Update Spiders = Xenobio compatible (Part 1 of 2)

[FantasticFwoosh]

Right now spiders are nightmarish and under-maintained as a mini antagonist that can appear for multiple reasons. The little spiderlings are everywhere but aren't really well defined or partial to enriching our use of them in the game and mainly serve as a annoyance that skitters through vents.

Fundamental nerfs

- Spider eggs are solid constructions that can be destroyed/harvested & replanted into a object item (replanting renews the growth cycle)
- Spiderlings are removed, instead two (and a 10% chance of three) stage one (frail mobs, not spiderlings) spiders emerge from the eggs, spiders need a small amount of time to mature.
- Spiders get a limited amount of web to spin before it needs to replenish. So there is no spam.

Buffs/rebalances

- Spiders get new sprites, and improved UI for when put in the hands of the player
- "Spider Faction" includes other spiders, members of the spider-clan (which can be made alt-operative lore) and scientists who coat themselves in spider repellant via making it out of pheremones.
- Control is offered to player-spider eggs rather than grown spiderlings, in which the player has choice over what role of spider they want to play out of the three base types
- To suppliment it being nerfed, the power of webs for the spiders self benefit is increased, as spiders get a positive boost to passive health regeneration when inside webs and retain normal movement speed.

Xenobiology

The proposed concept is that spiders become the second of the three species you can actively conduct testing on, and are the most aggressive kind of test subject and requires careful personal management to ensure safety in collecting the eggs from the enclosure

- Nurses are your breeder type, these are the ones who will consume the monkeys the other two castes where they appear can be kept separate from the main stock of nurses to ensure proper production lines. They also produce the most silk.
- Warrior caste are strong and also yield the most meat, they are ideal subjects to apply docility/pet potions too with a ongoing side by side slime programme
- Posion caste, with correct protections of wearing gloves/biohazard suit and also your spider repellant these can be milked with a bucket for their precious venom, which varies between mutations. Biohazard suit is important because certain spider types spit poison at you, so the nessecary protection against biohazard threats is needed.

Each mutation of spiders induced by lacing the eggs with unstable mutagen (also scrambling up the caste of the egg as to take a few tries) with additional chances of killing the spawn of the egg. Much like the slime system there would be a mutational system tree with progressively changing but also quirky spiders. Capturing a ice spider from the wild or a away mission in a xenobio console would give you a head-start on what to do.

- The determined gender of the spider can be affected with pheromones a attractant harvested off the spider materials passively from their meat, and mixed with other reagents (Spider pheromone & sugar makes nurses, plus nutriment makes warriors, and when mixed radium makes poison caste spiders) as to actually make the pheromone spray chemical yourself to refill your canister, you would need to mix pheremones with sulphur as to create a unappetizing but familiar smell to spiders.

- You can gather silk by using a sharp tool on helpful intent to slowly remove a lot of it, destroying webs forcefully will destroy webs faster but also yield less silk material (which as a tech level of material 2 engineering 2 and bio 3 as well as being used to construct some pieces of clothing)

You can manage spiders by shifting the settings of the xenobiology console to cater to spiders away from slimes (hence two consoles in xenobio is ideal), a cold or airless enviroment will kill (most, not ice spiders) quickly if you need to harvest their bodies. The objective of the xenobio project is to mutate the spiders while also getting as much as possible out of the spiders themselves materially, either in their web silk, poison, meat or servitude when exposed to docility potions.

You can get spider & the additional species covered in part 2 from a hacked xenobio vending machine which keeps small stock of slime scanners, 2 extra slime cores & when hacked a supply of spider repellant and some pheromones.

[Reece]

Spider ranching yes please.

[kevinz000]

Right I don't think this is a good idea as spiders are already potential round enders, they don't need to be put into the spotlight.

[FantasticFwoosh]

Creating a pheromone bomb out of raw concentrate pheremone mixed with smoke will highlight you as a priority to spiders, just for a constructive use if you manage to expand the xenobiology test area by renaming a zone or otherwise, you can drop spiders into the halls. Then throw some smoke grenades into the crowd (or if you want to protect them, some spider repellant)

It also means that anybody eating spider meat based food (which is easier if the particular breed of mutated spider is non-toxic to eat) where the pheremone is present is also prioritised to be attacked.

Spoiler:

- Mixing spider pheromone with black slime mutation toxin creates a sample of the R.I.P.L.E.Y virus, for people who already know what this does in the code base, the black goo (slime) and bizzare random mutational nods are a homage to "Prometheus" and the new film Covenant, as well as being a end-goal for xenobiology because of the time it would take to simultaneously farm spiders effectively and also run a slime processing function at the same time.

