Leaderboard

So, this is a guide that I worked on with Berkzerk3r (Oss Szzei) back in March. I never decided to post it because I figured that a lot of people understood how to do Toxins. Upon coming back from a break from the server and playing Research Director I've noticed there are quite a few people that do not understand how to do Toxins effectively. This guide is by no means something that I expect to be completely understood, however I am looking for assistance on making it become more legible for the people who are completely new to Toxins. This is simply a guide I use that wrote down myself to figure out how to do Toxins. I don't know all of the specifics but I know a decent amount. 1.Grab two oxygen tanks and a plasma tank from toxins storage. Attach (By wrenching down) the Plasma (Red) Canister to the Northern Gas Mixing connector and an Oxygen (Blue) Canister to the eastern one. Connect the Mixing (Yellow) Canister to the western connector to receive the mixture. Make a mix of 33% Plasma (North), and 66% Oxygen (East). Output Pressure:4500 kPa Node-1:66% Node-2:33% 2.Cool an Oxygen Canister on the freezer to temperature of shockwave for shift: 3.Check the Tachyon-Doppler Array in the room to the right and it should inform you of the radius goal for the shift. Bomb Radiuses! (Temperatures the oxygen must be to achieve the shockwave numbers.) If the shift goal is not one of these numbers try adjusting temperature of oxygen with freezer up or down by five Kelvin if target is missed. (Lower the temp larger the boom.) -84 Celsius = Shockwave of 8 (189K) -94 Celsius = Shockwave of 9 (179K) -100 Celsius = Shockwave of 10 (168K) -107 Celsius = Shockwave of 11 (161K) -110 Celsius = Shockwave of 12 (156K) -119 Celsius = Shockwave of 13 (154K) -123 Celsius = Shockwave of 14 (149K) -126 Celsius = Shockwave of 15 (143K) -134 Celsius = Shockwave of 16 (139K) -139 Celsius = Shockwave of 17 (134K) -141 Celsius = Shockwave of 18 (132K) -145 Celsius = Shockwave of 19 (128K) -149 Celsius = Shockwave of 20 (124K) IF YOU MISS BY ONE ON ANY OF THESE, REMOVE OR ADD THREE K. LARGER NUMBER = SMALLER EXPLOSION SMALLER NUMBER = LARGER EXPLOSION. 4.Then attach the Plasma (Red) Canister to the pipe system and Mixing (Yellow) Canister to the input pipes for the heat chamber. 4.Turn the Pipe up to max pressure and hit the igniter (May require a few ignitions) Once the Plasma goes away your plasma tank should have very high pressure and heat, the number you're aiming for is around (6,500C). Pipe valve to activate. Igniter. The plasma should turn a bluish white and the pressure panel should be blinking if you've done this correctly. the number you're aiming for is around 7,000-10,000. Check this pressure panel to see temperature. This is the number you are looking at. Once the number peaks and begins to drop you want to turn off the valve letting the plasma into the burn chamber as soon as possible, otherwise you lose pressure. Grab Plasma and Oxygen tanks from bin on top right corner of the room, then empty Oxygen tank in air pump to 0 tank pressure. Fill oxygen tank with 650Kpa of cooled oxygen. Then use the Plasma tank on the Plasma canister with max pressure enabled to pressurize and heat it. Then apply your Cold oxygen and hot plasma to a tank assembly, then attach a remote signaler to the assembly. (Make sure to have your PDA open and use the signaler function ready to activate the signaler on the bomb.) Now take the bomb you've made and go to the room to your east and put it on the Mass Driver. Now click the button on the northern wall to send it to the toxin's testing range. Wait about four to five seconds, and then activate the signaler via your PDA. Seven is the maximum number for scientific research you can achieve for toxins, so if you hit seven you did great!

