Kaed

So Why are you exchanging one prompt for another one? Wont you have similiar issues? And by doing it you are making it easier to resist the cult and you are allowing players to have different standards of "This cultist met my personal expectations of role play so i will accept". Currently i can stun someone with a talisman, cuff them and remove their headset and then stick them on a rune. If they resist or click no then they die and the round ends for them unless they become a construct. That is actually a good thing. We still have players who resist and ghost out of spite but at least they are no longer playing in the round. Its unhealthy for the game. Every player has different standards that they expect the antag to meet. In the process you describe they have a greater ability to resist. You do not get to fuck the antag over because they didnt meet your personal expectations. I dont think there is any redeeming quality to a "do you want to convert" prompt in even a heavy role play environment. As someone who deals with players abusing the feature it is never for "the roleplay". It is always done out of spite. The most efficient way is not the laziest way. There are no glaring and outrageous issues with our word combos now other than "words of power" basically being moot. They do not really matter when you start with all of them. they are essentially spells. It was super annoying to spend 20-30 minutes on a dumb minigamebefore you can role play. The new prompt is under an entirely different set of circumstances, it's initiated by the would-be cultist using a knife on a book, and exists solely to gate accidental cult conversions by people idly clicking on things. It's a confirmation, not an aggressive 'join y/n' prompt resulting from a rune activation by someone else. But for the sake of argument, what would you recommend as an alternative, assuming that changing or removing the conversion rune somehow was a given requirement? For instance, would you like a 'forced conversion' alternative to be available somehow, like by the cultist using the blank book on an injured person (injured because their blood is already out now, they don't need a knife to smear their blood in the book anymore). Sort of a 'standing over the bleeding person, holding out the open book and telling them they have one last chance to live' scenario. -I can expand on them a bit later when I have time, this was just summary notes -The commune verb will be on a cooldown (something like 10-15 seconds), require a setup time, and telegraph that you are doing something shifty to nearby people. Effectively, you will still need to go somewhere private to do it. The only difference is I've cut out the requirement to draw a rune first and tied it to the antag type. The same principle applies to summoning a new tome. You shouldn't need a piece of paper to give you a piece of paper to get your tome, or someone else to write you a rune so you can get your new book. It should be something cultists just know how to do, but can be stopped by someone who is watching them in their cell. -The Nar'sie avatar is the part of the list I am least certain on. If I do it, it will absolutely be the last thing I add in, because it mainly arose from a suggestion I found cool. Since I'll be doing this in lumps over time, it might be dismissed entirely if I can't find a way to make it good. -See my reply to Garn above -Making the runes convey what they are to cultists is definitely in the plans Yes, it is, and in fact it already happens with several cult items.

You're misunderstanding some of my intent. I don't intend to make murdercult impossible. I'm mostly trying to phase out the godawful way that cult is done mechanically with something more organic. The popup "Sell your soul y/n" is awkward, interrupts what you are doing, and sometimes if you are typing, it selects an option without you meaning to. It also encourages anxious cultists to spam the rune repeatedly, racking up preposterous amounts of hallucination and fireloss. Finally, it's entirely location based and the rune is incredibly obvious on any camera view or passerby that something is up. But let's be clear here. People are either going to join the cult, or they are not. No amount of punitive measures for refusing are going to stop them from refusing to be the cult. And if they want to join, they'll basically say yes on the first prompt with the current conversion rune, or might hold out a little bit for some pain roleplay before 'capitulating'. What I am doing is shifting the responsibility for dealing with people who refuse to convert away from a static object that you just click to damage and make a popup. Instead, the responsibility for choosing to join or taking care of people who won't join falls to the players themselves. I will give them tools to facilitate having to 'convince' someone to join, or flat out murder them if they threaten to squeal. with things like a talisman that blocks radio calls for help, something that stuns the target if they try to run for help, possibly even something that temporarily makes their cult daggers soundless, so they can cut you down without anyone overhearing. The point is, murder is still a viable option for cultists in this system. They'll have the tools for it, new powers and toys I bring in. But the conversion rune was never anything more than a hamfisted and sloppy tool for getting person to join the cult, and it was originally designed to just convert people, that's it. Adding a 'Do you want to convert' prompt was really more a concession to the higher roleplay environment we operate in than a fix, much like how making all books automatically start with all words known was a hotfix and lazy way of doing things when we could just rework the whole system to depart from word combos entirely (which is what I'm doing, also)

Yeah I disagree. Captains don't need a secHuD on spawn. Even by loadout. If you really must have one to be snowflake secCaptain, just get one from security. But you shouldn't. Like jackboot says, DELEGATE.

