Xenobiology is broken

[Seeli]

 Hi there! So I noticed that Xenobotany was under the knife at the moment and I thought I might bring up Xenobiology as well. On the 7th of December, I commented in the Brainmed board that when Brainmed was testmerged on Aurora, Xenobiology was broken.

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Bug report, hello again! Thought I would add this here so coders can look into it, in case it is braindmed.

So, I played xenobiologist two(?) days ago, prior to the recent brainmed testmerge, for three or four rounds in a row. I had no trouble with the slimes feeding, splitting and becoming friendly, except for the first round, when I joined late (there was an adult slime loose before I joined, so it instantly valided me, so unrelated to this bug).

Today, I played two rounds and both times the slimes refused to eat the monkeys completely. They stopped eating before the monkey lost consciousness, would grow to adulthood sometimes (some got stuck on baby), and then in all cases they would follow the monkey around the cell, with feeding expressions. I was able to remove the monkeys, add a fresh monkey and ran into the same problem with the new ones. I was able to split a slime once deliberately, but the slimes were aggressive still, despite me being present throughout feeding. It seems they were starving by watching their food and maintaining aggression.

The second split I managed was spontaneous, when the aggressive adult lost interest in a farwa it was staring at and pounced. It did not attach, but pouncing caused it to split. Again, they maintained aggression, as I was immediately jumped by the new slimes, which is unusual. Something seems to be getting stuck in their coding and preventing them from becoming friendly, so I am wondering if it is related to the changes to monkey health from BrainMed.

MattAtlas responded the next day that it should be fixed and it was! But when Brainmed was brought back to be fully merged with the server, Xenobiology was broken again. A lot was going on and I was disheartened, so I stopped playing to take a break and came back hoping that it might be fixed again. But upon playing a few times, I am sad to say that it is still very broken. Slimes prematurely detach, stare at the monkey, get hungry and angry the longer they stare, do not grow to adulthood while the monkey is present, sometimes do not grow to adulthood even when the monkey is removed, and seem unable to mutate to the rare strains like Adamantine and Cerulean.

This was a scan of all of the dark blue slimes that I split from a dark blue slime, that had a very similar scan. (Edit: It is supposed to have cerulean listed)
 

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Slime scan results:
dark blue baby slime
Nutrition: 591.968/1000
Electric change strength: 2
Health: 150
Possible mutation: blue
Genetic destability: 13% chance of mutation on splitting
Growth progress: 0/10

So perhaps, instead of just fixing the borked Xenobiology, it might be time to update it.

As it stands, xenobiology offers very little worthwhile to the station. I read the wiki TGstation and the xenobiology has amazing uses. For example on tgstation, the silver core creates food OR drinks, while the blue slime core create frost oil, a slime stabilizer and foam that carries a reagent. Their yellow core seems very similar, however, it seems to have the added bonus of self-charging. A low power self-charging cell sounds exceptionally useful.

What suggestions would people have for slime cores? How could we make xenobiology useful to the station and not just a meme/gremlin dungeon?
If I can get solid feedback and suggestions, I will make a suggestion post with the proposed changes for Xenobiology.

Edited January 14, 2020 by Seeli

[BurgerBB]

Science has always been broken. No developer really wants to touch science at all considering how much shitcode there is to touch and the fact that science mains are some of the most entitled players out of any department; even surpassing sec. I remember when I introduced modular kinetic accelerators, some science player didn't like it because mining players don't deserve improvements like that.

[Gangstafary]

Honestly I would just ditch slimes away or just keep one and fill the rest of the pens with different xenofauna. I'd rather xenobiology to be more RP-focused than trying to produce something out of a slime core, that seems to me as a forced utility in a desperate intent to make it attractive. Have in mind xenobotany can produce really useful stuff and yet the xenobotanist will have to go out of their way to hand prototypes to other crew, they won't come to ask them for it, and xenobiology is in a worse state related to that, as we all know the general condition of science sublevel

[Seeli]

Wow. Yeahhh, that's a bit odd.

Still, it would be nice if Xenobiology could help the station and also have more interesting slimes to research.

Like interact with Xenobotany, perhaps help with growing interesting plants and Xenobotany could help Xenobiology with slimes. From TG, the ones that seem the least LRP: self-recharging cells (the little ones), sentience extract (get a ghost player in the injected slime/monkey/slimeperson). Healing extracts (heal a type of damage from certain extracts, or create a chemical from others), slime stabilizer (reduce mutation), increase slime mutation extract.

My own additions: Get a little gold from gold slimes, little silver from silver slimes and little uranium from adamantine slimes.
Black slime additional extract: Mimic extract causes the simple mob to transform. Become a skrell when core was injected with water, or human when it was injected with blood.
Psionic ability extracts: Due to their origin in the lore, an extract that could give psionics like telepathy would be interesting.

An additional function of Xenobiology could be the study of foreign Fauna (like carp or cortical borers). Scanners that can study creatures, like the anomaly scanners and such in xenoarch. 

