Botany trays are weird and confusing in general

[KoboldCommando]

The botany trays really don't work very well and are among the more obtuse machines on the station. Any improvement to them would be a huge benefit.

For one, Seeb reported to me and I've seen as well that golden trays with 0 weeds and 0 pests can sometimes have weeds overcome the plants seemingly at random. I'm not sure what causes this. The best guess we came up with is that the weed amount may get just high even in between ticks of the golden tray clearing them.

Also, converting the tray to golden supposedly records the fertilizer currently in it? But I'm not sure, since that's never actually addressed anywhere in-game, so it may just be a rumor. And I'm not sure what happens if there's no fertilizer at all. There are a few ways you could address this, listing the fertilizer "stored" and letting it be changed should be pretty straightforward.

Another big issue are the lights, which get a lot worse once you start working with golden trays. The solid red light means pests, except when it means low health, except when it means old age, or whatever else. The blinking red light is weeds, except when it's... I'm not even sure why else it shows up but it does quite a bit in the absence of weeds. Overhauling the trays and lights would be nice, but a quicker fix for this may be to expose more stats to the botany plan scanner, make sure we can see every stat that set soff lights.

[dwasint]

weeds overtaking on gold mode is still possible as golden trays just reduce the amount of weeds in a tray per tick so high weed rate and weed number can cause overtakes

Its not that it stores it, its just gold trays stop nutriments from going down, and most plants will fill the trays nutriment area up. Which stops you from adding it in afterwards

[KoboldCommando]

I thought different nutriment sources had different effects? If not, my mistake.

The weeds issue was the main reason I made this post, but I figured it was worth bringing up the generally confusing-as-heck state of trays as well. It's ok if it gets closed but thanks for reading!

[dwasint]

They do, just most chems can occupy the nutriment catagory despite not doing anything