Plumbing has been soft-removed. Let's talk about it

Dear @mc_meiler and the powers that bee,

Today I went to automate some medicines as a chemist, when I found out a pull request had gone through causing all chemical synthesizers to require manual refueling using compressed matter cartridges.

I went and had a look at the PR and had the following thoughts:

Regarding the “Why it’s good for the game” in the PR

Free tiny size instant heal patches bad.

They aren’t free, it requires time, effort, mechanical understanding, tools and a LOT of iron to set up. By that same notion surgery is “free”.

Plumbing in its current state can single-handedly replace the entirety of Medbay because one chemist decided to make a factory in 15 minutes that creates infinite amounts of tiny size, instant healing patches constantly for free.

I’m sorry, but this is clearly hyperbolic.

The medbay has more to it than “slap patch on injured person”.
You need to defib the dead, choose the right meds for different races, paras need to recover the dead and injured, doctors perform surgeries including removing xeno chestbursters, and much, much more.
That is not overwritten by a handy-dandy patch dispenser.

This entire line of reasoning is shonky now I think about it. Doctors are NEVER responsible for meds getting made. What it sounds like you have a problem with is the output being public-accessible.

What, are you going to remove the round start patch kits next?

Additionally: it usually takes WAY more than 15 minutes to make a full-size everything-patch fac. you’re acting like every single round we have a old-hand chemist that nails the chemfac that covers everything in no time at all. the median build time for large facs like that is closer to an hour. Chem facs are not easy to set up. this change is punishing the people that worked hard to get really good at something.

This PR requires chemical factories to not only have a resource requirement, but also require maintenance from chemists to keep them operational.

Kind of defeats the object of the automation system that chemfacs are. And even if you want to make this the case, you’ve gone too far. They had a resource requirement already. Time, and the initial investment of iron.

Maintenance sounds like it could be a cool concept, but you didn’t add maintenance. You didn’t add troubleshooting, you added a petty and brutal cost that makes the entire exercise not worth it. see the solutions list below for a more reasonable take on maintenance.

The massive resource cost is intended, as factories should not be running 24/7 at maximum capacity. If you want efficiency, do it yourself you lazy fucks, you already have macros on chem dispensers.

The resource cost is absolutely ridiculous. Factories will never be used at scale again, which is a massive shame. They are one of the most beautiful aspects of SS13 and you’ve killed them.

And as an aside: calling people who took the time to learn how to make factories, raced to build them at roundstart so they could be useful within the first hour, and proceeded to perfect their methodology on a round by round basis “lazy fucks” not only reflects poorly on your character, but also reflects poorly on your understanding of the playstyle.

Solutions

At the risk of being told “WYCI” I do have some ways I feel this could have been implemented in a way that does not remove the usefulness of factories, here are some options of what could be tried instead, in order from best to worst.:

Option 1: add a small chance for synthesizers to fluctuate in the amount of the given chem they are producing. this can cause bottlenecks and supply issues that would slow down and eventually stop the factory without maintenance. You could even do the same to reaction chambers.

Option 2: Add an ore silo linked plumbing construct that can be attached to a fluid duct system, from which the synthesizers can draw from. Perhaps add a minimum material limit that stops the construct drawing out the last of the iron/metal in the ore silo (with a hard minimum to avoid griefing). Perhaps it requires ore silo multitool jiggery-pokery like when you build a new ore silo linked lathe.

Option 3: Make the synthesizers start with matter already in them, equivalent to the iron used to create them, and either let the chemist refill them with iron sheets or make compressed matter cartridges printable from the medical autolathe.

Some of these options will still leave chemfacs as a more niche-use system, but I’m sure it won’t have as detrimental an effect on the chemist’s job.

Please reconsider what you have done here.
Thank you for reading.

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Just give up it’s pointless, bee coders will never do good changes.

Yes there were better ways to balance this out, do coders care? nope

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Once again, Meiler sets people off with their shitty personality.
You yourself already faced that when they made the PR.

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This is entirely unrelated to that, I spoke with Meiler in private and he was very courteous and reasonable.

If nobody talks about it, it’s never going to get looked into.
Doing these write-ups are how I contribute to bee, tbh.
Player feedback is important.

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I can’t even begin to think why this is a good idea. Chem factories already eat quite a lot of power from what I know. Either way though, basically killed the entire aspect of chemistry. Good job.

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The original pr isn’t the OP’s, just so you’re clear on that. Other than that, yeah I agree with you and definitely think the way it was previously was better.
If beestation truly wants to make chemistry not dominate all of medbay, there’s a real REAL simple port coders can make.
It’s called tg injuries.

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TLDR
but my take on the change is that, while it does make alot of things more hard to do (like loobe machine for clown)
I do belive its ulitmately for the best
Being able to automate heals or anything realy isnt good
we’ve all seen the rounds where theres just a bajillion full-heal super patches lying about infront of medbay

maybe they should take iron instead of matterr cadrides or such but :person_shrugging:

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No they don’t. I’m still in the boat that plumbing should have been hard removed instead of this tbh.

The effort that goes into setting up plumbing is minimal - most of it is in learning the bumps and limitations arbitrarily imposed upon it, and once you have those down it is barely any more effort than mixing the chems in a dispenser, except the output continues infinitely.

Sleepers are bad for medbay in their current form, and plumbing before the nerf was even worse than sleepers.

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I think the issue is that this pr was created as a way to gimp plumbing to the levels of unusability due to the fact that complete removal was denied.
There are limitations you can put on it but this was the most impractical version you could make.

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Content that optimizes player to player interaction out of the game is bad for a roleplay server that wants to create scenarious in which crew interact with one another, especially in the current antagonist atmosphere where they are starved of the ability to make creative scenarious without forcing their way into a department that nobody ever has to leave.

