/tg/Station 13

I discussed this issue on discord but I'd like to formally parse it here to see what you all think.
Playing QM lately, every round, I find myself with an odd lack of what to do with my 100k credits by round end. As I scroll through the console on a game in which I don't have null crates, I find myself praying for a blob so I can justify buying emitters, or Lings/Aliens being sighted onstation so I can do the epic Gun Cargo meme. More often than not it's 'buy a bunch of pizza/snek crates/etc and distribute them to the station' which is just inventing work for myself to do.
Typical endgames as cargo:
>Cargonian independance XDDD
>Gun Cargo
>Being the base for [group antag] to get them all weapons which is basically just Gun Cargo redux
>Nullcrate spam
>Buying BSA/DNA vault parts
Most rounds, if you watch the request console, it goes entirely unused save Botany requesting bees perhaps on extended rounds or a nuts engineering team requesting more emitters to add more unnecessary power to the grid or whatnot, and even that's rare. Not only that, but if Cargonia doesn't get null crates the dirth of Cargo-exclusive endgame items gives you no goals to strive for unlike other departments. The solutions brought up in the discord were things like "Well just do the tesla/singulo bounty" but spend the credits from it on what? Oranges made a post recently about fixing Chemistry so that it's dependant upon Xenobio/Botany, and I believe a similar change is in order for Cargo. As is right now, I struggle to think of a scenario in which the station is crippled with nobody playing cargotech/QM, as the station can easily supply everything they need to make everything they want. Maybe that's a good thing, but if that's the case, why have the department at all?

maybe remove some of the 400+sheets of metal and glass that spawn on the station roundstart so people show up for building mats/autism projects

Unironically I blame map bloat from maps like metastation getting more popular. Why order something from cargo when you can find it lying around roundstart?

That, at best, fixes the smallest part of the problem. Once Mining starts rolling in mats, you usually have enough metal to build another station. Changing the round-start available metal won't help much for fixing end-game Cargo content.

If Cargo actually had gear worth buying, it would probably help. As is, you can get guns much too expensive for anyone to bother with (though ideally the items that fix cargo wouldn't just be straight weapons), and a three-pack of insulated gloves. What if we moved some mundane items over? The CE's special tools (hand drill and jaws of life) aren't particularly high tech, and it seems silly that they're locked behind research anyway for a game set in the future. Those could totally be order-able, $100 each? How about tablet computers, if we can find something worth using for general employees to use in the way of software? Basic foodstuffs for the chef if botany is busy/nonexistent? Shutter door kits, since those can't be built normally? Floor tile decals, which also can't be made?

Maybe respond to supply requests by people, such as bartenders or cooks who ask for more supplies/meat/booze because some greytider broke everything. As bartender I've gone up to Cargo asking for asking for a supply crate to replenish booze supplies because some greytider bombed the fucking vendor and now I need booze.
Every single time, as bartender or engineer or chemist or random greytider, the request for anything other than that mandated by a head-of-staff is "ha fuck off" followed by more AFK wall-gazing, if that. At this point, even Ebin Cargonia Maymays can't even get off the ground because they either have no budget, or nobody gives a fuck about them because they don't give a fuck about anyone. The most interesting thing I've ever seen Cargo do in the past few months is set up a tesla in the cargo bay that immediately got loose through some very shady grey-area RP denials.

I usually spend the first 10k on some metal foam grenades, the backpack firefighting tank, an oxygen canister so people can refill their internals and other disaster management stuff- Then botany usually want some strange seeds, the HoP or Captain wants lots of useless corgis.

Often miners are incompetent enough to prevent any real wealth from accumulating for me.

Here are some ideas though:

• When designing new items consider adding them to cargo instead of the department lathe.
  Add crates with randomized contents for that lootbox experience.
  Remove the RCD and RPD from the hacked autolathe, instead offer them as crates.
  Increase scarcity of items such as medkits, IV poles

Horza wrote:Maybe respond to supply requests by people, such as bartenders or cooks who ask for more supplies/meat/booze because some greytider broke everything. As bartender I've gone up to Cargo asking for asking for a supply crate to replenish booze supplies because some greytider bombed the fucking vendor and now I need booze.
Every single time, as bartender or engineer or chemist or random greytider, the request for anything other than that mandated by a head-of-staff is "ha fuck off" followed by more AFK wall-gazing, if that. At this point, even Ebin Cargonia Maymays can't even get off the ground because they either have no budget, or nobody gives a fuck about them because they don't give a fuck about anyone. The most interesting thing I've ever seen Cargo do in the past few months is set up a tesla in the cargo bay that immediately got loose through some very shady grey-area RP denials.

