Doctor is a Less Shit Job Now: The State of Medbay

[CDranzer]

So I took a break six months ago just before cobbychem hit and I came back like a week ago just after cloning got yeeted, and since then I've spent an entire Three Days playing medbay roles on Manuel.
Naturally, this makes me far more qualified to start a discussion about the general state of Medbay than anybody else.


1) The Good: Bye Bye Cloning, Hello Surgery
Before I left I held the belief that cloning needed to die and after actually playing for a while I can confirm that this was 100% the correct decision to make. Doctor is now a job being perfomed by Doctors instead of assistants moonlighting as geneticists. Surgery is a bit of an involved job, but the you-don't-stab-your-patient-with-the-wrong-tool QoL change permits a certain level of educated guessing (incision retraction clamp incision Do The Thing cauterize). I'm genuinely surprised by how little use Cryo gets, at least on Manuel. Perhaps it was mainly just seen as a way of dealing with cloning's cellular damage? I guess it sometimes works as a fire-and-forget for injured patients in times of heavy influx, but still.

Roles mixups: I'm glad genetics finally got kicked out to Science because that's where they always should have been, and I wholeheartedly encourage the inevitable expulsion of Chemistry in due time as well. I haven't had a chance to play around in the chem lab yet (mainly because as far as I can tell Delta doesn't have one and I've yet to roll Chem on Meta), but I think that giving doctors Pharmacy Access was probably the best solution that could have happened. Paramedic is an interesting job, and it amuses me just how much you can do given a little extra access and a crew monitor. I'd perhaps like to see them get some basic healing tools so that they can patch up minor damage in the field, but even without that the role is a fun time when it's not extremely quiet, but again, Manuel, so this may not be a problem on more heavily populated or chaotic servers.


2) The Bad: Stasis Beds and Organ Decay
Stasis beds are always the primary choice for surgery, to the point where I consistently see the CMO deconstruct the surgery computers and rebuild them next to the stasis beds at round-start. Being able to keep your patients from dying just by placing them on a surface is kind of the obvious choice, but when surgery is only ever used for more trivial surgeries like giving security team x-ray vision, I'm starting to think we may have a bigger problem. I think the most practical way of solving this may be to simply turn stasis beds into pods, if only so doctors are forced into using alternative preservation methods like epinephrine and formaldehyde. I hate to waste the neat Stasis Bed sprites, but I think the sleeper pods may actually be a perfect candidate for this. (Side note: Dragging people onto stasis and surgery beds seems harder than it should be, I feel like half the time I have to throw people.)

Speaking of formaldehyde, there's another issue I see cropping up: Organ Decay. When a rotting corpse gets dragged into medbay and all their organs have long since shit themselves, you've got problems. You either print out six replacement organs and go through Seven Surgeries (chest organs, eyes, ears, appendix, brain surgery, tend wounds, revival) or you lop off their head, staple it to a monkey's body, and then still have to mostly do the same surgeries because replacing the chest organs is more or less the easy part. I've had more than one patient go soulless on me half-way through trying to repair their broken mess of a body, because it takes so damn long. I'd really like some solution for getting all of a rotting body's organ's just barely above the threshold where the patient won't immediately drop dead on revival. Not much, just enough so that they'll heal up themselves provided they aren't subjected to extreme stresses.


3) The Ugly: Toxins and Chemistry, or Jesus Christ Cobby What The Fuck Are You Doing
I am willing to accept that old chemistry was Too Easy. Tricord was trivial. Charcoal was trivial. But the replacements for the low-end chems are flaming hot garbage. I like sutures and meshes. They're nice. Libital and Aiuri are acceptable for minor damage, with surgery being the go-to for more heavy damage. Synthflesh having a unique use as dehusking, okay, sure. But toxin damage. Jesus Fuckmothering Christ, toxin damage.

Allow me to offer my carefully refined method for using Cobby's anti-toxin chemicals to deal with green damage:

1) Obtain 25 units of Multiver, 25 units of 1:4 water-diluted Syriniver, a Syringe, and an IV-Drip bag
2) Very carefully dump that shit in the garbage
3) Brew up a batch of Pentetic Acid and never think about that shit ever again

Pentetic is obviously going to be nerfed into the ground the moment somebody realizes that nobody wants to deal with anti-poisons that are worse than actual poisons (wasn't there some """medicine""" that nuked your entire blood supply and made you bleed to death in seconds?), but it still needs a serviceable replacement.The idea of converting toxin damage into other damage types is a good idea in and of itself, and maybe you could even make a game out of that if the chems themselves weren't miserable to mix (Ash and you have to heat it? Are you fucking serious?), but there needs to be some better options than this.