Plumbing is content that gives one person something to do while easily sacrificing what little interaction medbay is currently necessary for.

No it wasn’t. And it’s nowhere near unusable, even if you only utilize the starting supply of chemicals. What the PR did was lock advanced plumbing behind needing enough materials to produce compressed matter. It doesn’t even need to be reloaded that often, and the starting supply can output 1600u of finished product.

I made an example in the PR of some basic, but very high volume mixes you can still produce with plumbing from roundstart. More advanced mixing setups require game progression to enable extra synthesizers, very similarly to how most advanced tech requires research.

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I made a seperate post about the nerf and muller straight up said his intention was to gimp plumbing because as a medic main it was taking away from their job.

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I’m sorry. I agree with @mc_meiler. They wanted to remove it completely and I think this is a okay compromise.

This feature dose not encourage roleplay. It should be therefore remove or changed.

When you make statements like this I question do you even play the same game as me.

“They aren’t free…”

Once the factory is set up it produces forever with no user input required and no resources needed. That is clearly what is meant here by “free”.

Some people mention the power cost. This is also laughable to me as if power is our current system is not binary. We have power or we don’t. Of all the plumbing factories I made power has never been a factor unless the entire station has ran out of it because them SM was not started or the tanks not replaced.

“it requires time, effort, mechanical understanding”

I’m sorry but again this is just wrong to me. The time for a persons who know what they are doing to make a Styptic Powder + Silver Sulfadiazine is like 6 minutes. The “effort” is clicking a few times to make synthesizers and copy paste the chem names into the reaction chamber.

This is not even atmos. “Mechanical understanding”? This is a point to point system where the reagents don’t mix in the pipes, there is no pressure and there is not temperature to worry about. You have a machine that can pull out exact quantities of reagents and mix then only when it has proper amounts. When I first was learning the system I was shocked how much more simple it was then I taught. You can’t even use the analyzers on the pipes because they work like electrician cables and not pipes.

“tools and a LOT of iron”

See when you say it like that it sounds like the chemist must find/make these tools and materials. Of course this is false since you start with all the tools and materials needed to make a very large factory indeed.

“By that same notion surgery is “free”.”

Not the same at all.

First of all there is only one set of saw and retractor round start. If you want to have the tools for any type of surgery you have to go make a saw and a retractor. These cost a non trivial amount of iron and it has happened that I can’t sometimes have these tools due to lack of iron.

Secondly it’s not automatic. I can’t step up a auto-surgery machine that does surgery on any body placed next to it round start and just forget about it. I have to do surgery myself manually.

Thirdly and this connects to point number two surgery has an action cost since while I’m doing it I can’t do anything else.

And finally good surgery required research and a operating computer. Things that are not done or made every round.

You could make a case that surgery and plumbing are the same if plumbing required research, the tools had to be made, and the materials for the machines as well as the pipes sourced somehow. But that is not how that works. Instead you are given all of that round start.

I’m sorry, but it’s completely accurate. 90% of the injuries are brute/burn and a chemist can make the adequate factory in like 6 minutes that then spits out the patches forever.

I guess we also have tend and defib and defib cryo. It’s mostly slapping the generic healing supplies and using the kits sadly.

Again this is so misleading. It implies that every race has it’s own medicine or something. The only race with impactful differences in chemical metabolization is ozeelings.

Sure. It dose not literally replace everything the medbay can do. Just cuts it’s work load by about 90%.

??? What? Who are you playing with lol.

Like I said before the most common damage types are brute and burn and that one can be made in like 6 minutes. If you wanted to add toxin as well that might push it up to 10ish.

Your post is long I can’t address it all right now I’m kinda tired. I also feel you repeat yourself a bit. Anyway while was typing this Ruko said things that I agree with.

You got good taste in cult choice at least.

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Okay yeah, the intent of the PR was to totally remove plumbing and they had to settle for the biggest nerf that would pass. What I meant to say was the current state of it does not actually gimp it anywhere near the point of unusability.

It’s just much worse than it was because it needed to be much worse than it was because 10 minutes of plumbing made pretty much the entirety of medbay obsolete short of husked corpses and the occasional defib.

In the current iteration of medical im afraid chem and doctors dont interact for healing chems, 99% of the time the sleeper is used instead of the 30 oxaland patches in the fridge and you end up stockpiling.

I have yet to see a sucessful use of the new plumbing system.
The issue is the overlap and doctors should have been given more to do (e.g fractures physical trauma, stuff thay chem cant fix) rather than removing a large part of chem.

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I personally didn’t consider plumbing this much of an issue, if anything sleeper is what could use a nerf the most since it’s basically a near unlimited chemical synthesizer that makes chemistry useless most of the time.

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Frankly, I dislike nerfs that are material based. I prefer true complexity over needing more materials every time. As well, that need for materials sucks so much in rounds where you simply can’t get it, we don’t need more material sinks on the station, it harms the station as a whole. (The reason I say this is because lack of materials makes rounds grind to a halt, and I don’t want to be bored playing this game.) You want it to be resource based? Fine! Make it require chemicals to be placed in, not materials everyone else already needs. Everything that makes synthflesh is required to be slipped in every so often, done!

If you think it’s too easy, make it technically harder based on real input and knowledge from the player. We’re not about to make RPD’s require matter cartridges, are we? (I’d be done with engineering at that point.) But if you want plumbing to be removed because you don’t agree with it at a basic level, then just remove it! Stop making people steal what little iron I have left!!!

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Easy, add compressed matter to Cargo (if it isn’t already there).
Now it’s a money sink too!

Remove mining already, Ruko.

NGL the only reason plumbing was “Good” was because people never filled/checked the chemfridge

see patches take patches
patches aren’t visible, they don’t exist

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