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What it says on the tin. Xenobiology as a subdepartment is valuable when it wants to be, creating many quite unique and useful things, but at the same time, it is not really related to anything else going on in science. What follows is that there's a certain subset of xenobiology mains who refuse to do R&D, and scientists who have no care for Xenobiology. This causes some friction, because there can be too many people who wanted to be a xenobiologist but did not get to, or - especially on low pop - the only active scientists might not be interested in R&D. By splitting xenobio off (two slots?) and reducing science slots, a lot of this could be avoided. It becomes more clear what isn't being done for latejoiners, as well. Also reduces Scientists' powergaming potential by making it harder to access every single part of the research department with just one ID.

Everyone knows I'm full of terrible ideas and this one is no exception. However, it did spark a bit of interest in the Discord, and I wanted to collect some of the conversation here, and help to expand on the mechanics I'm imagining in a discussion where people can evaluate things at their own pace and not feel rushed to respond. Problem Statement Comms is one of the most critical aspects of being on-station. It is vital to intradepartmental progress, it gives Command a useful signal as to their crew’s effectiveness, it allows endangered crew to call out for help, it is how Central communicates to the station, and it allows for announcements that other crew-members may find interesting or fun. From my perspective, however, comms is a firehose of information with an incredibly low signal-to-noise ratio, especially with regard to the Common channel, which will be the subject of the bulk of the discussion below. Communication amongst your department, to the crew, and in aggregate for command, is unceasing, but no one really has the option to disable any channels, because they all carry some amount of information worth appraising. From an RP perspective, common is absolutely bizarre. Comms is aural in nature, which means in theory every crew member on the station from the Captain to the Clown in perma has carte blanche to yell whatever they want into everybody’s ears at any time. Even in a rickety, poorly designed station overseen by a bureaucratic nightmare corporation should recognize how ineffective and annoying this is. Many crew have tasks that preclude them from following comms closely. Miners are constantly firing and clicking their KAs. Command on the bridge is assaulted by constant noise- and speech- related messages from bridge hobos (and bridge designs with a space gap, while nice, don’t actually stop noise from reaching the other side). I don’t really know medbay but my understanding is a lot of time is spent reading diagnostic printouts. If a group of players is roleplaying, their focus is on their character and the characters around them, and if the interaction goes on long enough, a large amount of comms will have scrolled past, but we want people to roleplay. AIs observe the entire station but also need to watch their comms for “AI open”. I think one of the most telling demonstrations of the above is how many highlighted strings many players have. If a player needs a dozen regexes to find the salient information in the rubbish, I feel that’s a strong indication that the core aspect of station-wide communication needs work. Proposed Solution Remove common comms from all headsets. Preserve it on public intercoms. Add the ability for crew to call out for help specifically from Medbay and Security when they perceive or are dealing with a threat. Summary Justification This removes a large amount of noise from the chat log while still allowing crew to make generalized announcements for the benefit of the whole crew. Replacing Existing Use Cases For most uses of common, the PDA is an excellent substitute. The PDA is an excellent substitute because conversations between individuals are condensed. The only scrolling one has to do is in the singular conversation with another crew member. Receiving a message makes it plainly obvious who the messages (and any of the recipient’s subsequent replies) are for. Multiple conversations can be easily kept track of. In addition, since PDAs have an audio cue and their chat log text shows up distinctly (inasmuch as anything can be distinguished), and provides an immediate reply button, they facilitate rapid conversations, and make it much harder to miss the communication. Remember that this proposal keeps departmental comms. Miners can still call out on Supply for help, Security can still coordinate, etc. The goal here isn’t to make it harder for anyone to do their job, but (in part) to increase the signal-to-noise ratio of all communication channels, and to encourage players to interact on a more personal and fine-grained basis with the rest of the crew. Emergency Callouts, or: HELP MANTIS This use case is a very distinct one than others, and possibly one of the most valuable uses of common comms. When crew are attacked, when runes or terrors are sighted, calling out on common is the most common response. But why? It’s fast. The muscle memory for talking on common is ingrained very early on in terms of hours played. It’s effective. It alerts all departments at once, but most importantly, Security and Medical simultaneously, the two departments most vital to handling an individual emergency in its first few minutes. It provides redundancy (in the positive sense); if the people who should be caring about your health/well-being are otherwise preoccupied, at least one other crew member will see your comms and possibly pass the message on. In the case it is a station-wide problem, this is the fastest way to get everyone on the same page—in the event they see the