Semi serious non atmos player atmos story thread

[vincentius_vin]

Goof opened a PR recently trying to change some toxins stuff, in that PR he gave his account of what happened when he's learning atmos. That account is helpful, maybe, or at the very least fun to read.

So if you dont play atmos/toxins and are trying it out recently, consider giving your thoughts here. Maybe a coder will pick it up and PR something nice, or maybe not, we'll see.

Some leading/pilot questions:
1. What are you trying to do?
2. How are you doing it?
3. Where did you get the info to do it? Wiki? Other players? IC?
4. What confuses you? What is poorly explained?

Thanks for your time.

[Annihilite111]

Objective: create really hot gasses through the power of canburns.

Method: pipe plasma and oxy into a gas mixer and further into a T2 can. Use double thermomachines to quickly heat can to 400C.
Result: Atmos utterly ruined. Myself husked and blown to bits. Several burncans lost to the accident.

I didn't touch the wiki for this. Most of my atmos knowledge is from experience or the occasional elder atmosian teachibg me some tricks.

[sinfulbliss]

Some leading/pilot questions:
1. What are you trying to do?

No clue

2. How are you doing it?

Wrongly

3. Where did you get the info to do it? Wiki? Other players? IC?

No where

4. What confuses you? What is poorly explained?

Pipes and gasses

[vincentius_vin]

Locking sec items behind atmos brb

[massa]

You should be asking atmos players these questions so that we can tell you how to make them a bit easier to bite into for players in general. People who don't play atmos don't even touch the RPD or try to use it. People who do tox effectively do ghetto atmos, but you can make some insane shit work there.

Knowing the intelligence level of the average spessman, if my THC fried brain can learn atmos in the short time it took me to with little guidance, you can all learn it in a metaphorical 5 minutes, especially with a good guide nearby. The dumbest motherfuckers on Sybil and Terry could learn atmosia in a single round, but it looks spooky so people just avoid it innately. You've all really got this.

[Pandarsenic]

The most confusing part about learning atmospherics is probably the highly unintuitive way that pipes and pumps work (all connected pipes distribute gas in their connected segment instantly, across any distance, perfectly evenly)

This is, btw, why optimized supermatter setups replace all the pumps with straight pipes; there's pretty much no benefit to keeping the sections separated.

[Not-Dorsidarf]

I'm not sure I like that the extremely niche autism fort side project feature that's actually understood by maybe 10 people total and everyone else just follows rote steps if they can be assed to acknowledge its existence at all should be forced into a mandatory step for a different department's round progression.

Like, all the silly fusion and specialist gas reaction stuff is just about tolerable when its sectioned off into little optional boxes for people who care about it to play with, but every time ghilker's personal passion projects extrude outside the box it just makes everyone else suffer

[NecromancerAnne]

Spoiler:

I just dislike that it's full of traps that make it impossible to complete inside of toxins if you fall into them. The can bursting is definitely one of the worst ones, but frankly so is the amount of gas you have available to you being very scarce, so any errors you make can really handicap your entire departments ability to progress. Then, ultimately, you are reliant on atmospherics to resolve the problem. Especially the cleanup. Most people don't bother going back once toxins burns down. The entire set of progress is just gone from the round at that point, which is actually not replicated anywhere else in this game if I'll be entirely honest. Even the supermatter and HFR are extremely permissive of mistakes compared to messing up toxins.

Having so many ways in which not only can you screw up this optimization hell section of the department very easily, but that compared to atmos being very permissive of failure thanks to its abundance of gas reserves and easily sectioned areas for controlled mixing, it begs the question of why on earth would you be doing atmospheric experiments in a less effective setup zone with much fewer failsafes. So no, I'd rather not learn atmospherics in toxins, but if I have to learn atmospherics before I can learn toxins, where failure is significantly more punishing, then ultimately toxins is just hardmode atmospherics, isn't it?

