/tg/Station 13

In light of my thread about the policy of public genetics consoles, (https://tgstation13.org/phpBB/viewtopic ... 33&t=28000) it's pretty clear that genetics is in a very poor spot regardless of the outcome on the policy. This thread is a response to that one and should be used for making suggestions on how to improve or rework the Genetics role.

The current biggest issues with genetics in my opinion are running out of content, and power level of the mutations especially when widespread among the crew. I really like the power level of the mutations and it's pretty much the only draw for people to play the job right now, so I'll give my idea on how to keep the power level or even increase the individual power level of mutations, while balancing it out somewhat.

Reworking instability.
Mutations shouldn't last forever, instead they would have an artificial duration based off their instability, the longer a mutation is activated in you the more instability will accumulate until you start to have a genetic meltdown or suffer various side effects.

Instead of the current flat amount of instability each mutation gives, and the zero instability from activation, where you can't go over 100% instability or you instantly start to have a meltdown, instability would work on a scale from say 0 to 1000. Injecting space adaptation would immediately give you 200 instability and then over time tick for 2 instability afterwords as long as you still have space adaptation. Once you reach 1000 instability your mutations would be purged while you suffer some side effects or you have a meltdown. You would need to counteract this with mutadone, which would no longer immediately remove all mutations but instead rapidly start purging your instability. Once you reach 0 instability all your mutations would be removed. Mutations from activations would have reduced instability costs, but not be completely free like they are now. If you wanted to micro dose yourself with mutadone and attempt to balance not having a meltdown and keeping your mutations for as long as possible you could.

Chromosomes could be altered in a way to add more depth to managing your instability. Extremely powerful chromosomes could be produced at the cost of a resource like a flux wave anomaly core. A very powerful chromosome could completely eliminate the instability buildup of a mutation, or increase the buildup rate while improving it's effects, thermal vision could turn into x-ray at the cost of a much faster instability buildup for example.

The goal of this change would be to add a bunch of knobs to tweak in regard to genetics balancing and a little bit of depth to the job, while preventing people from just injecting themselves up with all the meta gamer mutations once and calling it a day. Something too powerful? Instead of outright removing it you could simply increase the instability cost, or change the bonus it gets from certain chromosomes. With the endgame goal being creating a super powerful mutation with chromosomes, if they're lucky or have enough time to acquire the resources for it.

Genetics suffers from a dangerous combination of three things:

Being too quick to do
Being too easy to do
And having little risk or danger involved

People can speed run entire the content set in 10-15 minutes.

It isn't hard to do that content, there is no real mystery factor involved or much that can go wrong.

There is little risk involved, the syringes and mutations are always labeled and done so correctly both in and outside of the machine (outside advanced syringes), and things like radiation from the machine and instability hardly matter.

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Duration is an idea, and it would add more weight to the cooldown timer that consoles have, meaning it would take both time to stockpile them, and effort to maintain them. Building more consoles also takes time and resources. Situational usage is cool, in the same vein that chems and chem mixes are situational and limited time only.

Quite a few of the mediocre ones could actually get some cool buffs this way, or even become something like one use button press powers with a bigger effect that you have to reinject. Something like a one use EMP you have to decide to use now, and not have for later when you really need it type of example.

One idea I've had for a while is a merging of the geneticist and virologist and throwing nanites into the mix to make a new hybrid role since all three have similar scopes and effects. Could be taken into consideration alongside other suggestions from the thread, perhaps.

EOBGames wrote:One idea I've had for a while is a merging of the geneticist and virologist and throwing nanites into the mix to make a new hybrid role since all three have similar scopes and effects. Could be taken into consideration alongside other suggestions from the thread, perhaps.

Bioengineer. Imagine how powerful that role would be with all three things within arms reach.

Personally i find timer-based bonuses generally not very useful or fun, because the only way to make use of them is to stockpile enough different types for every situation, and the unused ones end up having been a waste of effort.