- A side plan is to make xenomorphs natively accessible to xenobiology by creating ripley virus, and then injecting it into a stable growing spider egg in order to create a fresh face hugger egg and go from there. Since xenomorphs are a potentially game ending antagonist, this is locked at the very end of a alternative route of spider xenobiology instead of going the normal route as to create a highly mutated and purpose functional set of spiders. As such the AI or security can intervene if its not wanted to farm xenomorphs (or spiders for that matter, destroy all the eggs & confiscate the machine stock to take them out of the natural round)

Right I don't think this is a good idea as spiders are already potential round enders, they don't need to be put into the spotlight.

> This nerfs spiders into the ground already, none of the spiders in the xenobio are actually intelligent, slimes are also round enders in big enough quantities and when used maliciously. Other precautions can be made.

Just to re-iterate incase there's any misunderstanding about the OP

Spoiler:

Fundamental nerfs

- Spider eggs are solid constructions that can be destroyed/harvested & replanted into a object item (replanting renews the growth cycle)
- Spiderlings are removed, instead two (and a 10% chance of three) stage one (frail mobs, not spiderlings) spiders emerge from the eggs, spiders need a small amount of time to mature.
- Spiders get a limited amount of web to spin before it needs to replenish. So there is no spam.

Buffs/rebalances

- Spiders get new sprites, and improved UI for when put in the hands of the player
- "Spider Faction" includes other spiders, members of the spider-clan (which can be made alt-operative lore) and scientists who coat themselves in spider repellant via making it out of pheremones.
- Control is offered to player-spider eggs rather than grown spiderlings, in which the player has choice over what role of spider they want to play out of the three base types
- To suppliment it being nerfed, the power of webs for the spiders self benefit is increased, as spiders get a positive boost to passive health regeneration when inside webs and retain normal movement speed.

Spiders are made more uniform to being a smaller mini antag that doesn't spread so autonomously, spiderlings do not skitter around wildly dispersing themselves but instead they have a similar lifecycle to slimes, weaker hatchling spiders would be easy to splat and don't have the abilities of their parents. The ability to spam movement making webs is also reduced, and the two (or potentially three) per NURSE spider (weakest caste) out of random distribution ratio per egg also means they are much more controllable. Scientist dropped spiders to terrorise the halls will probably be from induced poison or warrior class.

- The eggs can be splatted and destroyed to outright stop spiders spawning or moved and put down somewhere else, a intelligent spider player put their eggs in a secluded spot

So mekhi you don't want your spider clan syndie bundle for spider immunity, some "add water" drop and go command following spider clan eggs and a cool katana.

[Reece]

Also. Why not port...VG's? Terror spiders?

[FantasticFwoosh]

Also. Why not port...VG's? Terror spiders?

Port their spider queen as a high level spider nurse (or entirely different kind of end level spider caste to replace nurses)

*Im not personally familiar with terror spiders, tell me more*

Because Mekhi can't read and is grossly arachnophobic without giving criticism & understanding the fundamentally how spiders work (no they aren't infinitely replicating mekhi, throwing a shouting match in IRC because 1 rare caste of spider needs to eat a person to breed) i've put the removal of spiderlings into another thread very clearly & also below.

For the arguement of (a simple mob is percieved to be a lot more deadly than it is) spiderlings are rightfully terrifying and unbalanced.

Now its impossible to implement any constructive use of spiders while spiderlings are active because they firstly move too fast, are near indestructable and are ticking time bombs to spawn into fully adult spiders en-masse. Spiderlings are the reason why consistent spamming over a vent or a changeling can quickly inundate the entire station with a self replicating swarm. Removing this would make AI'less spider swarms a thing of the past and localise the damage.

- Suggested change is that plant trays exposed to pests & mutagen simply drops a different mob rather than spiderlings which is abusable and that changelings lay full non spiderling spider eggs with a friendly preference to them (see below quotation)

[Togopal]

Interesting idea but the only reason mobs are made sentient from xenobio is to release them because 'studying' them would imply icky roleplay

Also they would need some sort of environment system since they can be as annoying as revenants with the breaking of windows to space

[FantasticFwoosh]

Well usual mix of temprature & oxygen works well enough for normal spiders (dying to space exposure), and xenbio already has a lot of door shutters to breaking off a line of sight to slimes which don't require to be in open sight to work because xenobio consoles allowing slimes to work in seclusion.

If there's nothing to aggrovate them via proper use of spider pheremone repellant they don't act or break windows to chase anything and will consume their monkeys/allow scientists to handle them as friends. Farm spiders for more pheromone, mix with chemicals and stay protected & influence the reproduction of future spiders rather than it being random distribution.

- Id be willing to propose experimenting with making the large test chamber actually a holographic enviromental room.