I still think a lot of the solutions to this are in more elaborate medical systems involving traumas, but even just using organ damage, I feel like we've got some good options. I wouldn't mind if the Liver became a sort of central point for medicines, and every "bloodstream" chem just cost you liver health, but that may get too dull. Regardless, I think now that cloning is out, the entire pharmaceutical line may need another hard redesign. Some better separation between chemical absorption methods would be nice (stomach and skin as intermittent containers that seep drugs into your bloodstream at varying rates doing various kinds of damage), but I don't know how miserable that coding black-hole would be to deal with.


All in all things are good but we still got problems. Post ideas. Somebody with knowledge of the codebase talk about how hard it is to change some of these things.


Edit: Oh and Virology is still just a misplaced science/antag role that doesn't actually have the tools to deal with viruses

[skoglol]

I dont get how people struggle with toxin, I just stab people twice with a syriniver syringe and they magically heal everything real quick.

Virology right now can mostly invalidate medbay by doing airborne regen coma, leaving only the dead cases coming in while the rest heal naturally. Its kinda shitty.

As for stasis, I got some plans but havent gotten around to it yet. I want a rework of the stasis beds and surgery tables to stop them stepping on each others toes, and also unclunk the surgery computer. Soon™

[oranges]

op is not correct

[Super Aggro Crag]

op is not correct

[PKPenguin321]

Virology right now can mostly invalidate medbay by doing airborne regen coma, leaving only the dead cases coming in while the rest heal naturally. Its kinda shitty.

I actually don't mind this at all. Healing basic injuries on living people is really boring since you basically just start a tend wound surgery then alt tab until it's done. Dead people require a lot more involvement and are more fun to handle (though it could be sped up a bit since the problem of people just disconnecting during very long revival procedures is annoying).

[skoglol]

Living people healing prevents them dying, leading to less dead people. Only having to deal with blood loss and toxin damage is boring.

Would you rather alt tab out of the game while you wait for a corpse?

[Armhulen]

still pretty unhappy with cobbychems in general. everything else has been a breath of fresh air

[Qbopper]

Virology right now can mostly invalidate medbay by doing airborne regen coma, leaving only the dead cases coming in while the rest heal naturally. Its kinda shitty.

I actually don't mind this at all. Healing basic injuries on living people is really boring since you basically just start a tend wound surgery then alt tab until it's done. Dead people require a lot more involvement and are more fun to handle (though it could be sped up a bit since the problem of people just disconnecting during very long revival procedures is annoying).

like skog said I'm not sure I follow this logic

if dead people are more interesting than wounded people, a healing virus makes it less likely for there to be either of those things, which is boring

[oranges]

the next logical step is to make wounded people have more conditions, so it's not just tend wounds

[PKPenguin321]

Living people healing prevents them dying, leading to less dead people. Only having to deal with blood loss and toxin damage is boring.

Would you rather alt tab out of the game while you wait for a corpse?

When there's no dead people I usually bide my time creating and dissecting monkeymen, so I don't need to alt tab between corpses. On the other hand, healing an injured person requires I sit there and do nothing else.
Also, people healing passively does NOT mean there are no dead people. People will still murder each other.

[Kryson]

As for organs, the trick is to just replace the chest organs and feed them oculine + inacusate to revive eyes and ears. Or swap heads with a prepared corpse.

Toxin damage can easily be treated with syriniver, a 40% syriniver solution in an IV-drip heals 5 toxin damage(!) per cycle but requires careful monitoring and pausing. I usually go with 30% syriniver mixed with epi and whatever. I don't like pent acid because i can't mix it with atropine.

[Anonmare]

the next logical step is to make wounded people have more conditions, so it's not just tend wounds

Can I dig up my critical damage suggestions from, who knows how long ago?

