Experimenting with the E.X.P.E.R.I-MENTOR

[Nabski]

Lets face it. This thing exists, mostly as the wrong room you wandered into on your way towards maintenance. It's not mandatory like R&D. It's not fought for who is working on it like xeno/toxins. It doesn't keep anything running like robo can when there is no medbay. I've seen the hallway turned into botany/telescience/cloning more than I've seen this actually used.

The E.X.P.E.R.I-MENTOR doesn't seem to have a purpose other than activating strange objects and "Critical Reactions" that unless you look into the code are almost near impossible to discover. These critical reactions can create plasma, Plasteel, a few harder to get chemicals in a coffee cup, improve the odds nothing bad happening on the machine, or duplicate the item. At best you can skip some research by transforming an object into another random object, which 90% of the time will be a battery. This is all made even better by the machine being able to perform only one type of function per item until you rebuild it. It would be nice if the scanner module improved this with level. Also fun would be some kind of atmos check where the more different gas in the mix enables more options, giving a purpose to BZ/Freon. That one sadly is a little more outside my coding skill so far.

Currently there are 4 reactions to an experiment type, with random extra fun stuff if you fail. Typically the only possible positive is the critical. I think it would be better to have 1 Critical, 1 Emagged, 1 Good, 2 Neutral, 1 Bad. I figure the Emag option should be a one time use, and clue security in that they should check it out.

I'm going to list what I think some good options would be, keeping close to the current functionality where I can but trying to make it fun as well. If higher tech leveled items increased the odds of good that seems solid, so players doing R&D can move over to this later in the round. Suggestions or any kind of opinion would be great.

Poke
Critical:Improve Machine Odds
Emagged: Create a Melee weapon and sharpening stone
Good: Increase the item durability (because everyone loves that item damage)
Neutral G: Run another random experiment
Neutral B: Throw the item at user
Bad: Destroy item, minor damage


Irradiate
Critical: Duplicate the item
Emagged: Trigger a radiation storm in 2 minutes.
Good: Transmute the item
Neutral G: Harmless Toxic Waste
Neutral B: Radiation Pulse
Bad: Large EMP

Gas
Critical: Create a plasma sheet
Emagged: Create a tank of BZ.
Good: Create a balloon, filled with ??????
Neutral G: Small EMP
Neutral B: Drug Smoke
Bad: Transformation Toxin smoke

Heat
Critical: Create Coffee (Now with industrial Chems)
Emagged: Max fun- Creates a beacon that can be placed to SLOWLY heat the area around it. Realistic- Spawn a few fire grenades
Good: Transform the item into a random research disk of random weighted level. For getting to lvl 6 without the help of other departments. This one is intended to be last resort.
Neutral G: Heat the room
Neutral B: Burn the user
Bad: Fireball!

Cold
Critical: Create Coffee (now with healing Chems)
Emagged: Everyone loves Freon right? Maybe just a plasma tank full.
Good: Item becomes fireproof.
Neutral G: Eject item, smoke.
Neutral B: Chill room
Bad: Freeze Oil/Freon release

Obliterate
Critical: Flatten the object into plasteel
Emagged: Spawn a throw-able ROD/Meteor that will take out about 5 tiles.
Good: Flattens an object, creating a gold, silver, or titanium sheet.
Neutral G: Flattens object, creating a metal or glass sheet.
Neutral B: Throw object at user.
Bad: Gravity Pull towards machine, Destroying object.

TD;LR Cargonia beat Utopian Science Association (USA!) last nations round, we need to fix that.

[XDTM]

To be honest, the general opinion is that the Experimentor is a placeholder until someone codes one of the suggested alternatives. The Experimentor is not really interactive, being just an RNG machine, and i'd much rather have a Psionics or Bionics Lab or even a mining shuttle dock instead.

[Nabski]

I feel like bionics mostly exist in the robotics lab with the number of available implants. Shrugs on the psionics. This is just some content that I'm capable of adding to the game. If I was really cool I would merge the destructive analyzer and it.

The real question is now:

Should science have something that can be emagged?

Should I make it into a painful to play slot machine for when mining isn't showing up, or just continue the pointless but entertaining train?