Speak this word carefully. I myself have only grazed upon its fruits, not yet sought direct experience.
Yeah, well, I've actually gone for the raw dog in that regard. Which you'd think would mean I could remember the name of it when referring to its arcane mechanics, but apparently no.
Also I agree that botany is OP when/if they have direct access to a grinder, but back in the day when they had to finagle the *chef*? Chemists, pah. Whining because the public service department gets access to their toys.
After a lot of effort, while serving the public.
Sure, mass-producing certain compounds with system mastery is pretty powerful.
If you get mutagen. From chemistry... Or patience.
Botany was hysterically overpowered when I was playing around last year, and nobody wants to be the guy who nerfs them (they're not quite as sacred as Science's ludicrous stupidity, but they're also just "poor lil' botany" and nobody wants to admit that they're out of control) so I can't imagine they're any less powerful now. Not only do they have their own grinders, they also have lots of other toys that can only be used by that department. Biomass vendors make me feel strange things, because they're exceptionally useful but it's also a nonsense stopgap measure that exists because nobody can trust Cargo to do anything remotely related to their job.
And Chemistry mainly whines about Bot for two reasons... 1) You need to give them one of your dispensers unless you feel like making BOTH departments less efficient by having to constantly feed them thousands of units of mutagen just to
do their basic job, and 2) They get
exclusive access to the best healing, toxic, stimulating, transformative and explosive chems in the game. Chemistry simply does not have the materials (or even the recipes!) to synthesize chems of similar strength.
So not only do you have to surrender "your" equipment to them, they will proceed to do a better job than you ever could have done with them. The entire chemistry department is metaphorically cuckolded by a couple hippie hicks in garish overalls.
Well at least there's still Medbay... I mean, sure, after Botany slapped mutant Gaia all over the place there's no longer a need for any kind of healing supplies, and they also smashed open cloning for easy access while providing a pod people alternative, but on the off chance there's an appendicitis event YOU CAN STILL BE RELEVANT!
...wait, no, Robotics took care of it. Nevermind.