Hi, This mainly applies to NSS Cyberaid map but it also applicable to all maps. Background: I've played a bit of engineer lately and begun to play around with power and I noticed a glaring problem in how the station is powered. At the beginning of the game it draws around 160 kW by default and unless major changes changes happens to the station, it rarely draws more than an average of 160 kW. Meanwhile the supermatter engine on nitrogen cooling easily provides around 360 kW and 1 set of 60 solar panels produce around 90 kW. All of the solar panels of course doesn't provide 90 kW at the same time, but around 2 sets can be assumed to be able to face the sun at any given moment. Now the benefit of solars is supposedly that they're safe and this is true. But a nitrogen powered supermatter engine is also very safe. Even a carbondioxide powered engine is quite safe (at least as long as you set it up correctly). This has the consequence that there's little benefit of solar panels compared to the SM engine since they're both quite safe. The overhanging threat of admin bans for antags who mess with the engine without ahelping also makes people not bother messing with it (or so I assume since sabotage of the SM engine has never happened once over the 100s of hours I've spent on engineering), leaving most power concepts pretty redundant and leaving the SM as a perfectly safe option on the same level as solar panels in practice. But solar panels take a lot longer to set up. The wiring mechanic is error prone and because they need to not be obstructed, they're set up in different corners of the station. In addition the use of hardsuit means it takes up inventory space and slows down the engineer who's sent out to fix them up. But most notably, the solar panels are very redundant! The SM is equally as safe to them, requires often no oversight whatsoever and produces like double the power of all the solar panels combined. Setting up solars is often just a waste of time and at best they act as a power reserve in case some engineer manages to blow the SM engine at some point or a meteor hits the SM engine somehow. In addition the SM engine itself often has no reason to be revisited in the round because of changing circumstances because it produces so much power. You could for instance add more emitters, but why would you when one emitter is basically enough to power the station on its own? You could in theory build another SM engine or some other power-producing object, but once again there's little reason to do so since the power requirements of the station is by default way too low for such to be necessary. Suggestion: There's multiple ways of balancing this issue. In my opinion, a SM engine which is powered by nitrogen should generate just short of enough power for the station by default (somewhere around maybe 140 kW), so it actually has a significant drawback to being a super safe cooling solution and it would require the assembly of solar panels for the station to remain power positive. This would still make power easy but it would also make it less brain dead. There would be incentive to revisit power throughout the round as well or to even upgrade the SM engine or use alternate sources, build more solar panels, make a backup SMES battery for important departments, you know useful stuff for engineering to spend time on... The other is a simple revision to the rule to allow the SM engine to be fair game without ahelping for antags to target. This is of course not super ideal since it can feel like an overbearingly vulnerable target and have far too great consequences should they suceeed but that is also the fault of the design of the SM engine. Maybe a SM engine fault shouldn't be so dramatic, maybe it should be easier to correct faults or sabotage? The current meta of ahelping is a bandaid in of itself because of a lackluster design from the start (no offense meant). The third option (which means more work), is to oversee the objects that draw power. Maybe certain objects should have a much greater power draw. Maybe cryo tubes draw too little or maybe the cooler does which cools the cryo fluid? Maybe the kitchen should draw more power somehow when objects are used? Maybe the chem dispensers should draw some power to regain components? I'd really like some sort of overhaul of the power system because it just seems to depressing that one engineer dabs off to fix solars every round and spends like half the shift doing so and in the end it's entirely pointless.

Title pretty much covers it. ParaStats is a really cool thing, and it would be great to give it some more visibility! Current message format (yes I know it's two messages but shhh): Proposed message format (or something similar):

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.

