OUTDATED
Spoiler:
Quality of life:
A lot of people's biggest woe with virology is the RNG aspect, and the amount of grinding. This can be countered by offering the chemist a trip into the maintenance closet for a quickie, in exchange for some specific mutagens. But typically, the chemist has never even heard of these mutagens, let alone have any idea what they do, or the time to bother making them.
So, instead:
Mutagens have a mutation point value. In order to achieve a certain tier of symptom, that mutation point value must be reached. Here's a list:
T0 Mutagen/Plasma = Random mutation value between 0 and 10 per unit used. meaning using 5 units has the highest random range. Using more than 5 units increases the chance of getting a higher tiered symptom. Reducing it guarantees that you will not get a higher tier symptom.
T1 Mutagen = 1 Mutation point per unit. Guaranteeing a tier 1 symptom when 1 unit is used.
T2 Mutagen = 4 Mutation points per unit. Guaranteeing a tier 2 symptom when 1 unit is used.
T3 Mutagen = 9 Mutation points per unit. Guaranteeing a tier 3 symptom when 1 unit is used.
T4 Mutagen = 16 Mutation points per unit. Guaranteeing a tier 4 symptom when 1 unit is used.
T5 Mutagen = 25 Mutation points per unit. Guaranteeing a tier 5 symptom when 1 unit is used.
T6 Mutagen = 36 Mutation points per unit. Guaranteeing a tier 6 symptom when 1 unit is used.
T7 Mutagen = 49 Mutation points per unit. Guaranteeing a tier 7 symptom when 1 unit is used.
Because of the way this works, you can use 49 units of T1 mutagen to guarantee a T7 symptom. But it's quite wasteful. (49 is tier 7^2, and happens to be the right amount to leave just enough room in the beaker for 1 unit of virus infected blood.) Similarly, you can use 0.2 units of T7 mutagen to achieve a tier 3 symptom. Which is much cheaper on resources and unit-space. (have no fear, i'm gunna make it so you can actually separate it into small amounts like that as well.)
------------------
Now mechanics wise, this is how viruses will probably change, and what im mostly hoping for feedback on:
Viruses have resistance, and power traits:
Resistance affects how difficult it is to fight the virus, and how resistant the virus is to medicines and antibodies.
Power affects the power of the virusses symptoms. And is directly proportional to the ratio of infected blood to pure blood in the hosts system, and the potency of each individual symptom of the virus.
Infecting someone with a virus, starts the virus at a low relative power (relative to the exposure levels), being quite easy to cure with medicine. The longer the virus goes uncured, the more powerful it gets, increasing the danger of individual symptoms. The virus gets a boost to resistance at low power, making antibodies less effective against it at first, ensuring the virus is given some time to grow. however once enough antibodies are produced, they will easily overpower the virus.
So while you may start off with an itch in your throat, if left to grow, it will quickly become more than just a mild annoyance, such as being stunned by a coughing fit, and feeling short of breath. With certain symptoms, they could become deadlier over time.
Once a virus power reaches a certain threshold, the hosts blood will start producing antibodies against it. If the host is of poor health, or low on blood, it will produce fewer antibodies. If the antibodies outweigh the virus resistance, the virus power will gradually shrink until the virus is cured. Otherwise, the virus will merely grow more slowly.
Spaceacillin: is used to reduce the virus resistance, slowing its growth, increasing the potency of other medicines against it, and ideally, reducing it to the point where the body can cure it on its own. There is one flaw, however. Spaceacillin will make the user dizzy in high doses, and if overdosing, will cause damage to them as well.
stabilizing agent + plasma: Increases the virus resistance. The more plasma, the higher resistance values that can be reached. (ie. using 1 plasma will only be able to raise the resistance to 10+1, at most. While using 100 plasma will raise the resistance to 10+100. The bonuses do not stack. So using 100 plasma, and then 10 plasma, does not result in 120 resistance. Only the highest resistance is considered.) For making a resilient disease, getting access to plasma and large containers is mandatory.
