Pennwick

I'm no longer sure if this is a guide that was abandoned or a joke about Security not knowing what its doing.

Megafauna on station first since thats a simpler issue. I don't really think its an issue either way. There are only 2 ways for it to really happen. A player luring megafauna onto the shuttle, and emagged jaunters. If a player does either of these things and aren't hijackers then the solution is a ban not making it even more difficult. I'm not sure that trying to passively stop the cult when they're well secured on lavaland is a great approach. An experienced cultist with a handful of papers can leave a bunch of hidden one way runes on station. You can only do so much to watch the runes when they're invisible and numerous. Random searches help but won't really stop blitzes where a cultist teleports in, kidnaps, and teleports out. I think the proposed but closed blood cult cult rework had a decent idea of Z level teleports leaving an obvious tear in reality for a minute afterward. So you could pinpoint the location of of station bases better. Really though I'm not against security assaulting off station lavaland bases but their approach not great most of the time. No reason to send the whole security team. Just send one officer or trustworthy miner out with a tracking beacon/implant and teleport out there once the location has been found. This way you're not leaving the station without a security team while you try and hunt it out. For return trips the handheld teleporter would be great. Hopefully you still have it. But broadly I agree. Security shouldn't be leaving the station to SEARCH for a base but attacking one they can teleport to and teleport back from is worthwhile. EDIT: Forgot the original thread topic. I don't think Lavaland ERT are needed. Against megafauna on station they're only as effective as regular ERT. The mining base is mining's job to protect and if its lost then you're out of minerals for the shift. The only emergency thats really ERT worthy is a cult base on lavaland and in that case you should really just be sending one individual to locate it. Just test and implant one of the miners with tracking and mindshields and have them go search.

Okay. Got it. So you're saying in addition to Holy water being poisonous then chaplains would be able to change null rod variants. Thats not as bad. I still think though you're going to run into issues. The biggest I think it is it will have little if any effect on security's choice to buckle and sip their suspects. Goodsec I wouldn't holy dunk someone without physical evidence/paraphernalia or testimony. And would likely do it regardless or not if it crit them or flatlined them. And a Shitsec officer who tasers the paramedic probably is going to force holy water no matter the consequences either. The fact that the Holy water is dangerous didn't change the behavior only made things worse for the innocent. The former is justified in their actions and the latter should be Bwoinked regardless if the suspect had 5 minutes wasted or were crit. Second. I can't see a great way for holy water to damage the imbiber without giving information we don't want the player to have. If it starts causing brain/tox damage immediately. Then a 5u sip becomes the new holy water test and removes all counterplay from cultists. If it doesn't start taking effect until the deconvert step you've created a rather stealthy and powerful poison. If it does brain damage then security really just needs to have a handful of Mannitol pills on hand. If it does Tox damage it can and will fuck livers every time. Now just because I can't think of a good way to do it doesn't mean there isn't one but it should be kept in mind. Third. There can be legitimate reasons to test someone who aren't cultists and neither player nor security should be punished severely. There are a lot of cases, where by your own standards, someone innocent could be incriminated and subjected to a near/lethal test. Security are held more tightly to SoP than other jobs. Both by players and Admins. They're expected to know it well or they risk copping a jobban. If some standards were established. Both in proper application and threshold needed before testing in the first place I think it would have more of an effect than making holy water poison.

