What's the point of mutating plants

[Ravien]

First of all - I like the idea, mutating plants creates new challenge, some new objective to achieve, but other than - looks not so rewarding. In current form it's a (late)mid game content. At this stage player solved food problem, built efficient meat/plant farms and have no incentive to build elaborate irradiation chambers to make new foods.

It would be nice to give plants ability to drop (rare) natural mutated seeds on it's own to make it possible to use them in early game on space irradiated farms, if +25 rad requirements for mutated plants could be substituted with solar light.

[TuxSam123]

5 minutes ago, Ravien said:

First of all - I like the idea, mutating plants creates new challenge, some new objective to achieve, but other than - looks not so rewarding. In current form it's a (late)mid game content. At this stage player solved food problem, built efficient meat/plant farms and have no incentive to build elaborate irradiation chambers to make new foods.

It would be nice to give plants ability to drop (rare) natural mutated seeds on it's own to make it possible to use them in early game on space irradiated farms, if +25 rad requirements for mutated plants could be substituted with solar light.

I got reaaly lucky and discovered two new plant mutations before cycle 100. My seed was also really nice because there was an ice biome nearby.

[solo6490]

After playing around with a system I really don't see much point. The benefits to the mutations and the rate at which you get the seeds with the mutations you want is just inconsistent. By the time you get the mutated plant you want you already moved on to better foods. 

 

  But your right rare resources would be a nice twist to the mutations. It would give you a different pathway to get things like isoresin which takes forever to get from the tree.

 

[Ravien]

Natural mutations for early game and gene splicer for late

[O.J.Vodka]

This system is dispensable，I'm too lazy to do it

[pether]

I don't agree with you.

First of all, it seems that additional food from harvest or faster growth are valid mutations you want to get even during late game. Ofc it depends on your playstyle, preferences, etc, but lets be honest +50% bonus is HUGE. If your farms currently can support 20 dupes, with modified seeds this number quickly grows to 30. And it scales really well, if you prefer having BIG bases, leap from 200 to 300 dupes is massive.

Second thing is all you need for mutation is some radiation. Make berry+shinebug farm and you will mutate the seeds in the early game as well. Sure, the chances are smaller, but it is present there as well

[O.J.Vodka]

5 hours ago, pether said:

我不同意你的观点。

首先,额外的粮食收成或更快的增长似乎是有效的突变你甚至想要在游戏后期。 离岸金融中心这取决于你playstyle、偏好等,但让诚实+ 50%奖金是巨大的。 如果你的农场目前可以支持20欺骗,与修改后的种子数量迅速增加到30。 天平很好,如果你喜欢大基地,从200年到300年欺骗是巨大的。

第二件事是你所需要的突变是辐射。 使浆果+ shinebug农场,你会变异的种子早在游戏。 当然,可能性更小,但是它存在

When you get enough mutant seeds, you may not need to increase agricultural production

[robotic_gamer]

the main issue I have with mutant plants is the lack of a good radiation source. shinebugs move around but need space to breed, wheezeworts cool and are a finite resource. space radiation is insufficient when you take into account the walling to keep it in air. the crashed satellite is not at your main planetoid. the nuclear reactor runs on a finite resource and makes a lot of heat. the only partial solution is liquid nuclear waste but to get enough radiation you either need to super compress it or use a planter box and make sure the tile below it and are diagonal to it are full of nuclear waste. the problem with this its very hard to get that much nuclear waste outside of exploits/bugs.

[Hokaeru]

I really like the idea of mutant seeds, and like how you can find diverse solutions for your colony. I think the management of the seeds could be simplified a little bit (it gets a little messy with storages I think sometimes). But it is very satisfying and fun !

[ATM Reaper]

Why mutate plants? Why not I say.......

[Orzelek]

4 hours ago, ATM Reaper said:

Why mutate plants? Why not I say.......

I will give the why not - because resulting plant requires radiation to actually grow. And there is no nice way to produce that radiation in your farming area.

[0xFADE]

True point.  Most bases move on to ranching as their primary food source well before you have the infrastructure set up to mass mutate plants.  I guess it would only be good if you can get mutations that make them very easy to grow.  Like actually growing sleet wheet for super high quality food.  I have not looked up all the specifics myself.