Antibodies reduce the virus power, and are produced by the hosts immune system once the virus has been detected. If the virus grows slower than the antibodies fight it, the virus will eventually become cured.
---------------------
Symptoms:
Symptoms are added by using mutagens. There are some basic things to note:
mutagen: Adds or changes a symptom associated with the tier of mutagen points produced by the mutagen.
spaceacillin + mutagen : reduces the power of the associated tier of mutagen, eventually removing it once the potency reaches zero. (The more powerful and developed the virus, the more spaceacillin that is needed. Typically if the virus has reached detection power, the amount of spaceacillin required to cure symptoms is high enough to cause the host to overdose, and should only be used as a last resort to reduce the danger of the virus temporarily while attempting to treat it.)
stabilizing agent + mutagen: Increases the power, or alters the traits of an existing mutagen of that tier.
stabilizing agent + mutagen + spaceacillin: reduces the effect of virus power on the symptom. For beneficial diseases, this is critical. It prevents the symptom from reaching dangerous levels. However, it also reduces the effectiveness of spaceacillin + mutagen against it. As such, it could be useful in dangerous diseases, as it prevents the symptom from being cured easily.
-----------------
Making a virus:
As a virologist, the steps for making a virus are typically about the same. 'plasma + virus' until you get the symptom(s) you want. The rest of the mechanics are to be used to fine-tune your virus as desired.
Before releasing the virus, balancing the resistance is often desired. A low-resistance virus can be cured easily, even without medicine. A high-resistance virus can be very difficult to cure without specific medicines, and will likely grow to get out of hand. The key to making a beneficial virus, is to balance the virus resistance such that the body wont immediately cure it, but that with minimal spaceacillin, it can be healed or tamed. (people will get hurt throughout the shift, allowing the virus to grow stronger. Use spaceacillin to weaken but not outright destroy it, in order to prune it backwards.
Alternatively, if you're making a deadly virus as an antag, you'll want to first make the virus as weak as possible, and inject yourself with it, in order to develop an immunity. And then strengthen the resistance as much as possible, so that other people have trouble doing the same.
----------------
Tweaking a virus:
Most symptoms will only start once the virus has reached a certain power. This replaces 'stages' entirely. The virus will need to grow to that point before the symptom will have any effect, at which point lower-tier symptoms may reach undesireably high-potencies. The key to fixing this is to balance the potency of lower-stage symptoms so as to match up with the power requirement for the higher stage symptoms to trigger.
to do this, use mutagens, and the reagents outlined above, to get the desired symptoms and adjust individual symptom potency.
As well, if the virus resistance is too low, the virus will never be able to grow to the point of power needed for the later-stage symptoms to trigger, and the resistance will need to be increased so that the symptom can trigger, but the virus does not get out of control, and lower-symptoms do not become dangerously potent.
-----------------
For the doctors: Curing a virus:
The first step to curing a virus, is to know what you're dealing with. If the virus has been named and uploaded by the virologist, this can be as easy as using your scanner on the patient. Otherwise, if it is an unknown virus, you will need to either provide a blood sample to the virologist to do so, or you'll have to make educated guesses about the virus based on the symptoms that appear.
Next, if the virus is still in the early stages, it might be possible by merely treating the patient with nutriments (to increase blood level, and therefore resistance.) vitamins (to increase immune system antibody production.) and spaceacillin (to reduce the resistance of the disease even further.) If this is the case, it typically isnt necessary to fully analyze the virus.
Otherwise, you have four options:
1: Treat the patient with spaceacillin and nutriment and vitamins, and hope for the best. If nothing else, it will slow the spread of the virus.
2: Give a blood sample to the virologist, who may then be able to reduce the virus resistance, and inject it into an uninfected host. The host will be able to overcome the virus more easily, and become immune to it. After which transplanting the blood or antibodies from the immune host to the infected host will give the infected host more antibodies against the virus, slowing, and potentially curing the spread of the virus. Note, blood type is important when performing a blood transfusion, so the choice of host for making immune can be critical, or else you'll just make the infected hosts immune system worse, speeding the growth of the virus.
