chaotic_idealism

Well... have we tried that?

What about a bigger, better, more well-equipped shuttle? Basically, a microcosm of the ship itself. Full chemistry lab, full kitchen, full science and engineering area, working medbay with all the trimmings, dispenser for EVA suits and oxygen tanks--if only softsuits. A small armory and a brig cell, too. And a lounge/cafeteria/bar, to serve as a meeting point and briefing area. The reason I say this is that the Intrepid itself is simply not meant to transport most of the crew to an away site, and it doesn't have enough resources to be used as a base once you do land. An entire base has to be built--which is fine if you have engineers coming out your nose, but not in a typical round, where you... don't. (Plus, engineers building a base takes the entire round and then there's no time to use it.) Engineering could still build things, naturally. A lot of the stuff can be built--machinery, wiring, solar panels so you don't have to feed a generator. But put the kits on the mega-Intrepid itself. Dragging things to the shuttle is utterly boring; they should already be there at round start. And my earlier idea about teleporting so we could use the Horizon itself as a base--okay, fine, it's a bit much. But we should still have a publicly-accessible teleporter between the Horizon and the mega-Intrepid, if we decide to go that way. The special event shuttle is a start. But it needs to be more than that. It needs to be a home away from home, including places to hang out and talk in. Because one of the main drawbacks of this sort of gamemode seems to be that there are no home bases, no places to gather and talk, gossip, tease one another, and worry about what Command's up to. We need that.

Teleporters instead of shuttles would be nice. And multiple teleporter locations all over the Horizon. People carry their own beacons, so they can teleport themselves back... That would make it possible to work out of the Horizon and still experience the away site. Would solve a lot of problems. And probably create more, but man, if I have to try to drag an entire medbay to the Intrepid and to an away site one more time, I'm gonna tear my pixellated speessman hair out.

I would say this is basically on-site Mercenary. Now, I do enjoy a good round of Merc, so that's okay. IMO, we can add this to the rotation once some rough edges get filed off. Some things that need improving: Lighting. We're doing everything in the dark, or else carrying light sources with limited batteries in a place where there are few or no power sources to recharge them. Quality of life issue. Daytime, please. Otherwise it's just not feasible. Maps. Unless one is posted at the beginning of every round, there's no map. It needs to be available on the PDAs. (And the PDA charges need to last all round, even if it's extended several times.) Setup time. The first two hours were essentially just setting up the round, which is going to get hella boring if this becomes a regular gamemode. On-ship setup time is about fifteen minutes. It needs to be about that long in this gamemode, too. Having to drag basically the entire ship's worth of equipment and supplies, manually, to the away site takes a LONG time, and it's boring as heck. This needs a solution. Complete lack of home base. Working out of the Intrepid was annoying and frustrating. You couldn't take a coffee break and chat with your friends over lunch; you couldn't hang out around the Medbay entryway, smoking and gossiping. There was a sense of being lost, constantly, even when you knew where everything was, because there were no established meeting places and no landmarks that everyone knew. No on-ship resources. Medical is doing surgery with anesthesia tanks and by flashlight. Forget xenobotany, xenobiology, hydroponics... No offices, no workshops, not even any vending machines. Can't get a coffee. Sure, you could stay on the Horizon to do those things, but you have to choose between them and having any active part in the round whatsoever. And of course the "if you mine a rock, you let all the air out of the planet" bug. We gotta solve that one. The way I see it, this could be a "ready-made event" sort of gamemode. Use it every once in a while when someone has a good idea. Maybe have an array of maps to use. But yeah, a lot of problems need solving before this is workable.

Well, it would make more work for the psychologist, anyway.

When there's no CMO to let Crusher out of the office, a sculpture will do.

Last round, one crew member saved another's life by doing CPR. Medical wanted to conduct CPR training sessions, but we realised we don't have a CPR dummy. We tried to make do with a monkey, but who wants to put their lips on a cube monkey? And besides, it's animal cruelty, because you have to stop its heart to make CPR possible (which matters to Medical and the friends of Pun Pun even if it doesn't matter to Xenobiology). We thought protohuman... but that'd also be a dead or dying protohuman, which is expensive, and again, you're putting your lips on an unconscious brainless clone. Yuk. Even if Medical isn't squeamish about it, the civilian crew sure might be. So... I'm begging you, kind coders, can you make us a CPR dummy? Just a human mannequin without a heartbeat (or without organs entirely), one that we could use to hold CPR training sessions. Make it something we could order, or dial up on the holodeck, or maybe just have it stored in the back rooms of medbay somewhere to be taken out during an Extended round. What do you think? Workable?