I am of the opinion that detcurity has always been a problem, but the lethal revolver just makes it more prominent and noticeable when you are shooting people with lethal rounds vs rubber ones. I don't know why the PR for the introduction of the lethal revolver seemed to imply that having it would lesson detcurity issues, perhaps using the thinking that deadly consequences meets equal consequences for discharging the revolver in situations where it isn't needed. That doesn't solve the mindset some people have playing the role. I can imagine it is also a very difficult thing to enforce, because sometimes the detective is quite valid in using the revolver and d-chat will still shout DETCURITY simply for the fact they are defending themselves against a lethal threat using lethal rounds. Recently though since I started playing again, definitely seems to be a spike in detcurity moments - that is just observing detectives going into maints on patrol with security or generally acting as another body, going to calls for backup and the like when there's plenty of security around to answer the call (this one i see a lot). That's all without any revolver issues mind you. Could be argued that having a lethal revolver emboldens detectives to do these things - I'm not so sure on that. Again, mindsets that are not being challenged. There's also odd disparity between the security team and the detective. You have sec with their non-lethal methods that usually remains the case until powered/uncontainable/lethal threats are found, and then you have a security attached role with a lethal revolver. It's an odd mix. I'm not against the lethal revolver, and the feel for having it is very noir, but it was introduced without any real changes to combatting the troublesome detcurity mindset. It's never going to happen - but one possible mitigating change could be to separate the detective and turn them into a P.I. Making them an actual 'aid/helper' to security rather than part of the department. Denying them access to sec-coms and sec-gear in general, doesn't prevent but does mitigate them joining up with security for the most part, and this should be supported by SOP/LAW changes. Then you can either make the case for a P.I to have rubber bullets or a 'special exemption' to be made for their lethal revolver; with consequences that go with that considering they are not attached to sec-department anymore. Making them a P.I would also open up the role to more rp-opportunities. The downside is rather obvious as it would mean less efficiency when it comes to aiding security and cooperation will have to be initiated by security for the most part. But nothing stops security enlisting the aid of the detective regardless, and the detective will be more encouraged to solve/trace antags the old way that doesn't involve listening to sec-coms and waiting for officers to spot an antag. Lets face it; lethal revolver or not, detcurity is still an ongoing issue. Their lethal capability has just made them more pronounced now when they do shoot someone. It's a role that is supposed to be a good dose of roleplay backed up by helping security solve crimes, but often than not turns into them patrolling/hunting antags with their pew-pew. If you look at why that mindset is happening rather than the equipment, can probably start tackling the problem.

I walked into the public farm today, all the plants settled there were dead. It reminded me of a day long ago. I was sleeping on a hard metal bed haphazardly created, living in a house not my own. I settled in the abandoned home of a prominent judge massacred during the mercenary attack. She doesn't matter though, the fucker jailed me for 3 months and I got a home out of it in the end. As I woke up, a man I remember as MacArthur was standing over me. He took me by the collar and started dragging me out of the room, as I was being forcibly kicked the dead vulgaris plant in the corner of my room stuck with me. It's funny, the plants in the farm today we're given as much care as the plants I kept for sustenance during harder times. I was a glorified homeless person then, granted the status of citizen and a monthly wage by the planetary government. In truth I was in debt to the police and to poor to buy property. I couldn't buy food and starved regularly, they kicked me when I was down and forced me to pay the bill as well. I should've killed them, especially HIM. But god was to selfish and the planet blew up before I could burn it down myself. But this station I reside in now...it doesn't bring relief. My crewmembers, they aren't regular people. If the people of Geminus were sociopathic cut-throat capitalists, the people of the Cyberiad are complacent workers distracted by temporary disturbances. They don't question the purpose of the station, those I've discussed with this with appear agitated but forget about it. I can't break myself away with this phenomenon either, I was complacent. When I see a breach I help seal it but I DON'T question it, they say it was the syndicate but don't discuss why they did it. Everywhere I go temporary distractions hold us back, NT had granted a DNA vault, a man in a red suit has blown up a window, spiders are breeding at Chapel. IT DOESN'T MATTER WHERE it comes from. They keep the crew distracted just enough until the escape shuttle comes. No one not directly connected to NT is a bourgeois extortionist of labor and those who are connected seem oblivious themselves. They inform us about the safety hazards but never delve deeper...because they know we can't reject their offer. Out of it all, the most disturbing will always be NT and not those against it. They hold us by the economic thread of life or death. NT is nothing more but an extension of a repressive regime in cahoots with SolGov based on monopolization and coercion of the masses, including their own. But sometimes, it's the simplest answers which are the most correct. Maybe the Cyberiad is just a glorified mining center disguised as a Science outpost researching the lava planet it orbits. The plasma extracted from the inhabited land is later sent to Centcomm after our leave. In the end, the validity of that doesn't matter BECAUSE I CAN'T LIVE LIKE THIS ANYMORE. I will do everything to tear as big of a gash into NT as possible. I will exact my revenge on those who have wronged me then and now. I'll just have to wait for the material conditions to ultimately ripen before I do. Agitation is unavoidable. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- I just realized I have covered nearly all of mission briefing by the time I post this. I'm not doing it on purpose I actually wanted to write these.

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.*