I'd suggest leaning on the concept of everyone having an unique random genetic code with latent powers, and making it so geneticists can activate them once they research the corresponding gene, but not implant them in people that don't already have that potential. The core gameplay of genetics would consist in solo testing and finding out the power genes in some way, and later manually enabling them on people that are willing to enter their DNA chamber.

From that foundation you could build up other mechanics:
-Some method that allows power transfer, but temporary and/or with a downside, and that requires geneticist effort to achieve either way. The DNA Vault could be turned into a method to gain extra genetic powers permanently.
-Power variants, where the same power (or disability?) can be boosted or twisted by a geneticist to give more possibilities even if you're stuck to only having one power. Space Adaptation could be turned into Thermal Resistance, losing the pressure resistance but gaining heat immunity, for example. This could be connected to techweb research, to unlock the various modifications.

more mutations so it takes longer for genetics to speedrun them all

maybe having to use something to make mutators, like chemicals or materials. Cost increases depending on instability. (bonus points if we get genetecists to do ghettochem to get the stuff they need for this).

mutators/activators not labelled by default with mutation name, only with the number of the mutation, to make them less "safe".

Delete hulk.

Delete the one hit fireball.

Make printing activators/mutators cost a dna resource, and get rid of the timer. This can be harvested from people, on a long cooldown. Ideally, mutators should require a lot of this (several people worth) while activators can be cheaper since your inherent mutations are limited. Clientless mobs should not supply the dna resource, or little of it.

skoglol wrote:Delete hulk.

Delete the one hit fireball.

Make printing activators/mutators cost a dna resource, and get rid of the timer. This can be harvested from people, on a long cooldown. Ideally, mutators should require a lot of this (several people worth) while activators can be cheaper since your inherent mutations are limited. Clientless mobs should not supply the dna resource, or little of it.

this is just nerfs cool rework ideas man

Happy to help

Dezupher wrote:You would need to counteract this with mutadone

This is not good design since you can easily produce thousands of units of mutadone at no real cost. We can already see this type of design failing with brain damaging drugs, people just routinely mix their drugs with mannitol, since obtaining mannitol has next to no cost.

You could replace the mutagen in the mutadone recipe with uranium to make it have a slight cost but any attempt to make these types of reagents less free is met with an incredible amount of pushback.

I think the biggest issue with genetics is that it has become too repetetive. It's simply not interesting to sit still for 20-30 and get some static power (literally only ever hulk or tk) that lets you then fuck around with people.

I think genetics needs an honest-to-god experimentation style gameplay. Splitting up powers into incomplete modules that sometimes have unexpected results would make things a lot more interesting.

The primary game-loop for genetics is tapping on a UI, which isn't exactly immersive gameplay. There's an entire game around you, being confined to a little UI is just a waste of potential. It should lean more into finding people, mobs and items to make progress, like how xenobiology does it now. Perhaps to activate a mutation, needing to actively poke a subject with a stick or light them on fire would be a lot more engaging and interesting than "turn X into A" simulator.

All mutations are also very selfish by design. Insulated, space adaptation and the smelling one are the main mutations that have an interesting utility outside of running around fucking with people. Perhaps a mutation that lets doctors trade some stamine in order to apply some kind of healing effect to people, preferably not a static mutation like I said earlier, so it could be tailored to the stations needs or abused to absorb the lifeforce of others. This way there would be legitimate reasons for people to coöperate with a geneticist, outside of assistants begging for "hulk".

Lastly, scarcity. Introducing extremely rare mutations or parts of mutations could keep things fresh longer. Right now the only thing resembling that is the Fire Breath mutation, which turns into a lizard hunt which is actually quite interesting and a good roleplay opportunity.

We will keep reworking the same mechanics until the work is complete

Time-Green wrote:I think the biggest issue with genetics is that it has become too repetetive. It's simply not interesting to sit still for 20-30 and get some static power (literally only ever hulk or tk) that lets you then fuck around with people.

As if this wasn't already a thing with xenobio, virology, r&d.

maybe robotics, chemistry, toxins, engineering, to an extent.

