Plant Cult (New Gamemode Suggestion)

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Arcanemusic
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Plant Cult (New Gamemode Suggestion)

Post by Arcanemusic » #425495

Hey, ArcaneMusic here. You may know me from Bagil, complaining in deadchat, or bringing this up a few times in OOC. Here's that Plant Cult Design Doc I mentioned so you all can trust that I'm no dirty dirty liar who lies like a liar.

Note: As someone who understands Programming, but has LITERALLY JACK SHIT understanding of Byond's ancient Spaghetti Code, I can assure you I don't have the means of implementing this into the game just yet, and as such, this all remains just a suggestion. Should anyone want to work on this seriously, please by all means. I am but a poor Blood Cult power gamer and shit poster, and won't have any issue with someone turning this into a project.
Without further ado,
Plant Cult.
Premise:
The plant god (No name yet) is attempting to bloom/emerge on the station as it’s the most dense source of biological life in the system. The plant god will begin by choosing a set number of crew members into the station as a “sleeper cell” in order to drain, and eventually overtake the station to fully bloom into the station as a whole. The intent here is to take some of the interesting components of Kudzu planting, and actually bring it into the game as a real roundtype as opposed to the usual “kill it before it kills us” situation kudzu always results in. As the plant cult, one member of the cult must be voted to pop, in a similar manner to the blob roundtype, as the grand seed. The grand seed must be kept hidden, but also must receive constant care and a supply-line of “nutrients” in order to keep growing. To incentivize holding the round off from typical conversion round griefing as a cultist, the ability to consume nutrients from dead humans and/or protein sources would be held off from until the later/last stage of the plants growth.
Win Condition:
The grand seed needs to be highly accessible, yet also must remain hidden from the crew for as long as possible. The grand seed, as a result, must be protected, and once popped from a crew member, will begin a gradual, slow conversion of the station from where it’s planted. The conversion is directly controlled by the grand seed, and too much growth will lead to the cult having to go loud, which the cult is not nearly as capable of defending from as blood cult or clock cult. However, the grand seed is effectively playing a tower defense mode than as the eminence or the blob. In order for the Grand seed to bloom, the seed needs an immense amount of Light, Water, and Nutrients each. As lights are typically not found in any place where you’d probably pop as Grand Seed, Non-popped members of the cult would need to cultivate either Glowshrooms, electricity heavy Floodlights, or quite simply greenrooms brightly in the middle of maint for the Grand seed to farm off of. The highest target areas for this requirement would be engineering or science based on their resource abundance.
Water would be slowly drained from any container placed onto the grand seed’s growths, draining at about 1000 units of liquid per minute, or ~16.6 units per second. This places great emphasis on areas of the station such as hydroponics/Janitor’s Closet/The Bar, which are capable of filling these requirements themselves. Tiles such as Showers/Sinks would need to drain water slower, as they are independent of power and could very quickly finish this requirement.
For nutrients, this is intended to be the last thing you would be able to accomplish. Effectively, anything with biomass or organic value would be acceptable to be feed to the Grand seed for this, making the highest value target here a combination of chemistry, hydroponics, and the kitchen, again. Anything from cloth, plants, fertilizers from chemistry, blood from virology, all of this would make for a good sacrifice to the plant god. The ideal sign that there’s a plant cult would be the crew wondering why there’s no food in any of the vending machines, why there’s no water coming from the faucets, and that there’s a strange lack of any bandages in any of the medkits.
Once the Plant god has acquired a certain number of each of the requirements, he bursts forth, able to consume not just organic, but inorganic life as well, spreading his spores across the station and enveloping the sector into plantlife.

Tools:

This is the part I’m still the furthest from finishing, as I’m clearly no expert on what is or is not balanced, and as such, I’m going to only provide the best I can for ideas, and leave that for an angry mob of admins to figure out later.
As the grand seed, you act as a combination of the Gang Boss/Blob Overmind/Nar'sie Artificer for the plant cult. While you have to have a high quantity of the three resources to win the round, you must use these resources to purchase equipment/upgrades for the plant cultist goons. Each plant cultist begins with a Briarheart (Like from skyrim, I know, not a lot of resources I could think of here) implanted in the place of their heart at roundstart. Visually, this isn’t distinguishable from the regular crew unless you’re having the heart removed. As the round progresses, you can purchase genes to upgrade the Briarhearts within each cultist, giving unique equipment and biological based tools to help increase resource collection as well as in the defense of the grand seed. Below is a table of all the tool ideas, with costs to be decided later.

