Remove Disappointing Artifact Rooms

[Erbbu]

Typically a given miner will find maybe 1-2 of these treasure rooms. When you dig in only to find some 2beard wine, a replica katana, a pair of laced shoes or something equally as useless, it's a pretty big downer. Mining is unrewarding as it is, I suggest we only keep the artifact rooms with meaningful items like the facehugger room, the energy cutlass room, the spellbook stashes and the likes.

[MMMiracles]

Don't forget the useless medical rooms that usually involve a random surgey tool and appendics 4 dayz.

But yeah, replacing some with stuff that either has more interesting fluff or equipment stuff would be cool.

Or add goon's artifacts and replace the rooms with those.

[TheWiznard]

I swear to god if you're complaining about how good or not rooms are gets them removed all together by your favorite coder I'm going to be so mad. The rooms as they are now are *yeah maybe not the best for being robust* but they aren't there for you to get super good gear or equipment in the first place. 99 percent of the time the rooms spawn within 10+- tiles of where they do every other round and to be honest I think more often than not you find a room that gives you a useful item regardless. The disappointment isn't from the rooms gear, it's from the job itself.

[Ergovisavi]

So when I did a quick pass over the artifact rooms previously, I tried to make them a little bit better by adding some items that might be valuable. That said, I didn't want to put anything that could potentially destabilize the round (Fireball spellbooks, Combat Mechs, overpowered guns), which is why several of them feel fairly lacking.

That said, some of the goodies you can find that I added in my pass:
Soulstones
Construct shell (And yes, it's barely possible to get both this and a soulstone and start a construct army in a non-cult round, the one destabilizing thing I potentially put in)
Smoke, Blind, Forcewall spellbooks
Parts to build your very own chem dispenser
Double barrel shotguns

I was pretty hesitant in putting in anything stronger.

[iyaerP]

I did get a soulstone as a traitor miner once, and sharded my target so they couldn't be raised. Thank you blessed Ergo for giving mining some cool shit.

Ideas for cool things to be in artifact rooms:

A gibonite refiner. Increases the effect of gibonite or by -1, so a gibonite stopped at 2 reactions left would blow up as it it had 1 left. Obviously would have no effect on idea (0 reactions) ore.
An Xray SE. Xray is astoundingly useful for miners. This may seem OP, but the fact that genetics powers are pretty RnG even when they are in the correct range, makes it far less so.
A speedboost module for a ripley.
An upgrade module for a kinetic accellerator. (higher range, faster recharge, something like that.)
A treasure map that provides coordinates to dig at on the asteroid. Dig(with a shovel) at those coordinates and find a bunch of and silver gold bars/ore.

[paprika]

That said, I didn't want to put anything that could potentially destabilize the round.

That said, please up the chances for the alien being spawned because xenomorphs in xenobio is really fun especially since they can build a hive and it's fun for ghosts

[Alex Crimson]

Rather than a facehugger, could we not instead have some kind of mob egg/spawner that spawns certain hostile mobs? Like Space Carp or Giant Spider eggs. Would be a neat gift to give to Xenobiology or try to keep as a pet. Mak Xeno infestations any more common and people will just bitch endlessly about it.

[kosmos]

That said, some of the goodies you can find that I added in my pass:
Soulstones
Construct shell (And yes, it's barely possible to get both this and a soulstone and start a construct army in a non-cult round, the one destabilizing thing I potentially put in)

But are you allowed to do this if you're not an antag?

[Alex Crimson]

Miners can get themselves infected with a facehugger if they find one, so why not allow them to make a construct? So long as they dont kill anyone to do it.

[paprika]

Yeah spiders reeeeaaaally need eggs you can take back to xenobio.

[RG4]

If you think we need extra goodies on the artifact rooms then you CLEARLY have never found the energy cutlass medibot in one round.

[iyaerP]

I have done a TON of mining, and never seen the energy cutlass.

[paprika]

Can always exploit ghost view to find it oh no better delete this post before I get banned ingame

[RG4]

I have done a TON of mining, and never seen the energy cutlass.

Now add that I was double agent with noslips,hyperzine and full goliath armor against other e-sword DAs.

Spoiler:

[Erbbu]

Just removing the boring rooms entirely would be a good place to start.

[Lo6a4evskiy]

Why would you remove something that doesn't do anything bad whatsoever if you cannot replace it?

[Erbbu]

Remove and replace with meaningful rooms is what I meant.

[Ergovisavi]

Remove and replace with meaningful rooms is what I meant.

Here's a question for you; What is a meaningful room?

1) A room that contains a robust item?
2) A room that contains something that would disrupt the standard round?
3) A room that has a massive gamechanging object?

If it's 1, do we really need to add a M1911 or a combat mech to a mining room? It's just not a great idea.
If it's 2, people already complain when admins intervene by pressing buttons on a round. Are miners "Ruining muh round" by bringing "Mysterious object X" on station really worth what we'll gain?
If it's 3, why would we have a massive game changer in a low % chance in a random room on the asteroid? It's better to rethink of it as something that can be used on station all the time, so we get more diverse gameplay.

[Alex Crimson]

I dont think the items really need to be game-changing or robust, but it would be nice if they were atleast useable and fun. Like Mining Point cards, or special snowflake colored mining suits. Current most of them dont really do anything, or are weapons that non-antags dont really have a use for.

and yeah, no point removing the boring vaults until new ones are ready. Otherwise wont the chances of the facehugger vault spawning increase? Lets avoid that.

[Erbbu]

Remove and replace with meaningful rooms is what I meant.

