How to make Strange Reagent revival less tedious?

[Miraviel]

Hello!

 

For the impatient, my questions are:

• How would you make Strange Reagent revival less tedious, without making it much easier?
• Would you like to have the internal organ revival process similar to limb debridement?

 

I intend to make Strange Reagent revival a bit less tedious from medical's side, to (hopefully) slowly make it a more appealing alternative to "just shove it into the cloner". Please note that I do NOT want to make it a faster, easier, better alternative to cloning. I just wish to see it happen more often, outside of "well, they cannot be cloned, so I have to do this".

 

Here is what happens when you revive someone with Strange Reagent (please correct me if I misread the code!):

• They get 50 clone damage
• They get 0-15 brute, burn, toxin damage
• If they were revived within:
  • 1 minute, no necrosis occurs
  • 20 minutes, necrosis occurs up to a 40% chance
  • 20+ minutes, necrosis occurs with 40% chance
• If they have necrosis, they get a level 3 infection in the same organ.

This is the usual treatment they receive, in no particular order:

• Anti-crit medicine
• Mannitol to fix brain damage
• Cryotube to fix the clone damage
• Debridement surgery for limbs
• Taking out organs one by one, splashing them with mitocholide, reinserting them
• Fixing surface injuries
• Fixing toxins.

 

One thing that I wish to address here is the organ revival part. While you can do multi-surgery with debridement (for example, you can revive six limb parts at once, and only have to do it one by one at the dropper part), the organ revival part looks like this:

• Open up the body part
• Remove the necrotic organ
• Then either:
  • Have a bottle of mitocholide, a beaker, and dropper
    • Use the dropper to transfer reagents between the mitocholide bottle to the beaker
    • Pick up the beaker
    • Splash the organ
  • Have 1 unit mitocholide pills and a beaker
    • Put the 1 unit pill into the beaker
    • Pick up the beaker
    • Splash the organ
• Reinsert the organ

This feels needlessly tedious compared to debridement (and very unsanitary, since the organs just end up on the floor), where you can transfer mitocholide directly from the bottle (via a dropper) to the limb. I suggest this should be able to be done the same way as internal organ disinfection:

• Choose the Organ Manipulation surgery
• At the organ manipulation step, have a container with mitocholide in it
• Directly apply it to the organ to revive it
• (Fix bones and) close the incision

I do not wish to take away the original method, this is just an alternative I would offer.

What are your thoughts?

[Agatasa]

Having mitocholide organ revival act like debridement in Organ Manipulation would just be a huge quality of life improvement, and wouldn't really make SR revival too overpowered or something. It doesn't circumvent the real mechanical hurdles of SR revival.

Strange Reagent is, like other parts of medbay including simple surgeries, always suboptimal to the 'stop having interesting gameplay' button that is the cloner, when available. "Given the opportunity, players will optimize the fun out of a game."

Another issue SR has(other than the silly name) is that it's a 1u chem(including mitocholide and mutadone), which always feels kind of cheap and cheesy to me, when they could require varying amounts of chems or have effects over time. This ends up creating a cheap solution for chemistry where you just make 40 1u pills of any of these and forget about it. No more job work really, time to make meth or colorful reagent or something.

[Charliminator]

I don't play medbay, but I don't get SRed. one major issue, I feel, outside of the things outlined in this post are:
 

• the "you skin is literally decaying off you" text doesn't go away, simple bug fix
• the name, and recipe. holywater implies its literally magic, I would rather it not be literally magic.
• gibbing, could we have some other negative to misusage than gibbing? really only because of how antags can weaponise it to really easily permakill anyone. something like husking, or organ damage, or both.
   

other than that, the points in this thread make sense. if someone does write up a design doc revolving these ideas I might look into coding it. I don't play medbay so I cannot write it myself.

[Agatasa]

The recipe could be changed to require epinephrine/ephedrine and formaldehyde instead of holy water.

Husking and organ damage seems like a good thing to replace gibbing with (How is it getting the force to spontaneously explode people with?).

Husking is extremely visible, unlike organ damage which a new player could cause again and again wondering "why doesn't this WORK??".  Another option is that 1-2 limbs fall off.

Names that could be used:
Someone on Discord suggested Verticalicine as a joke(Cures horizontalitis)
Something a little less obvious joke could be something like Elevazine (-ase, -yl, whatever).

I had offered up Lazarus Reagent on Discord as a bad-but-better name.

My actual suggestion is Anastazine (as in anastasis, resurrection)

Or you could go with something entirely random. Maybe pull out an obscure trek med name from the show.