The other problem is that atmospherics probably requires specific types of learning and approaches to actually get your head around it. For me, the way that I know I learn tends to be a lot of trial and error and observation and extrapolation. Atmospherics has extremely little information to gleam in-round as to how best to approach, so failure will sneak up on you out of nowhere. Which is what makes learning in atmospherics pretty fine for the most part, but hellish in toxins.

There is practically mountains of text explaining how to do it out of the game, with part of it requiring code diving and calculations, so the density of this system just makes it overwhelming to me and near unapproachable on some levels. People have really tried to teach me in earnest about how to do toxins 'easily', but I'm never satisfied with that alone and just being told how to do it or being given a recipe doesn't mean shit, because it won't stick or just isn't...fulfilling I guess? So I struggle to learn the systems the way I want to be able to approach it, I can't learn it the way people expect me to learn it, and the utterly unfriendly design of the systems results in it just feeling bad overall to be then told I'm having content from what I actually play held hostage by it.

I don't like this trend of haemorrhaging content I actually want to play to atmos mains benefit (I play roboticist, so I'm not even able to access toxins on most rounds, so it is not content for my main job I do enjoy), then being surprised when I struggle to do something they find simple and I find extremely difficult and unfun. It feels like an attempt to push the game design towards a very elitist subgroup of the community, and excluding me from no fault of my own from having meaningful involvement in the progression of the game. I think more work needs to be done to give atmospherics more intuitive approaches, and if that isn't something anyone is interested in doing, I'm already tapped out. I suspect I'm not alone in this, given the completion rate of the current atmos locked experiments oranges posted in discord being something like 10% of completion compared to the month prior.

TL;DR Atmospherics, and especially toxins, is not designed to be friendly to anyone trying to learn it, and especially probably involves a good deal of hostile game design meant to weed out those who can't actually approach learning the systems in the same way as a small group of players who have the right learning process to get their head around it. This means only a tiny fraction of our playerbase is equipped to handle these experiments. If new players can't learn it, they're probably reliant on cargo cult methods of approaching toxins, not actually learning how the systems work, but instead knowing that certain actions cause certain results, never actually bridging the gap towards learning how this came to be, because there is no ingame explanations for most of this that are presented in a user friendly manner. This results in a hollow experience for the player, and would feel more like a chore than gameplay.

That needs to be resolved before literally anything can be expected to be gated behind atmospherics. If that's not acceptable, then it shouldn't be a hardcap for any progress at all. If that is also not acceptable, the rest of the game suffers for it the more we push in this direction.

[Rohen_Tahir]

Spoiler:

I just dislike that it's full of traps that make it impossible to complete inside of toxins if you fall into them. The can bursting is definitely one of the worst ones, but frankly so is the amount of gas you have available to you being very scarce, so any errors you make can really handicap your entire departments ability to progress. Then, ultimately, you are reliant on atmospherics to resolve the problem. Especially the cleanup. Most people don't bother going back once toxins burns down. The entire set of progress is just gone from the round at that point, which is actually not replicated anywhere else in this game if I'll be entirely honest. Even the supermatter and HFR are extremely permissive of mistakes compared to messing up toxins.

Having so many ways in which not only can you screw up this optimization hell section of the department very easily, but that compared to atmos being very permissive of failure thanks to its abundance of gas reserves and easily sectioned areas for controlled mixing, it begs the question of why on earth would you be doing atmospheric experiments in a less effective setup zone with much fewer failsafes. So no, I'd rather not learn atmospherics in toxins, but if I have to learn atmospherics before I can learn toxins, where failure is significantly more punishing, then ultimately toxins is just hardmode atmospherics, isn't it?

The other problem is that atmospherics probably requires specific types of learning and approaches to actually get your head around it. For me, the way that I know I learn tends to be a lot of trial and error and observation and extrapolation. Atmospherics has extremely little information to gleam in-round as to how best to approach, so failure will sneak up on you out of nowhere. Which is what makes learning in atmospherics pretty fine for the most part, but hellish in toxins.

