Minor Alien Changes

[WJohnston]

So you know me, advocating for changes to xenos every day, and I've been meaning to make a thread on neat little ideas that should hopefully not be too difficult to do to make xenos extra fun.

1. Give xenos the "me" emote. I know I know this thing has been removed some 3 years ago thanks to amy lessen or someone else. With the banning of ERP and way more admins to crack down on fun, I don't really see a reason why xenos shouldn't have the ability to make emotes. It's not like communication is a problem since all of them can literally talk to people by whispering, albeit a bit cumbersome, and we ban mimes for being awful at this stuff anyway.

2. Let xenos be able to melt mineral walls. A thing I've always wanted to see is a xeno nest on mining, but to my knowledge xenos either can't melt mineral walls or when they do it also goes through the floor and opens to space. It'd be pretty neat to just have a little ant farm experiment.

3. Surgical people extraction from xeno guts. Currently the only surgery you can perform on aliens is take out their brains, and it's a real shame you can't also pull anybody out of their stomach in a super desperate attempt to save them.

4. Inhands for facehuggers. Already drawn, but there's seriously no excuse not to have these in. It's the equivalent of not showing someone wielding an LMG or a double energy sword with how effective facehuggers are.

5. With the addition of exotic blood that lets you extract slime jelly from slime people, why not let us extract acid blood from xenos?

[Gun Hog]

All of these are from me!

[Saegrimr]

Let them slash the mineral walls down, acid melt costs a shitton of stored plasma and if we're talking about digging out hives in mining, that's just not gonna be worth it at all.

[WJohnston]

If they could slash through mineral walls then it ought to be a fairly slow process, requiring a lot of hits (and I wouldn't dare suggest people add a health value to these things)

[Saegrimr]

Treat claws as a mining pick with the speed tuned down?

[Bombadil]

Here's the thing about mining nests...

It's utter hell to get to the station from mining. You have to drift through space and hope you get there safely

[deathhoof]

I say that xenoblood should be the best acid in the game, meaning that circuit printers should be able to take it but also it should have all the propertoes of polytrinic acid.

[Gun Hog]

https://github.com/tgstation/-tg-station/pull/6299 had xeno blood being deadly, but sadly RR gave up on it and let it die with a whimper.

[WJohnston]

I'm actually not a fan of having xeno blood being usable as a trap, given the way that blood is spread. I'd much rather have it that hitting a xeno with a brute type weapon in melee range would have some acid gush out onto you. Burn weapons like welders could be chalked up to cauterizing any damage done on the spot, I guess.


Also another idea for aliens:

6. Being able to actually see if they're hurt through descriptions. We have this for humans and (I think) monkeys, why not xenos? We don't need damage icons, just examine "it is severely bruised!"

[Gun Hog]

Come on, you of all people can make better IC alien text than that! Say "its chitin seems to be mangled" or something like that!

[WJohnston]

I wasn't suggesting how it would or should be written, just that it be written at all. But yes it could be done better than my explanation.

[Fayrik]

Great suggestions in here, WJohnston.

There should be some kind of IC reminder that all aliens in game are female.

Is there any real source that states that all Xenos are females?
I remember hearing that the hunter in the first alien film was initially planned to be male, but in the final cut all references to it's gender were removed.

Also, what a scrub. It's the only xeno on the ship and it didn't grow into a drone.

[WJohnston]

The easiest way to do that, I imagine, is to write "She has severe bruising" as opposed to "it" when examining for damage.

But hey, that's up to you and personally I would prefer keeping them as "it" and "they" to keep it as unidentifiable and alien as possible. Even if we all know they're female.

[Remie Richards]

I think it's based on /one/ of the canons where any alien regardless of cast could moult into a queen, thus implying they were all female (but to be fair clownfish can just change their gender on the spot so I don't see why a ferocious hostile alien couldn't do so as well)

and yeah it really changes nothing ingame.

[Steelpoint]

From what I read I assumed that all Aliens were Male aside from the Queen who was Female.

Eh, makes little difference anyway.

[WJohnston]

I'm still hoping to get with someone to actually work on these changes, I've been waiting on these for a pretty long while now.

[Xhuis]

I might see what I can do but it's pretty low on the priority list, especially since I'm doing shadowling and some other miscellaneous stuff.

[WJohnston]

https://github.com/tgstation/-tg-station/pull/8629

IT'S HAPPENING.

[DemonFiren]

Meh, just let xenos melt swallowed entities at a plasma cost. Handwave it as putting their digestive system into overdrive.

[WJohnston]

It has been changed now so that bodies are now melted away about 5 mins after digestion in xenos, and I think 10 for humans. There's also a description that tells you the xeno has eaten someone.