B-Side Flower Ideas

williewillus

Ideas floated a long time ago and locked in Discord hell since. Archiving it publicly.
The idea is for some flowers to be able to be put into a B-side mode where its requirements get much harder, but the mana output increases in conjunction. Either in an addon or in Botania itself.

From Zach:
Endoflame - Plant it on top of a furnace (bonus if it's a blast furnace) and it makes mana while the furnace is running (wow I bet nobody has thought of doing this before)
Entropinnyum - Generates mana when nearby items are destroyed by explosions, with a bonus for variety
Gourmalilis - Just nerf the base output and make it operate more like a rafflowsia, rewarding large cycles
Hydrogaengas - now sponge up water they consume
Kekimurus - now consumes cake even when internal buffer is emtpy. also doesn't work near pumpkin stems
Munchdew - the munchdew produces less mana overall, doesn't take digestive breaks, and has a vastly increased buffer. When the buffer runs out, it decays.
Narslimmus - Now requests slimes in Big-medium-small order (like spectrolous), dumps buffer when fed something wrong
Rafflowsia - Now only consumes generating flowers, producing mana proportional to the mana in the consumed flower's buffer times a function of the cycle length (with potential for shitloads of mana for a full cycle)
Rosa Arcana - now gains full mana from enchantments and XP orbs, but can't produce mana from players.
Thermalilly - turns consumed lava into water

There's more but I can't bother to dredge them up to post here.

adarsh

I love the idea of nerfing the Kekimurus near pumpkin stems, even as a feature of regular Keks. Discouraging cross-mod/vanilla exploits is not new to vanilla (Blood Magic and Thermalily cooldown, and TNT duping respectively). At the very least, it'd make super-compact Pumpkin -> Cake farms with Astral Sorcery less enticing.

Not sure how the lexicon might convey this though haha

gonzo2735

I like these ideas a ton! I feel like if these concepts were to come to the mod it would have to be in conjunction with the original mechanics, though. If mechanics get too complicated to adequately automate without an intensive amount of resources and shutter thought- it would just reinforce endoflame spam further.
PS Munchdew having to be constantly fed leaves to survive gives gremlin vibes and I'm for it. 👍️

KiNg

The whole idea is being able to switch between the A (current implementation) and B (suggested) sides on a per-flower basis. That said, here are some of the ideas I've had for it.
Spectrolus: Wool is no longer requested in a set order. Instead, the wool color is specified by the signal strength output by the flower (16 colors of wool, 16 possible signal strengths with 0-15)
Dandelifeon: Tracks the location of all of the "player placed" cell blocks (anything not generated through the game of life). After consuming cells, places unbreakable blocks where those blocks were located (can still be broken by a wand of the forest, and are removed when flower is broken). Cells consumed get a multiplier based on the number of unbreakable blocks present.
Shulk me not: No longer interacts with shulkers attacking other mobs. Instead, when a shulker is created, both it and it's parent are consumed for mana.

Amygdala

although I don't think there will be an upgraded version of flowers in botania, it seems to be a good idea as another mode of flowers, here are some of ideas.

Hydroangeas
Take only nutrient-rich water (waterlogged plants), add passivedecay and gain mana after clearing the blocks.
Thermalily
Absorbing too much lava during overheating converts the surrounding cobblestone into lava.
Munchdew
Leaves closer to the log (lower distance) generate more mana.
Entropinnyum
When mobs dies from the tnt blast damage, it generates mana based on the number of mobs and max health.
Kekimurus
Eat the entire birthday cake (with lit colored candles) to generate mana, additional mana is obtained in the order of 16 colors.
Dandelifeon
At a random time after 50 cycles, all cells are cleared and all surviving cells are counted to generate mana.

Wormbo

How about alternate, but related functionality for some functional flora as well?

Dreadthorn is essentially a B-side of the Bellethorn
Jijuulia could count as B-side of the Tangleberrie
Bergamute could absorb vibrations instead of (or in addition to) audible sounds, and maybe actually produce (homeopathic amounts of) mana from those
Bubbell could crate a ball of water that won't flow out
Clayconia could dry mud blocks into clay, or even further dry clay blocks into terracotta
Heisei Dream could make hostile mobs only angry at different types of (probably also hostile) mobs
Pollidisiac could feed baby animals (youngest first) instead of adults
Solegnolia could be the magnet for items and/or XP orbs

fish

really obvious idea for the dandelifeon: use some other cellular automaton

Wormbo

"C-side" for Rosa Arcana: Extracts XP from furnaces as it's being produced (maybe with compat hooks so other XP-producing blocks work as well), but no longer accepts XP orbs or player XP and doesn't consume already stored XP from furnaces either.