That would be great, except what exactly requires a supply request aside from mass-arming the station? I've gotten 2 supply console requests all week and both of them were from Botany for bees. When I radio out for free stuff to the station, nobody actually needs anything from cargo. That's the problem I'm getting at. Zxaber pointed to Cargo's lack of endgame purchases sans null crates, which is a part of the problem, but the main one is that as-is their only useful role is ordering 500 lasers and distributing them to whoever the people in charge tell them to.

Cargo tesla is fun
Also before they would order supplies but now everything can be printed

The best part is when you're actively ordering/offering to order things for people and watching the requests board, and people still break in/walk in and order what they want wordlessly instead of asking for it.

Bounties were a great idea though, and a good template for how interdepartmental interactions could be fostered through mutual benefit and long term goals.

Floiven wrote:The best part is when you're actively ordering/offering to order things for people and watching the requests board, and people still break in/walk in and order what they want wordlessly instead of asking for it.

I vary between reinforcing the whole of cargo bay lobby or making the lathe/console public. Either way is annoying, but you can't stem the grey tide.

somerandomguy wrote:Cargo tesla is fun
Also before they would order supplies but now everything can be printed

I remember seeing a screenshot of one of the furry stations that built a tesla in the cargo shuttle and mailed it to centcom

the best part is that they did it right before the shuttle was called and the angry zapball found its way onto the emergency shuttle before it moved to the station so all he people trying to evac were met by the wrath of zeus

Cargo is pretty irrelevant because there's little you need to actually buy that can't be achieved through other means on the station. Even if you removed all the roundstart mats you only cause an issue with people roundstart rushing to cargo, which means people are going to break in (and under our current escalation policy, multiple people would probably die).

Cargo has some things going right for it, however, with virology and botany being able to get things they couldn't otherwise by ordering it from cargo, but these examples are the only part of cargo that allows another job to extend what they're able to do. Money right now is also superficial and people dump it for cargo to buy the "fun toys" (guns) because there's little unique items to buy from cargo.

tl;dr if you want cargo to become relevant you'd need finite resources on the station or allow other jobs to order unique items to extend what they do.

Radical idea: remove the ore silo and move the ORM to inside cargo.
Add a method to build "delivery crates" that are single use things you can put on MULEs, and then add a machine that links to the ORM and dispenses a delivery crate full of mats.
Cargo would then have to use MULEs or drag it by hand to the department requesting materials via the requests console.
Delivery crates could be loaded directly into the protolathe.

zxaber wrote:That, at best, fixes the smallest part of the problem. Once Mining starts rolling in mats, you usually have enough metal to build another station. Changing the round-start available metal won't help much for fixing end-game Cargo content.

One day anon.... I'll balance minerals....


... One day...

fug cargo

Muh "Build a power generator" bounty

Muh "Benos" Bounty


gamers these bounties usually always end the round but they still attempt them

fugg u cargo you greedy round enders/trolls

station starts with a massive surplus and if you wanna buy more space cleaner for example you gotta buy a whole box of janitor shit
buying basic resupply should be cheaper than buying dank memes

confused rock wrote:station starts with a massive surplus and if you wanna buy more space cleaner for example you gotta buy a whole box of janitor shit
buying basic resupply should be cheaper than buying dank memes

This, to be honest.
The cargo crates give you a lot of useless extra junk when sometimes all you need is a phat bottle of space cleaner.

actioninja wrote:Radical idea: remove the ore silo and move the ORM to inside cargo.

If you do this, people are just going to break in.

Electronics wrote:

actioninja wrote:Radical idea: remove the ore silo and move the ORM to inside cargo.

If you do this, people are just going to break in.

Then the cargo techs can shoot their asses with all the guns they order every round.

Electronics wrote:

actioninja wrote:Radical idea: remove the ore silo and move the ORM to inside cargo.

If you do this, people are just going to break in.