There is practically mountains of text explaining how to do it out of the game, with part of it requiring code diving and calculations, so the density of this system just makes it overwhelming to me and near unapproachable on some levels. People have really tried to teach me in earnest about how to do toxins 'easily', but I'm never satisfied with that alone and just being told how to do it or being given a recipe doesn't mean shit, because it won't stick or just isn't...fulfilling I guess? So I struggle to learn the systems the way I want to be able to approach it, I can't learn it the way people expect me to learn it, and the utterly unfriendly design of the systems results in it just feeling bad overall to be then told I'm having content from what I actually play held hostage by it.

I don't like this trend of haemorrhaging content I actually want to play to atmos mains benefit (I play roboticist, so I'm not even able to access toxins on most rounds, so it is not content for my main job I do enjoy), then being surprised when I struggle to do something they find simple and I find extremely difficult and unfun. It feels like an attempt to push the game design towards a very elitist subgroup of the community, and excluding me from no fault of my own from having meaningful involvement in the progression of the game. I think more work needs to be done to give atmospherics more intuitive approaches, and if that isn't something anyone is interested in doing, I'm already tapped out. I suspect I'm not alone in this, given the completion rate of the current atmos locked experiments oranges posted in discord being something like 10% of completion compared to the month prior.

TL;DR Atmospherics, and especially toxins, is not designed to be friendly to anyone trying to learn it, and especially probably involves a good deal of hostile game design meant to weed out those who can't actually approach learning the systems in the same way as a small group of players who have the right learning process to get their head around it. This means only a tiny fraction of our playerbase is equipped to handle these experiments. If new players can't learn it, they're probably reliant on cargo cult methods of approaching toxins, not actually learning how the systems work, but instead knowing that certain actions cause certain results, never actually bridging the gap towards learning how this came to be, because there is no ingame explanations for most of this that are presented in a user friendly manner. This results in a hollow experience for the player, and would feel more like a chore than gameplay.

That needs to be resolved before literally anything can be expected to be gated behind atmospherics. If that's not acceptable, then it shouldn't be a hardcap for any progress at all. If that is also not acceptable, the rest of the game suffers for it the more we push in this direction.

Skill issue

[vincentius_vin]

Coding feedback is in another block.

Asking for stories of you folks interacting with atmos, not your opinions. Jesus christ, we got plenty of those.

[NecromancerAnne]

That's my story. It's poorly explained and difficult to approach and frankly nobody involved in the process can articulate it to others in a way that makes it easy to onboard. My experiences amount to feeling like it's all a chore and I never learned a damn thing about it even when successful. And I have been successful, but no idea how.

Also lemon linked to this thread to explain where things have been a problem so blame him.

[Jonathan Gupta]

I can tell you right now atmos is simple, you get trit from cooling white hot plasma and oxygen so it keeps burning Then you put that tritum make it hot in a t3-t4 can and put it in a plasma tank after scrubbin said plasma tank scrubbing a oxygen tank and cooling a regular one.

[Jonathan Gupta]

TL;DR Hot Tritum (Cool a Plasma Fire), cold oxygen.

[Kendrickorium]

the only fun thing about atmos for me was knowing how to plasmaflood for a couple months on hippiestation

then they changed it slightly and i never bothered to relearn it, ever

[InfiniteGalaxies]

even if you do atmos, shit is like 90% is useless, or not needed from making gasses or reactions

[YBS]

Good thread. Atmos is mostly like some kind of eldritch magic to me, so I'm happy to explain my failures.

