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I'm a sentimental person so I'm probably prone to this, but to me SS13 and this server in particular is a game of moments. Fleeting and ephemeral. Awkward moments of social interaction. Conflicting interests and misunderstandings. Bravery, cowardice, and malice. Mentorship and menace. When the round is over its all gone forever. Mostly. You had to be there. I'm not adding anything new here, just dropping a note of thanks for rounds well played. Hope I dropped it in the right place. I also hope in the long run I can keep up. Big thanks to those of you who have helped me acclimate.

chiki ref but colorpicked this time

hi :D i have a whole pile today Spoilered as usual cause theres a lot

I laughed harder than I should've

Photos taken seconds before chaos.

this round was hilarious

I talk about Space Transylvannia a lot.

This is due to gameplay reasons. Imagine a vampire who has glare and rejuv getting shotgunned to death for existing. Roundstart vampires are weak, so you cannot really let them be lethalled. However the lore is- well bad. *The code includes mentions of space Transylvania and i HATE it.*

In my headcannon, both greys and swarmers are related to abductors. Abductors, being much more advanced specie from outside the milky way, have performed a lot of different experiments and made a lot of bizarre inventions which can not be even known by different communities of abductors themselves.

Rare traditional art. Very rough sketch of Rivera from fitness club.

Unofficial Lore and Headcanon Thread This thread is for the community to share and discuss Paradise Station's Space Station 13 lore, headcanon, and other community-made legends (including stories, encyclopedias, and more). All lore posts will be linked to the original post (this message) for easier and more organized viewing. The purpose of this thread is for the community to share each other's materials and take inspiration from others to craft their better-written characters for a higher quality of roleplay and immersion. #Unofficial Lore Thread is also a discord thread under #spacestation_13, join the conversation there! Universe Lore https://www.paradisestation.org/forum/topic/21432-unofficial-lore-thread/?do=findComment&comment=159844 Cyberiad (& Tajaran) https://docs.google.com/document/d/1zUxgIDzY-YrqxlQFwur1rAGgzSRTemC87CWpzoX7XjM/edit Jäger Heavy Industries Species https://www.paradisestation.org/forum/topic/21432-unofficial-lore-thread/?do=findComment&comment=159806 Vox Arks https://www.paradisestation.org/forum/topic/21432-unofficial-lore-thread/?do=findComment&comment=159843 Vulpkanin (& Cyberiad) https://www.paradisestation.org/forum/topic/21432-unofficial-lore-thread/?do=findComment&comment=159829 Vampires & Their Soul https://www.paradisestation.org/forum/topic/21432-unofficial-lore-thread/?do=findComment&comment=159842 Cabal Vampires https://www.paradisestation.org/forum/topic/21432-unofficial-lore-thread/?do=findComment&comment=159820 Abductor Miscellaneous https://www.paradisestation.org/forum/topic/21432-unofficial-lore-thread/?tab=comments#comment-159796 Species, Factions, (& Misc) Be respectful to each other; enjoy literary work, story writing; and have fun!

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.

A journey I am grateful to share with you. With you all, I cannot state how much I appreciate this community. Thank you.

A journey in reverse.

This is too true. I still have vivid memories of specific, amazing moments I've had on SS13 from years and years ago. SS13 creates such unique experiences that you really can't get anywhere else. I'm so glad you've enjoyed your time here so far, and here's to many more great moments.

Literal war criminal.