3: Analyze the virus symptoms, and have chemistry manufacture medicines to combat them. All symptoms have a counter-medicine, a medicine which will reduce their potency, and eventually destroy the symptom. When all the symptoms are destroyed, the virus will be cured. The viruses resistance will affect the effectiveness of medicines against it, and so spaceacillin will greatly affect effectiveness of medicines against the virus. (ex. If the symptom is coughing. Use cough medicine. This will reduce the severity of the symptom, and potentially cure it entirely.) This is the most effective method of curing a late-stage virus.
4: Freezing the host will slow, and eventually stop, the spread of the virus. While this will not cure them, it can prevent the virus from growing to a point where it would be more difficult to cure, or spreading to other hosts. Do note, A humans heart will not pump frozen blood, this means that if a patient is in cryo, any medicines used will have no effect on the virus. touch-based chemicals are the exception for cryo (such as cryoaxadone, styptic powder, acid, etc..)
The fastest, and best cure, is to perform all four options. 1: boost the patients immune system. 2: provide the host with specific antibodies to fight the virus. 3: Treat the virus symptoms with medicine from chemistry. 4: Put the host into cryo until a cure has been manufactured to prevent the worsening of said virus.
If the virus has reached the point of no return, it may be better to give up and just clone the patient, and then provide a cure to the patient once they have been cloned. (Contaminated objects left in cloning are likely to infect the new clone, and are especially dangerous as the new clone will have a very poor immune system.)
A lot of people's biggest woe with virology is the RNG aspect, and the amount of grinding. This can be countered by offering the chemist a trip into the maintenance closet for a quickie, in exchange for some specific mutagens. But typically, the chemist has never even heard of these mutagens, let alone have any idea what they do, or the time to bother making them.
So, instead:
Mutagens have a mutation point value. In order to achieve a certain tier of symptom, that mutation point value must be reached. Here's a list:
T0 Mutagen/Plasma = Random mutation value between 0 and 10 per unit used. meaning using 5 units has the highest random range. Using more than 5 units increases the chance of getting a higher tiered symptom. Reducing it guarantees that you will not get a higher tier symptom.
T1 Mutagen = 1 Mutation point per unit. Guaranteeing a tier 1 symptom when 1 unit is used.
T2 Mutagen = 4 Mutation points per unit. Guaranteeing a tier 2 symptom when 1 unit is used.
T3 Mutagen = 9 Mutation points per unit. Guaranteeing a tier 3 symptom when 1 unit is used.
T4 Mutagen = 16 Mutation points per unit. Guaranteeing a tier 4 symptom when 1 unit is used.
T5 Mutagen = 25 Mutation points per unit. Guaranteeing a tier 5 symptom when 1 unit is used.
T6 Mutagen = 36 Mutation points per unit. Guaranteeing a tier 6 symptom when 1 unit is used.
T7 Mutagen = 49 Mutation points per unit. Guaranteeing a tier 7 symptom when 1 unit is used.
Because of the way this works, you can use 49 units of T1 mutagen to guarantee a T7 symptom. But it's quite wasteful. (49 is tier 7^2, and happens to be the right amount to leave just enough room in the beaker for 1 unit of virus infected blood.) Similarly, you can use 0.2 units of T7 mutagen to achieve a tier 3 symptom. Which is much cheaper on resources and unit-space. (have no fear, i'm gunna make it so you can actually separate it into small amounts like that as well.)
------------------
Now mechanics wise, this is how viruses will probably change, and what im mostly hoping for feedback on:
Viruses have resistance, and power traits:
Resistance affects how difficult it is to fight the virus, and how resistant the virus is to medicines and antibodies.
Power affects the power of the virusses symptoms. And is directly proportional to the ratio of infected blood to pure blood in the hosts system, and the potency of each individual symptom of the virus.
Infecting someone with a virus, starts the virus at a low relative power (relative to the exposure levels), being quite easy to cure with medicine. The longer the virus goes uncured, the more powerful it gets, increasing the danger of individual symptoms. The virus gets a boost to resistance at low power, making antibodies less effective against it at first, ensuring the virus is given some time to grow. however once enough antibodies are produced, they will easily overpower the virus.