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If you have any thoughts, ideas, etc, I'd love to hear them. What with all the shittery about "Blood Cult has a 90% win rate" and with the semi-permanent removal of Gangs and Clock Cult, I'd love to see a new game mode being introduced to the codebase.
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Yakumo_Chen
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Re: Plant Cult (New Gamemode Suggestion)

Post by Yakumo_Chen » #425664

The word "cult" is enough to immediately turn off most people and we could provably do without new conversion modes for the foreseeable future
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NanookoftheNorth
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Re: Plant Cult (New Gamemode Suggestion)

Post by NanookoftheNorth » #425773

I like the idea a lot.

You have a lot of great ideas to set this apart from any other gamemode. The objective is to feed a source non-humans, but not power. It's fun to imagine crew worshipping a plant and to imagine the crew stealing things and giving it to a plant.

I think that direct conversion might hold this idea back. I think, instead of having to do the typical knock out and drag a guy into maintenance type move that all other cults do, maybe instead the plant has telepathic powers or spore that as it grows automatically converts those without mindshields who pass by. So lets say it only has started, it wouldn't have the strength to convert anyone, but as the round progresses it gains the strength to convert one or two people, but once those people are converted it again can't convert anyone else.

Honestly I don't know if mindshields would be a good countermeasure. Honestly saying it's a cult I dislike since we already have cults. Mind control plant would be cooler flavor text, and maybe utilizing hardsuits against spore or something the chef/bartender could make to counter it.
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Re: Plant Cult (New Gamemode Suggestion)

Post by BeeSting12 » #425785

Every time I see an ideas thread with the word cult in it I die a little inside.
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Re: Plant Cult (New Gamemode Suggestion)

Post by Nabski » #425835

You seem to have a relatively clear idea of what you'd like to do, and if you understand programming already then byond isn't THAT bad. If you get the code downloaded I'll work with you a little to share what understanding I have of byond code. Game modes are enough of an undertaking that it's unlikely that anyone other than you will seriously do it.

Properly draining sinks and pressure levels would likely require a system we don't currently have. I personally think you'd be better off requiring the consumption of CO2 with some way to link into the atmos system.

That would make your three key resources Light (Power), Air, and Biomatter.

I personally would recommend starting with a few fun key components of this and making pulls to add them first to get a handle on Byond. My recommendation would be starting with the heart and giving it a default ability such as photosynthesis. You could then make that the default heart of a pod person. (I might be forgetting some current pod person update that just happened based on plant stats that would make this awkward.
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Re: Plant Cult (New Gamemode Suggestion)

Post by oranges » #425938

>reskinned cult

>conversion mode

>clockcult tier overly complex mechanics

fuck me
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Arcanemusic
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Re: Plant Cult (New Gamemode Suggestion)

Post by Arcanemusic » #426567

Back again!
Thanks for all the feedback. In retrospect, yeah, having it be this conversion heavy does pretty much draw from the negative stigmas from cult as it is now, and I've been brainstorming some ways around it. I may change the post title away from "Plant Cult" as a result.
(Also yes Oranges this was too fuckin complex but it was a rough draft sue me I have the axe in hand now)

So, thinking about it, I REALLY like Nanook's suggestion, specifically:
I think that direct conversion might hold this idea back. I think, instead of having to do the typical knock out and drag a guy into maintenance type move that all other cults do, maybe instead the plant has telepathic powers or spore that as it grows automatically converts those without mindshields who pass by. So lets say it only has started, it wouldn't have the strength to convert anyone, but as the round progresses it gains the strength to convert one or two people, but once those people are converted it again can't convert anyone else.
I think there's a potential in this that wouldn't make it conversion based in the slightest, while allowing it to keep the same resource gathering aesthetic. What if the plant, instead of needing to grow within the hosts like the briarheart idea, instead allowed for random body takeovers, in a similar fashion to the Malfunctioning Cloner? The crew would begin with something like 5% or so being infected with invisible spores. These players wouldn't know that they're infected, and would only start showing symptoms of their infection during their periods where they're under control. For example, say you're playing an assistant, and begin the shift infected. You could go around for 2-3 minutes grabbing your hacking tools, vandalizing shit, the usual grayshirt behavior. Suddenly, you slip on a wet floor tile, and when you slip, the water instantly evaporates. You could just consider that convenient, but instead it's the spores in the assistant draining a few units of water for the plant remotely. Now, the plant could have a power allowing them to assume direct control, granting them about 2 minutes of time for them to move around, and assume the identity of that assistant. During that time, the real assistant player would be completely blacked out, but able to see their body moving, but unable to interact with the crew. This allows for short, limited periods where the plant could go and gather resources, but also giving an incentive to ditch their host body after the 2 minutes so as to not arouse suspicion. Perhaps as the plant grows and expands throughout the station, they could place more "Loud" seedpods, scatting spores into new targets, and with fast enough timing the plant could instantly assume control of a new target. Granted, targets until direct control would need to gain generalized plant weaknesses, such as an aversion to being in too much light under the risk of becoming overweight, having the possibility to get fucking DESTROYED by Pete in the Kitchen, or something similar.