Local IPC makes borgs, people inhabit borgs, people don't stop inhabiting borgs. The round ended with fourteen borgs, and four that cryoed, all of which made by me. I also did speed borgings with a plasma cutter. Robotics on highpop is an experience

I think both of these fit somewhat into what amounts to a crazy conspiracy theory: It's the NSS Cyberiad, which means it's a SCIENCE station. But what science gets actually done? The stuff RnD produces seem to be all known, robotics doesn't produce anything new, there are no chemicals to be discovered, toxins can only do so much for the perfect mix, and xenbio slimes are also known. So when the science department doesn't actually do science, what's getting studied? The crew, or rather the effects of prolonged exposure to bluespace activity. Lavaland does have quite a few "supernatural" mobs, and given the amount of anomalies/rifts we get to know (for the active shifts), the separation between the normal space and bluespace is weakened. And the NSV Icarus is there to monitor this, it does have advanced sensories for it. As the Caberiad is not the research facility, but rather the subject of said research, it makes sense to have a bit more lax screening and similar, as it's not that important, and it encourages stressful situations to happen. After all, NT will want to know that there are no problems from that exposure, especially in a crisis. What use is a bluespace exploration team if it goes crazy from the exposure in case something unusual happens? Moving on from that conspiracy thing, i got a few things i try to keep in mind for playing my Tajarans: As a motif in their religion is the light, and the veils kept their use there. They probably started as snow goggles, but after more advanced gear was made for it, their use got moved more to the religion. After all, you can get only so close to the light if your eyes burn from it. So blindness may even be seen as a boon to some sects of the religion. A figure of speech: "to wrap it in cloths" means to say it nicely, they use tapestry and such as insulation and make the wall feel nicer, so i would think that works in general. In a similar vein, an "ice shard" may mean the same as a red herring: Seen something glister, and investigated it, but it was just a chunk of clear ice reflecting the light, so a bad lead that something is there. During the Overseers regime, and the rebellion in the end, there was a need for smugglers and couriers, and as waiting and hiding in the snow is not the nicest thing, it was solved by running and parkour. Building will have been close together to retain some heat, so running over the rooftops is a good way to avoid otherwise patrolled streets. It changed to a more legal delivery, but otherwise survived to the current day, even if it may be dying due to other delivery methods brought in by corporates.

A running list of personal headcanon I have (some running directly contradictory to accepted lore): Vulp Things: Vulpkanin culture strongly disapproves of large families. As a consequence of limited resources, limited living space, and limited...everything really, it would make sense for Vulps to see having large families as wasteful, or taking resources from others. By extension, being born a twin/triplet/etc. is seen as a sign of bad luck by the more superstitious Vulpkanin, and as a burden by the more logical. If you want to go darker with it, in a world of genetic modification a government with broad emergency powers such as the Assembly could easily demand population control down to a cellular level, further reinforcing the idea the Vulpkanin have sacrificed greatly for their collective survival. While Vulpkanin are constantly torn between the assimilationist and parallelist philosophies, they nonetheless form large cultural enclaves in whatever cities they settle in. This can be a point of contention among Vulpkanin and the dominant culture. These predominately vulpkanin "CanniTowns" also lead to a very interesting "It-takes-a-megastructure" communal parenting style, in which older members of a habitat or archology may watch the children while their parents go to work, giving colony-dwelling Vulpkanin a wide assortment of views and experiences. Being a largely immigrant culture Vulpkanin are still struggling to overcome discrimination, especially in the Sol system, where the already Human-centric TSF has heavy influence on most media and corporate entities. Some Sol citizens still maintain that rising Vulpkanin populations will eventually out-compete the native humans, even 3 centuries after the diaspora began. Racht. Oh man Racht. That's like 5 paragraphs of philosophical ramblings I wrote out one night to justify how Monism, an almost entirely material philosophy, would encapsulate a "universal will", I'll post that another time. Non-Vulp Things: The Cyberiad is where all of NT's problematic, incompetent, or plain untrustworthy employees are sent. This keeps them away from the profitable and efficient facilities, and conveniently keeps them all on a station with one of the highest incident rates in the galaxy. If they die, they die. If they turn a profit before hand, all the better. The majority of TSF citizens serve in the civil corps, a massive bureaucratic organ required to maintain and supply the largest military in the galaxy. TSF has four branches: Navy, Marines, Security, and Civil, each with different taskings, but all soldiers have Primary Training, explaining why crew members understand first aid, firefighting, simple engineering, and are competent with advanced weaponry. Nanotrasen keep a very close eye on the crew of the Cyberiad, both past and present, keeping long dossiers on each (explaining crew records being so detailed) Nanotrasen sometimes has Internal Affairs agents and Human Resources personnel in plainclothes undercover aboard the Cyberiad, which (in addition to a Comms Officer listening in on radio chatter) is how Central always seems to know whats going on. Nanotrasen maintains several Habitation stations, or company towns in space. One of which, the NBS Hearthwood is where all my characters go at the end of the round. Mars is terraformed to an extent, leaded to a vast desert planet with a thin but breathable atmosphere. Massive mega-cities are separated by large swaths of nigh-inhospitable wasteland supporting small, insular, plasma-mining communities. Space Texas The Chihong Sea is a massive ocean, turned red by the same mineral deposits found in Martian soil, that handles thermal and atmospheric regulation.

