Sparky's Slime Handbook Part 6: Now what

Alrighty everybody, it’s been a while. We’ve had some nerfs, had some more nerfs, and xenobiology is in an interesting place right now. (Links to relevant PRs in comments)
So, changes from last time,

  • the advanced mutation strategy no longer works, so that’s off the table now.
  • In addition, warping grey no longer works and nobody seems interested in fixing it.
  • Reproductives are also a new player trap now, and have resulted in at least one confused Mhelp.
  • However the rainbows trick still works, despite lacking a good way to derive rainbows from no rainbows.

So, on to the updated procedure.

  1. Breed your greys, you can put all your cubes in the machine this time since keeping them outside no longer matters.

  2. Go get parts, and possibly a bit more plasma, you might end up needing it. Five advanced matter bins, five nano manipulators, and an autolathe board. Assemble the autolathe, and upgrade the slime processor and monkey recycler with the other parts

  3. When you come back, you can grind some greys, and add plasma to the core to make a living slime. This allows you (with upgrades) to make one slime into two cores into two slimes into four cores and henceforth

  4. With your new infinite supply of monkey cubes, assess your other slimes.

  • One or three adult greys should be made, depending on how you plan on approaching the rest of the guide
  • Oranges should be bred, looking for reds
  • Blues or purples should be bred, looking for dark blue
  • Metal should have one adult made
  1. Breed your dark blues for cerulean, and mass-breed them in a similar way to old-style stable cerulean production lines. These will be used for your reproductive substitutes, reccurants.
  • While recurring extracts cannot, to my knowledge, crossbreed, they act as an infinite and portable source of most extract uses. Some, usually effects that transform the extract rather than simply filling it or splitting off something else, consume the entire thing, but most effects (like grey/blood and red/plasma, which we will be using) work just fine.

  • In order to properly use a recurring extract, allow it’s uses (visible by inspecting it) to rise to 10, add whatever you want to use with it in 1u intervals until you’ve added nine, then stop. If you consume your last “use” the extract will vanish, and it begins with 2.

  1. Produce, in priority order a recurring red, a recurring grey, a recurring metal, an industrial grey, and anything else you feel like

  2. Use mutators to breed a lineage of slimes to rainbow, and keep that line breeding

  3. Create an enclosed 1x1 space, surrounded on two sides by dense objects, one side by the smart fridge, and the final side by a closed, anchored locker. Inject >5 Plasma into each rainbow extract and watch as it unfolds into a bounty of random extracts.

  4. (optional, and only if warping grey gets fixed) Make a warping grey, enjoy your infinite everything, and continue to exist to spite Zams.

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Have you ever considered leaving xenobiology, outside science department and asking botany for monkey cubes? You know, interacting with crew instead of powerleveling in a lab.

Botany can make you hundreds of cubes easily.

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The nerfs worked then. You now actually have to interact with the system now at least somewhat. The old system was quite brainless, like making a RnD maxcap. Now there is actual variation since you don’t know exactly what you are going to get.

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Xenobio is fairly time consuming, and its a waste of that time to run to botany for cubes. Worst case scenario, you have to run across the entire station for cubes. also industrials still exist, so its not necessary, just pump out 200 cubes with a handful of plasma. I mean with an industrial grey, and an industrial dark purple, you can produce infinite cubes and plasma sheets.

We uh, we don’t need cubes. We can make plenty of cubes, that’s not the problem. The problem is that they produce four cores a minute with max level bluespace parts and the hassle of having to wrangle and kill a living slime. Functionally, they make one living slime to jumpstart, and the then breeding is just faster. I suppose that’s the objective, but now they do nothing. at all.

While this is true, is this not the entire game? The SM is 100% consistent assuming you do a safe setup. Research is just “hope other people do their jobs”. Virology is “stare at a spreadsheet and then grind crates and maint for symptoms” I could go on, but the only truly dynamic jobs are medical and security, which are entirely dependent on other people with nigh-on nothing to do if everything runs perfectly. There was at least optimizations to be found, and it was so “brainless” because the playerbase found all the optimizations and taught each other.

This is false. I do know exactly what I am going to get. I have outlined it above. This is the point of the guide. Xenobiology is now no more or less brainless than it was before. It is also no more or less efficient than it was before. I’m not even fucking complaining, I’m calling it like I see it.

use recurring metal it’s so much more efficient

That is exactly right. That is why I am a security/medical main. I think all jobs you mentioned are not well designed if the goal is to encourage roleplay.

When I say brainless I mean repetitive with no variation. Xenobiology at least now has a little bit of variation that you have to take into account since you don’t know what luck you will get when breeding smiles. I don’t mean it’s random. It’s deterministic at the far end, but I mean in general.

This is because you actually need more color naturally then you did before. For example you would not ever bother before with mutation chance or getting a natural rainbow because you… well you know.

I mean, you still needed blacks, and oranges (which to be fair are tier one).
And this has just become “rush cerulean and red”
Where before it was “rush black and orange”
My point is that nothing has changed variance wise, you still get rainbows fast and do things with them.

Looks like further nerfs are needed then.

“job is good”
“no”

Ideal state for a common regular is zero change whatsoever for any reason ever.

those are words

Ideal state for Kotaminant appears to be nerfing everything he doesn’t like until it’s unplayable.

Should have said this earlier but I’m very appreciative that you take the time to write out this many xenobiology guides.

I’d been following your previous ones to try and learn how to do it, but kind of gave up after the nerf because I understood that the nerf had made your guide obselute, but not enough to figure out what I had to do instead. So I just kind of gave up and moved on to learning other jobs.

Wasn’t expecting that you’d take the time to push out a new one, and I’m definitely going to give xenobio another shot again.

takes significantly longer to obtain, and its not really that much more efficient if you have to make sure you dont accidentally use it all up. An industrial dark purple doubles the plasma you put into it, so its effective and you can get it earlier.

as an aside thank you for the tag change crossed
i don’t actually know how to do that myself

I like to play xenobio more slowly. If I am not doing toxins because of other incompetent scientists, I grab the RPD and build a custom Miasma scrubbers in each of the cells, harvest and sell to cargo for long shifts, since you’ll always have dead monkeys.

Have you ever considered leaving xenobiology, outside science department and asking botany for monkey cubes? You know, interacting with crew instead of powerleveling in a lab.

Botany can make you hundreds of cubes easily.

This is all pending on if Botany is: knowledgeable on the process of getting monkey cubes, willing to dump 25 monkey cubes each bio bag (you’ll have to carry a big load), and not “powerleveling” themselves by making killer tomatoes or whatever they do.

Looks like further nerfs are needed then.

In my personal opinion, for a lot of science and other problematic departments require full reworks, not gradual nerfs driving players away from the department. Nerfs are not gradual at all and do not provide an opportunity for adjustment, and there will always be players who play avoiding interactions.

Why are you leaving monkeys in the cells instead of recycling them?
There’s a lot of easier and better ways to make Miasma farms anyway.
I like using an AtmosBot that’s had its safeties overridden (Emag or have a Silicon do it).

Not for the specific purpose of miasma farming, just collect the consequences of the process. Additionally, the miasma applies a fairly ugly effect that makes the monkeys puke and just sits there over the course of two hours, sometimes I really do be putting 20 monkeys in a 2x1 adamantine pen, or walk away from xenobio for a bit.

Plus, we can benefit cargo.

just collect the consequences of the process.

UPDATE: with this pr, I no longer build scrubbers for the unsanitary miasma :+1: