anaylzer

[Killette2]

An upgraded plant analyzer from RnD would be helpful for a better botany experience. Some things it could possibly do is (in order of importance)

-Tell exactly how much food and water the plant takes instead of using words such as a lot or little because there is still a lot of variation between a lot and a lot, where you may want to use one instead of the other. -Tell what gasses it produces/absorbs. -Tell what chemicals the fruit will provide. This one is not as important but could be good for the lazy botanist. -Maybe analyze apiaries so bees can be further explored/understood? I understand that they grow from feeding plants (which is why I would like to know how much food plants take so I can please the bees without them dying from overpopulation) but I do not know how honey is produced and ways to manage bees besides constantly growing more plants.

I figured since more and more jobs are getting research upgraded items such as surgery and with the floral somatoray becoming a little lack-luster with all the new mutations and potency being near impossible to raise, that this could be a good feature.

[Midaychi]

Those sound neat but, knowing what I know about the xenobotany system, I don't think a lot of that would be very useful. I guess having a measurement of 'units of water' and 'units of fertilizer' per time period could be conceivably interesting but not very useful, due to all the plants working off a background nutrition and health system. All you really have to worry about is that there's fertilizer and water in the tray, and final amount doesn't really matter much. Each fertilizer increases the nutrition of the plant in the background per unit absorbed, depending on the fertilizer, either 1 nutrient per fertilizer or 2 for diethyl. Some of the fertilizers also count as beneficial reagents and confer a bonus to that plant per unit; Robust harvest or pure nutriment increase yieldmod and Radium or left4zed will increase (the somewhat useless) mutmod.

Knowing the exact plant gas exuding and absorption would be neat, but in my experience I've never seen it really matter much, and I have my suspicions to if the gas exchange code even works on vg. Tray lids can be closed to isolate the environment, and wrenched to a connector port, piped to another connector port with a tank so you can use an analyzer to figure out the gas exuded at least.

Chemicals in the fruits would be neat I guess, but you can just scan the seed packet before you plant it.

Bees are basically magic.

I'd be more interested in a scanner if it listed the current yieldmod and mutmod of the plant, the nutrition level of the plant, and the health level of the plant. Then you'd have a more detailed idea of when to inject cryoxodone and etc.

Maybe if you scan a plant, and it mutates, and you scan it again, it shows the changes between the last time it was scanned and its current state? Not actually useful for anything besides record keeping though.

I think a more useful addition to botany from R&D would be a two parter: 1, making the biobalistic and disks and centrifuge deconstructalbe/constructable/printable, and 2, making it upgradable. Upgrades might reduce the gene deterioration, and maybe unlock allele manipulation so you could write individual stats to disks rather than a whole range of stats (Ie, for the vigour loci you could specifically nab the lifespan, or the yield, or the production rate.)

What I mean as allele manipulation is that you'd still have to find the loci that codes for, say fruiting and potency, but you could further enter a sub-loci mode where you had to guess out which allele on that gene loci coded for potency, which for fruiting, etc, and if you found them you could use them as for far more specific GMO-seed production.

[Killette2]

The reason I want to know how much nutrament plants take is due to bees. If your plants are all full because of the bees, the bees will eventually die because they have nothing left to pollinate or something like that. I have experienced it before where the bees did too good of a job feeding the plants (which is why I use bees) and collapsed because of this. If I were to find a plant with the maximum nutrament requirement, I would be able to keep bees alive longer or forever, as I've gotten lucky in some rounds with very high cost plants.

For seeds, you cannot scan to seeds to see what chemicals they will produce currently, that is the feature request to be able to scan the seeds or the plant.

For the gas thing, as soon as xenobotany came out, plasma in botany was very common as people planted many exotic seeds as possible without scanning for the good ones first. Seeds have a chance to produce or absorb any gas, including plasma, and there is no way to detect this until you plant them and see an air alarm going off.

[Probe1]

Having more depth through xenobotany would be cool. I like the idea of alleles.

[9600bauds]

I'd like a better way to know what type of gas a plant exudes, I wasn't aware of the connector port business though. can you explain the method better?

[Midaychi]

How it was originally designed is that plant trays were moved over to being atmospheric machinery. They should have a right click option to close the plant tray, which isolates the plant in its own atmospheric environment. Unless vg changed it somehow, you should be able to wrench it to a connector port and the tray will adapt the environment in the pipe into the tray. This also works both ways; You can harvest gasses off the plant like this. This is why the baystation xenobotany lab has a connectorport and pipes/waste distro pump that nobody ever uses.

Basically what I was getting at was that if you suspect a plant might exude or suck up gas, then you can close the lid and wrench it to a connector port and use common atmos methods to figure that out.

[Probe1]

An upgrade path that would be appreciated is information on the reagents inside the plant. So you can know what it will produce when used on a grinder without having to grind it. That'd save some work for exotic seeds.

[Killette2]

You can already do that with the fruit Probe1, by scanning a fruit with a plant analyzer you can see what chemicals are inside. The thing I'm asking is being able to do to the same for the seed before planting it so you don't waste time, but of course this would take RnD to make a nice item like that.

[Probe1]

It's funny I learned that this round. I had never tried it before. And here's your post, about the same time I was figuring it out on my own.

I'm all outta ideas then.

[Killette2]

Another suggestion for an upgraded plant analyzer - allow it to see exactly how much weeds and pest are in a tray. We used to be able to do this but are no longer able to, we can just tell when it's over the tolerance of the plant.

[ihadtoregisterforthis]

How far has this been fulfilled?

[9600bauds]

Regular plant analyzers already tell you the gasses that the plant produces. More accurate nutrient and water consumption readings could be a thing, as well as accurate pest and weed levels, though I think showing chemicals before the plant is grown would completely trivialize exotic seeds. Somatorays are now not-shit so that covers the R&D aspect.

[gbasood]

Is there anything from this that needs fulfilling still?

[PJB3005]

Precise water / nutrient levels, and I'd like to add pressure to that too.

[Killette2]

I'd like an advanced scanner from RnD that could show the chemical output, and how much chems per potency. Maybe it could even read out what the plant will mutate into potentially (even though you probably have this memorized already)