Maybe you didn't read the OP very clearly, because it specifically was posted about the fact that you cannot equip one via the loadout. ;p

None of anything I am doing in this update so far as even the slightest bearing on IPCs being cultists. I plan to tackle their interaction with the cult much farther down the line, because 'they turn into constructs' is a passable stopgap while I'm working on making something more solid. Frankly, I still don't think they deserve to be in cult, but I recognize that there are some ooc stipulations about player antag participation that need to be met for 'fairness' on the server. Now for the rest. Because what we have is a steaming pile of half decade old, poorly coded garbage that needs more fixed than 'a blood vein overlay to justify muh ipc cultists'. It's completely stagnant and one of the least popular round types for a reason. I don't see what significance that has. Confusion is a result of not understanding something and that is corrected by learning about it and experiencing the new thing. "It will confuse people for a while" is not a reason to never innovate. Good idea. I'll put it on the list.

You slice meat into cutlets, cutlets in to bacon, bacon into bacon bits... WHERE DOES IT END?! Can we turn bacon bits into bacon mush? Bacon mush into liquid bacon?! Turn the liquid bacon into a disparate cloud of baconium gas?!! Joking aside, I'm not sure with our current food system this would add much. You can't 'mix' things into other foods, really. Maybe after Burgers possible food rework he's been talking about.

I agree with you in principle, largely, but players need a way to participate rather than just being murdered for being incompatible with the cult. I probably will not let them join the cult, but there will probably be some way to use them. Right now IPCs are turned into constructs when you convert them, but with the removal of conversion runes that won't be feasible anymore. I'll probably think of something to do to them that can turn them into a minion. It will probably be horrible (for the IPC). Hmmm... right now off the top of my head, I'm thinking you can use a filled soulstone with an IPC in a special ritual that turns the IPC into a special kind of construct that serves the cult but has two minds and voices and are in constant tortured agony. Both of them have specific abilities, the IPC steers the body, while the soul inside has some stuff it can do. It will be pretty strong, because of this, but since it necessitates two people and a murder, it makes up for it. Also, speaking of soul stones, I'm thinking on reworking those, and the general tone of cult to make it so that they only can get souls/power/strength through RITUALS that kill the target. They therefore incentivized to take prisoners and drag them back to their lair to have their souls or hearts ripped out rather than just murdering all opposition. Dead bodies will be useless for their purposes of progression, and there will be no more cultblading people to the floor and soul stoning them over the span of 7 seconds.

Another addendum: Fuck it, after some talk with people, I'm just going to remake the whole damn system. We don't use rune word discovery any more, so I don't see why we need to make all the runes based on a shitty ancient word combo system. So I'll throw that in the fire and just make runes something you place down and it does the thing it does. This will give room for runes and things that aren't locked to a limited number of possible word combinations. Here are some pointers for other planned stuff -I will be removing conversion runes. This will be replaced with the following mechanics: --Cultists start with an arcane tome already in their inventory, and the talisman we used to have gets entirely scrapped. We port some of the functions of said talisman into the book itself (and replace the god awful shitty paper talismans with something else but I digress), but replace the thing that lets you summon a summon tome talisman with something that's infinite use and lets you summon and unbound arcane tome. You can give these unbound arcane tomes to people, and let them borrow your knife too. Reading the unbound tome basically instructs them how to give their blood to the tome to empower it, and when they use the knife on the unbound tome, THEN they get a prompt asking if they want to do that. It takes like 5 seconds and then they stab themselves in the hand or w/e and now they art a cultist and have a proper arcane tome with it's own ritual knife in. -Nar'sie summon rune is going to be completely removed and replaced with the following --The end game for cultists involves 9 cultists, but instead of summoning Nar'sie, the cultist in the middle becomes the Avatar of Nar'sie, gaining superpowers and extreme durability, and super cool equipment and/or sprites. They don't necessarily need to be devoted to murdering everyone, either, and can do anything they want with their powers (though if you become the Avatar to peacecult I will gib you through a secret backdoor verb just you watch). Keep in mind that the cult has no hard coded leader or person who gets to become the Avatar. Cultists will need to cooperate with each other and agree who gets to become the Avatar or they aren't going to have a chance to get there. There will be a method for the Avatar to sacrifice himself to bring the Geometer itself into the world, but it will be extremely difficult and probably won't show up in most rounds, similar in rareness to a Supermatter Cascade, and requiring very specific, unusual circumstances. -I will also be adding new items such as --A number of special talismans that are not make from sheets of paper do things like disable radios, stun people, function as an escape teleport, call other cultists to you. --New weapons, including ranged, and not all of them will just be for killing, some of them will apply debuffs or special effects --Base building mechanics, including a new version of pylon charging that will completely replace what we have now.