message. Now I’d like to share some of the reasons I think this is a bad idea. It’s fast at the expense of accuracy and response time. A lot of crew are real bad at giving useful information when they are being assailed. Even if they do manage to squeak out a “help maints”, people will berate them on common for not giving enough information, while they die in a dark corner of the station. I don’t think players, in general, should be punished with round death because they didn’t give precise enough information while they were being fucking murdered. Antags now know what you know. It is rare an antagonist won’t have common, so if the victim manages to get something out, or the cult hears their runes have been found, they can adapt quickly. By letting anyone shout anything they want on comms they can more than give away the position and ability of the crew charged with apprehending the antagonist. The right people can easily miss it, making it worthless. Again, as above, the chat log is constantly full of shit, sound effects, big-font messages, and so on. The impending death of a crew member may never register to anyone, which is an asset to the antag, but is entirely determined by what’s going on at comms at the time. Comms can be dropped. This is an engine limitation, and can occur anywhere from dchat to big-font messages (I once round started as NTR and never got the Declaration of War sent by the nukies in that round). Once someone screams “V-V-V-VAMP SCIMAINTS” everyone knows the round type now, and starts falling into predictable uninteresting patterns. Replacing Emergency Callouts What does a replacement for common used in emergencies look like? We already have the answer. The SM reports its own degradation. Death implants dutifully report the casualty (unless it got EMPed and is on the fritz). Many systems self-report, and only to the appropriate department. To pick an example from real life: emergency dispatch services are a phone number. You call them, they dispatch. Everyone in the world doesn’t find out. The Emergency Transponder In lieu of being able to announce personal emergencies over comms, I introduce a transponder, built in, or produced as a cartridge, into the crew’s PDA. When in the player’s hand or PDA equipment slot, the emergency call button shows up as an ability at the top of the screen similar to turning internals on, antagonist powers, etc. What happens when this is activated? The same thing that would happen if the station had an emergency dispatch. Security, Medbay, either, or both, get alerted. The amount of information they get could depend on several factors. Perhaps they don’t get a location if the crew doesn’t have suit sensors on. One way or another, the departments responsible for taking care of the crew in the most specific sense are the only ones that get the information. The whole crew doesn’t find out at once, and the antagonist retains more of the element of surprise. A tool like this could be abused pretty easily; some of this can be ameliorated with a long cooldown, as well as a round start cooldown (unable to be pressed until 10-15 minutes into the round). I would also imagine it to be somehow locked to the person whose PDA it belongs to, but I don’t really know how PDA ownership works. It may be worth allowing anyone to press it, which means sec may have to investigate more false positives, and the boxes of PDAs in the command area suddenly become much more valuable. What about callouts of station-wide valid antags? They already get callouts. Biohazards have a big font announcement, cult gets one once they pick up enough steam, giant spiders get infestation callouts. In addition, one of the most tension-killing moments is when a roundstart blob doesn’t pick up enough steam before someone diving maints calls them out. Or a terror gets spotted before they have a chance to even settle down somewhere and form a game plan. This isn’t to say that people can’t report these things. Again, they have departmental comms, so they can report it to their department. But now we have something interesting, where people need to spend time communicating, and relaying information to the right people. To wit, as it stands now: the round starts. A blob pops. A maints diver sees it, calls it out on common, everyone suits the fuck up before the blob has spawned its first factory, cargo rushes guns, science spams flashbangs, the blob is killed, and everyone hates that the round ended early. Command may not have even said anything or given any orders to the crew, but everyone knows what to do. With this proposal: the round starts. A blob pops. A maints diver sees it and either activates their transponder or calls out on their departmental comms. Now the department is responsible for relaying the information to security. It could go through, say, the department head over to the HOS via Command comms, it may have to just be relayed to a sec officer the diver passes by in the hallway. Officers have to go and investigate the reports, let the department know what’s up, and hope the Command staff are competent enough to get all the departments working together to fight the blob. Instead of random civilians shouting on commons to print welders and order guns, it will require Command to coordinate and give the correct orders. If the communication fails to make its way to security, the crew may not find out about the blob until its biohazard announcement, which is pretty fairly timed out from the initial spawn events for biohazards. Conclusion This is obviously a pretty drastic change to one of the fundamental mechanics of a game that is, by and large, predicated on consuming large amounts of text. It is for this reason I don’t expect it to gain traction, but I would be very interested as to if this has been done/considered before, if there’s balance/mechanical ramifications I’m missing, and so on.

