RNG beyond maintenance/warehouse.

[NerdyVampire]

So here it is. We are on the Horizon in a non-stop crew rotation. Yet, our maintenance drones find the time to reset the entire ship to standard every single shift without fail. No wonder they are constantly rebelling!

My suggestion is that we do away with this outrageous expectation of our little friends, and allow some leeway for them to leave behind lore-friendly RNG-generated items (maybe more pressing matters took their time away) related to each workspace; items that could realistically be left behind by colleagues of the 'last shift' (not actual last shift, we don't do that), such as unfinished work-items, trash, food, splatter on the floor or minor personal items. This could be as mundane as a chair that doesn't spawn, a beaker that spawns with a random liquid, a toy, an unfinished coffee mug, an empty pizza box, an expired guest ID or other such things.  Variety that fits the target workspace. I am sure more creative people than I can come up with good ideas.

This could potentially benefit round-start RP as players discover either beneficial or detrimental changes in their workspace "God dammit! Someone left an empty pizzabox in my lab - AGAIN. Who are these pigs that can't learn to throw it out?" or "Wait.. someone actually already prepared a beaker full of.. what is this even?" or "Hey director? Someone left a satchel in here.. with a few sheets of phoron in it! Score!" The mappers might even be devious enough to add some stronger 'mess' spawners, adding a bunch of trash to an area, or making dirty such an area, adding more round-start stuff for a janitor to engage with.

It would in my mind be very stimulating to begin a shift and discover something new about my workspace, either minor or major, that I have to deal with or decide what to do with.  Even small things can break this possible monotony and sense of sameness, hence the suggestion.

Now this would of course require some work, so I would suggest we simply pick a department and try it out there first to see how it feels.

TL:DR :
We ask / encourage / beg our resident mappers to look at our different workspaces (maybe non-workspaces too) and add randomness elements to break the monotony of round-start, provide new RP opportunities and add the illusion of shift-coherency in a lore-friendly manner.

Edited January 8, 2023 by NerdyVampire
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[Sputnik5927]

Actually jealous I didn't think of this first. Absolutely +1, helps make it feel like a persistent world and seem less empty even on low pop. Fucking genius

[Wildkins]

sounds cool i will immediately brainstorm ways to do this before someone walks in complaining about balance or something

[Carver]

Adding things is nice. Missing things is not nice. That sums up my thoughts on randomization.

[Cnaym]

20 hours ago, Wildkins said:

sounds cool i will immediately brainstorm ways to do this before someone walks in complaining about balance or something

Heyho, had talked with Nerdy about this before and am in absolute support of this idea. I figured designating spots on desks / tables / chairs with an invisible marker that picks from a loot table like the warehouse does would be easiest, that way you could add specific area markers like "chem-lab" or "engineering" which could safely spawn tools or stuff that belong into these departments. My idea was to give them a relatively inconsistent chance to spawn things at all, so it makes it look very random on a round to round base. Sometimes you'd get a messy lobby, sometimes you'd just find an empty coffee mug someone forgot about.

As for the missing things, I am not that certain about that. A chance for stuff to have moved around would be neat but probably kill map loading times if we gave every chair a chance to be a tile left or right.

[NerdyVampire]

20 hours ago, Carver said:

Adding things is nice. Missing things is not nice. That sums up my thoughts on randomization.

 

23 minutes ago, Cnaym said:

As for the missing things, I am not that certain about that. A chance for stuff to have moved around would be neat but probably kill map loading times if we gave every chair a chance to be a tile left or right.

That's a fine stance, I am not firm that making things possibly missing is important, my thought process was more that it might open up some more dependency on operations if semi-important workplace items (but easily replacable) went missing. But that of course warrants that operation is staffed. Don't think twice about it, not important.

[wowzewow]

I'm pretty sure this was kind of tried before with "The Grimdark Update" TM wherein there was huge talk about having vendors randomly spawn with substantially less items, grime randomly spawning on the floors, maintenance being more random, more lights being broken on roundstart etc. So janitor had more stuff to do, I guess. I can't recall the entirety of it.

 

Anyway I think it would be pretty neat to port the soapstones from /TG/ (basically cross-round graffiti and messages), and to a lesser extent cross-round blood and stuff (from Bay, I think). Would be in the same vein, I guess.

[greenjoe]

Cross round persistant dirt/graffiti would be cool, sticky notes and messages on message boards too

[NerdyVampire]

9 hours ago, wowzewow said:

basically cross-round graffiti and messages), and to a lesser extent cross-round blood and stuff

I haven't heard about it, and though I wouldn't mind it as a cool feature, it does seem different from this suggestion.

Just to clarify, the suggestion isn't pushing for cross-round compatibility, but just for random spawners, where the spawners are defined based on the workspace or locale it was made for :))

I do like the idea of the other stuff being more random though. Generally I like unpredictability, as you can tell hehe