If an admin ruled you were being suspicious then YOU might have been the problem in that situation. Or its possible that nobody is at fault in particular. If its code red you're supposed to stay in your department and comply with all lawful orders from security. Cults are serious. Spessmen die and some can't even be brought back. A vampire is one of the most dangerous regular antagonists once they reach full power. They can't be faulted for trying to protect the crew. In fact if Security says stay out of maint and you go into maint you can be brigged for 10 minutes for creating a workplace hazard. Thats twice as long as your confusion from holy water and fully justified under space law, SOP, and common sense. Now if you're just in maint, its kinda borderline. You stuck your toe over the line, the officer jumped on you and you both ended up wasting your time. But if you're carrying a stun prod, cable cuffs, unknown, carrying paper or any combination Security is fully justified. At that point you're either validhunting or looking to get converted. Both are rule breaking violations. In either situation even if holy water did have adverse effects I feel like security would be justified in using it. Except now if you're just in a bad place at a bad time you're all messed up instead of just taking a 5 minute timeout. As for making the prayer beads the only method of conversion thats just... bad. I'm all for chaplains taking a more backline role against the cult but if you tie the only method of de-conversion to the null rod in a single form then you're making everything worse. If the null rod or chaplain goes missing Security's only option is to kill all cultists until a replacement can be found. And in more extreme cases they are going to want to kill suspected cultists. Take a scenario where you find a discarded tome and decide to turn it into security, on your way security decide to stop and search you due to a large number in your department being confirmed cultists. They find the tome and take you back to the brig for deconversion. The officer calls for the chaplain but hears on the radio that he hasn't been seen in 5 minutes and his sensors are turned off. The officer has 3 choices. They can let you go, there is little reason to believe you aren't a cultist at this point, if they do so they would be endangering the station. They could lock you in a brig cell and hope that both the HOP opens another Chaplain slot and that somebody latejoins, they're competent, and can make it to the brig alive. All the while they run the risk of you being teleported out of their grasp. Third option, they execute you on the spot for being an uncontainable EoC, they can revive and deconvert you once a chaplain is available. This isn't a great option either because there is a slim chance you're not a cultist and your story about just wanting to turn in the tome is true but as the cult gets stronger and stronger option 3 starts to look better and better. None of the options are good and in the two arguably best options the detainee ends up worse off. ---------------- Responding to Kyet's idea that antag tests are poor form I broadly agree but in this case I feel like the fact the test is accessible and slow means its a little more balanced. If the justification is loose then security is punished by having to hang around 3 minutes for the de-conversion to dud. I'd support making it less foolproof though. Ways to give security a false negative would mean it could have some interesting counterplays. See my suggestion of having it fake deconvert if the test fails for one example.

While spending it in the lobby phase would be neat I don't think its feasible since I'm pretty sure the server has already forgotten who was who by that point. Your only option would be to karma based on user keys. Which is probably a bad road to go down.

I agree that you can't give it out for station objectives. As for the popup though is there a particular reason we couldn't have an opt in karma popup AFTER the shuttle docks at central? That way you could have a whole interface that listed Name/Job/Antag/Greentext statuses and just give Karma with one click. This would favor antags somewhat but a lot of the time I suspect that ghosts give Karma to antags more often anyway. Plus you could just as easily scroll quickly for that name you wanted to Karma but couldn't pick out on the shuttle. You do shorten your post round violence time but you can easily karma early or not opt in.

Can confirm Warrior is correct on what Holy water actually does. After 75 ticks it has a 33% chance to deconvert each additional tick. 35u will have a 99% chance to deconvert and 40 will 99.99%. It'll pretty much lock you in confusion until it fully purges from your system past that point. If you're a cultist or thrall it all gets purged from your system on deconvert. I wouldn't want to add any kind of real negative side effects. Its just going to end up hurting the imbiber more than security. If someone is being real dumb about it then you can ahelp it. I was once given 200u because I picked up a tome as a librarian and never de-converted because I wasn't a cultist just a bookkeeper. Personally I think this might best be solved with a change of SOP. Make the deconversion procedure more standard. 40u or 4 sips. IAAs can yell at officers that give more and security have less of an excuse of 'I didn't know how much to give'. Usually I'm against Security having perfect knowledge of how to deal with Antags but in this case it makes it easier on the person stuck in processing more than anything. I kind of agree that security just hoarding a big holy water tank is a bit of an issue. Though I wouldn't say that holy water shouldn't deconvert. The fact you can make it through Chemistry means that there's an option if the Chaplain is absent, negligent or dead. Otherwise the only choice is to lethal cultists and leave them to rot. You could possibly make it so only handheld items could be blessed. That would mean they best they could do is have a couple buckets on hand at a time. Alternatively, and I'd rather see this, make it so cultists can sully holy water. That turns holding onto a holy water tank into a liability because if the cult steals it they suddenly have an unholy water tank OR they can even leave it in the brig and let security forcefeed everyone unholy water. Healing their cultists and killing the innocent. (This is also mostly irrelevant to the discussion but I'd like it if Cultists showed the deconvert message always when the holy water purged from their system. Even if it wasn't successful. It would allow for some counterplays with dental/chem implants. As it is now if you don't deconvert and they're pretty sure you're a cultist they can just feed you more and more until they get their happy little message. If it showed any time the chem ran out you could just pop your charcoal pill halfway through your deconversion and slip through security's fingers. Maybe you could even get a mindshield out of the deal too!)