Two fragments of vamp lore I need opinions on, both with very different tones. The first is more cold, and I suppose is a piece of a TSF report or something. The second is a very brief, more dramatic blurb, something I'd probably put on the wiki one day if it can be made to fit the style. Need thoughts on things like names. A name for the vampire organization is still needed, I'm using "Cabal" and 'Sanguine Collective" as placeholders. Also generally I'm open to literally any suggestion, I am not a writer.

While I'm allergic to both lore and rp, I did have a bit of headcannon/gripe with current vampire lore. The current text in the wiki states: Particularly with this part: This is no different from changeling, who absorbs a body, inheriting memories and mimicking personality. Yet, vampires are not KoS and are still considered to be part of the crew. So my own headcannon is this: As a body approaches death, the vampiric bluespace entity can seep into the corpse and the souls are joined into one. The original personality and memories are intact, but with the entity attached the crew member feels compelled, to varying degrees, to feed and sustain themselves. This can range from outright murder to reluctance to feed, or even turning themselves in or pulling victims to medbay from guilt. Imo thats more interesting than the vampire outright replacing the original soul, and it better reflects current SoP/Spacelaw as well as making sense why some vampires turn themselves in or otherwise act kind. Also leaves room for sick rp regarding innate conflict and need to kill, not that I'd ever participate in such a thing. Other than that, one practice I and a few others have (no idea if its written somewhere) Vast majority of shifts aboard the NSS Cyberaid are calm, with mostly petty crimes, if any, committed. The shift you, the player, have aboard the shift is the exception, and always will be the exception. That way it makes sense as to why NT haven't installed a tougher screening process for crew members, and why they don't mindshield all heads of the station/have cameras in literally every part of the station.

thank u!!!!! i love them!! sm!! oh yeah totally. :p I've had the idea for a bunny/jackalope IPC for a long time but after watching TWF i got more solid ideas and kinda ran with it cause indulgence. shes 100% shamelessly based off banny.

You based that IPC off the Walten Files, didn't you.

Malibu looks really cool!

Based Letov driving the cult away with harsh words.

THE JOGGERS!

I really wish Medbay had been crazier that round. Imagine going into medbay while it's overwhelmed with injured, surrounded by bodies, fading in and out of consciousness, and some droid drags you into maints. You think, "Oh god this is it" only for you to wake up in the SECOND medbay, like some sort of fever dream.

I dont have many head canons, but a couple of big ones ive always had in regards to Vox: There are only 20 KNOWN arkships in existance on NT records but there are far more of all sizes out there. From small city sized ones, to larger moon sized ones. Each ark contains its own culture that has developed over the untold millennia separate from the others and can be radically different. So you could have a very strict ark where vox are mass produced worker drones with barcodes on them, another that has formed into some kind of industrial nightmare scape, or another where Auralis are viewed as gods, or another where they are viewed as a myth since no one ever sees them. Could even have an ark where there ARE no more auralis for one reason or another. All vox designs exist in the same story universe due to a mix of the culture aspect and their genetic engineering. So small vox, big box, feathered vox, scaled vox, 3 eyed vox, 2 eyed vox, split face vox and beak faced vox, all exist, just on different arks where that's how, over time began to be engineered for various reasons. (To me this both explains why vox have so many variations and makes them more of an unknown aspect that you cant exactly pin down)

