/tg/Station 13

There actually has never been a discussion about spiders, either on part they are too rarely seen or when they are its usually during a round ending apocalypse.

Few key questions

- Do you think they are ugly - (Personally yes, im sure we could come up with more organic and less brown smear sprites, given we did such a good job with sloths)
- What do you think of spiderlings - (Personally yes, spiderlings are invincible bullshit and why spiders are dispised because this life cycle that spreads them out all across the station)
- Should changelings/botanists be afforded to spam spiderlings (especially after botanists got it nerfed into spawning full purple spiders last i checked)

I mean Remie wants to look at the ancientcode just to tie up a few loose ends on bad code and maybe some action verbs so it'd be valuable to get public opinion on them out there, given that they don't function very well as a mob in themselves and more of a basic spammable simple animal rather than any animal with a layer of complexity similar to a killer tomato, but with its own spider faction that nothing else is really exclusive to.

I like spiders, wish they were less bullshit.

Reece wrote:I like spiders, wish they were less bullshit.

What of we made it so getting bit isn't guaranteed to inject you with venom or you only get poisoned after a certain amount of bites?

That's getting patched (in the case blocking with riot shields was injecting poison), it was just a bug of shitty coding because (suprise suprise) the spider mob is largely un-maintained and supported to say the depth of a monkey which is also a mini antag.

I like them.

They're one of the better mini antags/threats for the crew to have to deal with. I like that they spread through the neglected parts of the station, could lead to unexpected danger when you open a room, crew can be proactive and communicate to get the situation under control, and the threat they pose can be significantly reduced by teamwork and preparation.

Spiderlings being easier to kill once you've spotted them wouldn't undermine that.

Jacough wrote:

Reece wrote:I like spiders, wish they were less bullshit.

What of we made it so getting bit isn't guaranteed to inject you with venom or you only get poisoned after a certain amount of bites?

Or just change up the spider types to have a hunting spider that doesnt use webs, and instead goes out to beat people up with no venom. Then another spider that focuses on setting up webs and trapping people so it can inject them with venom.

As i said in another topic, it would be neat if a spider could have some kind of stealth/camo fade when they are inside their own webs. Rather than having them as some kind of crazy round-ending threat, just make them fairly weak ambush predators that hang around in maint and eat unsuspecting people. Difficult to find, easy to eradicate with a dedicated group.

Spiders are the herpes of spacestations. Once they're in there you're sure as shit not getting them out

Different spiders should have different toxins, or even worse better just randomize the toxin they inject, chosen at birth

I think the sprites are just fine, imo

Could do the bee thing and color code part of them to reflect the chem.

Any excuse to get them & the mechanics properly looked at and addressed.

Give them randomly genreated scientific names

Pls not the poison mechanics from bees. That feature is really... goofy. Its way too random and can end up giving you incredibly shit toxins or an overpowered one. Id rather have a more consistent option than memey randomness.

Alex Crimson wrote:Pls not the poison mechanics from bees. That feature is really... goofy. Its way too random and can end up giving you incredibly shit toxins or an overpowered one. Id rather have a more consistent option than memey randomness.

We could have some consistent toxin and one random one

Dagdammit wrote:Could do the bee thing and color code part of them to reflect the chem.

They already are. Red inject you with toxin, green morphine, purple something else.

ShadowDimentio wrote:

Dagdammit wrote:Could do the bee thing and color code part of them to reflect the chem.

They already are. Red inject you with toxin, green morphine, purple something else.

Wrong, wrong, wrong.
Red have no venom, green injects toxin as their venom and purple injects lots of toxin.

Some kind of unique toxin that causes paralysis would be neat. So they can still talk, but not move.

Also for the annoying egg spam, how about instead of spawning an army of spiderlings, the eggs attach themselves to the host, and deal brute damage in small amounts. After say... 20 brute damage, a spiderling is spawned. Once the body reaches the damage cap, it stops spawning shit. Kinda like how Lifeweb works with parasites. Give the ability to lay eggs to all the spider types, but have a 5 minute cooldown to stop spiders ramping too fast.

You could also make the method of spiders healing themselves similar to eggs. Have them eat people, which deals some brute damage in exchange for healing their own. That way to eats into their ability to spawn more spiderlings. They would be encouraged to bring back people as intact as possible.

Alex Crimson wrote:Some kind of unique toxin that causes paralysis would be neat. So they can still talk, but not move.

Also for the annoying egg spam, how about instead of spawning an army of spiderlings, the eggs attach themselves to the host, and deal brute damage in small amounts. After say... 20 brute damage, a spiderling is spawned. Once the body reaches the damage cap, it stops spawning shit. Kinda like how Lifeweb works with parasites. Give the ability to lay eggs to all the spider types, but have a 5 minute cooldown to stop spiders ramping too fast.

You could also make the method of spiders healing themselves similar to eggs. Have them eat people, which deals some brute damage in exchange for healing their own. That way to eats into their ability to spawn more spiderlings. They would be encouraged to bring back people as intact as possible.

giving spiders parasting would probably not be fun, the best part about spiders is that they have zero stun based combat involved.

we need stuns for the spiderling attachment.

healing? Maybe just a passive but it was nice to know that if you injured a spider they couldn't ever heal, which made fighting them slightly more bearable.

Webs would stun. Or rather, root people in place. Lay eggs on stunned/cocooned players, if they escape then they would need surgery to remove em. Even just basic surgery like scalpel>hand>cauterize.

Spiders do stun, its just that it comes from crazy damage rather than an actual stun. To stop stun spam, could you give them some kind of toxin sack like a ling? Each "bite" attack would drain venom from their reserve, injecting it into the target, and would regen over time. That way they cannot stunlock someone. Although they would need lower melee damage, because by the time someone is stunned from venom, they would be in crit anyways.

The issue with no healing is that even the most robust players cannot dodge everything. A passive would just allow spiders to run and hide when they get hurt. The brute damage thing would at least require them to be active in order to heal and expand the spider infestation.

Alex Crimson wrote:Pls not the poison mechanics from bees. That feature is really... goofy. Its way too random and can end up giving you incredibly shit toxins or an overpowered one. Id rather have a more consistent option than memey randomness.

Oh absolutely, wasn't saying to use the MECHANICS- just the procedural color-coding process that bees (and glass beakers) use to provide info about the reagent they're carrying.

Dagdammit wrote:

Alex Crimson wrote:Pls not the poison mechanics from bees. That feature is really... goofy. Its way too random and can end up giving you incredibly shit toxins or an overpowered one. Id rather have a more consistent option than memey randomness.

Oh absolutely, wasn't saying to use the MECHANICS- just the procedural color-coding process that bees (and glass beakers) use to provide info about the reagent they're carrying.

I was, it sounds fun as shit