Sometimes. Lavaland generation just decides that seeds should stay in the vault.

If you die with poisoned Berry Banned in your system it'll play the Bwoink sound effect. Good luck killing anyone with Berry Banned though, its one of the weaker poisons out there.

Poly and other parrots already do this. Every so often they'll learn a phrase spoken recently and add it to its random sayings. However since Poly starts with 14 phrases memorized you're somewhat unlikely to hear your new one.

I don't think you'll ever be able to get past the 'lol cloned' problem of hostage taking but perhaps things could be done to improve the problem of security Bum Rushing the antag requiring a lot of time to kill the target that you should be using to defend yourself. We actually already have a mouth shot ability that does 5x damage with a gun by targeting the mouth and clicking on an adjacent target. Perhaps an advanced version of that could be possible where you still have a 5-10 second windup but then you hold it, shooting when the target moves/you're hit/click them again. Perhaps grab intent for hostage taking and kill intent for immediate shots. Though even with the damage is a little low. 100 damage is devastating but won't kill a healthy spaceman. Perhaps the damage needs to be upped on it? I mean if you had them still for that long you could have probably killed them with a toolbox. Plus nothing can be done similarly with a melee weapon. Perhaps targeting the throat with a sharp object should allow for similar hostage taking doing huge amounts of bleed damage. Not instantly deadly but very lethal.

There is a flaw with the chemical implant method. Security can see chemical implants with their security HUDs. And when you trigger it the dot will disappear. Possibly tipping them off. Will work on some but not others. The dental implant is safe though. Also with that mix I think you'd poison yourself pretty good wouldn't you? While both are in your system Calomel will deplete at 1.3u(on average) per tick and charcoal will be depleting at 5.4. The charcoal would also get purged by the calomel way faster than the charcoal purges the calomel. Leaving you to get tox damage and tipping off the officer possibly when you puke. Even if you balance it correctly you have a random chance of puking with calomel. Pentetic Acid and Salglu might be a better choice. 5u of Pentetic Acid will remove a full glass of holy water and cause no vomiting. You will however suffer some very minor brute and burn damage which should be mostly counteracted by the Salgu however it would still be noticeable by a watchful brig doc. They should all work but none of them are perfect. Well there is one perfect method, and that is to swap the holy water tank in processing with regular water when security isn't watching.

When a strange plant is put into a fermenting barrel the alcohol potency is random each time. It can be anywhere from .1 to 1.5. There's a 1% chance it'll be 2. Even drinking straight Ethanol, Suicider, or Pan Galactics only have an boozepower of 1. If a sip tells you the alcohol is suicidally strong its over 1.2. Sadly its hard to mass produce as every plant added will be random. You have to work one plant at a time and taste every batch. You'll get hammered faster than any clients.

Alternatively they can easily chill a tank of otherwise unused nitrogen or co2 and make a tiny chamber on your own. You don't need every step done for you at round start. *back pops* Back in my day we didn't even have slime management consoles, we did all the slime raising by hand and thats the way we liked it! Goshdurn it!

An upgraded science HUD could maybe read the contents of the RPED in your hand and put a marker by machines upgradable with the parts inside.