Curator Extension or: Give Curator a job with books

[Doctor Ape]

Hey there, curator is currently a rather boring role that only becomes fun when you do not actually tend to your curations.

So I decided to think about how the curator role could get changed.

First of: What are the current issues with the curator role?

- No one reads books
- You barely get visited
- Absolutely no relevance for current game mechanics, unlike similar roles
(chaplain interacting with wizard and cultists for example)
- All the gadgets are designed around you leaving your library.
- Curator has nothing to give to the crew except RP.
- The current equipment in library is not being used

Now for the actual rework ideas:

THE LITERATURE REWORK:

Implement new types of books that give actual benefits.

Reading a book about mining increases your mining speed with a pickaxe

Have books that upon reading them give you abilities after a delay equivalent to the time it takes to read the book
(to stop people from just clicking on every book once without reading it).
These books have to be crafted by the curator or are very rarely in your library on round start, the potency level of these crafted books depends on the research level and the materials being used
(connection with botany, chapel, science and mining).

Implement books with riddles in them. Solving the riddle enchants the user or an item he has in some way.
These enchantments can be both good or bad. To decurse yourself you have to do something, solve a quiz, visit chaplain or get the curse deciphered by Curators current devil tools.

Book ratings are only visible to the curator and are the following:

Common books are the books we currently have. Nothing special about them. These can be made by everyone. The amount of stories and quality of the books could be pumped up by taking royalty free novels from the internet.

Rare books would be books that increase an ingame skill of your character or give you a boost in some way. Can be crafted by curators and spawn in the library sometimes.
Examples: Increase in mining skill, 20% faster cuff time, 10% brute healing modifier from chems, 50% easier time to get good mood…

(the reader can only guess based on the book type, there is no actual ingame notification in order to encourage experimenting and discovering)

Mystical books spawn very rarely in the library or can be crafted by curator very late into the round due to the requirements for them.
Mystical books can be of any book type and have pretty useful effects, similar to genetic mutations or science shenanigans.
Mystical books can not be removed from the library and either turn into dust upon leaving the library tiles or curse the holder.

Legendary books are mostly admin memery. These books have a chance of less than 1 in 1000 to spawn naturally and their effects are basically mini events.
Legendary books can not be removed from the library tiles and always uniquely curse the person using them. It is forbidden knowledge and almost always admin memery.

How to circumvent players from min-maxing books:

- Players can only guess from the title what the effect may be
- Some effects only occur after reading z book for x amount of time, similar to how much it would take to actually read the book.
- Powerful effects are gated behind chance, research levels and materials on top of the things above.
- Using several different titles for the same book prevents people from just learning which book does what
- Players have to interact with the curator to even learn the category of literature they are trying to read
- You can only have a limited amount of positive permanent effects on you, similar to genetics.
- Books can only be read after renting them via the Curator console system, similar to how HOP works.
- Another idea I had was letting books stay over round end, similar to whetstone messages to incentivize book production, BUT:

Mystical or above books always decay on round end and do not persist.
Rare books decay with a rate of around 60-80%, using a search tree algorithm (for example by using the individual book id as a key) and only taking x% amount of books.


THE CURATION REWORK:

- Library does not spawn with items inside of the show panels. Instead , Curator may get optional objectives to have certain items in it.
- Some of these may have effects when gathered, for example a temporary boost on mood for all crew members that inspect these items.
- Having certain sets of items on display may change the library in some way, for example having a skull, a necronomicon and a voice of god may give library the shadowshroom effect.
PAINTINGS:
Disclaimer: Paintings would not change in the foreseeable future due to the amount of work all of this would be already. But interesting ideas would be:

Paintings would work similarly to books but in a toned down manner. Some might be cursed and be harmful to look at, some might bless you, some might just give you a mood boost and most might just not do anything.
Cursed paintings might give the xth person that inspect them ( to stop people from trying to metagame antag status) the obsessed role, a random objective or make them ill.
Curator could give customers money for especially good user art.

In my opinion, the curator role has a lot of unused potential.
Also sorry for any grammatical errors I might have overlooked.

[Farquaar]

I always saw curator as a more chill, creative job. Making it a place to collect minor buffs doesn’t really further the purpose of the role, which is, in my view, a person who showcases creative works by the community.

[blackdav123]

someone should start a book club like the art club so that the library isnt full of trash

[Helios]

I'll just take this opportunity to plug my idea on how we could change writing.
viewtopic.php?f=9&t=32096

[Shadowflame909]

I like it

[Farquaar]

someone should start a book club like the art club so that the library isnt full of trash

The library will always be full of trash until a better book rating/searching/tagging system is coded.

[Doctor Ape]

I always saw curator as a more chill, creative job. Making it a place to collect minor buffs doesn’t really further the purpose of the role, which is, in my view, a person who showcases creative works by the community.

I think it would still be somewhat quiet once the "new content hype" would die down a little. Given that you can not know or metagame small buffs it would not be time effective for people who just want to improve their characters to enter the library. But maybe it would create a new niche of assistants or players that spend their round reading books and occasionally getting something out of it, negative or not while Curator would have an option to actually become a bookworm and book administrator.