ORM should be on the lavaplanet, and cargo techs should be ferrying materials in and out.

actioninja wrote:

Electronics wrote:

actioninja wrote:Radical idea: remove the ore silo and move the ORM to inside cargo.

If you do this, people are just going to break in.

Then the cargo techs can shoot their asses with all the guns they order every round.

Sorry, this is a bad idea that just adds useless busywork for cargo techs to do and encourages the problem caused by making the autolathe unpublic - people will just break in, every single round, and the QM who decides to crack down on it will suddenly become 'that guy' for daring to enforce access restrictions. You'd also have to give Cargo Techs like departmental access or something so they can make expedient deliveries. We have mules for menial delivery jobs.
They need to become an actual support department rather than merely just mining + odds and ends.

Idea: Have a menu by which individual objects can be ordered from Centcomm in a custom delivery.
The deliveries don't come in crates (or comes in non-recyclable crates), negating any value that comes from recycling.

Basically, put in a little extra effort and the loss of a recycling bonus to trim the fat off your order. The only downside would be that more prices would have to be decided on, but most prices are very arbitrary as it is, and could use another look.

Spread more cargo computers all over the map.
Lower the price of toys, costumes etc between 100-1000 points.

People buy their toys/clothes/costumes with their own cash.
They go to cargo to retrieve their stuff.

Basically make cargo the post office of the station.
You could also have people receive random packages by their family or as an employee bonus, with a PDA notification that they are receiving the package and that they need to retrieve it at cargo.
The latter could also add a traitor item, a bomb package/crate that explodes when opened, you just push in who you're giving the gift to, they get the notification as if it was a normal package and you know the rest.

My experience with cargo is that I usually only need things rounds start like singulo parts and they don't have enough money unless I go get all the round start plasma. I don't need cargo late round because I usually plan for what I need up front.

But this is from the experience of "30 minutes or your money back" Bagil rounds

Also 90% of the time in my hop rounds I yell at cargo to order and deliver a paper supplies crate and they tell me to fuck off or are too lazy to do it. Cargo doesn't want to help anyone else.

I've been saying it for a while now, each department is becoming its own minigame. That's why they scream EMAG whenever they see it, that's because ordering dozens of syndicate crates is par for the course, and if you oppose you gonna get laughed at. The chain of supply from mining through cargo to other departments is no more. It's all about memes now.

Deltastation over there gives brig a entire wall nanomed and TWO space cleaners and so now brig never has to interact with medbay or service and definitely not cargo to resupply, map bloat has consequences.

Lumbermancer wrote:I've been saying it for a while now, each department is becoming its own minigame. That's why they scream EMAG whenever they see it, that's because ordering dozens of syndicate crates is par for the course, and if you oppose you gonna get laughed at. The chain of supply from mining through cargo to other departments is no more. It's all about memes now.

I think it's a universal thing that every time someone fails to get what they want from another department where departmental cooperation is intended to be required, a salt PR will follow where their department gets given the thing at roundstart because they neeEEEeeeEEEeeeeEEEeeeEEEeeed it to do their jobs
all it takes is a single uncooperative/absent cargotech/chemist/miner and UGH WE JUST CAN'T GET THE THINGS WE NEED FROM THEM EVER

Screemonster wrote:

Lumbermancer wrote:I've been saying it for a while now, each department is becoming its own minigame. That's why they scream EMAG whenever they see it, that's because ordering dozens of syndicate crates is par for the course, and if you oppose you gonna get laughed at. The chain of supply from mining through cargo to other departments is no more. It's all about memes now.

I think it's a universal thing that every time someone fails to get what they want from another department where departmental cooperation is intended to be required, a salt PR will follow where their department gets given the thing at roundstart because they neeEEEeeeEEEeeeeEEEeeeEEEeeed it to do their jobs
all it takes is a single uncooperative/absent cargotech/chemist/miner and UGH WE JUST CAN'T GET THE THINGS WE NEED FROM THEM EVER

People REEEEEE over missing the pettiest shit. I remember when nudonut was first being testmerged one guy was complaining chemistry was unplayable because there was only one large beaker at roundstart.
It's not like the way to get more is literally feet away or anything.

we are all guilty of it

Its what happens when you have to do the same basic interaction every round that it becomes a chore. having to run to cargo at roundstart to ask for beakers or order needed supplies before you could even do anything is lame after the 50th round of it.