[Seeli]

Oh! Additional note: Maybe the increased mutation/reduced mutation addition could be with Xenobotany's help.

[DeadLantern]

Nevermind

Edited January 14, 2020 by DeadLantern

[geeves]

Hey @Seeli, thanks for making this suggestion. I actually posted a PR "fixing up" xenobio before you made this thread, but I didn't know slime reproduction was awfully bugged until I read your post, so, I quickly figured out what was wrong and corrected it. Slimes will now properly eat, gain nutrition, and kill fools. The PR can be found here: https://github.com/Aurorastation/Aurora.3/pull/7993

Currently, it's only a "Touch-Up", as the name implies. I don't intend to make drastic changes just yet. Once this is merged I want to move forward and expand upon xenobio, hopefully I don't burn out or lose interest before then.

I would also like to note that I absolutely adore Prey (2017), the Typhon are super interesting and slimes hit a lot of chords for me that the Typhon did. So if I ever make adjustments to Xenobio, Prey will likely be a huge influence for it.

 

3 hours ago, BurgerBB said:

Science has always been broken. No developer really wants to touch science at all considering how much shitcode there is to touch and the fact that science mains are some of the most entitled players out of any department; even surpassing sec. I remember when I introduced modular kinetic accelerators, some science player didn't like it because mining players don't deserve improvements like that.

I wouldn't take a non-developer's words at face value, especially if they speak for the whole team. While it's true that some members of Science shits on PRs, the team works for the people that appreciate the effort, which is why I decided to fix Xenobiology in the first place. In short, no, this is pretty much false. (The shitcode is correct though, holy fuckoly.)

[BurgerBB]

2 minutes ago, geeves said:

Hey @Seeli, thanks for making this suggestion. I actually posted a PR "fixing up" xenobio before you made this thread, but I didn't know slime reproduction was awfully bugged until I read your post, so, I quickly figured out what was wrong and corrected it. Slimes will now properly eat, gain nutrition, and kill fools. The PR can be found here: https://github.com/Aurorastation/Aurora.3/pull/7993

Currently, it's only a "Touch-Up", as the name implies. I don't intend to make drastic changes just yet. Once this is merged I want to move forward and expand upon xenobio, hopefully I don't burn out or lose interest before then.

I would also like to note that I absolutely adore Prey (2017), the Typhon are super interesting and slimes hit a lot of chords for me that the Typhon did. So if I ever make adjustments to Xenobio, Prey will likely be a huge influence for it.

 

I wouldn't take a non-developer's words at face value, especially if they speak for the whole team. While it's true that some members of Science shits on PRs, the team works for the people that appreciate the effort, which is why I decided to fix Xenobiology in the first place. In short, no, this is pretty much false. (The shitcode is correct though, holy fuckoly.)

This is coming from a guy who has spoken to developers at the state of Aurora and someone who was a developer at the time when I proposed several science changes, only to get shut down because a vocal minority of science players wanted science to be intentionally boring and tedious so normies wouldn't play it.

[SatinsPristOTD]

thanks for the fix, Geeves. It's why I haven't been playing XenoBio much lately.

Maybe now I can get back to it.

[Seeli]

12 hours ago, geeves said:

Hey @Seeli, thanks for making this suggestion. I actually posted a PR "fixing up" xenobio before you made this thread, but I didn't know slime reproduction was awfully bugged until I read your post, so, I quickly figured out what was wrong and corrected it. Slimes will now properly eat, gain nutrition, and kill fools. The PR can be found here: https://github.com/Aurorastation/Aurora.3/pull/7993

Currently, it's only a "Touch-Up", as the name implies. I don't intend to make drastic changes just yet. Once this is merged I want to move forward and expand upon xenobio, hopefully I don't burn out or lose interest before then.

I would also like to note that I absolutely adore Prey (2017), the Typhon are super interesting and slimes hit a lot of chords for me that the Typhon did. So if I ever make adjustments to Xenobio, Prey will likely be a huge influence for it.

 

I wouldn't take a non-developer's words at face value, especially if they speak for the whole team. While it's true that some members of Science shits on PRs, the team works for the people that appreciate the effort, which is why I decided to fix Xenobiology in the first place. In short, no, this is pretty much false. (The shitcode is correct though, holy fuckoly.)

You are my hero @geeves! 
I am loving Xenobio. Even while it is broken, I keep going back to play it, investigate where exactly it is broken and try to come up with ways it could be helpful in the long run. I really like playing my cave gremlin. So reading that you've given it a much needed patch, I am very grateful! Thank you!

Prey was a terrifying game. I did not have a console, so I could not play it myself, but I watched playthroughs and hung out with my friend while she played it. It was a good game and I loved it. The typhon have some scary and interesting abilities, and part of their durability comes from them being slime-like to begin with. So yeah, that would be an amazing influence and I look forward to seeing what you come up with. I only hope that they stay colorful, even if they get scarier.