Mission failed, we'll get 'em next time. New gameplan is making a snow chemistry recipe. You can splash this on the floor and if you splashed (insert amount here) units it creates snow.

oh god oh fuck

I do like turning random unused maint areas into bars and such. This one was cool because my character's kind of industrial-themed so the pipes really added to the atmosphere.

Hi all, its time for another mapping discussion. This one might get spicy since meta is close to many older players hearts. Please read this through before forming an opinion, these threads are useless if you come in with your mind already made up. If you still disagree after reading it, that's fair enough. But please do at least give it thought. Metastation is poorly designed for para culture. What I'm suggesting: Replace metastation with a unique map that is distinct from the ones we currently have, EclipseStation. (Click that to view the webmap for it) We don't increase the maintenance factor of keeping a new map up to date by replacing meta, and we get a map with a different playstyle. Why have map rotation if we are just going to have 2 of the 3 maps be quite similar in design, with one being worse? Why I'm suggesting this: Right, here is my case against metastation. Primary complaint: Metas maintenance SUCKS for Paradise. Like, it's terrible. Lets see some examples: You are an antag in engineering maints, and sec are approaching, so you choose to run. What are your options? (Red circle marks start point) If you run north, you are faced with a super long 1x wide corridor, meaning you are almost guaranteed to be caught by any player with more than 3 braincells. But Sean, just run south?! Lets look at the south then: Uh-oh! It's the same issue, there are no alternate routes, there are no easy alcoves to duck into, there is just a long corridor of pain. If you look at the meta map, here. What do you see? ALL the maints are like this, every single one is a long corridor with no alternate routes or gaps to duck into. Why is this bad? Well, this might work on TG, with faster movement speed, stamina only combat, and crawling. But on paradise? Expect a tazer or a few disabler shells up your ass and game over. Antags will be forced to go loud in the hallways, or just kill sec instead of escape. Meta is not designed with para in mind, at all. Again, look at the maints south of dorms. This is terrible map design. Delta and box do everything meta wants to do, and they do it far better. This is not hyperbole, this is plainly obvious to anyone who's done map work before. Okay, but why EclipseStation? Just to make this clear, I'm not claiming Eclipse is the holy grail of mapping. It isn't, and will need work to be para-ready. But what does it offer? A unique layout, with departments being in an outer ring with a separated central area. Lots of maintenance room for antags or maint goblins to do crap. Well laid out departments that are functional for both antags to break into, and for regular players to just do their jobs. At the end of the day, fixing the issues with meta requires a hundred times more effort than porting a better map. And you won't find a mapper willing to do it since the issues are to areas integral to meta's design. Issues that need solutions: Eclipse will need remapping. I am willing to do this work, but community input on various departments will be needed. Areas such as permabrig, AI sat, and toxins test need a complete overhaul. Think of Eclipse in the webmap not as the finished product, but as the canvas to work from as a base.

As someone who is still relatively new to SS13, I can't speak to how much impact this change would have on the server as a whole, but I would like to add that the sheer volume of information in Common is overwhelming to new people. I am slowly getting to the point where I can understand most of what is being said, but I will still frequently miss important stuff because I am focused on what I am doing instead of reading the rapid text scroll. Less random text information would be a blessing. And more audio cues or AI announcements are good. On the other hand, as a tourist/civilian/assistant without access to dept comms, I think the game might end up feeling a bit lonely or too quiet without the constant station chatter. You would be out of the loop most of the time and that could add to boredom and lead to people walking into danger unawares. On the upside, the lack of general chatter will make the Journalist job more important and news releases have more impact. ... One other thing I would add - It has always frustrated me that there is not a better way to report emergencies or threats directly to Security. The emergency transponder might be perfect for some situations, but there are others when it wouldn't be appropriate but I still would like a way to inform Security of a problem without shouting it to the whole station. Where is the 911 radio channel? Currently, I will grab my PDA, scroll all the way down looking for HoS, fail to spot his name, give up and look for a random Security Officer, send him a quick message, and then put away my PDA. All of that takes so long that I might as well have just announced what I saw over Common, because the bad guys are all long gone ... or I am already dead before I hit "send". PDAs are not great in a life or death emergency or for warning people about a station-wide threat. I would love an emergency channel that anyone can use to report problems, but only Security personel and Command can view. Or maybe the Emergency line is monitored by a designated Dispatcher, similar to the Paramedic, but for Sec. Either way, it would let you send quick message that would be visible to Security ... if they bother to check them.

