/tg/Station 13

Hear me out. I was thinking about genetics design and this came up. The last time I added disabilities to genetics, I added some relatively harsh ones like acid flesh that outright cause you to shoot acid now and then. I decided to make their unlock difficulty pretty high, since I wanted to make it so that weaponizing the genes should take some effort.

Thinking back on it now, nobody uses the acid flesh gene. It isn't worth weaponizing; it acts much too slowly, and can be cured far too easily (either with mutadone or a gene machine). Then I got to thinking, what gene is worth weaponizing? Monkey is.

Monkey is probably the strongest negative gene in genetics if you plan on using it as a weapon. It will always be the first gene you unlock, it strips the victim of their belongings, it effectively works as a mute as it takes away their Galactic Common language, it makes them unable to perform most actions (like use computers to cure themselves), it makes them very weak (they can get knocked out for an extremely long time from a punch)... It basically does it all, and is the easiest gene to access out of any of them. It's so strong that it's the sole reason we can't have things like DNA injectors in syringe guns.

I think a reasonable nerf would be something like the gene being a two-parter: A monkey-to-human gene and a human-to-monkey gene, both of which are separate genes. Monkeys start with monkey-to-human, but human-to-monkey would have to be gated somehow and made a whole lot harder to unlock. To compensate and to make other genes worth using, we could add things like the aforementioned ability to put DNA injectors into syringe guns. Thoughts?

Maybe this is just me but the reason I never used negative genes as a traitor was because you couldn't really hide that you were doing it. If you try to inject someone with a DNA manipulator then they will see exactly which mutation you're injecting them with. If you want people to use the negative mutations you'd probably need some way to rename the injectors, either from the console or with a pen. If you did that then I could see myself maybe giving someone 'hulk' which is actually mute so they can't yell for help or clumsy so they can't shoot they're guns

that's a 1 line change (add unique_rename to the injector)

I thought monkeys could talk Galactic Common now

Genetics got fuck all worth doing for antagging, except maybe annoying some people with monkey for the whole minute until they get mutadoned. Taking that away doesnt make it any worse, go ahead.

you can use weapons/guns as monkey, crawl away in a vent and tell ai genetics dehumanized you.
tourettes is more dehabilitating as you ll get stunned, genetic deffects are a joke to cure and you ll get em only by bad cloning and rads you can do more damage by overdosing people with powers which has like 90% death 50% perma removal ( give people 2 expensive powers syringe then syringe them with third expensive power), still gene instability takes 2 min to take effect, it should be shorter tbh

Monkeys can speak common on /tg/.

Genetics has almost nothing worth using as a traitor except for TK, X-ray and space adaptation. Maybe fire breath if you are a lizard.

Genetics used to be a lot stronger in antag game but goon genetics completely ruined it as you cannot print full mutation set injectors any more, just one gene at a time. There's almost no point in having the vast majority of genetic defects any more except as filler and to annoy you during a rad storm / working near the engine without protection, since the harmful genes can no longer be used offensively in any real capacity.

I don't see a reason to nerf Monkey gene. It's relatively easy to cure, it's very loud to use, and doesn't actually harm the victim, it just disables a lot of what they can do. What they CAN do however is still attack you with anything they previously had on them.

Yakumo_Chen wrote:Genetics used to be a lot stronger in antag game but goon genetics completely ruined it as you cannot print full mutation set injectors any more, just one gene at a time. There's almost no point in having the vast majority of genetic defects any more except as filler and to annoy you during a rad storm / working near the engine without protection, since the harmful genes can no longer be used offensively in any real capacity.

Really good post. Somehow this had never even occurred to me. Maybe then a good way to fix genetics-centered sabotage would be to add a new menu to the DNA console that lets you build a custom SE injector. I would imagine it being limited to 5 genes or 99 instability, whichever you reach first. Could combine that with the ability to rename the injector and it could be pretty useful

I believe they also removed the ability to change your Unique Enzymes, which is pretty aggravating as now you can't change your DNA to someone else (useful in revs / traitors) or (very useful as non-antag in ling and wizard rounds) change your DNA back to your own, had you taken time to save it on a disk.

Are DNA disks even worth anything any more? Goon genetics kind of fucked up a lot of the classic uses of genetics.

Another issue with genetics in general is two-fold:

A) You can solve the entire gene pool in ~9-10 scans since each person's sequence/blocks for mutation aren't randomized like true Goongen.
B) If you've played on Goon before as a geneticist, you'd know our system is in no way like theirs, where theirs actually requires effort to go through and has a neat minigame to it that grows the more you do it.

[quote="Yakumo_Chen"]I believe they also removed the ability to change your Unique Enzymes, which is pretty aggravating as now you can't change your DNA to someone else (useful in revs / traitors) or (very useful as non-antag in ling and wizard rounds) change your DNA back to your own, had you taken time to save it on a disk.
/quote]
There is still a tab for that but I forgot what it was called

TheMythicGhost wrote:Another issue with genetics in general is two-fold:

A) You can solve the entire gene pool in ~9-10 scans since each person's sequence/blocks for mutation aren't randomized like true Goongen.

What? Big disagree on this, I don't find this to be true at all

PKPenguin321 wrote:

Yakumo_Chen wrote:Genetics used to be a lot stronger in antag game but goon genetics completely ruined it as you cannot print full mutation set injectors any more, just one gene at a time. There's almost no point in having the vast majority of genetic defects any more except as filler and to annoy you during a rad storm / working near the engine without protection, since the harmful genes can no longer be used offensively in any real capacity.

Really good post. Somehow this had never even occurred to me. Maybe then a good way to fix genetics-centered sabotage would be to add a new menu to the DNA console that lets you build a custom SE injector. I would imagine it being limited to 5 genes or 99 instability, whichever you reach first. Could combine that with the ability to rename the injector and it could be pretty useful

I got a bounty PR up thanks to the feedback from this post, hopefully it will go through: https://github.com/tgstation/tgstation/pull/46129