Medbay 2 aka the submedbay, a smaller but functional medbay below the main one that I built on a slow shift. With more time it would have been fun to add a janky chemistry room and morgue (with wooden caskets), but that's for future building endeavors!~

I wanted to write/share a few of my own headcanons, hopefully they don't directly go against canon aha. Though they're all kinda small things, so. I took a bit to write these down cause I have quite a few, and some aren't 100% mine I think (or I got the idea from a convo) so I'll tag appropriately (Sorry if something doesn't make sense, I'll probably make edits later when I'm not about to pass out) Because Vulps have big families and Tajara are very community-oriented, the two species throw really good parties. (came up with @JackoMallows) Vulps are known for having really loud, extravagant parties, while Tajara are more known for elegant and fancy ones. These are both stereotypes. Tajara parties are ESPECIALLY important to their culture. Vox display affection by holding tails or bumping beaks. (also came up with this while talking to @SlimeBird) Tajara are stereotypically a little snobby when it comes to appearance, which came about during their artistic renaissance. They are literally pretty kitties. Tajara have big beauty pageants and fashion shows to show off their fur coats or fashions. Tajara musicals are very popular across the galaxy. Tajaran kittens are sometimes given claw caps when misbehaving, though they've also become a fashion statement. USSP planets/colonies/stations/ect being "cheap & poorly ran" is mostly SolGov propaganda. While it's not entirely false - there are plenty that are - more and more planets have become autonomous zones. These planets still group themselves with the USSP, but are 100% self-ran and are the result of the USSP not being a very strong government force. There are a few groups scattered across the galaxy dedicated to helping victims of The Syndicate, and some who try to fight The Syndicate directly (though are unfortunately unsuccessful) Similarly, however, there are also groups who pretend to help victims. The Syndicate themselves have had people fake these groups to lure more people in. "Syndicate Scams" aren't uncommon, but aren't easy to find either. People actively seeking The Syndicate out are more likely to get scammed. Modern medicine has made people more accident-prone since many figure they can be fixed easier than they could hundreds of years ago. This is all I can remember from the top of my head, but I know I probably have more I'm forgetting ^^

Editing is scuffed but this one surprised me so much I had to post it

Hi! It's been a while! I've started classes up again, so it's been a challenge to find time to draw, let alone play space @__@ either way, I've gotten some art done! here's the final image I did for Idunn's backstory timelapse: here's also Freya's ref, finally finished after four months in wip file limbo! I plan to make her a crew record and character bio post soon! here's a few doodles featuring @Woje, @punkalope, @JackoMallows and @SlimeBird! finally, an art I did with Fiona and @Jabronio gaming! it was a lot of fun to draw Anton and Fiona :]

Just a small doodle for today!