Sometimes when playing as a security officer you are needed in space, for various reasons. As the officers dont have access to the more closer external accesses, you have to walk from the Armory, where the hardsuits are located, to Arrivals external access, the reason you had to go into space will more often than not be long gone. So I was thinking. How about adding an external access in security, for security access only. Maybe it could be located between the labor shuttle access and Gamma shuttle access. If this is implemented I belive there will be a lot more confrontations with security when you are an antag and operate alot in space, as it's rather a safe space (no pun intended). Thoughts?

What would be helpful is if more pod pilots actually stayed in space. There's several members of security who are responsible for dealing with stuff on station there's only one who's responsible for dealing with stuff in space and too frequently someone will request the pilot go check into something in space and they're busy patrolling the hallways down by cargo or something like that and take 5+ minutes to get outside. Officers should patrol the hallways so they are available to respond to incidents within the station quicker the same as a pilot should be patrolling the exterior of the station to be able to respond to incidents out there quicker.

you can now grug stomp

EORG Moment

Oh no...I hope you alerted the brig physician

Officer Mongo Brooks brigs a dangerous criminal for destruction of company property (maint wires).

Time-Dilation Anomaly. A new anomaly that can appear on station. As the name implies, when a player gets too close, or stands inside the Anomaly's range, AffectedArc gets pinged on the discord.

Everyone starts with a microbomb implant. The perfect way to end any round. Nukie put you into stam crit? Blow up while they step over your body. Traitor need your hypospray? Fuck you, I'm taking it with me to hell. AI Malf? Send greytiders into to suicide bomb turrets and borgs. Being checked for implants? Confirm their suspicions by blowing off their hands. Slipped by the clown? Hide your shame by obliterating yourself from existence.

This is a idea that has been suggested more then once. In my opinion the current perma brig is to small to have a prisoner role also when security is understaffed having a prisoner to deal with aswell can be annoying to say the least. Then the brig guard I have a few issues with that in essence they are warden assistances. Even tough it can be a good job for people to learn to become warden I do not think it provides much more use then that. Those who are interested in becomming warden can just stay in brig to assist the warden. I just do not think paradise is a place where this will work well or really need to have it. There is enough roleplay and we have more need to fix some of the other jobs that are lacking then having new jobs that will need a lot of work just to make it work.

Random Minor Event: Sentient Piñata appears on the station. The Sentient Piñata has civilian access, can not ventcrawl, can not attack/drag, and runs at Xeno Hunter speed. It only has the objective to survive. When killed, explodes into a large amount of various candy/chocolates. There is a 10% chance that it is instead filled with random narcotics and floor pills.

Stop suggesting actually interesting ideas >:^(

Check my Twitter / DeviantArt for more examples ^ ^ You can contact me on Discord Synkkä#5542 or twitter.

I think you're missing the OP's point. The point was less to make an antag more robust and more to make them *aware* of how their interactions with security feel as a security player - specifically how being a shitty, powergaming antag with no sense of sportsmanship can really make a security player stressed out and fuck up their round. It's kind of a "mile in their shoes" sort of situation so that an antag learns why playing to win isn't all there is to antagging. I'm all for this suggestion.

A Wizard round where they have no truly highly dangerous or disruptive powers....BUT they are a special lich bound to the NAD...can't destroy it or get it off station...but you can't keep the lich down....Eventually someone will look away and they'll be able to teleport out of the area to continue to be a spooky annoyance. Rattle them bones, drink all the station's milk. Their ultimate goal is to make the crew miserable, yet unable to do anything about it to the point they just...stop trying and they can finally just chill out. Picture it, it's your turn to babysit the NAD...a spooky skeleton sudden shows up and starts slapping at your hands, knocking tools free, running around your workspace making "Spooky" sounds, being annoying and disruptive but ultimately harmless....Sure, you could bash it's skull in but...It'll be back...you can only hope to hold onto sanity until it's someone else's turn to carry that cursed disk...

