Starbound has a huge variety of plants at its disposal, all assumed to have varied properties and effects on different races. As I'm looking to start up this library faction, I'm looking to collect ideas from all about for some unscrupulous lore-whoring. What have you used them for, medicinally or otherwise?
I haven't studied much about them beyond the fact that glitch plants exist as a simulation of food for Them, and only Florans can eat Oculemon.
starbounder.org If you wanna lore-whore, I suggest that place. It's the unofficial/official/whatever wiki. Codex entries, food entries, you name it, etc. Only real thing of note regarding plants is what Animator said. Oculemons are apparently poisonous for all races except the Florans (despite all races obviously being able to eat oculemon mechanically... and the hylotl entry for oculemons says they can be used as a flavor enhancer if "carefully prepared", so I assume raw oculemons are poisonous) and the Glitch plants like the automato, currentcorn, are "simulations" of their natural counterparts, given to the Glitch by the Glitch creators as simulated food.
It's the official wiki and my personal favorite because everything is so well-organized. It's not as well-known, though, so other wikis that are unofficial have a habit of having slightly more information simply because there are more users contributing to it. There's really no real lore to plants beyond the ones I've stated. The only other plant that comes to mind that has some sort of variation in terms of it's identity is Avesmingo, which is considered to be the fruit of a hundred flavors. Because of this, there also isn't much variation of foods beyond the glitch default ones, so it's a bit poignant to focus on them even after accounting for different racial diets. Even the racial diets aren't that variable (excluding glitch); Apex like bananas, humans have burgers, Florans like meatsss, and Hylotl have refined pallets. Hell, they probably even eat sushi and fish, since they're based more on axolotls/tree frogs than actual fish, despite the taunts they get like fish-face. I recommend pointing your focus on trees instead, since they definitely have tons of variety. You can get participants to donate seeds and plant them in a private place as an archive of all the trees that exist. This is definitely a challenge: Trees are spawned with any given type of base, and any given type of leaves. Mathematically speaking, 26 kinds of trunks * 23 kinds of leaves = 593 possible combinations. To note, this number is calculated without taking into account some impossible combinations: You won't get a tree with brains and a mushroom base, but this number is further expanded with the color combinations that exist as well.
For trees I highly recommend checking out Mysmarri's guided over here. http://community.playstarboundrp.com/threads/mysmarris-universal-plant-index.2378/ They've gone a very good job classifying trees. As for non-lore related things plant wise Izzida has used reef-pod juice and the inner 'meat' part to sooth burns on another hylotl. Sort of just like aloe. I've also seen boneboo being good for bones as well as good for avian mothers to help strengthen their eggs shell. There is also a discussion of crops that might be used as drugs. http://community.playstarboundrp.com/threads/illegal-crops.4193/ also http://community.playstarboundrp.com/threads/event-new-narcotic-toxic-tops-reefpod.4227/ If you need any help coming up with possible alternative uses for IG plants I'm pretty good with ideas. My character is a bit of a farmer so I'm knee deep in starbound plant stuff. Except glitch plants. *shrugs*