As the title suggests I am here to discuss the issues with our current station goals. I will be presenting my arguments in a mostly organized list going over each station goal, afterwards I will attempt to provide some potential solutions to the issues I've mentioned, so let's get started then. General Issues This section will cover a couple topics that affect multiple station goal, in particular the BSA (Bluespace Artillery), BSH (Bluespace Harvester), and Station Shields. Lack Of Tangible Impact On The Round The BSA, BSH, and Station Shields all lack a tangible impact on the round, with all the fanfare and name of "Station Goal" one would think that said goal would have a tangible impact on the round, when in reality the aforementioned station goals have a number of issues unique to themselves which prevent them from being interesting and impactful, I will go into further detail in each of their dedicated segments. Station Goal? More Like Engineering Goal Once again the BSA, BSH, and Station Shields fall short in their purpose, this time in the fact that these goals are all essentially limited to just Engineering. The name STATION Goal implies that they'd be a station wide effort, however the 3 mentioned goals outside of ordering from cargo or getting some parts from science have no other departmental aid. Solutions In regards to impact on the round I will go over in their own segments. In regards to involvement the three involved departments are currently Engineering, Cargo, and Science, this leaves out Security, and Medbay, these two departments could be implemented easily enough. Security could have interaction with the station goal by giving antags a new objective in the form of sabotaging the station goal in some form (note these would also succeed if the goal was never built in the first place), maybe to their own benefit similar to what happens if you emag the BSH, to implement Medbay involvement perhaps the various station goals could have more intense operational hazards for Medbay to treat. The Bluespace Artillery This section will cover my issues with the BSA in particular and some potential fixes, generally the BSA is not that bad of a station goal and can be fixed with some effort This Thing Is Too Niche The BSA while interesting on paper has very few actual use cases due to our ruleset, this isn't implying we should change the ruleset and is more so an issue with the BSA itself. Anything off station is either too durable or pointless to target to make actual use of the BSA on, while using it to fire upon a station based target would be a violation of our rules barring a select few niche cases and also requires far more effort to setup than it's worth. Solutions The BSA's general use case of "explode stuff" is hard to work with considering our ruleset, a potential implementation I can think of that would at least make the BSA more useable would be to have it produce low power targeting grenades as a secondary function, these would function very similar to what was proposed in PR#16275 albeit with a smaller blast radius than a standard BSA shot. Having the BSA be more useable in particular against mid-rounds would help make it matter in a typical round. Station Shields Station Shields, oh boy where to start with these things, if I were in a position to say so I'd say to just outright replace these with something else and let you order them through cargo at any time. The Opposite Of A Station Goal These things are so detached from being a station goal it's disgusting, unlike every other goal you just slam these things down randomly in space around the station then press a button on a console. How is this a STATION goal when it's literally just Engineering doing some minor EVA they were probably already going to do when wiring the solars. Extremely Underwhelming Function Station Shields serve one purpose and no other, blocking meteors, on paper this doesn't sound that bad BUT, meteors are both uncommon and underwhelming as an event, opinion incoming but I personally find that the meteors hitting the station is actually more interesting than just being deleted as it gives engineering something to do on a potentially slow round, okay opinion over. The ONE case where these would actually be useful would be during a Meteor round, funny thing about that? Meteors as a round-type are not in rotation meaning that these things are even less useful than one would think. And you want to know something extra funny? A meteor event isn't even guaranteed when you get the shields as an objective meaning they can be completely and utterly useless based off of pure RnG. Solutions As I said above I personally don't think these are salvageable but I'll still try to give some input. Shields could be upgraded to provide a larger coverage area with stock parts, and to give security some interaction perhaps these could either "upgrade" meteors or attack the station itself if sabotaged by an antagonist. And to make them more useful they could perhaps guard against more than just meteors attacking space carp and the like. DNA Vault Ah the DNA Vault my personal favorite of the four goals I'd say this one is actually what a station goal should be, it involves multiple departments, is generally accessible, and also has a proper impact on the round. I'll discuss the elephant in the room that is the actual balance of this thing below. Boy This Thing Is Busted The actual balance of the vault is at 2 extremes, half the genes are super busted and the other half are basically useless. In particular two egregious genes are Leg Muscle Stimuli (base movement speed increase) and Neural Repathing (halves all stun times) while on the other end of the spectrum we have Toxin Adaptation (no damage from breathing plasma) and Lung Reinforcement (can breathe regardless). Solution Simple enough on this one, balance out the various traits you can get, I have nothing in mind myself so if you have an idea leave it down below. Bluespace Harvester To be honest, I was very disappointed by this when it finally got in, first it was too hard to get the higher levels which was fine, it was better to be like that than to have it be baby mode where it is now. An Underwhelming Project The Harvester is in a bit of a weird spot and I guess this could be more of a critique of our current power system rather than the goal itself but regardless it is both A. Nigh impossible to reach higher levels with the SM due to the very low power output, and B. Far too easy to crank up to a very high level with an easy to make TEG setup. An Underwhelming Reward The earnings from this could've been so interesting considering that it's supposed to be tapping into an alternate universe, but in truth the rewards are all already obtainable for the most part barring the scarab eggs, the hat option is just a renamed crate from cargo, pretty much the only unique list of items on the payouts list is from the cultural artifact but even then there's a solid chance you just get some brass which to be fair at the time couldn't be made but is now just as easy as throwing some chems together. Incredibly Isolated Due to the nature of the BSH essentially requiring its own private powernet there's very little room to try building it in different places, this results in the BSH only ever being interacted with by Engineering/Atmos, for a Station Goal this is once again missing the point of a station goal. Solutions As I said earlier the power criteria on the BSH isn't so much an issue with the harvester itself and moreso the current power generation methods available to the crew, fixing this should be relatively easy, make the SM actually generate power, nerf the TEG or just nerf the TEG and reduce the power threshold on the BSH as the TEG is busted. In regards to making it more rewarding to use. And a way to encourage building it somewhere that isn't just engineering the addition of a remote power input device could solve the issue of it needing its own private powernet. Conclusions All in all I love the concept of Station Goals and only want to see them improved, I've had these issues with the station goals for a while and a lot of them leave me lacking any real motivation to do them only further draining the limited amount things that Engineering has to do in the first place. I'm up for discussion of things and would like to hear your opinion's down below.