That being said, it might have gone a bit too far the other direction, If you never need to ask for supplies at any point then you have too many. Adding more a la carte items to cargo instead of just kits would help somewhat. Spreading around cargo computers would also help.

Gooncargo orders items individually from traders and get kits from centcom. Maybe add traders with rotating access to individual items and such.

Move some fun stuff to Cargo and then randomize what they can buy. Automatically reroll every 8 minutes, plus you can spend money to reroll. I chose 8 minutes because it's long enough to gather money if something good appears yet is short enough to passively get 5-8 rerolls in a round generally, which feels ok. Not everything should be random though, like extra metal and shit, because that would be silly, but it would be cool to have like extremely cheap bulk metal available as an option. The goal is to create excitement about what cargo has available rather than feeling that you "need" stuff from cargo to do your job, which is an annoying timesink. All the fun aspects of opening a loot crate but without extorting as many children.

Granted adding RNG elements is basically my solution to every problem with every department but eyyyyyyyy.

Interactions between departments should be encouraged but never a necessity, else when someone breaks this chain of dependency because they fucked off to do their own thing or they just suck at their job only two things can happen:
1. you can't do your job
2. you have to break in other departments to do your job

Good example of this is the janitor: the chances of chemistry being manned later in the round are very slim, but you have the mop to fall back to if you can't get your hands on more space cleaner

Sort of like team composition in games, you don't NEED a healer but it's going to make your life a whole lot easier

MisterPerson wrote:Move some fun stuff to Cargo and then randomize what they can buy. Automatically reroll every 8 minutes, plus you can spend money to reroll. I chose 8 minutes because it's long enough to gather money if something good appears yet is short enough to passively get 5-8 rerolls in a round generally, which feels ok. Not everything should be random though, like extra metal and shit, because that would be silly, but it would be cool to have like extremely cheap bulk metal available as an option. The goal is to create excitement about what cargo has available rather than feeling that you "need" stuff from cargo to do your job, which is an annoying timesink. All the fun aspects of opening a loot crate but without extorting as many children.

Granted adding RNG elements is basically my solution to every problem with every department but eyyyyyyyy.

Stuff on sale sounds great. Why'd you buy 50 boxes of snakes? They were a great deal!
Things could also go up in sale value too, stuff like bounties were a great idea to get the department to interact with the crew.

Floiven wrote:

MisterPerson wrote:Move some fun stuff to Cargo and then randomize what they can buy. Automatically reroll every 8 minutes, plus you can spend money to reroll. I chose 8 minutes because it's long enough to gather money if something good appears yet is short enough to passively get 5-8 rerolls in a round generally, which feels ok. Not everything should be random though, like extra metal and shit, because that would be silly, but it would be cool to have like extremely cheap bulk metal available as an option. The goal is to create excitement about what cargo has available rather than feeling that you "need" stuff from cargo to do your job, which is an annoying timesink. All the fun aspects of opening a loot crate but without extorting as many children.

Granted adding RNG elements is basically my solution to every problem with every department but eyyyyyyyy.

Stuff on sale sounds great. Why'd you buy 50 boxes of snakes? They were a great deal!
Things could also go up in sale value too, stuff like bounties were a great idea to get the department to interact with the crew.

Definitely bounties were a great idea. I think we can build on that system, something like.. the QM trading with alien cargo ships to fill random alien request orders for X thing and getting access to neat alien tech that can help out other departments with miscellaneous upgrades, giving my cargo techs something to do aside from advanced tiding.

cargo also needs more organic job content like bounties.

There was a big idea pushed once for a factorio based cargo, I'll have to see what I can dig up and start a new sticky thread.

oranges wrote:cargo also needs more organic job content like bounties.

There was a big idea pushed once for a factorio based cargo, I'll have to see what I can dig up and start a new sticky thread.

roblox-tycoon based*

Cargo should have some more unique stuff. Give them a buyable beacon that calls down a BSA after like 5 seconds, make one beacon cost 10k or something

Yakumo_Chen wrote:Cargo should have some more unique stuff. Give them a buyable beacon that calls down a BSA after like 5 seconds, make one beacon cost 10k or something