Fully remove swarmers both the lavaland and antag version

General
1

They ate my fnaf inspired pizzeria.

Seriously though. I rejoined bee in 2021 and had not a single fun interaction with swarmers since then, and I know a ton of people thinks the same. Can we take a look at them?

(obvious ided salt !! ! !! !! !! !!! !!)

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Pizzeria post swarmer attack: (He got teleported out and thought it was joever, but thankfully it wasn’t)

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I do agree they’re both due to a rework, we’ve had a bunch of threads discussing better gameplay forms, last one was kinda good

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(I did not overreact at all!! )

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How to fix lavaland swarmers: yellow melee attack is baton instead of insta-down.

How to fix station swarmers: hardcoded denied ore silo (edit: and machine/console boards)

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Given all of the feedback over the ages, this is my best take on both swarmers:

Lavaland swarmers: Yeet them. I don’t have a better defense for lavaland swarmers outside of the fact lavaland is somewhat starved for content. They provide an excessive amount of bluespace crystals so I typically like finding them, but I gather that I’m pretty heavily in the minority on that front and most miners hate them.

Station swarmers:

  • Swarmer walls and traps no longer cost resources, with walls instead having a set-up time and traps having a cooldown after use.
  • Swarmers lose the ability to replicate at will, instead the first swarmer is able to build a stationary beacon
  • There can only be one beacon at a time, and it is where new swarmers are produced
  • All resources gathered by swarmers are pooled in the beacon together
  • Ghosts control (and/or fight over) the beacon’s production
  • Beacon is able to produce all three types of swarmer instead of just blue, with yellow and red being more expensive (and only available if ghosts are collectively patient)
  • If a beacon is destroyed, all swarmers are stunned for a few seconds and the beacon drops [device] that can be used to track down all remaining and future swarmers.
  • Surviving swarmers may build a new beacon after some sort of cooldown period, and if they manage to come into contact with [device] they can consume it
  • Swarmers are still expected to keep the station habitable and powered, but no longer care about harming crew, instead needing to defend their beacon aggressively.
  • Swarmers can no longer outright destroy the ore silo or lathes but are able to drain a random resource from them one sheet at a time by attacking them. This leaves the infrastructure in tact while still allowing them to be a high risk/high reward target.

This should make station swarmers a more directly engaging antagonist, and also make them less of an endless threat while still keeping to the same flavor. Only problem is someone has to code it.

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you know what, those are good ideas, I like them (though I would probably still hate swarmers and nothing will make me like them!! :rage: :rage: :rage: :rage:)

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I defend lavaland swarmers. I hate them as much as other miners but this is purely because of the instadown>teleport, the teleport also being a potential kill on the spot (spider room, syndicate base).

Remove the instant down and suddenly it’s perfectly dealable with.

Still too strong? Remove yellows altogether. Too annoying? Make them not eat ores/tendrils.

Also my second reason for defending them is that a mech trivializes them and thus promotes bugging the roboticists.

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beside the yellow ones one my issues is them eating any structures. Ruins, spawns… it’s annoying to see a round’s lavaland seed being tarnished by the swarmers eating everything and making the area a flat land

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So deal with them. Do you start mining 30 minutes in or something? Whether you rush them immediately since numbers are low or mine for 10 min and get a mech, they should die before “everything is a flat land”

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i think they would be better if they were unable to ventcrawl, so they’d actually, you know, SWARM an area by being forced to congregate together as a collective and not all individually running off into the pipes to lock onto station critical locations

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Sounds radical, but you would definitely need to improve their survivability in a one on one fight with crew in that case.
As it stands, they are by definition a stealth antag.

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Guys you know we can just place some mob in the vault that attack hostile mobs right? The hos carp already kill them if in range.
I think this would be funnier.

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Also old lavaland swarmers had to be released to get out of their crashlanded ship, maybe people would prefer if it was still the cases.

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Crowbar and wrench my friends
They can’t ventcrawl when there are no pipes to crawl

Edit - don’t take this as swarmer defense
Nuke them from orbit

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I think the suggestion I gave fulfils this criteria without directly removing venting

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100% remove swarmers from lavaland

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Do you want to play then game after getting round removed?

Get banished to lavaland syndie base as a miner because its a safe location?

Miners loosing all moral when they appear next to base?

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outside my complaints of lavaland swarmers I highly suggest SmartFridges (chem,botany,xenobio)
become swarmer proof as when broken there is a mass pile of items and right clicking you get large lag spike or a crash if its a lot.

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what if, and bear with me on this, what if we just left them alone entirely? They’re like, my favorite clicky antagonist

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I agree they are fun to play and to deal with.

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I think removing the vent crawl by itself would be bad - swarmers already have a tough time when borgs charge into maints to valid hunt

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