I really can't think of a way to make BSA more useful to the station. It's just a big gun. It's not gonna have any real use because we don't have anything big to shoot every round. (And making it more effective vs Lavaland mobs would open a bad can of worms). As cool as everything about it is, it's not really practical as a regular station goal. BSH has potential, but needs more tweaking. Its rewards are lackluster and there arent enough options to power it except for a TEG. If the BSA and Station Shields werent also station goals, BSH would be a nice "Engineering/Atmos" focused goal with some adjustments. I have nothing new to add to the DNA Vault discussion except to add "Tough Skin" to the list of useless DNA vault powers. You take a little less brute damage, but you're also completely unable to be injected with hyposprays or syringes. Doctors hate him! Having station goals that involved more than just engineering is always nice. An example: Station Goal: Neural Education Organism A station goal that requires the joint efforts of medical. Nanotrasen would like the Cyberiad to experiment with the forefront of their "Education" program. The Neural Education Organism has been pre-loaded with Nanotrasen endorsed knowledge and ideals, and would like you to build a machine that can transfer it directly into another's brain. Unfortunately, ensuring compatibility with both the machine and subject is a violent process. Extensive medical attention will be required for both the preparation and attuning process. The cargo crate contains a cube containing the test organism, random cybernetic augments/limbs/organs that must be installed, a list of additional organs from randomly selected species to be transplanted, and the machine board. Once the test organism is set up and machine is built, the attuning process can begin. The organism must be attuned to three different species of sentient humanoids before it is complete. Unfortunately the attuning process is long and extremely violent. Both the organism and the subject will take large amounts of brute, burn, oxy, and toxin damage throughout the procedure, but must be kept alive for the two minute attuning process to complete. If either dies, the attuning process fails and must be restarted. Once this is successfully done three times, station goal is complete, and people can enter the machine for a quick blast of education. NanoTrasen-Educated individuals can understand all humanoid languages, have access to a special crafting menu (what you can craft is yet to be determined), and feel a bit more loyal to NT (just fluff). The organism must stay alive in the machine for it to continue working. It can be defibbed, but not cloned. If you lose it, you'll have to start from scratch with another one from cargo.

