Bottom post of the previous page:
I'll admit, I don't really have much room to speak in terms of departmental jobs sans xenobio, so I'll just focus on that.The list below is my current gripes with the system:
- Xenobio currently is meant to operate with two people, but as OP posted, usually only one person will ever function in there at a time. Honestly, if we split the roles of science up into individual jobs like posted above, we can pretty much solve this issue. You're way more of an asshole if you tell your coworker who can only work in your section of science to fuck off than if you told that to some dude who could work anywhere else, which would hopefully stop people from doing it.
- For being a deparment called xenobio, you don't actually work with many aliens much at all. Gold slime cores are as close as you get, and the best you can do with them is make sentient creatures, most of which can only smash stuff.
- Most of xenobio's slime core creations are self-serving or useless. However, the ones that are useful to other fields (yellow slime cores and speed potions for the most part) usually only leave xenobio if directly asked for.
- running Xenobio isn't as engaging as it used to be. Back before consoles when you had to personally feed slimes (and the larger ones could break containment), being the xenobiologist was a much more involved task. The only thing now that might harm you in xenobio is either an idiot compatriot who teleports living slimes on top of the grinder or if you get lucky enough to spawn with an alien (which usually gets instantly killed by another scientist once the department knows it spawned).
My thoughts on how it could be better:
- If Explorer's were added, having them send animals to xenobio to experiment on could finally inject some more ayy into the job outside of slimes. Any other additions which let xenobio utilize other mobs in a useful manner would be a plus.
- Have xenobio's work actually benefit the station outside of occasionally being the infinite battery easter bunny. One thing I thought about was how xenobiologists can make sentient mobs. Most of the mobs are useless outside of smashing shit, but some like the lightgheist are very useful to certain departments. Perhaps we could look into making xenobio's sentient mobs having utilities which benefit the station? A system which also lets those unused cores circulate to those who could have use them would be godly as well.
- Perhaps make slimes more of a threat. The combination of xenobio becoming super safe to operate and the slimes being made weaker has made xenobio pretty much accident-proof, which is less engaging.