So while you may start off with an itch in your throat, if left to grow, it will quickly become more than just a mild annoyance, such as being stunned by a coughing fit, and feeling short of breath. With certain symptoms, they could become deadlier over time.
Once a virus power reaches a certain threshold, the hosts blood will start producing antibodies against it. If the host is of poor health, or low on blood, it will produce fewer antibodies. If the antibodies outweigh the virus resistance, the virus power will gradually shrink until the virus is cured. Otherwise, the virus will merely grow more slowly.
Spaceacillin: is used to reduce the virus resistance, slowing its growth, increasing the potency of other medicines against it, and ideally, reducing it to the point where the body can cure it on its own. There is one flaw, however. Spaceacillin will make the user dizzy in high doses, and if overdosing, will cause damage to them as well.
stabilizing agent + plasma: Increases the virus resistance. The more plasma, the higher resistance values that can be reached. (ie. using 1 plasma will only be able to raise the resistance to 10+1, at most. While using 100 plasma will raise the resistance to 10+100. The bonuses do not stack. So using 100 plasma, and then 10 plasma, does not result in 120 resistance. Only the highest resistance is considered.) For making a resilient disease, getting access to plasma and large containers is mandatory.
Antibodies reduce the virus power, and are produced by the hosts immune system once the virus has been detected. If the virus grows slower than the antibodies fight it, the virus will eventually become cured.
---------------------
Symptoms:
Symptoms are added by using mutagens. There are some basic things to note:
mutagen: Adds or changes a symptom associated with the tier of mutagen points produced by the mutagen.
spaceacillin + mutagen : reduces the power of the associated tier of mutagen, eventually removing it once the potency reaches zero. (The more powerful and developed the virus, the more spaceacillin that is needed. Typically if the virus has reached detection power, the amount of spaceacillin required to cure symptoms is high enough to cause the host to overdose, and should only be used as a last resort to reduce the danger of the virus temporarily while attempting to treat it.)
stabilizing agent + mutagen: Increases the power, or alters the traits of an existing mutagen of that tier.
stabilizing agent + mutagen + spaceacillin: reduces the effect of virus power on the symptom. For beneficial diseases, this is critical. It prevents the symptom from reaching dangerous levels. However, it also reduces the effectiveness of spaceacillin + mutagen against it. As such, it could be useful in dangerous diseases, as it prevents the symptom from being cured easily.
-----------------
Making a virus:
As a virologist, the steps for making a virus are typically about the same. 'plasma + virus' until you get the symptom(s) you want. The rest of the mechanics are to be used to fine-tune your virus as desired.
Before releasing the virus, balancing the resistance is often desired. A low-resistance virus can be cured easily, even without medicine. A high-resistance virus can be very difficult to cure without specific medicines, and will likely grow to get out of hand. The key to making a beneficial virus, is to balance the virus resistance such that the body wont immediately cure it, but that with minimal spaceacillin, it can be healed or tamed. (people will get hurt throughout the shift, allowing the virus to grow stronger. Use spaceacillin to weaken but not outright destroy it, in order to prune it backwards.
Alternatively, if you're making a deadly virus as an antag, you'll want to first make the virus as weak as possible, and inject yourself with it, in order to develop an immunity. And then strengthen the resistance as much as possible, so that other people have trouble doing the same.
----------------
Tweaking a virus:
Most symptoms will only start once the virus has reached a certain power. This replaces 'stages' entirely. The virus will need to grow to that point before the symptom will have any effect, at which point lower-tier symptoms may reach undesireably high-potencies. The key to fixing this is to balance the potency of lower-stage symptoms so as to match up with the power requirement for the higher stage symptoms to trigger.
to do this, use mutagens, and the reagents outlined above, to get the desired symptoms and adjust individual symptom potency.
As well, if the virus resistance is too low, the virus will never be able to grow to the point of power needed for the later-stage symptoms to trigger, and the resistance will need to be increased so that the symptom can trigger, but the virus does not get out of control, and lower-symptoms do not become dangerously potent.