Everyone talks about leg stims, no one talks about the ridiculousness that is arm stims. Regardless. I'd much prefer to see some nerfs to DNA Vault powers- more specifically neural (discount CNS), leg stims (blood replaced with meth) and arm stims (gloves of the north star on crack). BSH? BSA? Shields? Boring as all hell. I actually LIKE shields now, because I can do them in ten minutes and then the department can work on their own projects and actually enjoy the round. God forbid its BSH, and we have to spend the rest of the round being very frustrated and annoyed- unless there's a competent TEG setup, in which the rest of engineering sits around eating snot for about thirty minutes, until one guy finishes his gamer broken engine setup, and then hotwires it. If I could code I'd definitely try to make a PR for shit like lavaland gas mining and other such goals. People need more departmental interaction. Its the various inter-departmental interactions that drive a lot of rounds, and there is no interaction to standing in front of the ORM reminding the QM that we need more diamonds, or me standing for twenty minutes in front of RND for an arbitrary number of blue raspberry dipping dots that WILL all get deleted when the scientist who decided to man RND after twenty minutes of waiting threw them at me, reasonably thinking that they wouldn't just ALL delete. Like DNA Vault, each station goal needs to CHANGE the station. As Leanfrog said, it is a STATION goal. Not a 'one atmos tech sitting on his ass' goal, nor 'the CE realising no one else has done shields so he guesses he's doing it goal' or even 'an engiborg having to make a BSA room because no one else wants to do it' goal. The only real fun people HAVE with the current station goals is doing them in stupid locations, and as much as admins frown on these stupid locations- the fact that people do it is a symptom of the problem with station goals. Station goals suck ass and the only reason I do them as CE is because I'm expected to take engineers away from projects they actually enjoy and want to spend the round doing, to do these arbitrary tasks they have already done so many times, before a nanite filled pulse pistol man comes down and executes me in front of a live studio audience.

Mercy does a little plushie collecting Favorite quote from the round, from Haakar Shar trying to find the anesthetic tank to put on himself before surgery: "HOW DO YOU FIND ANYTHING IN HERE???" "It is meticulously organized."

Doodled some spess characters with character archetypes I think they line up with! Rivera Kirkland Fiona Phillips ft. Tidal Kirkland Chikitita Idunn Raan Kikeri

More old art posting, my shading was still pretty horrid. Commission for Jacob Pearls

Forgot to post this old art Flick Stroh, Toobenreshi, Aleister Burnwood, Jacob Pearls, Hichi-ki, Jade Burnwood, Fiona Phillips, Bubblegum, Elliot Saunders

Something I've been doing some sporadic work on: finally making a proper reference sheet for Rivera. It's taking me forever to finish though, so here's a WIP. Mostly, I just have some changes to make to the genetics jumpsuit, then I want to draw her in the mining suit. And honestly? Now that I look at this I sorta don't like how the cybernetic arm turned out. Might change that too, or make a separate, more detailed reference. But ehh, I'm being picky over a character reference... Then it's a matter of a couple more visual notes, and then additional, appearance unrelated notes for a second reference sheet for use outside of game. Maybe I put too much into the reference sheets for my characters? IDK

More pokemon art and Fiona coping with the loss of a friend

More sads. Space holodeck hit hard.

How have I never uploaded this melodramatic culted-Tide art. smh how could i not memorialize Tidal's first shift on this thread

This was a commission done for @Esenno who's a wonderful trial of a nerd. It's law. MARSHAL law. Here they are doing some reading on a particularly difficult case. Probably the murder of 4 grey-shirts who broke into the kitchen via the chef who made them into delicious burgers. Trespassing in the kitchen will do that. or maybe not. He's probably looking at something a lot more serious. At least he's got some company to keep him motivated. *chirp

