RnR Mycology is still under development, but we wanted to get it right by including a guide from the start. Expect this guide to evolve with the mod.

Feedback is welcome, but please understand we are a small volunteer team and we have RL commitments and other interests. We can't and won't implement or respond to every request, but we do appreciate every comment.

RnR Mycology is (going to be) a deep dive into mushroom foraging and cultivation. While this is a niche interest, it's absolutely fascinating and has a lot of potential depth.

The ultimate goal is to be able to maintain a culture library to cultivate mushrooms of all kinds for food, medicine and mental health. We have a roadmap that provides interesting new identification abilities, recipes, cultivation teks, items and crafting equipment as you gain experience from a basic forager to a lab-capable cultivator-scientist.

We also have a vision for a specific mushroom that is *very* hard to find, but which can be transformed by a top-level Mycologist with a high-end lab setup into a single-dose Knox antidote for endgame bite insurance. We're aware of the potential balance and tone issues with this; so if we can implement it, it will be disabled by default.

It's straight up fascinating. Everything in the mod is possible to do perfectly legally at home IRL with the right equipment and knowledge. Cultivating mushrooms is more science than farming, and involves keen attention to detail, scrupulous clean lab procedures to avoid contamination, and a good understanding of the fungi lifecycle.

Of course there are some species of mushroom referred to in this mod that have various degrees of legality in different jurisdictions. We are not encouraging unlawful behaviour. This is a mod for a video game and that's all.

• "Growing Gourmet and Medicinal Mushrooms" by Paul Stamets is the "bible" of mushroom classification and cultivation.
  
• "How to Change Your Mind" by Michael Pollan is an excellent book and Netflix documentary.
  
• "Fantastic Fungi" is an excellent (if a little overdramatic) popular science overview of fungi, which features both Stamets and Pollan among others.

RnR Mycology starts with foraging some mushrooms (and in future, truffles). This is done with the vanilla foraging mechanic. From Foraging level 3 you'll be able to select "Mushrooms" in the search focus, and this will improve your chances to find them. The Herbalist trait will shortcut this - we have to do some work to understand how our mod will interact with Herbalist and Foraging in b42 without devaluing them.

Abundance varies throughout the year. You'll find none in midsummer or midwinter, and abundance will peak in mid-autumn and mid-spring. There is also a bonus after rain. The main upshot of this is if you try to forage straight after starting a new world in midsummer, you'll find no mushrooms at all. This is normal. Go watch Life and Living and focus on surviving until August.

The mod currently disables vanilla mushrooms to make the experience of mushroom foraging consistent. We are planning to add a configuration option for the mod to toggle on/off vanilla mushrooms, if this is possible. This would aid compatibility with other mods if needed.

When you do find mushrooms by foraging, they will have a name that physically describes the mushroom, like "Small Brown Mushroom" or "Chonky White Mushroom". This represents what you see when you look at it. In order to figure out what you actually have, you need to identify the mushroom.

As a level 0 Mycologist, you are able to take some time to identify gourmet mushrooms found in the wild by using the right click option on it. This is the main way, along with eating raw Mushrooms, to gain XP in Mycology until recipes are learned. Note that poison, medicinal and active mushrooms will not present an Identify option until you are the appropriate level:

• Identify Gourmet: Mycologist 0
  
• Identify Poisonous: Mycologist 1
  
• Identify Active: Mycologist 2
  
• Identify Medicinal: Mycologist 4
  
• Identify Truffles: Mycologist 6

Identifying a mushroom will change its description from the physical descriptor, e.g. "Chonky Pale Brown Mushrooms" to the actual name, e.g. "King Oyster Mushrooms".

Eating an unidentified mushroom will give you a stress debuff. How much depends on your Mycology experience. This represents the uncertainty your survivor feels at nomming a potentially harmful mushroom. Note that the level of the debuff is still being balanced. Also note that actually poison mushrooms have a vanilla green skull icon on them, identified or not. We plan to remove this for the unidentified ones if possible.

Mushrooms, whether identified or not, can be composted like any other organic food using vanilla mechanics.

Mycology is implemented as a Skill just like any vanilla one such as Carpentry or Cooking. It similarly has ten levels and five core skillbooks which work just like any other Skill, granting an XP bonus to the respective levels.

The skillbooks are distributed using the vanilla Procedural Distributions system into a variety of locations including side tables, bookshelves, schools and other places skillbooks are commonly found. Each level of book is progressively harder to find, with Mycology Vol 5 being 5x harder to find than Mycology Vol 1.