1. What are you trying to do?
I have tried to set up a tritium harvest through the turbine engine a few times, each time I usually had to cry for Evola Vickers or their equivalent atmosian to come save me from myself.
I have also attempted mixing fancier gasses, with limited/poor results.
2. How are you doing it?
I set up the turbine normally, but then attempted to divert the waste to a omni-filter which went to an upgraded can to hold trit, which then hits a cooler, which then hits the waste distro since I thought having colder gasses in there would prevent clogs.
I have also attempted to take reactions up to t2 gasses, with mixed or completely failed results.
3. Where did you get the info to do it? Wiki? Other players? IC?
I defaulted to https://tgstation13.org/wiki/Guide_to_Atmospherics back when it was not nearly as comprehensive as it is now.
I also have shadowed atmos players, who explained everything well enough in the moment, but it never stuck for me.
I quickly assumed that this was because I was just bad and I eventually gave up learning it completely.
This is probably still true but atmos remains the most frustrating job on the station.
4. What confuses you? What is poorly explained?
Pipe layering interaction confuses me. Putting pipes 'through' windows and walls then connecting them is something that I still fear fucking up. Not understanding clogging makes me not want to deal with waste. Also, when an area's atmosphere alarm won't cut I don't know the first thing about properly restoring true atmos kpa/temp.

These are small details where the guide is usually "room cold? use heater" but in reality that is codependant on room size, current temp and a wide variety of other factors.

There is also always an unspoken 'optimization' that comes from atmos that is barely explained apart from 'volume pipe good' while not explaining the mentality that would let new/confused players find these adjustments better on their own.

The way that the gas recipes are written out in the wiki is fine, but then you have situations that go something like this:
I've made my two-three cans of filled prerequisite gas, somehow, through this one distribution pipe that may or may not be contaminated with leftover gasses because I don't understand how fully purging a pipe works.

Now I have to mix them in a setup that is temperature sensitive then filter it into a new can. Now, because they are temp exposed, all of my moles are different.

Having these not being written out exactly makes sense to me, but the way these details are disjointedly sprinkled in will not work for people just quickly trying to do something that makes atmos more exciting to them, which IS how the average player approaches a ss13 job. Botany has this same issue.

Both departments need a 'do this one cool thing!' handholding guide that lets any new player do one cool but not game breaking craft result that structures how to approach all of the other desired crafting results.
For atmos this could be something like: Make a Trit Harvest Turbine or Make a Cool Functioning Cooling Loop In Space.

Something like optimizing distro is not something a new player can even see. Back when I first learned how to do this, with now probably outdated information, I remember thinking "wow I did that - so fucking what?" since you cant even see the results.

[Pandarsenic]

Some leading/pilot questions:
1. What are you trying to do?
2. How are you doing it?
3. Where did you get the info to do it? Wiki? Other players? IC?
4. What confuses you? What is poorly explained?

Thanks for your time.

Well, I tried

1. making my first Hyper-Noblium
2. I took some tritium I found abandoned and some N2, following the Wiki guidelines. I put it 2:1 in a canister and plugged it directly into a Cooler set to 13 Kelvin. Nothing happened for a while. I tried moving 10 kPa to a mini oxygen tank in case there was a pressure/moles requirement, no further reaction. So I unwrenched the gas can, which - now disconnected from the port leading to the cooler - promptly heated up and then exploded, taking my arm off and breaching the floor.
3. Wiki gave all the information I had about formation conditions, mostly.
4. Why did the gas not react until I unwrenched it? Was the explosion caused by the Hyper-Noblium reacting with the Tritium directly? Is Bz to reduce the reaction heat NECESSARY or merely convenient? Can I react this in pipes for safety + precooling before I move it to the canister and then the tank?

There appears to be some sort of invisible reaction criterion I missed that stopped it from reacting until I unwrenched it but I can't imagine what it was.

[vincentius_vin]

Wrenched cans dont react, it's just one of those weird atmos quirks that we know but never thought about whether its worth keeping or not. Might be interesting to change or at the very least add examine messages on. Thank you.

Nobformation energy's heat is indeed astronomical, on par with trit burn, probably should give more emphasis on it in the wiki or in the guide.

As for the layer and eqalization thing, thats gonna be a trickier devil to solve.