Shulk Me Not: The other mob must not be a shulker, and the shulker itself must not have the levitation effect either. Maybe even streak bonus for varying the other mob, but substantial nerf if the mob is always the same. (Could also reduce mana output for A-side, considering fast shulker farms are a thing nowadays.)
Spectrolus: Adult sheep only. If the sheep has the wrong color or no wool, the flower's internal buffer is cleared. (Combine with comparator randomization idea for additional challenge.)

Wormbo

Looking into some of those ideas, assessing feasibility/automation difficulty:

Endoflame: Making a furnace run to produce power was a popular thing in Create, which also provided the tools to make a furnace do that essentially indefinitely without consuming smeltable items. Botania can probably do something similar by extracting the smeltable item via a corporea request (which accesses blocks from the top, which for a furnace is only the input slot). The contraption would definitely be more complex than the usual endoflame setup, but a combination of corporea and redstring makes it possible with just Botania. (I just made a button-powered POC using two corporea networks.) This is probably easily overcome by only generating mana for a non-zero smelting progress.
Entropinnyum/items: Destroying items sounds good, but probably needs some kind of quality rating system. Its not difficult at all to make a cobblestone or basalt generator, have TNT break those blocks and the same TNT also deletes items from the previous blast, generating mana from the B-Entropinnyum.
Entropinnyum/mobs: Automation probably requires a player to spawn mobs in large numbers naturally, and a blast-proof killing chamber. I assume those mobs won't drop anything, as the Entropinnyum mana itself should be reward enough.
Gourmaryllis: No notes. Rewarding variety is always good, although some mods make it way easier to turn up the variety without much effort.
Hydroangeas/sponge: Would he B-side still decay? Sponging up water can only delete so many source blocks. It wouldn't be that difficult to make a tank large enough that it keeps reforming sources even from repeated, aggressive water removal in known locations. I hope a B-Hydroangeas setup the size of a Dandelifeon field is worth the effort. 🙂
Hydroangeas/plant eater: Vanilla Minecraft doesn't have a particularly big range of water-loggable plants, but mangrove-related blocks (especially propagules and roots) and water-logged leaves are probably not that hard to make. Other options include large dripleaf plants, which are easily renewable with bone meal, and they are multi-block plants, same with kelp. This would probably benefit from a streak bonus to prevent cheesy repetition exploits.
Kekimurus/candle cake: I'm not sure Botania has a way to automate candle cakes yet. The Rannuncarpus can't put candles on cakes at this time, so this would either not be automatable or require additional mods.
Munchdew/"munching spree": How would this run start? You'd need to intentionally use a low-grade spreader setup, but even that will likely cause the buffer to empty a couple of times before the spreader's transfer rate finally gets saturated. I'm not sure I could properly describe a start condition when to begin monitoring the decay condition that wouldn't be likely to cause start-up issues all the time unless you use a very low-grade spreader, which wouldn't be able to keep up with the much better mana production of the flower then.
Munchdew/leaf distance: This is probably easy to cheese, as trees ignore nearby logs while growing. It would reduce the number of leaves generating, but you can easily grow a 2x2 spruce that is surrounded by additional log pillars (or even a more complex pattern that uses the logs even more efficiently) to reduce the average leaf block distance by a lot.
Narslimmus: Interesting mob sorting challenge. Achievable feeding rates would be much lower, though. With an appropriate spreader setup you could probably empty the buffer very quickly most of the time anyway, though.
Rafflowsia: Considering I have yet to automate this flower, I'm not sure I can assess it accurately. However, a flower that eats other flowers might make it somewhat difficult to leave those other flowers alone for a while before actually eating them. Would probably need the Rafflowsia to accept a redstone signal to control it, similar to the Dandelifeon.
Thermalily/water: That's probably not even a real issue. If the lava block is properly contained when it converts to water, it won't do any damage, and a dispenser can just replace the water block with a lava block in vanilla already.
Thermalily/overheat: I'm not sure if that's a particularly relevant effect, as you can just not have any cobblestone around the flower.
Rosa Arcana/no player XP: I'd argue that might actually be a benefit, as you can stand on the flower and pull the mob farm's XP towards it. The flower eats the orbs before they reach the player.
Shulk Me Not/eat duplication pairs: This does indeed introduce some minor complications. The answer is probably to have two shulker farms – one for breeding shulkers to restock the other one, which is covered by the Shulk Me Not.
Dandelifeon/random clearance: I don't think introducing randomness is a good idea for this particular flower, as it's supposed to be a deterministic puzzle.
Dandelifeon/residue blocks: It might be a good idea to let the wand also clear those block if operated by a dispenser instead of a player. It's not worth automating something as complex as a Dandelifeon with evolving play field if it doesn't actually run fully automatic.

I'm not sure how the first Kekimurus suggestion is supposed to work. Explaining the pumpkin stem interaction could be explained as "a dislike for unexpected pumpkin taste", though. 🙂 (Would be hard to track if the pumpkins are harvested and placed manually near the Kekimurus, though.)