[Sasza22]

Actually once i saw the plant mutations for the first time i thought they would be good for new bases. I could improve them in my main base and use the improved version on one of the planteoids. Especially some of the low maintainance variants like the self harvesting one or the one with minimal fertilizer reqiurement. The radiation requirement kinda kills that purpose.

[Nebbie]

The point? More food or less labor or easy rot piles.

Is it worth it? Well in the early game, those are great things to go for...but you won't get these in significant quantities because of the inability of a mutated plant to drop seeds. Seriously, if they could drop seeds, then the meta might actually be to mutate plants early and slowly replace the original crop by cycle 50 or so, which would be really cool.
The rad requirement contributes to this problem, because using your limited rad sources on making new mutations means not using them on growing your existing ones. That isn't just bad in general, it actively discourages experimentation with the system.

As to the lategame, I'm swimming in resources and see no need to get better plants except for new colonies...which will struggle to provide rads to grow mutated plants.

Oh, and to top it all off, most of the game treats all variations of a seed as exactly the same, which means I can't store mutated seeds separately, nor plant mutated seeds when I have no base seed available, nor tell my grill to stop cooking mutated sleet wheat or nosh beans.

I dare say, this is the most badly-designed system in ONI. I would only ever bother with a tiny portion of it that's pre-planned out from before a colony is even made, and disregard everything else about it.

[FreezingSlickT]

If there were more common ways to get rads, I think it would make it more helpful to have mutated plants 

[Hjoyn]

I disagree, mutations single handedly make the vast majority of crops actually worth using. Without mutations, essentially every crop other than mealwood and mushrooms (which are map dependent) are never worth using, because they consume huge amounts of otherwise valuable resources. Meanwhile, ranching provides very high quality surf and turf for a small amount of natural gas and a little dupe labor. There's simply no gameplay reason to every use those crops when you can do nearly as good for essentially zero resource cost. 

Mutations alone provide a 267% greater yield per fertilizer, making those resource costs a lot more manageable. It also makes the plants grow 4x faster, reducing space and dupe labor requirements, as well as decreasing turnaround time. The faster life cycle also makes fertilizer more viable, as the yield bonus from fertilizer is increased by 267% as well, since the micronutrient fertilizer bonus stacks with the mutated plant. Additionally, the reduction in the amount of plants required also reduces the labor required to apply the fertilizer. Taken together with the now viable plants, fertilizer is now actually a useful buff that you will want to set up the production chain for. 

The new grubgrubs make this even more powerful, providing another stacking buff that reduces the resource requirements of plants even further, if a bit finicky to use on non-grubfruit plants. 

I don't see the need for rads to produce and utilize mutated plants as an issue, as they are not an early game system, nor do I think they should be. In early game, you don't need mutated plants because regular mealwood and mushrooms suffice. Mutated plants compete with ranching in mid game, when you have no problem providing the radiation needed to create and farm the plants, both of which are solved by nuclear reactors. What mutated plants do is reduce the resource requirements of plants to a point where they are competitive with ranching. The incentive to produce mutated plants is the greater food variety, utility (made useful by buildable rockets), and slightly higher quality they enable compared to ranching. I do not see mutated plants as a solution to the need for food nor low quality food, as both are handled by ranching or mealwood/mushrooms. 

While I do agree that uranium being a finite resource is an issue that should be rectified, with the use of beetas you should have a thousand or so cycles of uranium per map. Nuclear reactors provide both the high radiation for creating plant mutations as well as the low level radiation for farming them in the form of nuclear waste. They also help indicate that once you have nuclear reactors, mutations are a natural next step enabled by the reactors. 

[0xFADE]

On 6/23/2021 at 1:25 PM, Nebbie said:

I dare say, this is the most badly-designed system in ONI. I would only ever bother with a tiny portion of it that's pre-planned out from before a colony is even made, and disregard everything else about it.

It takes awhile for a mechanic to develop.  Back when egg cracking was new you had to bend over backwards to get specific eggs cracked and not any random egg you actually wanted to raise...  That is I think they have fixed it.  I don't crack eggs since I'd rather let it hatch naturally then drown for meat.

[SeniorPuft]

Has anyone tried pip planting mutant seeds?

Is that possible?

[sakura_sk]

6 minutes ago, SeniorPuft said:

Is that possible?

Yes. You just need a radiation source nearby

[SeniorPuft]

16 minutes ago, sakura_sk said:

Yes. You just need a radiation source nearby

Rad!