[oranges]

no I only want coders

[Anonmare]

no I only want coders

You can't stop me from making a PR orange man

[XDTM]

When i made brain traumas i always thought the system would be very portable onto other organs, especially now that we have organ damage to trigger it (at the time the only organ-specific damage was brain damage and eye/ear damage).

[CPTANT]

op is not correct

Why.

I feel doctors actually have something to do now. I can make medicines in the pharmacy, dissect bodies for research points and difficult procedures involving multiple surgeries and other steps now actually exist because you can't just chuck someone in the cloner and have them be 100% healthy 3 minutes later.

[Flatulent]

op is not correct

Why.

I feel doctors actually have something to do now. I can make medicines in the pharmacy, dissect bodies for research points and difficult procedures involving multiple surgeries and other steps now actually exist because you can't just chuck someone in the cloner and have them be 100% healthy 3 minutes later.

You always had an option to do all of this, you had a choice between cloning and defibbing, now that choice is gone. If you could not enjoy MD before cloning removal, it was entirely your problem.

I dont get how people struggle with toxin, I just stab people twice with a syriniver syringe and they magically heal everything real quick.

weird how stabbing 1 extra time kills their liver haha yes we like syringe gun syriniver

[Tlaltecuhtli]

op is not correct

Why.

I feel doctors actually have something to do now. I can make medicines in the pharmacy, dissect bodies for research points and difficult procedures involving multiple surgeries and other steps now actually exist because you can't just chuck someone in the cloner and have them be 100% healthy 3 minutes later.

You always had an option to do all of this, you had a choice between cloning and defibbing, now that choice is gone. If you could not enjoy MD before cloning removal, it was entirely your problem.

I dont get how people struggle with toxin, I just stab people twice with a syriniver syringe and they magically heal everything real quick.

weird how stabbing 1 extra time kills their liver haha yes we like syringe gun syriniver

just get a pentetic medipen duhhh

[Flatulent]

just get a pentetic medipen duhhh

its just gonna get nerfed tbh smh, and overzealous chem nerf machine will also nerf its purging speed
at least secret gamer trick will remain

[NecromancerAnne]

Cryo is pretty okay for patients dying from wounds but otherwise treatable with regen. Or treatable with iron in the case of heavy blood loss. It isn't used that often mostly because most important healing is done via surgery and you can't do most surgeries while someone is in the pod. That is, healing organs and the like, which can't be readily fixed by chems and present lingering issues.

[Flatulent]

Cryo is pretty okay for patients dying from wounds but otherwise treatable with regen. Or treatable with iron in the case of heavy blood loss. It isn't used that often mostly because most important healing is done via surgery and you can't do most surgeries while someone is in the pod. That is, healing organs and the like, which can't be readily fixed by chems and present lingering issues.

It presents a much required streamlined healing tool and it's important when bodies pile on. It also protests the patient from collateral damage, and it's very convenient when medbay gets attacked.

Making all healing require constant presence from doctors is a bad thing, and I very very very don't like this new tendency of streamlined healing being gutted.

[Cobby]

still pretty unhappy with cobbychems in general. everything else has been a breath of fresh air

the downsides are surprisingly uneventful unless you're already organ hecked. Not sure what part unless it's another "i hate the names" bikeshed.

I would still like to mve all chems to the C2 system, no point in even bothering with any of them when you can just make ones that don't have any downside (surprise surprise not hard to do!)

[Super Aggro Crag]

i hate cobby chems cuz they take too many steps to make so instead i just make chlorine trifluoride and label it "burn patch" and stock the fridge

[Anonmare]

The biggest offender is granibitaluri in my eyes. It's a chem that needs sterilzine and water, in addition to heating to make.
The thing is, sterilizine needs multiver, which also requires heating to make, which needs ash which ALSO needs heating to make.

And it only heals damage under 50 points, and gets progressively more weaker in healing the closer it is to 50.
So to recap, this is a chem that's super tedious to make and only heals between 0.5-0.1 brute/burn per tick. A total waste of time.


Bear in mind, this is supposed to be a dilutant and something you can produce a lot of to mix with the C2 to get around having the slight amounts of damage that the usual treatments aren't worth doing.