Genetics is probably the most repetetive and grindy out of all of these though, except maybe r&d. At least with genetics you don't have to deal with shitty rng like viro or xenobio (that often. Genetics still has a bit of rng).

EOBGames wrote:One idea I've had for a while is a merging of the geneticist and virologist and throwing nanites into the mix to make a new hybrid role since all three have similar scopes and effects. Could be taken into consideration alongside other suggestions from the thread, perhaps.

merging all the "sit in gamer cave and dont talk to anyone the entire round" is at least a start

rather than making it hurt you over time or build up instability or whatever what if it genuinely didn't have a downside under normal circumstances but made you vulnerable to some other counter and I don't mean "here is how to remove someone's superpowers and revert them to baseline human" kinda counters, I mean one that's actually a vulnerability that unaugmented people don't have

kinda like "I can get a robot arm and it's great, but it means that now if someone EMPs me my arm falls off"

That way if someone does hand out telekinesis like candy to the entire crew then on a greenshift that may well be safe but oops it's actually dynamic and someone just rolled traitor and spent their telecrystals on a psionic amplifier that they just wired to the grid and now everyone with telekinesis in a 40 tile radius just had their head exploded

i was going to make a post but heres my genetics proposal

ideally it would be combined with a different distribution setup but it would make genetics more modular and less rushable

maybe youd have to do science techweb shit to research gene combinations idk

That picture is unironically a better design document than all our actual design documents.

I like when you boldly dare to lay down some truths

nianjiilical wrote:

i was going to make a post but heres my genetics proposal

ideally it would be combined with a different distribution setup but it would make genetics more modular and less rushable

maybe youd have to do science techweb shit to research gene combinations idk

you papered over the whole "discovering genes" step, which is 99% of the shit gameplay in teh first place.

Everyone pays attention to the rewards, but not the getting there, which is why genetics continues to suck

I guess I always assumed the grind in the game had to both be a grind and suck because how could it not

You can build a grind that is engaging too it's just harder work and most feature coders aren't willing to approach it

oranges wrote:you papered over the whole "discovering genes" step, which is 99% of the shit gameplay in teh first place.

honestly its hard to immediately envision a replacement because right now that step all genetics is

if you held a gun to my head right now and told me to come up with a genetics rework id say

-like the picture above, remove discovering mutations and replace it with discovering genes via minigame
-this would mean there are way fewer genes to discover, so the minigame would have to be changed to make each gene a more involved process than it currently is
-alternatively, the minigame could also be focused around discovering gene combinations, something like this



in this case, in addition to discovering genes, youd have to discover the links between them; to make hulk youd need to have discovered the 4 component genes as well as how to combine them in a way to make a single unbroken chain

also find some way to tie it into research. maybe you have to research tech to unlock bigger combinations, like say researching 3-gene or 4-gene strings before you can make mutations with that many genes in them

the biggest problem is, again, im not honestly sure what the minigame to discover the genes would look like. it could be the same as it is now, or growing genes in little pods ala botany, or doing chemical shit to them, or having to win a generation 8 pokemon vgc match against the gene, or tetris or some shit

at this point itd probably be better to just come up with some wild ideas for little minigames to play to unlock the genes that can actually be coded reasonably and my brain is empty on that front

i think we need something more radical for genetics






>chromosomes are blocks
>big combos = gives u progress on mutation
>doing t spins gives u new mutations

Tlaltecuhtli wrote:i think we need something more radical for genetics






>chromosomes are blocks
>big combos = gives u progress on mutation
>doing t spins gives u new mutations

Dog wth you can't lock it behind t-spins not cool also I love this idea goodjob with the TGUI part that is big smart

thehogshotgun wrote:TGUI part that is big smart

tlal's brain is like a tumour that will grow to eclipse the entire game one day

Tlaltecuhtli wrote:i think we need something more radical for genetics

this reminds me of when vg made their r&d tetris for a day

Why does it need a fucking minigame? Chemistry doesn't, atmospherics doesn't, robotics doesn't.

I think we should move away from the "jobs are you doing a minigame and getting a reward" design because every single time we've tried it, it's failed.