dense path
step by step nature experiment guide with progressive spoilers.
OVERVIEW
The nature experiment is very different from every other experiments, and it has a few quirks. First, you will see a lot of different buttons, each will be explained shortly, it isn't nearly as confusing as one might be led to think.
BASE MECHANICS
The first thing you will do in the nature experiment is plant seeds. Every seed has a different cost, more expensive seeds will take longer to bloom and give more plant points when harvested. Plant points are spent on upgrades and prestiges.
For a plant to grow, it requires to be watered, your watering can's duration can be upgraded at a cost of 10x1.2^(level) plant points for an extra 150 seconds, up to 4650, and there exists a worker 
task for watering to be automated, which renders watering can duration a non-issue. With the auto-harvest option, plants that grow fast enough can be harvested multiple times in a single game tick, making lower tier plants often the better option for farming points.
Plants are separated in tiers, which all have a name that isn't readily shown to the player.
The basic flower (t1) costs 100 green resources and takes 350 (5:50) seconds to grow, awarding 1 plant point.
The cauliflower (t2) costs 2,500 green resources and takes 700 (11:40) seconds to grow, awarding 2 plant points.
The bell plant (t3) costs 74,000 green resources and takes 1200 (20:00) seconds to grow, awarding 3 plant points.
The bush plant (t4) costs 9,250,000 green resources and takes 2000 (33:20) seconds to grow, awarding 4 plant points.
The brain plant (t5) costs 8,000,000,000 green resources and takes a whopping 4000 (1:06:40) seconds to grow, awarding 5 plant points.
Plants can be removed with the shovel to prevent the auto-replant upgrade from looping them if you wish to change which species you are growing in that square.
The heat up, cool down and day/night buttons will be explained in the "botany" section.
PRESTIGES
This is where the nature experiment differs wildly from every other experiment, it only has a single choice for prestiges, gaining a 10% multiplicative increase to time speed in the experiment. One needs the fundamentals 
skill to avoid losing their plant points and resetting their farm plots when prestiging. The optimal strategy to prestiging is to use t1 flowers to farm points until cauliflowers grow in a single tick, then increase from that point as tiers become able to grow in a tick. Note that mutations award more plant points, so you will need to adjust your "build" to maximize the points gained as you discover mutations
Every prestige is 10% more expensive than the one before.
BOTANY
For full solutions, see the wiki's page https://www.perfecttower2.com/wiki/Experiment:_Nature, there are a total of 105 mutations, 104 of which are needed to maximize the goals tab. Getting all 105 mutations grants the ⭐ Botanist achievement.
Plants will grow into a specific color if a certain set of conditions are met. These conditions have to be met before the plant grows.
To achieve each mutation, different criteria will have to be met, unique for each. These criteria can be one or multiple combinations of the following :
- time has to be specifically day or night (toggle day/night button)
- temperature of the tile the seed is planted (heated up, cooled down, or neither)
- temperature of surrounding tiles in all 8 directions (heated up, cooled down, or neither)
- presence of a certain number of plants of a specific tier around the planted seed.
Some mutations are simple (ie : heat up a tier 1 flower at day to make it grow into an orange mutation), while others are a 3x3 pattern, some will even require the whole 5x5 grid to be a specific pattern to be solved, or require only 5 plants in cardinal directions.
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