Heya, me and my significant other decided to flex our skills (I code, they model!) in an ARK mod, and well… Ark needs more scenery, especially with the sadly low amount of crafted scenery. Of course, I run a TON of mods for it but none really have a large gamut of flowering plants, especially the more spectacular ones! I’ll be using this thread to track our progress and get a bit of help as well. I’m unfamiliar with C++ and the ARK dev kit (I’m a Java dude myself) so you can see why I’d love help. That, and I’d love to see what people would like to see first so we can focus on that and then introduce it! And, lastly, see if we can optimize this to go hand in hand with other mods (this is quite standalone so I think there won’t be much conflict! And it would be simple enough to be available in all game types of ARK).
That being said, we’re currently a bit busy, expect this to be slow. We got nothing but ideas, too! And hope, which is important. It takes my modded up ARK 10 minutes to load, so hope’s good.
If you do help, I’ll be sure to credit that in our documentation 
We intend this mod to be free for everyone to enjoy the wonderful frustration of our dear old angiosperms.
Currently In Development:
- Plant Species
- Models
- Crafting Station
- Growing
- Utility
- Breeding/Hybridization
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Explanations and Pseudocode:
Species:
Plant Species are an ongoing search and romp through Wikipedia for us, so if you want to have a sneak peek on what we’re looking at, boy do we have a google doc for you! Some have genus and then a bunch of species, some are just a single species, and some are a whole order or family we like! We’re always looking to expand, though!
If you want to suggest something we don’t have listed and/or want to see a model expedited… Here’s a little form! Suggestions are optional, of course, but if you do suggest, we’d rather see uncommon plant species! Roses, tulips, daisies, pansies, lilies, etc are a no go at the moment since they’re extremely variable and everyone would likely expect them. We want to focus on obscure (and sometimes extinct) plants you won’t normally find in a bouquet.
Models:
Ongoing by Scott. I’ll be using placeholders while they work, of course. This section I’d love to spoiler for some nice previews.
Apart from plants, we’d love to add in pots of various sizes! Of course pots would also have color regions as well, for anyone who just wants some nice pottery to go with a flower of their home. Custom pot walls/half-walls also an idea here.
Crafting Station:
Dumping all this jazzy stuff into engrams seems a bit massive, so I want to code this into something similar to a crafting station. There would be folders to sort plants based on species (or color?) and one folder for tools.
For the station’s model I’m up in the air, so perhaps a little table with a small spade, potting soils, and clay pots?
Possibly another crafting station discussed in breeding section 
Growing:
Will be similar to that of the crop plants. Using the crafting station you can convert crop seeds to the special kind in a 1x to 1x conversion. I was thinking of making the seed requirements echo the flower of the desired plant. A purple flowering plant = 1x amarberry seed and 1x azulberry seed. After you have crops for these plants, the seeds in the plot kind of become redundant as your dinos can collect them like mad. Hopefully this at least helps breathe some new life into an endgame-useless item (?).
Growing takes no fertilizer, irrigation, or water. It’s strictly time-based. Which will be funny if linked to ARK’s day/night cycle, since you can make these plants grow rather quickly that way. Once they’re in the pot, all you need to do is wait. I wonder if I can code in flowering cycles, too. Like, say, a lotus flowers for 2 days every 17-day cycle (last 2 days are for flowering). All this might just be a copy + edit for the crop growth code, or maybe even simpler. And, of course, all plants have different flowering/growing cycles! Plant them at the right times and you can cycle blooming periods or make them converge every so often.
Perhaps a mechanic to get a mature plant to hold off flowering by using shears (or a new tool?) while it is in the budding/flowering stage? Possibly reset the plant to day 1 for its flowering cycle. Therefore, you can manipulate plants with different cycles to bloom at once! Impress your friends or the neighboring tribe that wants to crush you with a spectacular bloom exhibition. Or just whittle time away pruning and breeding flowers like Mendel did. But in dinosaur land. Beats having to afk while eggs hatch, right ?
And, for water plants, nice aquarium walls/pots! Bigger pots hold more plants and give you some room for arrangement. The glass tank wall and a half-wall would be nice for aquatic plants as well, and maybe I’ll transfer it to land plants with wood/stone/metal walls with pot cubbyholes. So you could have a star anise growing from the wall, why not. Half-wall would have pottable areas at the top, of course.
Utilities:
Certain plant species can be used for defense or offense! Some won’t need to be bred to deadly persuasion, while others would likely need to. And some, through use of the TEK tier, can soar to capabilities similar to weaponry. Neurotoxins, exploding fruit… the plant world can be made a bit more extreme to your enemies’ woe. Some plants are parasitic, so a seed-bullet would be an interesting mechanic to disrupt wooden buildings or even dinosaurs. Or maybe they’ll just grow so fast your generator or crafting stations are blocked by biomass (kudzu on steroids) to the point that torching the place and moving is an actual viable option.
Scott also suggested some nearby plants giving dinosaurs or insects a buff 
Some real world insects use plants to get pheromones, so modifying them to make a sweet phero scent that buffs a certain species wouldn’t be far off. Such buffs would possibly increase gathering efficiency for certain resources, or give a buff to a stat.
Breeding/Hybridization:
Plants are notorious for being able to interbreed readily (such relationships combined genera, haha). This is only usually in between genera with some exceptions (well, quite a few), so I’m on the fence on if I should throw that outta the window for SnGs or just use it for color, size, and flower variance. Of course, this is gonna be one of the last things worked on, so me and Scott have time to sit on it and decide if we want to make a ton of hybrid models or just a few Don’t really expect to see this implemented anytime soon…
In any case. The main tool that would be in the station would be the brush (named exactly that to distinguish from paintbrush). Just a tiny painter’s brush that will be used in plant breeding! You can craft 5 from 1 wood, 1 fiber. They each will have ~ 100 uses, not repairable. The breeding mechanic is for SnGs so locking it by making a tiny brush cost an arm and leg seems a bit meh. And for those who want it, you get a decent start with just one craft. Brushes can only hold pollen from one species, and will have an expiry, which on expire goes back to being a regular brush. You can extend pollen longevity by putting it into a preserving bin/fridge/etc, because pollen would have a 5 minute expiry time (not realistic, but a 7 day timer would make this feature redundant when I intend for it to be a challenge when trying to hybridize and breed). In the best preservation bin, it can last for two weeks.
Possibly TEK tier stuff for going mad scientist on different general, so you can make that lotus x archaefructus monster you always wanted. This would be its own crafting station or tool, likely. A literal gene gun with gene pellets. I can be wild. We have T-rexes with lasers on their heads in-game. Why not literally shoot a plant up with genes?
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The Special Thanks Section:
Man, does this forum have spoiler text? This is gonna become a very long first post someday…
And of course, without the text wall above, lemme say even pointing out what I can use to code this stuff would help a bunch