/tg/Station 13

Why did they do this....from my perspective. It must be another one of those cargo bike situations, where it's not meant to be creatable and only exists to catch bug abusers/meta-commers. The worst part is, the simple mob isnt even all that useful for all the jobs you have to do to get it.



Looks simple enough..I wonder what the guide say- OH MY GOODNESS SQUIDWARD







You have to go to >Chemistry > Botany > Bar > Morgue > Lavaland If you don't want to get curb stomped by the game. It's clearly a lengthy process, but isn't it too lengthy in comparison to what it's worth? What do you guys think. I think the gameplay loop is quite harsh in comparison to everything else that exists on station. I even had to do a bit of bee-keeping for the more "harder to obtain in large amount chemicals." Reminds me of old RND with the fetch quest-line.

Now that i've gotten that out of the way. It does a great job at keeping me from being bored, since I have to do so much. Like xenobio, it's a job I can spend all shift doing! For better or for worst. Helps keep the burn out at bay.

Still, could use to rely less on other jobs, so you dont have to get a heavy case of "dew it yourself"

Edit: Tldr: The take away from my rambling is I think the difficulty barrier of the mob soup could be lowered. Can't even make them sentient until xenobio does their job

I don't know why people add things that suck to do and don't even have a reward that makes them worth doing

cacogen wrote: ↑Mon May 02, 2022 2:41 am I don't know why people add things that suck to do and don't even have a reward that makes them worth doing

Because coders flex. The inner circle of influential/head coders virtually don't exercise any sort of public coding discipline to weed out bad practice like robotic graphic-sheet talking, lack of understanding of player viewpoint and blatent downvote-baiting. I can much better waste my time on or off server, than code supermatter delamming kisses or make mediocre cytology subjects using substantial amounts of lathe-taxed tools to set the complex kit up.

Aside for mail, cargo-mail was absolutely the definitive mvp PR of that year that gave me a reason to stick to /tg/ while i was playing.

cacogen wrote: ↑Mon May 02, 2022 2:41 am I don't know why people add things that suck to do and don't even have a reward that makes them worth doing

Overabundance of caution with power creep means everything has to be shitty. No fun allowed.

Cytology really highlights the need for communication infrastructure that will actually facilitate interdepartmental supply chains more complex than just running up to another departments front desk, handing them a laundry list, and then hoping they actually do it or bargaining with them if they just ignore you.

Bounty consoles could help with this but barely anyone even looks at those things.

I've been tentatively curious about cytology but never bothered to learn it because all it seems to do of any "value" is make sentient clown abominations.

Pandarsenic wrote: ↑Thu May 05, 2022 10:05 pm I've been tentatively curious about cytology but never bothered to learn it because all it seems to do of any "value" is make sentient clown abominations.

that's basically what it does.
except sometimes instead of growing clown abominations you grow a vatbeast, or a gelatinous cube. depends on the mood really. i've never seen sholean grapes but they can apparently heal people, so that's exciting.
it's sort of like atmos, if atmos could only be used to create literal monsters that attack you and you have to hope the engineers did their job so you can make them sentient.

I've talked with Kryson about Cytology a number of times and my takeaway was you either know ghetto chem or GTFO. I've tried explaining why the current system really sucks because a lot of the chems aren't obtainable without a lot of cross-department cooperation, and the only things that could rebuke it were "maybe someone will help you make your death machine for no return" and "you can do ghetto chem to get this easily". My issue with relying on ghetto chem to reason the balance out is that without having prior ghetto chem experience from elsewhere (or just some chem experience as well), you're not going to know how to do any of this shit. There's no way anyone could learn how to do this within the context of Cytology, arguably a Botanist or a chemist is more equipped to do Cytology than the average scientist. Seeing as there's been a push to make Cyto a major part of Xenobiology balance, I think a lot has to get straightened out with how the chems work overall.

I would also say there isn't any other job that you have to completely rely on other departments to do do your own job, and there's a reason for this. Nobody is going to help you without something in it for them (cytology has almost nothing to offer in this regard) and for that reason being completely reliant on others sucks ass. Being able to do nothing without kind strangers assisting you every round is fucking awful and I really hope Cytology pursues some other method of balance instead.

