/tg/Station 13

Add to CentCom a new Z-Level:

• A Chemistry Lab
• A Toxins Lab
• Bonus Round: An Atmospherics lab and/or Botany

Give them each:

• A ghost spawner
• A single scrying orb so they can ghost to talk to dead chat then come back to the lab without giving up their spawn
• A setup that imitates the department's roundstart state on MetaStation, complete with stuff like toxins compressors
• An arbitrary supply of their necessary Stuff (Atmos gasses, infinite power cells, tools, bluespace RPED and a full set of parts of every tier, a lathe NOT LINKED TO THE STATION with a fat stack of all the materials, plumbing equipment and space for construction, etc.)
• Unusual stuff that's hard or impossible to get to, like a premade tritium supply, geysers of Lavaland-only chemicals, corn oil, strange seeds, etc.)

In short, let people who die (or observe) fuck around with systems that are normally opaque and punishing to fail at so that people can figure out how they work in spare time on the server, without requiring them to commit to a full round as those roles or setting up a private server.

Any spawn on the centcom z-level feels like a bad idea, too many sensitive areas and items around that map.

If you could safely isolate it on an unreachable/inescapable level then I guess that would quell those concerns ; isolating may be difficult however (e.g. must either cut off specific escapes like teleporter, or generally taint that z-level so anything leaving it via any means gets purged)

Even then it may just detract from the game if you're just testing ideas ; as disruptive as that often can be on a station it contributes to part of the life and opportunity of the station. Pretty hard to predict if it will make any difference overall though and I'm not terribly against the idea (having set up a private server for exploring before I used it for a minor bugfix or two).

Yeah, I have to agree, guaranteed spawns on CentCom aren't something I think would be wise- we already don't want people there without supervision, hence the fairly strong separation between it and the station. An isolated level as iprice suggests would be more palatable to my mind, but that separation needs to be bulletproof if you're intending to give people the powerful toys, especially a direct link to deadchat- we don't want a repeat of VR where there were a lot of exploits for bridging the gap.

Fair, one Z-level is as good as another in most regards. I was just thinking of the level with the operative base, wizard spawn, all that, but the important part is absolute, 100% inability for this level and the station (or any station-connected level) to reach one another without deliberate, unmistakably intentional admin interaction. And the last thing it needs is someone figuring out how to cross those walls...

I think allowing ghosts to experiment with rare roles is a good thing.
My first suggestion would be bring back gateway missions, have a Blob mission, and that old Wizard mission where the Wizard Servants couldn't go back to the station through the Gateway.

I would 100% be up to fucking with people on the Centcom level if Centcom looked a little better, but having spawners for the above reason is a no from me as well