Taking suggestions on a better name.
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Re: Plant Cult (New Gamemode Suggestion)

Post by Nabski » #426785

The undergrowth.

Then have a large portion of it's expansion be vines that grow under tiles. This makes it take 10 seconds per tile to remove the tile, and gives people a way to actively fight it other than just destroying the central base.
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Re: Plant Cult (New Gamemode Suggestion)

Post by NanookoftheNorth » #426833

Arcanemusic wrote: What if the plant, instead of needing to grow within the hosts like the briarheart idea, instead allowed for random body takeovers, in a similar fashion to the Malfunctioning Cloner?
...
Now, the plant could have a power allowing them to assume direct control, granting them about 2 minutes of time for them to move around, and assume the identity of that assistant. During that time, the real assistant player would be completely blacked out, but able to see their body moving, but unable to interact with the crew.
I think this idea alone is great for a separate idea entirely. I think a mind control parasite that transfers from character to character would be super fun and cool. However, losing character control is something that is tricky and probably disliked. Have you ever heard of Animorphs? The main antagonist of the show was a mind control parasite.

So with a separate idea of it's own, the mind control parasite would basically be a moving antag token. The mind control parasite would speak to the host and tell them what to do. If they don't listen, they'd have the ability to either directly control them for a limited time (2 minutes), or insta-gib them (so the threat of death forces them to cooperate despite having antag objectives now). The mind control parasite would have a similar objective as a changling. The mind control parasite would transfer from person to person through the air. They can't stay in the air for more than 2 minutes without a host. When inhabiting a host, there would be some sort of indicator on the head of the inhabited, forcing the host to wear a hat to conceal the parasite. When the parasite leaves the host, they return to their ordinary state. The direct counter to getting infected would be to be wearing ear protective gear. Mindshield doesn't work on them.

The only way to defeat it would be to either catch it mid transfer and force it external to any host for 2 minutes, or to surgically remove it. Killing the host wouldn't kill the parasite.

I imagine this separate idea to be like having a pAI but instead a parasite with goals. I think cooperation would be fun too. Now, maybe I got ahead of myself with the idea, but I think this is different than most
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Re: Plant Cult (New Gamemode Suggestion)

Post by MollyKristoph » #426852

Lore-wise, my deadchat-regular ass isn't too keen on Yet Another God in cults, but rather a deranged/out of control attempt by the ancient Lifebringers found on Lavaland, to try and bring life to other worlds.
Needless to say, with Nanotrasen Systems thrown into the mix, a spore of this got mutated and turned into the aggressive, invasive parasitoid species of xenoflora panspermia we see in this suggestion.

Though, it would be neat to see a variation of the Nar-Sie Win animation where the station blossoms into a chrysanthemum-looking plant or something.
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Re: Plant Cult (New Gamemode Suggestion)

Post by skoglol » #426862

Just a note regarding feeding with anything containing biomass. As a botanist it is fairly easy to make 100 potency watermelons with densified chems containing 40 nutriment and 40 water. Add bees and production speed, and you got a plant producing 800 nutriment and water every couple minutes. Now multiply that by 15 to represent the available trays in hydroponics on metastation.

If anybody is going to make this happen, it would be good to keep this in mind when balancing feeding rate and such. Maybe it should not be based entirely on available biomass?


Otherwise, sounds like a promising idea.
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Re: Plant Cult (New Gamemode Suggestion)

Post by Nilons » #426930

1 cult is more than enough
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Re: Plant Cult (New Gamemode Suggestion)

Post by InsightfulParasite » #429366

I wonder if you could make a neutral mob. Similar to a blob where it converts floors and walls but gives benifits to the crew who stand over it. So the crew choses if they want to keep the plant alive or not. I can already feel that my idea is a terrible idea.
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