Have we considered adding things that would be useful not just to Mining, but to other departments? I often get a Lazarus injector and deliver it to Medical, in case Crusher or Ian dies. And I've certainly ordered a half dozen pizzas and served them in the mess hall; frozen pizza is better than vendors and there isn't always a chef. Mining interacts with other departments plenty, while delivering materials and after they get back from a run. But it would be cool if they could provide more than just materials. For example: That autochisel. Ops asks for a statue, you make one, aided by the AI in your autochisel, Ops gets points, you get to flatter somebody by sclupting them. Very nice. More like that would be neat.

So you're carrying the satchel in your hand while using your KA, which takes both hands to use. Where'd you get the extra hand? Or did you leave your satchel at the end of your strip-mining row? So your ore bag is back wherever you dropped your satchel; what are you doing, picking up the ore one by one and dropping it into your crate? Dropping your KA and running back over your row with the ore bag? Now you're defenseless and a carp has bitten you; your bandages are back there with your satchel, sucks to be you, say goodbye to your blood volume. This is just not workable. A pickaxe is not a useful mining tool; where a KA takes out six tiles in one shot, a pick takes three swings to take a single tile. That's more than 18 times slower. And without an ore detector, you're going to be using that pickaxe on a lot of empty rock. I don't know about you, but I like to get back with a good haul in time to sit around in the bar and chat with my buddies. If you like poking along with a pickaxe and no ore detector, more power to you, but that's not how mining is done nowadays. Sure, you CAN mine that way, but you're gimping yourself so hard that you might as well not be playing a miner at all. As for using a hand scanner as a miner: Yes, you can use one. There's one in the Spark for you to use; why would it be there if miners couldn't have basic first-aid training? It's not like I'm doing brain surgery. Using a hand scanner is on the same level as taking someone's temperature. I usually play it as not really knowing how to read the finer details or infer what may be happening; but I can identify where they need to be bandaged or what color first-aid pouch they need. Miners without first-aid training are just looking to get killed--or watch their injured buddies die needlessly, which honestly is even worse.

Ruptured artery, then. But that's a bug anyway; having a ruptured artery SHOULD cause you to bleed internally, that's what's relevant.

Do you play miner a lot? I ask because you mention a pickaxe as though it's a normal thing to carry... which it hasn't been for ages. Carrying that much equipment hasn't got anything to do with hoarding, and every bit of preparation is absolutely necessary--you die without it, or simply can't do your job. And as I've said, you do need both your hands to manage a KA. Mining equipment, bare minimum: Harness (Loadout item): Radio, GPS, bandages. Pockets: Mining satchel, ore scanner. Belt slot: Lantern. (Your voidsuit/hardsuit only casts light forward, and enemies attack from all sides.) Hands: KA. Requires both hands. Backpack: Wrench, crowbar, screwdriver, inaprovaline autoinjector. Optional extras: Medical scanner, the rest of the toolbox, autoinjectors from the Spark vendor, extra batteries, metal rods to build lattices. We're getting to the point where a medical scanner (which can tell you if you are bleeding internally) is an "optional extra". Seriously. And yes, you can put that inaprovaline autoinjector behind your ear, but isn't it unrealistic to reach behind your ear when you have a voidsuit on? It shouldn't even be possible. A mining belt isn't the solution either, because your mining satchel, ore detector, and lantern will not work if they are in a mining belt. Miners really do need that much room. Mining really is that equipment-focused. I find it a lot of fun, especially with a buddy, but the mining vendor is quite outdated (it even has ladders; we haven't had z-level mining in ages!). It needs to be updated, plain and simple.

The issue with hardsuits is that inventory space is really at a premium for miners. You choose between a hardsuit and a backpack, and your backpack carries things like your bandages and autoinjector, which can save your life, and your tools--wrench, crowbar, and so on--which you will use for salvaging or managing drills. Hardsuits can be made with space for three small items, but that's really no compensation for a proper backpack. Your webbing, belt slot, and pockets are already taken up by radio, GPS, lantern, ore satchel, and ore detector. Hardsuits are simply not useful for anyone who has to carry a lot of stuff. And no, you can't carry a duffel in your hand the way medics do; you need both hands to pump your KA. Plus, the more you're juggling inventory, the more time it takes you to respond to the odd reaver. So yeah. Hardsuits are not the solution, unless they are re-made to fit into the suit slot and allow the use of a backpack. And I'm sure everyone would yell about that being overpowered immediately.

I'd like some quality of life stuff to be added to the mining vendors. Bottled water. Big ol' bottles of it, for the thirsty miner. Maybe a big thermos of coffee, too, so we can stop stealing the carafes from the cafe. Night-vision goggles. Lighting is hard to code, night vision is not. And night vision goggles save lives. Splints. Those broken hands and feet from fighting carp with your KA are annoying. Batteries, fully charged. Emergency autoinjectors. Coagzolug is particularly useful for slowing bleeding when you can't bandage yourself through your suit. Maybe one of those thirty-unit autoinjectors, filled with a mix of chemicals meant to keep you alive in an emergency? A selection of KA parts, beyond what we have now. It'd also be nice to be able to hack them and get stuff like hyperzine and machetes, but that'd probably take some extra coding.