Further plans upcoming: -Remove the communicate rune and add a Commune verb available to cultists. The same thing will happen to Summon Tome. -Rework the sacrifice rune to involve using your Ritual Knife to cut out someone's heart. Right now, I'm thinking that this will be a sort of channeled process that no longer requires multiple people where you put them on the rune, and when you activate with a restrained person standing on top of it, while holding the Ritual Knife in your other hand, it pins them down to the round, and you begin a multi-step process where you start using the knife to carve out their heart. It will probably take a total of something like 30 seconds and be interruptable the entire time, dealing sizable to their chest during the middle, and at the end, you carve out their heart, instantly killing them. The heart becomes a phylactery-like talisman, which you can use for certain purposes, like activating pylons (this will entirely replace nanakos old way of activating them, and I will probably make them better to compensate for the need to murder)

So, some changes resulting from feedback: Now, a normal (non-diona) player will have to create a ritual wound upon themselves the first time they craft a rune, dealing a hefty chunk of damage that CAN cause bleeding. Upon doing this, they then draw blood directly from this mystic wound through Blood Majjicks, allowing them to create runes. This normally happens to one of your hands or arms, but if you have no valid arms (missing or mechanical) then you instead create the ritual wound in your chest. All arcane tomes now also contain a hidden ritual knife, which can be used for spooky ritual murders and self defense (though keep in mind it deals less than half the damage of the giant cult blade). This has a custom sprite: Only cultists can store and remove this knife via a 'Manifest' verb contained within the arcane tome (it works similarly to the PDA and pens, just use the knife on the tome to store it again) and like the cult blade, attempting to use it as a non cultist will have consequences.

Examine code currently contains no checks to determine if your wounds are covered by anything. You can be wearing a hardsuit that covers your whole body and people will be able to see every wound. It would take a substantial rework of how wound visibility works which I certainly am not taking on as a project, mostly because I wouldn't even know where to start. Lohikar said he might poke at it, though. I guess we'll see. But even then, in the end, you're asking me basically to put in a bunch of work to basically deal 1 damage to people's hands every time they... ... Okay actually never mind, I just got an idea. What if I made a variable, we'll call it 'cultcut' or something that starts at false for everyone, and the first time you make a rune, it runs the the hand check and does some damage to you as you ritualistically open your flesh and we set the variable to true. After that, the wound is like, mystically present but doesn't bleed until you need it and you can just draw blood from it at will. That way there isn't a damage check every single time you use a rune.

So what's the deal with this bein added in?

I don't know, it makes perfect sense to me the way it's doing it. If you look at it strictly from the mechanics of the code then yes it's magically removing blood, but you can flavor the way you removing the blood however you like. Technically speaking even the flavor text just indicates that you're cutting open a finger and drawing with the blood, not slitting open your wrist in a way that would leave a visible scar.

I'm glad you ignored the rest of the implications behind my change to explain to me how much code I would have to copy paste to every single Rune that does a cost check. This is a much simpler method and doesn't rely on you wounding yourself repeatedly to use your runes and instead using blood to power blood runes. Is there an actual reason you think that we should go back to brute damage but now specifically targeted to whatever limb it can find, or are you just being contrary for the sake of it? What benefit is there in doing it like that as opposed just having a blood cost and hand waving that your wound heals shut afterward or it being too small to notice?

Someone already changed IPCs to be cult constructs. I'm not touching them. As for biomass on diona, I don't really know how their biomass is calculated. But I can give it a poke. Edit: Nevermind, looking at diona code gives me a freaking headache. What what we have here works in that it gives diona some limitations and keepts them from being infinite use cultists, imposing some down time on them between uses, but not a lot of it. It's basically the same as it works for humans. If you want to change that, do it yourself, I already spend an hour and a half fucking with diona specific code before going fukkit and just damaging them significantly more than it used to to compensate for their healing. So this is still an improvement on the default cult mechanics, even if it isn't perfect. The problem is that they are fundamentally difficult to balance while they're in light, because they just regen ridiculously fast. And as as far as I can see for diona, they don't suffer for having low biomass like they do with low health, so that isn't really a limit without me coding in a 'you don't have enough biomass!' message to pop up and block them from runecrafting, or recoding their entire species to be hurt by low biomass in the specific situation where they used it for cult runes.

Someone is trying to feed the black hole like void that is our pets stomachs. But your pet is already hungry again after you feed it. The hunger system for pets needs to be fixed before we add pet food. Or as part of it, perhaps.