[Tlaltecuhtli]

there are already a bunch of chems that would work fine as "dilutants" and for scrachs healing: sal gluc and minersalve that can be made easily in chem but if you maybe want something to make to deal with light damage as doc without having to do chem maybe change the recipe to epipen + charcoal (both highly common in medbay) just like tricord was, i think this recipe was intended like this : sterilizine isnt rare but still takes way more effort for the 0.1 heal

[CPTANT]

The biggest offender is granibitaluri in my eyes. It's a chem that needs sterilzine and water, in addition to heating to make.
The thing is, sterilizine needs multiver, which also requires heating to make, which needs ash which ALSO needs heating to make.

And it only heals damage under 50 points, and gets progressively more weaker in healing the closer it is to 50.
So to recap, this is a chem that's super tedious to make and only heals between 0.5-0.1 brute/burn per tick. A total waste of time.


Bear in mind, this is supposed to be a dilutant and something you can produce a lot of to mix with the C2 to get around having the slight amounts of damage that the usual treatments aren't worth doing.

Especially because saline glucose is way and easier to make and fills the same role.

[Anonmare]

That and Sal-Glu doesn't have this reduced effectiveness scaling with damage and has the added benefit of acting as pseudo-blood which helps with severe bleeds.

[Dr_bee]

That and Sal-Glu doesn't have this reduced effectiveness scaling with damage and has the added benefit of acting as pseudo-blood which helps with severe bleeds.

It also has the advantage of being the real life diluent that doctors use, so it is somewhat intuitive to use as such for anyone with a minor amount of medical knowledge.

The overdose should probably be raised to something like 100 units or so, or actually implement high blood pressure as a feature like it is on goon to prevent people from using it as free passive healing.

[CDranzer]

i hate cobby chems cuz they take too many steps to make so instead i just make chlorine trifluoride and label it "burn patch" and stock the fridge

See there's your problem, a 40u trifluoride patch will only do like 60 burn damage, and it'll do it really fast, so they'll immediately be able to tell that something's wrong and get help. A 40u multiver patch on the other hand will slowly nuke a person's lungs until they suffocate to death, and not only that, they won't even start showing symptoms until they've left medbay, so there's a far increased chance of them dying somewhere and not being collected.

One of these days I've got to try a Multiver or Syriniver Smoke Grenade, just to see how quickly I can make a crowd of people drop dead.

[Kryson]

which needs ash which ALSO needs heating to make.

Heating oil is not a sensible way of making ash, burning paper is way faster, easier and doesn't consume any energy. One paper bin yields 900u ash.

That being said, there is no point to granubitaluri.

The chems i think are worth diluting are typically syriniver and formaldehyde(if you want to use the syringe rather than a dropper).

Saline, higadrite and epi are typically way better diluents.

[cacogen]

these names

[cacogen]

also living is a more shit job now

[deedubya]

still pretty unhappy with cobbychems in general. everything else has been a breath of fresh air

entire point of cobbchems was to ween people off the reliance on chems for risk free healing

being able to slap yourself with a patch of syptic, silver sulf or synthflesh was wack and needed to go, now chems have drawbacks and require knowledge to apply(knowledge usually held by a doctor) or just get your wounds treated by a doctor risk free(obviously the intent is to shift people to this)

or just use the white kits laying around all over the place because those are still pretty abundant and are debatably better than they used to be for self-application

[Armhulen]

still pretty unhappy with cobbychems in general. everything else has been a breath of fresh air

entire point of cobbchems was to ween people off the reliance on chems for risk free healing

being able to slap yourself with a patch of syptic, silver sulf or synthflesh was wack and needed to go, now chems have drawbacks and require knowledge to apply(knowledge usually held by a doctor) or just get your wounds treated by a doctor risk free(obviously the intent is to shift people to this)

or just use the white kits laying around all over the place because those are still pretty abundant and are debatably better than they used to be for self-application

it's a reasonable explanation that makes me feel a lot better about it, just in game it can be frustrating when it doesn't work out as such. maybe it's the doctors that are getting more in tune with the meta right now that frustrates me most

[Tlaltecuhtli]

if you research tend wounds and make a bunch of medibots there is no reason to use chems other than specific shit like organ healers and anti rads

[deedubya]

if you research tend wounds and make a bunch of medibots there is no reason to use chems other than specific shit like organ healers and anti rads

In all honesty this is the direction I feel chems should be heading towards, things that heal specific non-generic damage types plus toxins. Or things that provide benefits, drawbacks, utility, and straight up poison.