Yes please. We would like to be able to go in as a matriarch and set up the engines on lowpop.

Xenobotany needs a bucket! There used to be a farmbot, and there isn't now; watering has to be done manually. There's a backpack water tank, which is nice, but a simple bucket doesn't have to be worn on one's back. Plus, in a bucket, you can mix fertilizer, water, and mutagen together and add them all in one go. The sprayer won't let you do that; put anything but water in the tank and it'll spray stuff into the air instead of adding it to trays. A couple more big beakers would be nice too, and another box of smaller beakers. Getting interesting chemicals out of your plants is half the point of xenobotany (the other half, of course, involves teleporting yourself into a table and yelling for Medical to fix your mangled limb).

Xenobotany is fun. Ordering strange plant seeds from Ops and growing them is a lot of fun, especially if you get some cool reagent that the rest of the station can use. Strange plants are even found on exoplanets now, for the expeditions to bring back. However, the reagents in those plants are rather limited. I'd like to add more, so that you REALLY don't know what you're going to get when you grow a strange plant seed. I thought about recommending we should add all reagents, but then you get silliness. Suddenly, your plants contain Chai Latte and Red Crayon Dust. So I've sifted through the reagents that are available in the game and put together a new proposed list of the names of the reagents as they appear in the code. My expanded list contains all the ones that you can find in strange plants now, plus any simple compounds or elements, drugs and poisons, and generic food-like reagents. I took out all the bar drinks except for very simple fermented beverages and tea/coffee grounds, the specific juices (carrot juice should come from carrots), anything that's obviously manufactured (welder fuel, dry ramen), and anything overpowered like Adminordrazine and Elixir of Life. The code in question, I think, is located in modules\hydroponics\seed.dm. I'm attaching what I think should be the modified section, as a text file, but I'm not a coder and I don't want to poke at it too much, because I don't want to mess things up. If this is a good idea, I would love a coder to look over it for stupid mistakes, check to be sure that this is actually the modification that needs to be made, and put in the extra chemicals list. I know it is probably long and unwieldy, but I found no very easy way to include all the interesting reagents while leaving out broken or ridiculous ones. So, list it is. It would sharply reduce the (currently respectable) chance of getting any currently available chemical out of an order of ten to fifteen strange plant seeds ordered from Ops, which means predictably getting Red Nightshade (if you're a bad guy) or Rezadone (if you're not) would no longer be possible... but well, you can't have everything. plant chems proposal.txt

I hadn't even thought of the jetpacks. Good point, yes, they should have the ability to use those to break their fall when necessary. Doesn't actually have to be coded in. Just assumed.

We had a Revolution round earlier today where the idea was that FTL travel would be impossible for five years, so we were stranded. I realized during this round that we actually don't have much lore on how self-sufficient the Horizon is. Sure, we get deliveries every few days, and Ops gets FTL shuttles... but without them, would we be a.) annoyed, b.) seriously hampered, or c.) dead? So here's my best guess. To survive in space, provided there are planets or asteroids nearby, Horizon needs: 1. Water. Can be harvested from asteroids or planets, presumably. Can also be recycled. 2. Food. Can be grown, with biogenerators making meat for Unathi and fertilizer for the next crop. 3. Air. Oxygen can be harvested from planets, or taken from sand (i.e., silicon dioxide). The atmos system conserves gas as best it can, as well. 4. Power. Requires either supermatter and coolant, or nuclear fuel. Requires mining. 5. Propellant and fuel for shuttles, because we need to mine to sustain ourselves. We can't get phoron from mining, so that could be a problem. 6. Spare parts, weapons, and supplies that can't be manufactured onboard. We do have autolathes and protolathes, but they can't make everything. How long until something critical wears out? 7. Medicine and other chemicals. Same issue as the spare parts, except that some meds can be refined from plants. But some can't. Thoughts? What can we do without those handy Ops FTL shuttles, and what can't we? Could we survive for weeks with no help--or years?