-----------------
For the doctors: Curing a virus:
The first step to curing a virus, is to know what you're dealing with. If the virus has been named and uploaded by the virologist, this can be as easy as using your scanner on the patient. Otherwise, if it is an unknown virus, you will need to either provide a blood sample to the virologist to do so, or you'll have to make educated guesses about the virus based on the symptoms that appear.
Next, if the virus is still in the early stages, it might be possible by merely treating the patient with nutriments (to increase blood level, and therefore resistance.) vitamins (to increase immune system antibody production.) and spaceacillin (to reduce the resistance of the disease even further.) If this is the case, it typically isnt necessary to fully analyze the virus.
Otherwise, you have four options:
1: Treat the patient with spaceacillin and nutriment and vitamins, and hope for the best. If nothing else, it will slow the spread of the virus.
2: Give a blood sample to the virologist, who may then be able to reduce the virus resistance, and inject it into an uninfected host. The host will be able to overcome the virus more easily, and become immune to it. After which transplanting the blood or antibodies from the immune host to the infected host will give the infected host more antibodies against the virus, slowing, and potentially curing the spread of the virus. Note, blood type is important when performing a blood transfusion, so the choice of host for making immune can be critical, or else you'll just make the infected hosts immune system worse, speeding the growth of the virus.
3: Analyze the virus symptoms, and have chemistry manufacture medicines to combat them. All symptoms have a counter-medicine, a medicine which will reduce their potency, and eventually destroy the symptom. When all the symptoms are destroyed, the virus will be cured. The viruses resistance will affect the effectiveness of medicines against it, and so spaceacillin will greatly affect effectiveness of medicines against the virus. (ex. If the symptom is coughing. Use cough medicine. This will reduce the severity of the symptom, and potentially cure it entirely.) This is the most effective method of curing a late-stage virus.
4: Freezing the host will slow, and eventually stop, the spread of the virus. While this will not cure them, it can prevent the virus from growing to a point where it would be more difficult to cure, or spreading to other hosts. Do note, A humans heart will not pump frozen blood, this means that if a patient is in cryo, any medicines used will have no effect on the virus. touch-based chemicals are the exception for cryo (such as cryoaxadone, styptic powder, acid, etc..)
The fastest, and best cure, is to perform all four options. 1: boost the patients immune system. 2: provide the host with specific antibodies to fight the virus. 3: Treat the virus symptoms with medicine from chemistry. 4: Put the host into cryo until a cure has been manufactured to prevent the worsening of said virus.
If the virus has reached the point of no return, it may be better to give up and just clone the patient, and then provide a cure to the patient once they have been cloned. (Contaminated objects left in cloning are likely to infect the new clone, and are especially dangerous as the new clone will have a very poor immune system.)
Virology has less grind and RnG.
Healthy people are more resistant to viruses, and may be able to cure themselves of them without any medicine whatsoever.
Eating your vitamins and nutriments boosts your immune system, so eat your veggies!
Unhealthy people have weak immune systems, and fresh clones typically have the weakest of immune systems, this makes removing sources of contamination from medbay especially important. (blood,diseased corpses, vomit, etc.)
The effect of a symptom, such as coughing, increases as the virus spreads, or the potency of the symptom is boosted. From a mild throat itch to a long fit of coughing up blood.
Adds a ton more customizeability to virology, which is completely optional, so you dont want to spend the time trying to learn it if you dont want to.
Makes viruses more interesting to cure, and oftentimes easier for the average crewmember to cure. Instead of 'scanner -> chug tons of specified reagent' it becomes -> spaceacillin + immune system boosters
(much more easily accessible to the crew 90% of the time. (how the fuck do you expect the doctors to get uranium before everyone on the station dies?))
symptom-specific medicines, such as cough medicine, or oculine, which reduce and eventually cure the specific symptoms of the virus. This means if you make a sneezing + healing virus, and you want the healing aspect to continue growing in potency, but not the sneezing aspect. You'll want to take anti-sneeze meds every now and then.)
