User:Pissachu/Hydroponics

Danger

Introduction

Hello.
This here is Smellifer.

You probably haven't seen her yet in this page, so let's get acquainted first.
I wonder what that yellow pin she's wearing is 🤔

The first thing I want to clear out is how you tend to a plant whenever it's inside a hydroponics tray
Once you put the seed in the tray, there are only 4 tools you really need:

• 

  The Mini Hoe to remove weeds

• 

  The Plant Clippers to take a sample seed

• 

  Hatchet to harvest plants (especially tough ones)

• 

  The Spade to kill plants and free the tray

• 

  ?

Since these are the base for most of the work, you'll want to have these items accessible at all times, meaning your belt.
There are alternative tools to most of these, except for the mini hoe, it's up to you to find them!hahahaha
The plants grow on their own by waiting, so all you need to do is make sure they don't die.

Hydroponics layout

The boring stuff starts here

Because you want your trays available to you at all times to check on the plants, you'll probably want them to be close and visible. Unfortunately not all stations have a well put hydroponics department on that regard;
always having a wrench on you to throw at furniture to displace it wherever you want is a nice additional tool to the arsenal.

Tip: always keep a sort of path uninterrupted by machines, especially trays, so that you always have some space to put things on the floor next to the trays for special operations; to have a good idea of what I mean, think of it as if your player has to be able to walk without tripping on the trays or other furniture.

Layout Examples

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Screenshots are only placeholders until more proper Hydroponics layouts are added

Oasis has a very basic layout (if not for the number of botanists available), as all the trays are separated but not too far away from each other, and there is a central place to put all the equipment you don't want to keep on yourself; I find it good, but too simple

On the other hand, as full of resources as it may be, I find that Cog's is too big and too separated, the two trays behind the pillar are hard to access and you need to run around the main section like a kid on adderall to access the whole thing if your developments call for more trays.

Tip: having the department floor and furniture filled with trash or tools left laying around can lead to confusion when trying to find an important item you need for something specific.
While I cannot give you physiologic proof of your brain getting confused by all the small things it's looking at, trying to distinguish them one by one, I can show you some proof of concept below:

This department fucking sucks Here we see how the usual amateurs and even most journeymen tend to keep their department. I never let this happen to me. As you can see, the equipment is all over the place, most of the seeds and produce are indistinguishable from each other (you could never tell if they got swabbed, mutated or anything else unless you memorised where you kept them), someone left a full belt and multiple various tools on the ground; the novice botanist that made themselves a diona character to try and RP even drank all the Robust Harvest and polymorphed into a tree. What's in that puddle? Now, I want you to look well at the gif, open it in another page too if you need, and zoom really well into it: let's see if you can find even a single pineapple seed. This is your homework! Where's Waldo?

Here's how I like to keep things instead. Everything has its own spot and place, which I decide usually on the fly at the start of the shift, but that keeps me from going insane if I start obtaining requests from the kitchen, bounties from cargo, requests from chemistry, and when a scientist comes to me asking to plant an anomaly core. Do you see any annoying tray blinking, on this static png? Good boys even get the extra chemicals, since they are able to do a good job and fulfill requests! The way I started thinking to keep items sorted is usually the following: the spare buckets stay near the water container; those giant Cocoa plants are to increase nutriments in the trays; there are specific spots for the equipment that you get from the various vending machines: the chemistry bottles, the swab containers, plant bags, the spare seeds that haven't been modified in any way, these all stay either on a counter, or in a corner, trying to at least slightly arrange them there is a distinction with seeds I consider 'important', which are seeds of plants that were modified, for example, to get more yield or potency; this is all so that there is no need to repeat the procedure with a new standard seed; I keep them inside a hydroponics duffel bag finally, I try to keep a separate hydroponics duffel bag or plant bag specifically for default cocoa seeds, the key to my success, to swab 6 yield into other plants

The boring stuff ends here

References

• Map layouts were taken using https://map.spacestation14.com/
• Shots of performing tasks were done with a localhost server through the steps in https://docs.spacestation14.com/en/general-development/setup/server-hosting-tutorial.html

• Botanist | 410H 13M

Signed User:Pissachu (talk)