There are a lot of appeals that get processed through this forum. While a majority of them have been accepted this is often after a lot of posts back and forth. This results in players being unable to play the game for a longer time while they're waiting for their appeal to be processed and in the admin team spending a lot of time working with people to bring an appeal to the successful stage. This post is intended to help cut that time for everyone by telling you upfront what you'll need to include. 1) Use the template. As a policy, any appeal that doesn't follow the template will not be processed until you use the format from the template. This template covers all of the information we need to know to process your appeal and it keeps everything in a consistent format which is easy for the admins to read and respond to. 2) Read the rules. These will show the code of behaviour that you're expected to follow while on the server. Your appeal is a commitment to follow these rules in the future, something which you can't do without reading them. If your ban was legitimately based on breaking any of these rules, then you'll be expected to identify what rules were broken so that you can demonstrate that they won't be broken again. 3) Decide what sort of appeal you're writing. They'll generally fall into the following categories. Identifying a factual mistake of the admins: If you didn't break the rules, then let us know. While we investigate every ban, mistakes do happen. Sometimes we get the wrong person's ckey if multiple people were involved in an issue. Sometimes a situation that looks like one thing was actually something else. In these cases it's best to get straight to the point. Identify what the ban was for and what we thought was going on, then explain the actual situation. If we were wrong then your ban will be lifted. Apology and commitment to improve: If you've actually broken the rules then the ban was legitimate. Regaining the privilege to play on the server may require some work on your behalf but if you can demonstrate that you're going to be a valuable member of the community and able to follow the rules in the future, we will work with you to find a way to bring you back. The best way to show that you're genuine is to understand and identify what you did wrong, if you don't know then how can you change it. If you genuinely don't know, even after looking through the rules, then feel free to ask and we can explain. It also helps for us to know why you did the action you were banned for. This isn't a matter of making excuses, it's helping us to understand the situation you were in and perhaps provide better strategies for handling that situation. Finally if you are going to change your behaviour, then say it so that we can see the commitment that you've made. If you're not genuinely willing to commit to this, then don't bother with this form of appeal. You might pull the wool over our eyes and convince us, but what's the point if you'll get banned for the same thing in a week's time. Work with us and we'll work with you. 4) Avoid using arguments that aren't accepted for appeals. There are some arguments which aren't accepted as valid reasons, while it's impossible to be fully comprehensive here are the ones we see most often. I don't like your rules Your appeal isn't a place to question the current rules of the game. That would be the suggestion forum. We will only be granting appeals to people who will commit to following the current rules of the game. If the environment you want isn't what we provide then unbanning is a waste of everyone's time. My brother did it You are responsible for everyone who uses your Byond account. By giving someone your password, you're enabling them to perform whatever actions they want in your name. Now this does sometimes happen and we're not asking you to lie if this is what genuinely happened, but it's not a defense. Instead you'll need to follow the policy above and understand what went wrong (allowing other people to use your account) and letting us know how you intend to prevent it happening in the future. Abusing the admins It should go without saying that abusing the admins isn't a good way to get us to invite you back to our server. However sometimes in the heat of the moment things slip out, so I'll remind you here to avoid this method. While we'll try to look past this, it does send a signal that you're not looking to co-operate. It should be a temporary ban If you're going to do the right thing, why would we wait to bring you back instead of doing it straight away? If you're not going to do the right thing, why would we ever bring you back? We only use temporary bans when that seems like the best way to change someone's behaviour. If you think that some time away will be a strategy you can use to commit to following the rules, then that's fine. You're welcome to suggest a temporary ban as the best way to bring you back, but this isn't detention or a prison sentence, it's not about providing justice or "paying for your crime". It was good roleplaying You choose the character you play and all the consequences that follow. Your character isn't a real person and we can't hold them accountable for your actions, it has to be done the other way around. Someone else did something wrong first If you've broken the rules, then it doesn't matter what anyone else has done. This is your appeal and unless we've clicked on the wrong person's ban button, we're not going to ban other people based on what gets decided in your appeal. Letting us know what someone else did, at the time with an adminhelp is the best way to see that appropriate action is taken against them. Once you've taken vengeance into your own hands, the issue gets so muddied that it's hard to take any action against them. 5) Listen to what the admins reply. If we're asking you questions or trying to teach you something, then it's pretty clear that we intend on keeping you around. We rarely waste this sort of effort on someone we're kicking out forever. Usually we're telling you exactly how to get your appeal accepted. Regards, M Kenner. Senior Admin.