I'm a maintenance drone aficionado. Call me crazy, but I love the brainless little spiderbots. There was a bug a while ago that made maintenance drones immune to fall damage. You could jump down from one z-level to another, and take no damage. I think it should become a feature. To be clear: Immune to fall damage only, not any other kind of damage. It should still be really easy to crush a maintenance drone with a crowbar, or your boot, if you want. In-character reasons: Maintenance drones already travel the ship by disposals system. They can interface with the system to tell it where they want to go; but more importantly, they can protect themselves from the bumps and jostles that would severely hurt a larger, meatier passenger. Why shouldn't they be able to protect themselves from the bumps and jostles of jumping from a railing? Maintenance drones are small. That means that when they impact the floor, there isn't very much momentum--and that means not much energy in the impact. Think of how a mouse can survive a fall at terminal velocity, but a human can't. It's like that. But it's easy to kill a mouse (if you can hit it), despite its resistance to fall damage. Maintenance drones need to be able to climb, jump, and fall to do their jobs. They're small, and they need to be able to reach things that are higher up on the walls, to weld in the plating and seal the cracks. Of course this isn't apparent in a 2D world, but it's obvious. It would be a bad idea to build a maintenance drone that would crack its casing every time it was fixing something on the ceiling and lost its grip. Out of character reasoning? Maintenance drones are small and railings don't stop them. This makes sense; they're tiny spiderbots meant to go into tiny spaces. But when you're moving around in a dark maintenance tunnel with a hole in the floor, or when the game lags and you go one space further than you were meaning to, you can easily walk under the railing and fall. And that takes maybe a third of your health at one go. It can be really frustrating to get damaged this way--especially if you are already damaged, say from disassembling malfunctioning fellow drones, and it kills you. And unlike a borg, you're a small brainless robot, so you can't really go and ask for repairs. Unless someone has upgraded a charging station, there's no way to repair damage to yourself. (Your welder doesn't work; it says you "lack the reach"; other drones can repair you, but there often aren't any around.) The only time maintenance drones really interact with the crew at all is when they're subverted by a traitor, and that's quite rare. Making them fall-damage immune would remove one of the most annoying parts of playing a drone, and improve verisimilitude, too.

They're not issued to miners or available in loadout; boot selection is just jackboots or cowboy boots. If workboots do indeed have enough armor to keep your feet from being so easily broken, this might be an easy fix.

Changing the names won't make the game any less gritty. Look at Rimworld; its cocaine analogue is called Flake or Yayo (obscure slang names for cocaine, apparently), and its marijuana analogue is called smokeleaf; I have yet to hear of any of those names hindering the war crimes in the least. Or look at Fallout, with its Jet and Psycho and Med-X. Nary a Teletubby to be seen. There's no floodgates to worry about here. Just a preference for a futuristic world with drugs named things like Med-X and Yayo rather than morphine and cocaine. Or, in SS13, hyperzine and tramarine. It's all about the atmosphere. When you say "cocaine", you bring in all the associations we have with the stuff. You grab a chunk of the real world and bring it into the fantasy. Suddenly there's drug-sniffing dogs and celebrity parties and Sigmund Freud all over your space game. It's jarring. But you change the name just a little, you call it yayo or whatever, and it works much better. Look at the names of things, in general, the food and drinks and the other medications; they're either very generic, refer to the lore, or made up entirely. I'd like to continue with that theme, that's all.

Have the poppies contain only nutriment, but mutate into opium poppies, which contain very small amounts of morphine.

Other possibilities to fix the miner achilles'-heel issue: Have voidsuits and/or magboots be armored. Voidsuits and/or magboots automatically splint broken limbs. (If magboots, then just feet.) Make it possible to splint limbs through the voidsuit. Make feet less fragile; or, make it possible to run on broken feet. (Adrenaline is a hell of a drug.) Issue an emergency autoinjector to miners, some combination of inaprovaline/mortaphenyl/coagzolug/dexalin/hyperzine and stuff to reduce the side effects of mortaphenyl, meant to keep you going so you can get to safety. More generally, do something about the "get a broken foot, go into pain crit, die" issue. Pain crit makes sense; getting it from a broken foot doesn't, really. A broken foot should hurt and slow you down, not stop your heart and kill you. But I think steel-toed boots would be a reasonable, easy to implement step in the right direction.

The best thing to help them survive would be to have the miner's voidsuit auto-splint limbs, IMO. That and a long-lasting painkiller/stabilizer autoinjector. Also: Steel-toed boots.

Why are we going out and using heavy equipment, tunneling through rock, without basic foot protection? Sure, we have magboots, but those mostly just help you stick to an iron hull. We don't have anything to protect our toes from the inevitable kinetic accelerator hit or carp bite. Feet don't have very many hit points; they break easily. The standard-issue miner's equipment includes nothing but regular shoes; you can pick boots in your loadout, but they're still just regular boots. Steel-toed boots would be very sensible. They'd help prevent broken feet, which would prevent that annoying miner's dilemma: If you have a broken foot, you're a sitting duck because you can't move fast (and thus can't run and kite mobs), and will go into paincrit if you walk on your broken foot. It's an annoying, un-fun, frustrating way to die. Okay, they're heartless megacorps, but they really should have the brains to issue steel-toed boots to miners.