I know we're in a scientific marvel of a space station in the future, but when was the last time you just slapped a chemical-infused patch on your body to accelerate your wound healing IRL? Comparitively, when was the last time you took medication to help treat illness, purge toxins, or strengthen yourself?

[Super Aggro Crag]

Chemistry is never staffed now and the fridge is usually empty

[Kryson]

Chemistry is never staffed now and the fridge is usually empty

C'*ders removed the expectation of chemists providing medicine by giving doctors chem access. Big mistake!

[CPTANT]

Chemistry is never staffed now and the fridge is usually empty

Like this wasn't already the case a large number of rounds.

Doctors being able to make their own medicine is a godsend.

[Anonmare]

I'd fill up the fridge if I didn't have to handload every patch one at a time cause chem bags aren't in the pharmacy where they'd actually be used

[CPTANT]

I'd fill up the fridge if I didn't have to handload every patch one at a time cause chem bags aren't in the pharmacy where they'd actually be used

I still do it, but I agree it's an unnecessary PITA. Honestly all pills and patches should just stack up to 5 pieces or something.

[XDTM]

I'd fill up the fridge if I didn't have to handload every patch one at a time cause chem bags aren't in the pharmacy where they'd actually be used

I still do it, but I agree it's an unnecessary PITA. Honestly all pills and patches should just stack up to 5 pieces or something.

Stacking is a bit iffy code-wise when each item is potentially different from each other. Bag mechanics are the best way i can think of to get around this.

[BeeSting12]

Why are you complaining about ash in a chem recipe when you literally have to burn some paper and scoop up the ashes? I have no comment on the remainder of your points but ???.

[oranges]

Why are you complaining about ash in a chem recipe when you literally have to burn some paper and scoop up the ashes? I have no comment on the remainder of your points but ???.

I don't like ash. It's all coarse, and rough, and irritating. And it gets everywhere.

[CDranzer]

I will concede that multiver only requires one cook because you can just cook oil and salt and you end up turning the oil to ash and heating the ash/salt mix in one go
It's still the single worst chem in the cobbychem arsenal
Say what you want about overpowered goofchem, if your content is so shit that nobody's willingly using it, it's probably not as brilliantly designed as you think it is
Still, that's how it's bound to work until chem gets an overhaul that's actually worth something, and chem's not going to get any better until there's a better framework for medicine than "Delete The Four Bad Numbers"

[Tlaltecuhtli]

multiver has its own way to be used, you arent supposed to chug it in your mouth when you get poisoned like any other goof/trek chem
multiver does like 2.5 heal tox and purges not medicine subtype reagents when there are 5 or more medicine reagents in the system and does some lung damage if you chug it like a retard
hmmmmm how should i use it then???? where do i find 5 more medicines????? you are now asking yourself this but i already know the solution,
multiver is used on 3 other med derivates oculine, inacusate and antihol which are multiver + 2 other simple chems, now you got 4 chems out of 5
hmmmm multiver use salt??? what else uses salt??? yes saline glucose uses salt so you scoop ash and make more than needed salt, convert extra into saline glucose by just clicking water and sugar then you click ethanol copper water hydrogen carbon x2 and you can just register this on chem macro, scoop ash click macro and you get more baby-safe tox healer than syringiver which also cures organ shit so you now can just spam these pills to heal half the problems the other half is rads (the 3 click chem you use as shampoo in cold shower to remove 45 + 20% rads /tick) brain heal and some out of crit stabilizers (oxal and salacid) poof

[CDranzer]

Or I could just make some pentetic and let the surgeons deal with brute and burn
yeah I think I'll do that instead

[Anonmare]

My eyes glazed over trying to read that.

[Cobby]

girls be like 5 meds are hard but insulin/spaceacillin/epinephrine are 3 and multiver roundstart syringes start with multiver (which counts) and granib which is 2...

I just opt to make the holy trinity of Sacid/Oxan/Pen though because they're piss easy and have literally no cost on the patient (or the chem machine if you just factory them, which can be done easily for Sacid/Oxan considering they overlap in recipe quite a bit). Absolutely dumb lol.

[Anonmare]

I prefer a straight healer and only use combo healers when there's supplemental damage. Using medicine that's not required screams at me for being wasteful.