Wish it was sec access though

AA is still a nerd

Picture with details and a couple of examples. Commissions are currently open You can also check my art thread here with more examples:

This'll be a bit of a long post regarding an idea I had for a new antagonist, so here we go. General Information: They are solo non-conversion antagonist. The amount spawned in the gamemode would be 1 + (num of players / 8) Antagonist mechanics: Knowledge points: This is the equivalent of swarmer points to sorcerers, they have a starting maximum of 100, are obtained through absorbing items and are spent in abilities. Arcane Torch: This is the only ability that sorcerers spawn with, it has no cooldown and it's effect is summoning/unsummoning an ethereal hand that baps items to drain them, and giving the sorcerer X amount of points depending on the item. A specific sorcerer can only absorb one type of item per game, so you cannot absorb a red toolbox twice. Absorbed items are easily recognizable as they are gray, have a special name/description, and are rendered useless. Absorbing an item leaves your fingerprint on it. Here's an example on how absorbing an item looks like: Leveling up: Sorcerers have levels, you start at level 1 and get the ability to level up when you reach your maximum knowledge points (100 for the most part). Leveling up awards the sorcerer with a couple of goodies depending on the level: Every level you level up, you are given a choice between 3 spells, the effect of these spells depend on the effect of the items you absorbed (if you absorb a lot of combat items, you have a higher chance of combat spells, medical items for healing, and so on). Choosing one of these spells grants you the spell. (all of this spell stuff is explained soon). Every two levels you level up (lvl 2, 4, 6...), you are allowed to upgrade one of your spells, the upgrade depends on the spell. Spells: Spells are the sorcerer's abilities, they are gained and upgraded by leveling up, and these are their unique quirks: Not all of your spells are active at once. Each time you level up, you randomly replace your current active spells with 4 random spells from all spells you own. Only active spells can be activated, the rest cannot be seen / used. Spells do not have a cooldown, but they consume knowledge points to activate and charges, each spell has their specific amount of charges, and each time you use a spell, one charge is consumed. Consuming all charges off a spell removes it as an active spell. Here is an example of the active spell mechanic: The one part I have not come up with yet are appropiate objectives, but ideally they'll be revealed to the sorcerer when they level up to a specific level (10, 15?). Posting this to see what the general opinion is, before I continue coding.

- Scientists that fuck off and ignore RND, so its not done until like 20 to 25 minutes in - CT's that completely ignore the QM because "Well acktually the HOP is the head" - Dept heads having no fucking idea what they're doing, bonus points if you somehow unlocked captain without knowing that the chain of command is almost always given to science, EOC's are not instantly executed, you cant clone vox, the SM does not like eating burn mix, and ordering 20 hat crates is a bad way to spend cargo points. - Genuine shitsec, like I enjoy calling people like Rurik or Sizzle shitsec because they know they aren't and will get a laugh out of it, but the genuine shitsec who are just like "Hey fuck you! I'm not gonna read space law I'm just gonna harmbaton you and give you 30 minutes for slipping me!". - Sec who beg for implants when there's maybe 1 traitor running around, bonus points if on blue/green, triple bonus points if you use a borg's law 2 to break in on extended to make yourselves full implants, AEG's, upgraded tools, shields, etc. (TOTALLY HASN'T HAPPENED TOTALLY NOT STILL SALTY) - RD's who have a no fun policy (i.e No cool/funny science projects like monkey teslas, generally newer RD's), but equally ones who spend their time exclusively on those, and don't bother with making sure toxins/rnd/xeno are done, and that robotics is not smoke bombing nanites and trying to use an automender on an IPC. - Traitors who speed run their assassinate obj, idgaf about high value items though. - People that go hard as fuck on new players, like miner man turning the bald dude whos asking "wher medbey" into dust because they accidentally punched them.

The "just clone them" crowd in medical still exists. I'm not happy about it.

The meme of non-antag chemists putting a copious amount of drugs in their food or tiders getting ants all over them every shift probably doesn't help chef player quality either