Thanks folks!

[Pandarsenic]

Ah, fuck me. Then it couldn't react there because I didn't have a pipe for it to react in between the cooler and the connector.

[Pandarsenic]

Did a standard 3-canisters-of-O2 tritium burn. Got 158 mol Tritium. Used them all in a research bomb. Oops.

Attempted to flush pipes for next burn. Hot plasma got out because I wrenched a Huge Scrubber onto a port, which released it all immediately. Said scrubber died in the line of duty.

Second burn involved 3-4 O2 canisters 3 physical canisters, but one filled to cap by a volume pump in Atmos)

This burn produced about 100 mol tritium, probably inefficiency due to improperly scrubbed pipes and my lack of attention to maintaining optimal ratio during the burn.

Caused another small detonation clearing pipes out again.

Lost another 20 mol caught in pipes.

Made a hellish reaction chamber trying to react them safely, but for some reason the passive vent inside the chamber got real broken and honestly who knows what was going on in there. The important thing is, when I gave up and extracted the gasses, only after pumping the pipes loose did I start getting the warmed gasses loose in the chamber, which weren't equalizing with the gasses in the cooling pipes at all.

Shoved the gasses into a T3 canister, which I assume is what I'm MEANT to do, alternating attaching and unattaching it to the freezer until it all reacted. This process was torturously slow, but managed to generate 8ish full mol of Hyper-noblium, with each mol taking around a minute of re-cooling minimum.

Had the entire oxygen supply of the station not been consumed by an atmospheric technician earlier in the shift, I might have been able to perform another burn and go directly to this method, but alas, it was not to be. Similarly, doing this on Icebox without space cooling is fucking agonizing.

Finally shoved 10 mol into a tank, got the experiment, called it a day, immediately suicided. Part of it was having to set up the engine AND go mining for uranium for T3 lasers myself, all while being on IceBox, but I would call this easily one of my most unpleasant SS13 experiences.

You could not pay me to do this again.

[Jonathan Gupta]

Did a standard 3-canisters-of-O2 tritium burn. Got 158 mol Tritium. Used them all in a research bomb. Oops.

Attempted to flush pipes for next burn. Hot plasma got out because I wrenched a Huge Scrubber onto a port, which released it all immediately. Said scrubber died in the line of duty.

Second burn involved 3-4 O2 canisters 3 physical canisters, but one filled to cap by a volume pump in Atmos)

This burn produced about 100 mol tritium, probably inefficiency due to improperly scrubbed pipes and my lack of attention to maintaining optimal ratio during the burn.

Caused another small detonation clearing pipes out again.

Lost another 20 mol caught in pipes.

Made a hellish reaction chamber trying to react them safely, but for some reason the passive vent inside the chamber got real broken and honestly who knows what was going on in there. The important thing is, when I gave up and extracted the gasses, only after pumping the pipes loose did I start getting the warmed gasses loose in the chamber, which weren't equalizing with the gasses in the cooling pipes at all.

Shoved the gasses into a T3 canister, which I assume is what I'm MEANT to do, alternating attaching and unattaching it to the freezer until it all reacted. This process was torturously slow, but managed to generate 8ish full mol of Hyper-noblium, with each mol taking around a minute of re-cooling minimum.

Had the entire oxygen supply of the station not been consumed by an atmospheric technician earlier in the shift, I might have been able to perform another burn and go directly to this method, but alas, it was not to be. Similarly, doing this on Icebox without space cooling is fucking agonizing.

Finally shoved 10 mol into a tank, got the experiment, called it a day, immediately suicided. Part of it was having to set up the engine AND go mining for uranium for T3 lasers myself, all while being on IceBox, but I would call this easily one of my most unpleasant SS13 experiences.

You could not pay me to do this again.

you burn it turn off scrubbers for 30 seconds cool the reaction, turn the scrubbers back on after 1 minute and then you use the air pump to absorb it.