Indie-ana Jones wrote: ↑Fri May 06, 2022 7:02 amwithout having prior ghetto chem experience from elsewhere (or just some chem experience as well), you're not going to know how to do any of this shit.

Your fundamental mistake is thinking that it exists to be used. Lots of things are devised, one way or another, that don't have any real, serious expectation of in-game use. Their purpose is to show off how cool of an idea the coder had and allow a small number of people who understand the system somewhat from experimentation or word-of-mouth learning to do little cool things, and for people who understand it deeply, probably from looking at the code, not naming any names, to make wildly overpowered things from it.

Pandarsenic wrote: ↑Fri May 06, 2022 7:32 am Your fundamental mistake is thinking that it exists to be used. Lots of things are devised, one way or another, that don't have any real, serious expectation of in-game use. Their purpose is to show off how cool of an idea the coder had and allow a small number of people who understand the system somewhat from experimentation or word-of-mouth learning to do little cool things, and for people who understand it deeply, probably from looking at the code, not naming any names, to make wildly overpowered things from it.

This isn’t a great take.

Indie-ana Jones wrote: ↑Fri May 06, 2022 7:02 am I've talked with Kryson about Cytology a number of times and my takeaway was you either know ghetto chem or GTFO. I've tried explaining why the current system really sucks because a lot of the chems aren't obtainable without a lot of cross-department cooperation, and the only things that could rebuke it were "maybe someone will help you make your death machine for no return" and "you can do ghetto chem to get this easily".

Needs a ghetto chem wiki for sure. I found that you can get peptides from the bloodstream via probital, but there's no way to take chems out of the bloodstream anymore. It wasnt until an admin codedived for me that you find out their also grindable from livers.

A lot of secrets need to be uncovered for this job

A fetch quest of such staggering proportions, for a role lacking maint access when implemented but needing it to do the job, that lacks chemistry tools but need it to do the job, and otherwise unapproachable intuitively because of reliance on hidden mechanics or codediving to figure out how the fuck to do half the job.

This is maybe the biggest example of why code acumen will not necessarily translate to design acumen or player usability (especially UI). You get shit that just seems genuinely vindictive towards the new player experience in its implementation, while laughing at whoever approaches it for being so stupid as to waste their damn time on a whole lot of nothing.

Now if Cytology replaced virology mechanics wholesale instead of xenobio, and attached it to medical, then we would be cooking with gas. The way cytology works could be a fascinating way of creating viruses, and there was partial implementation of viruses already.

Pandarsenic wrote: ↑Fri May 06, 2022 7:32 am Your fundamental mistake is thinking that it exists to be used. Lots of things are devised, one way or another, that don't have any real, serious expectation of in-game use. Their purpose is to show off how cool of an idea the coder had and allow a small number of people who understand the system somewhat from experimentation or word-of-mouth learning to do little cool things, and for people who understand it deeply, probably from looking at the code, not naming any names, to make wildly overpowered things from it.

This is a great take.

Farquaar wrote: ↑Fri May 06, 2022 7:50 am

Pandarsenic wrote: ↑Fri May 06, 2022 7:32 am Your fundamental mistake is thinking that it exists to be used. Lots of things are devised, one way or another, that don't have any real, serious expectation of in-game use. Their purpose is to show off how cool of an idea the coder had and allow a small number of people who understand the system somewhat from experimentation or word-of-mouth learning to do little cool things, and for people who understand it deeply, probably from looking at the code, not naming any names, to make wildly overpowered things from it.

This isn’t a great take.

it's not a take it's descriptive not prescriptive

Yeah uh in case that wasn't clear, I'm not endorsing this, I'm simply describing what I see is a problem: systems like this don't work for players because they literally weren't made for players. I strongly suspect this is why so many systems are so poorly documented in the Wiki, too.

Pandarsenic wrote: ↑Thu May 19, 2022 1:47 am Yeah uh in case that wasn't clear, I'm not endorsing this, I'm simply describing what I see is a problem: systems like this don't work for players because they literally weren't made for players. I strongly suspect this is why so many systems are so poorly documented in the Wiki, too.

Its a huge issue because instead of being a weird nonsensical-nondepartment that is ghetto chem it is an actual job and department thing sci can do "marketed as a thing to do as sci"