Here's a question for you; What is a meaningful room?

1) A room that contains a robust item?
2) A room that contains something that would disrupt the standard round?
3) A room that has a massive gamechanging object?

If it's 1, do we really need to add a M1911 or a combat mech to a mining room? It's just not a great idea.
If it's 2, people already complain when admins intervene by pressing buttons on a round. Are miners "Ruining muh round" by bringing "Mysterious object X" on station really worth what we'll gain?
If it's 3, why would we have a massive game changer in a low % chance in a random room on the asteroid? It's better to rethink of it as something that can be used on station all the time, so we get more diverse gameplay.

By a meaningful room I mean a non-flavor only room.

Your points aren't mutually exclusive. Really a big improvement here would be just removing and replacing flavor rooms or merging their contents with other rooms if you don't want to do anything else.

[RG4]

Last time I talked to blessed it he was wanting to have random rooms that were like:
Syndicate listening post
Goliath Queen/Lair
Critter spawners.
Essentially have sorta canonical stuff to add to flavor, the risk of the syndicate listening post is that they'd be simple mobs with deadly weapons and can easily kill you.

[Cheridan]

By a meaningful room I mean a non-flavor only room.

None of the rooms are flavor-only. There are some that could use some tweaking -- such as the one that can pick accelerators and resonators as primary rewards, since miners can get/start with those already. But all of the rooms feature items that are either unique or powerful.

Two of the room themes heavily feature items that aren't useful to the miners themselves. One has high/max level stock parts that can really bootstrap R&D, and one has rare mutated seeds. I think a lot of people find these rooms and go "Lol I can't use this shit" and are disappointed, but there are guys back on the station who'd kill for them.

[Saegrimr]

such as the one that can pick accelerators and resonators as primary rewards, since miners can get/start with those already.

Resonators got taken out of the mining voucher list.

[iyaerP]

I ask what good a broken phazon does? Because being able to deconstruct it to get a giant air canister is hardly amazingly "unique or powerful." Don't get me wrong, it is a cool fluffy thing, but pretty much worthless in game.

I will point out that I already made a bunch of suggestions for mining rooms, although the idea for a goliath queen's lair is horrifying and tantalizing at the same time. It would need some kind of indicative walls to show that HERE THERE BE DRAGONS, because otherwise trying to break in for goodies only to find the rape train would be another pointless thing that makes mining suffer.

And honestly, the few times I have found the phasic scanner, RnD already had that level of tech, or was 100% abandoned anyway.

[Alex Crimson]

By a meaningful room I mean a non-flavor only room.

None of the rooms are flavor-only. There are some that could use some tweaking -- such as the one that can pick accelerators and resonators as primary rewards, since miners can get/start with those already. But all of the rooms feature items that are either unique or powerful.

Two of the room themes heavily feature items that aren't useful to the miners themselves. One has high/max level stock parts that can really bootstrap R&D, and one has rare mutated seeds. I think a lot of people find these rooms and go "Lol I can't use this shit" and are disappointed, but there are guys back on the station who'd kill for them.

The high level parts are something R&D can make 100s of if you just supply them with 10 sheets of Silver/Gold/Uranium. The R&D vault is useless. Same with the Botany vault. If Botany wants to mutate a plant, they can just get mutagen from the Chemist and easily do it themselves. Except i think you cannot mutate that Novaflower thing, but that doesnt always spawn in the vault anyways.

[Cheridan]

I ask what good a broken phazon does? Because being able to deconstruct it to get a giant air canister is hardly amazingly "unique or powerful." Don't get me wrong, it is a cool fluffy thing, but pretty much worthless in game.

The way mining vaults work is, they have 2 lists. 1 is a list of treasure items, of which 1 is spawned. That's the actual prize. The second list is fluff items, some minor junk to make the vault more thematic.
Phazon wreckage is part of the fluff item list, it's not the actual treasure.

Mutated plant seeds are far from useless. Mutating a plant takes time, effort, and luck. Keep in mind that miners can also grow these things themselves using dirt plots and the fertilizer they find there.

[Erbbu]

I don't think I've seen any miner interested of doing botany. As for R&D parts, it's as Alex said.

[Alex Crimson]

I ask what good a broken phazon does? Because being able to deconstruct it to get a giant air canister is hardly amazingly "unique or powerful." Don't get me wrong, it is a cool fluffy thing, but pretty much worthless in game.

The way mining vaults work is, they have 2 lists. 1 is a list of treasure items, of which 1 is spawned. That's the actual prize. The second list is fluff items, some minor junk to make the vault more thematic.
Phazon wreckage is part of the fluff item list, it's not the actual treasure.

Mutated plant seeds are far from useless. Mutating a plant takes time, effort, and luck. Keep in mind that miners can also grow these things themselves using dirt plots and the fertilizer they find there.

It doesnt take that much effort. If you know which plant you want, you can just get a beaker of 90 mutagen from the Chemist and inject the plant until you get what you want. Its not hard, nor does it take that much time. Ive never needed more than 180 units of mutagen to get the plants i want.

[Raven776]

I just got a box of cats from an artifact room.

That needs to stay.

[bandit]

You need the disappointing rooms in order to appreciate the good rooms.

[Erbbu]

But when all you find are boring rooms, there are no good ones left to appreciate.

Honestly though digging into a room with a spellbook or some cult armor is going to be great even if such rooms were more commonplace.

[cedarbridge]

I spent 40+ minutes last night running around to find a Sonic Jackhammer and a bottle of booze. That's it. Time well spent.