Step 0: TABLES
You want to set up everything so you don't have to move a step while doing your job: so grab a wrench (you start with one in meta, grab the medical wrench when in box); deconstruct your 5 metal chair, and set up tables where you've got space. Also move the fridge closer if you need to, and clear the tables of the starting junk. You need spaaaace.
Keep one spot for a trash locker. It's a lot easier to just click on the locker with the bottles you want to throw away than to walk to the disposals or having to throw it.
This is how it looks when i set it up:
Step 1: Collecting stuff
Now you need to grab some fancy viro chems. First off, make a couple copies of one of the two viruses you start with, and place them like in the image. Put the original in the fridge as a backup. Now, grab 3 beakers, and fill two of them with 30 virus food from the dispenser, and one with 15. Place two empty beakers on the side of the virus cultures that you madebefore, and two will go unused for now and can sit on an empty table. Grab the large beaker from the grinder.
Pour the plasma you find in the fridge in the first beaker with 30 virus food, for your level 6 mix.
For the rest you'll want chemistry (the mutagen you start with is not enough usually).
On the remaining 30 virus food beaker you want to pour 30 mutagen (chlorine-phosphorus-radium, 5 at a time to it fits in the beaker)
while in the other one you want 15 mutagen and 15 sugar. You now have 30u of level 3,4 and 6 mixes.
Now fill the large beaker with 90 synaptizine (lithium-water-sugar). We'll use it for level 5 and for cleaning symptoms.
Step 2: Experiment
Set up the 4 beakers like in the image: the order doesn't really matter, but i like going counter clockwise.
To try getting new symptoms:
-Pour 1u of the chem you need on each of the two empty beakers with the dropper
-Pour 1u of the culture/blood on top of it, you should hear a bubbling sound. Rarely, it might not work cause droppers sometimes collect 0.999 of a chem. Just put more chem.
-Pop the beaker in the Pandemic: if it has a symptom you don't want, empty and eject, and go with the next beaker.
-If the symptom is the one you want, make a copy of it, don't bother naming it.
--Now empty and eject the beaker, pour one unit of the copy, and one unit of synaptizine, and scan the result. Repeat until the symptom you had is isolated. Make a copy of that, name it, store it.
--Trash the copy in the locker.
-To make level 5, just put 1u of virus plasma and synaptizine in the first beaker, then, since the reaction makes 2u, transfer 1u to the second beaker.
-If you need level 1/2, just fill a beaker with virus food.
-You cannot isolate Eternal Youth properly due to its stealth; i usually add Viral Evolutionary Acceleration to it to make it visible.
-You want to rotate the tests, instead of doing one level at a time: BYOND rng is pretty fucked up and takes a while to refresh. Doing level 6, 5, 4, 3 and repeating will randomize the results a bit more.
Perfect healing virus recipe: this is the one i use when i have the time to get the symptoms.
-Lv 6: Toxic Filter, Self Respiration
-Lv 5: Sensory Restoration, DNA Restoration, Eternal Youth
-Lv 4: Toxic Compensation, Weight Even, Ocular Restoration
-Lv 3: Stimulant, Viral Evolutionary Acceleration
Step 3: Mixing
When you have all the symptoms you need, you have to build your viruses. You can make up to 3. Usually this is pretty simple, but can get tricky with stealth.
Lay out ALL your symptom bottles on the tables you built, so you have them handy to re-add if they get deleted. Most of the bad symptoms stack, and so do Toxic Filter and Toxic Compensation; the rest are chem based and won't go faster if you have them on multiple viruses.
How to mix the healing symptoms above into usable viruses:
Virus 1: Tox Fil, Tox Com, Eternal Youth, Viral Accel, Self Respiration, Weight Even
Virus 2: Tox Fil, Tox Com, Eternal Youth, Viral Accel, Sensory Restoration, Ocular Restoration
Virus 3: Tox Fil, Tox Com, Eternal Youth, Viral Accel, Stimulant, DNA Restoration
These viruses are balanced to have an exact stealth score of 2, so just low enough to still be detectable by the Pandemic. The bonus symptoms in virus 2 and 3 are interchangeable as they're all a -1 to stealth; self respiration and weight even have to be paired since they're +1 and -3 respectively.
It'll rarely work on the first try: mixing over 4 symptoms will likely delete one or two. If the virus is still detectable by the Pandemic, simply add the ones you're missing and try again. If it gets undetectable, try to add Viral Acceleration or one of the support symptoms until it becomes detectable again. This can take quite a few tries, but it only has to go right once, and you have the virus.
Step 4: Distribution
If you've left sneezing in your virus, it will have a tendency to spread by itself; remember, however, that sneezing usually only passes one virus per sneeze, and by itself will be a really slow way to spread it. Plus, it's uncontrollable, and antags just love having stims.
What i usually do is drink the three viruses, take a syringe, take a blood sample from myself and use that, simply enough. Mixing the three virus bottles is however a bad idea, since it'll just try to combine the symptoms together into a single virus. If you want to do the same for a death virus, just store some blood from a triple infected monkey and use that as an infection vector.
Remember to leave a sample of your virus in the Pandemic for the AI or CMO to look at so you don't get lynched for that unrelated level 7 biohazard.
For more generic tips, look at virology in the wiki: https://tgstation13.org/wiki/Infections