So, I tried to play around with diona energy levels, and discovered that diona can lose all the energy you want to take away, but unless they're standing in the dark, it won't update their need for light. You can use runes three dozen times and then walk one square into darkness and be suddenly hit by a wash of 'you need light' messages. In lieu of trying to entirely rejigger diona (or make runes cast darkness, which was my second idea), I just decided to make the runes damage diona like before. It is a hefty chunk of damage (15 in most cases), which diona will find trivial to heal... if they are standing in the light. For astral projection, they can remain astral for an extended period if they're in a lit area, just like players, but not forever (test put them at 75 brute after 3 minutes and rising slowly. I could increase the damage to 12-15 if in main server playtesting it is going a little too slow). The damage eventually outpaces their ability to heal in full light, and eventually they will die if they don't come back into their body. What this does essentially is force diona to remain in lit areas if they want to be a cultist, because they will damage themselves significantly otherwise. This is normal for diona, but at least before they could survive for a bit in low light. Now if they are a cultist, it's working in the light or nothing.

i tested none of it Trial by live alpha test, I see.

My plan is for it to cost them 'light/energy', at a rate that makes it sufficiently possible for them to die if they remain on an astral rune for too long, even in full light.

The symbolic damage thing sounds like more effort than it's worth. I'd have to introduce some kind of variable that toggles the first time you use a rune to damage you, and I'd have to code it so it targets a valid limb, and what if both of your arms are mechanical, etc etc. It's just not worth it for a tiny snippet of flavor, and a huge part of this update was to remove cultists being visibly marked as cultists by their behavior. Not to mention that all cultists starting on the station have been cultists for a while, so this isn't going to be their 'first rune', and the people that were converted already experienced pain and damage from the conversion process. It's just simpler to handwave that their wound heals immediately due to dark majjicks. We've already comprehensively reworked how IPCs interact with the cult so they have to be constructs now. It's not so weird to create a separate situation for diona.

We've been down that road before with IPCs and generally the consensus I saw was 'that's not fair for diona players'. I could, for instance, make diona have an alternate 'making your rune' text where they turn their sap into blood using the Geometer's power, so that's a possibility. They're still living creatures, unlike IPCs, so it's not quite so implausible. I could also make it take away some of their 'light level' to use runes, I suppose. Since that is sort of what makes up their metabolism...

With this change, Diona can also use runes infinitely, because they have no blood to take away. Do you think their inherent racial weaknesses (extremely slow, can't wear clothes, can't be in a dark room) make this okay? And if not, how should I re-balance it for them? If nothing else, I might just have to block them from using astral travel, because that would basically be a free ticket for them.

No, the 'symbolic damage' is what we were doing before. It was why every cultist was covered in bruises every round. This is to get around that problem. The problem with brute damage is that it throws a tag on your character indicating they were bruised at a specific location. Usually, 'nonspecific damage' (which was what we used before, and is the easiest way to do symbolic damage) targets a random body part, leading to eventually every limb having a bruise on it. I could theoretically code it to always target your right hand, but then there would always be a bruise on your right hand. And then, what if you are missing your right hand? Or your right hand is mechanical? Then I have to add code to change your targeted hand, and at this point it becomes a mess of exception spaghetti just to make the 'symbolic damage' work properly, and all for a tiny trivial damage point that isn't honestly needed or helpful. I do like the out of the box thinking there of making a blood spy by hooking them up to IV. It would be an interesting dynamic and probably be noticed by medical due to the limited number of IV stands they have in their department. I think if it's overused it would eventually become the new metagame for cult, though, where you know what the round type is because you spot someone dragging an IV stand way out of place and blood bags are going missing.

https://github.com/Aurorastation/Aurora.3/pull/4803 Full rework in progress. Most details are strewn throughout the thread. Progress: -Make runes take blood instead of damaging the user. -Add special diona bloodless runemaking process -Add function that marks cultists with a ritual wound the first time they make a rune. -Add a ritual dagger that comes packaged in their tome, and that only cultists can retrieve and store in said tome, or use in battle. Upcoming: Rework sacrifice to be useful. Rework pylons to be better and require the result of sacrifices to activate. Remove the communicate rune and add a general Commune verb available to all cultists. Remove the summon tome rune and add a general Summon Tome verb available to all cultists Rework how conversion works to be less awful Remove rune words and replace it with updated functions. Sprite new runes Add supporting tools and functions to make conversions more feasible under the new system Cult base building. Add something for IPCs, since they won't be convertable in this new system. Rework all murder related cult mechanics to require rituals, rather than just clicking on someone until they're floored and using an item. (maybe) Make the standard endgame for cultists to be turning one of them into the Avatar of Nar'sie

Implying that there being no 'need' for a new feature means it can't be added. Sounds fine to me.