Mycology recipes, crafting inputs and cultivation teks will be learned through issues of the "Fungi Fancier" magazine, which is found in the usual places magazines are. The list of issues will be described when implemented, but there are currently 12 cooking recipes, 10 cultivation teks, 9 crafting inputs and 4 medicinal teks planned on the roadmap. Of course we hope this list will grow over time.

Mushrooms can be eaten raw or cooked, identified or not, and can be added to other dishes as part of the vanilla evolved recipes system. There will also be additional recipes that can be learned through Fungi Fancier Magazines that are particularly nutritious and reward Mycology and Cooking XP, but require specific levels in both Mycology and Cooking to prepare. These will be described when implemented.

Now we're done with the basics of finding and eating, we can move on to the advanced cultivation mechanics. In order to understand the cultivation process you'll need to know a little bit about how mushrooms are grown IRL. Of course they grow naturally in the wild, but the aim of cultivation is to grow specific strains in a specific place without contamination, with predictable results.

With thanks to the great Paul Stamets

• Inoculation: Spores land on suitable growth medium and begin to germinate
  
• Germination: Tiny fungal threads (hyphae) grow from spores and mate to create fertile mycelium
  
• Mycelial Growth: Mycelium expands rapidly, breaking down organic matter for nutrients while producing protective compounds
  
• Hyphal Knots: Mycelium condenses into small knots that develop into primordia (baby mushrooms)
  
• Selection: From thousands of primordia, only the strongest few develop into mature mushrooms
  
• Mature Fruitbody: All energy channels into developing the mature mushroom that will produce spores
  
• Reproduction: Mature mushroom releases spores into the environment, potentially starting the cycle again

As a cultivator, we can grow all the way from spores collected from a wild mushroom fruiting body. However we can also clone existing mycelium and fruiting bodies to start from a known-strong genetic specimen and reduce much of the contamination that comes with spores. The tradeoff though is that we can only clone so many times before the clones "stall" through senescence (aging of the genetic line) and we have to backtrack to an earlier generation clone or start again from spores to refresh genetic diversity.

Ingame, the basic "genetics to food" process will be as follows:

• Combine a genetic source (spores, mycelium, fruiting body sample) with some sort of nutrition substrate
  
• ensure the substrate is in the right condition for colonisation and fruiting
  
• harvest the fruited substrate, potentially multiple times

Specific processes are called "Teks" by the Mycology community. The outcome is the same (fruited mushrooms) but the inputs, steps and equipment can vary. More challenging teks have appropriately more reliable and/or productive outcomes.

More advanced Mycologists will want to grow and maintain a culture library, so that they can grow out specific strains at will. This is achieved through preparing and storing Agar Plates (Petri dishes), Agar Slants and/or Liquid Cultures which can be used as crafting inputs. These require specific care to keep them viable, but greatly improve success chance in terms of avoiding contamination.

The single biggest challenge in Mycology is avoiding contamination. An environment that's perfect for growing your desired mushrooms is also perfect for growing unwanted, potentially toxic moulds that will destroy all your hard work. Almost everything you do in the cultivation process step other than harvesting will be overshadowed by the spectre of contamination.

The planned contamination factors include:

• Mycology level: higher level results in reduced chance of contamination
  
• Air management: Cultivation work in open air, up to the point the substrate is colonised, presents a higher chance of contamination than if using specialist equipment such as a Still Air Box or even better a Flow Hood.
  
• Agar Plates: commercial, sterile, Parafilmed plates are much less likely to contaminate than crafted, unsterilised or untaped plates.
  
• Hygiene: Dirty clothes, hands, body or an unmasked face are much more likely to cause contamination than a scrupulously clean, masked and gloved survivor
  
• Genetic source: Spores and fruitbody samples are far more likely to contaminate than plates, slants and liquid cultures.
  
• Environment: Proximity of a corpse, animal or a bad smell will greatly increase chance of contamination.

These factors stack, so any one factor can bring down your overall success chance by a lot. But in most cases, relatively simple steps available at low levels can make a big difference.

We intend to balance it so that maximising all of these factors will still have a very small chance of contamination, while worst-casing all of these factors will still have some small chance of a clean outcome. There will be a definite incentive to establish a dedicated cleanroom environment for Mycology lab work, just as IRL.

Rice Tek is the entry level cultivation step available at Mycology 1 with the appropriate issue of Fungi Fancier read. It's an easy process, but also prone to contamination depending on the equipment used as supermarket rice is inherently unsterile unless well prepared.

Rice Tek requires at a minimum a Jar with a Lid, some Rice, Water, a cooking vessel (e.g. a Pot) and a Mushroom Genetics sample of some sort.

TODO