[Updated] Fixing Cargo and improving economy (1700~ word essay)

Opening word,

Roundstart availability of some critical supplies are to be limited. This is absolutely necessary for integrating the cargo department into the rest of the station. High demand, low supply will create a functioning Cargo department. Ask the question “what does this department needs the MOST in order to function?” to yourself.

basic economics, everyone. lets go.

THIS SECTION IS NOT CRITICAL FOR THE CARGO FIX. IF YOU WANT THE CARGO FIX ITSELF GO DOWN BELOW

—BANK ACCOUNTS AND THE BANK MACHINE—

  • The “Bank Machine” in the vault can now be used to manage bank accounts. It is extra tough as well.

  • The financial distribution pyramid now starts from this machine. The sum of the entire station budget is bluespaced into the machine and from there it is distributed into the budget cards.

  • Without a proper access level, you can not interact with the machine at all.

  • The machine will have a spare board in the Captain’s locker. This will mostly be useless for tiders, as it will require admin intervention to function (basically keeping the data even after machine is somehow destroyed and then carrying it over)

  • QM, HoP and Captain level ID cards will view the total money sum, money in all of the budget cards and by clicking them the sum of the next paycheck. If you click on the [UPLOAD MONEY] button after selecting a budget card, any physical cash or credit inserted to the machine will go to that budget. The transaction details (putting money in and out of budget cards) will be logged into the machine.

  • Only acount adding option will be visible without Centcomm ID. With a CentComm ID, you can add, delete or change the distribution of the funds by individual and inbetween budget cards. No one but admins will be able to use this feature. If an acc linked on an ID card is deleted, the funds in the account are liquidated into the civil budget.

  • A “Head of Personnel” level ID card is required to create a new bank account and a “CentComm” level ID card is required to delete/manage them individiually.

  • In the ID Consoles, upon inserting a target card there will be a new tab at the lower right showing if the ID card is linked to an account. This tab will mostly read “ID Linked to bank account”. When it is not, you can click the empty tab to either create a new account or assign the ID card to an already existing one. Pressing “create new account” will transfer the name on the ID to the machine and will randomly generate a 6 digit bank number.

  • There is a 5 minute cooldown between creating new bank accounts. CentComm can remotely manage the accounts but only should do so when there is a case of spamming.

  • An e-mag is now required to empty the vault funds. Upon hitting the thing on harm intent with an e-mag, it will start to siphon but can be stopped by clicking on the “stop fund draining” button in the UI.

  • The new alert for the “Unauthorized withdrawal” will be in bold text, and when there is little time left it will be in loud and bold text.

Yes, it drains the ENTIRE budget. High risk, high reward. Have fun planning out your incredibly elaborate Payday heist in SS13! Only an antag can do it anyways. I also suggest giving the pirate captain a special key that starts the fund draining.

—CARGO DEPARTMENT—

  • Roundstart availability of some critical supplies are limited. This is absolutely necessary for integrating the cargo department into the rest of the station. High demand, low supply will create a functioning Cargo department. Ask the question “what does this department needs the MOST in order to function?” to yourself.

  • “Buy Directly” option is removed. However, this will be the only option in hacked (not multitooled) consoles. If this is integrated with account logging in the vault machine, crafty Detectives can figure out if a QM is valid or not easier. This is, however, extremely unlikely on Bee.

  • You can no longer place orders by yourself on restricted crates. (on unhacked consoles)
    Clicking on restricted crates will print out an unstamped manifest form which is basically useless without someone stamping it for you. Useful if the heads office is damaged or out of power for whatever reason. Unrestricted crates are still OK to buy.

  • Budget Cards and Heads of Staff Stamps are now high importance items.

  • Heads of Staff will now directly order supplies from their offices, using the little console on the wall. (instead of shouting their lungs out on the Common radio.) and their stamps.

  • Any orders made will have a %10 margin that will go directly into the Cargo Budget, as their NET PROFIT

  • A new console called “Cargo Orders Console” will take place in Cargo Bay. This console will beep loudly when a new order has been placed and will print out an order manifest with the Head of Staff’s stamp on it. If a new machine of this type or a new console in a heads office is built, a multitool buffer connection is required.

This piece of paper will be very special, since this machine is the only one that can print out a valid stamped document. The other function of this console is to view the previous orders and the messages attached to them (and to print out copies of old ones with invalid stamps with lines over them to render it, well, invalid.) Photocopiers will now automatically put lines over the stamps to render them invalid for ordering. It doesn’t change the fact that it has been stamped, however, you can’t make orders with it. Emagging the photocopier will disable its safeties and it will be able to print perfectly fine copies of the same stamped document. Counterfeiting!!!
However, the photocopier will beep loudly whenever something is copied.
This makes the antagonist QM able to order gun crates ad infinitum with a just a single stamped document. Oh well, he is an antag.

This manifest will be inserted into the Supply Console and the thing will chew through it and automatically place a valid order in the shopping cart of Cargo. Upon the shuttle taking off from CentComm, the costs will be charged to the according budget and the seal can be disengaged by someone using the proper level ID.

  • HERE’S HOW CARGO ORDERS COOL SHIT FOR THEMSELVES AS A REWARDING MECHANISM
    Since Cargo Budget is mostly a matter of net profit or (maybe) tax returns, they can still order cool shit for them without making the station suffer too much. THE QUARTERMASTER’S STAMP IS A SPECIAL TOOL THAT CAN BE USED ON AN OFFICE CONSOLE TO SPIT OUT A SPECIAL ORDER FORM WHICH BUMPS THE CRATE PRICE TO %125 BUT GIVE THE LOCK QM ACCESS

  • CHANGED-----------
    HARDLIGHT SEALS SCRAPPED DUE TO STINGRAYS AND AIDS
    ACTUALLY, SHITTER QMS WHO STEAL STUFF BY EMITTERING OR SPEARING THE CRATES ARE TO BE CONSIDERED AN IC ISSUE AT WORST AND VALID AT BEST

Bearing contraband or unauthorized weapons, casually blasting open crates will make you valid as a QM.

  • “Hacked Console Board”, a 14TC QM/Techie special item that will replace the e-maggening of consoles. Upon being constructed, it acts as an emagged cargo console to order null, specops and all sorts of syndie crates (or maybe more.) This also gives the console a bright red display and the UI will be in Syndicate Red.
    USUAL CONTRABAND LIKE BIKER KIT WILL STILL BE AVAILABLE THRU MULTITOOLING.

  • This divides the “Console/Emag” playstyle that costs 20tc in total and rewards the robust capitalists between the “Emag/Cash Suitcase” that costs 7tc in minimum to provide an easier way of ordering cool shit without being a robust capitalist. It also solves the nullcrate problem, by prohibiting people from buying a hacked console and 70000 credits from the getgo. It’s now either nullcrate or illegally ordered crates.

  • CHANGED-------- IN EPIC GAMER STYLE
    Nullcrates will arrive as they are, BUT, they are rigged with an anti theft system! To prevent from all the contents getting ashed upon opening the crate, you have to emag it. This along with the new circuit board will prohibit the 4tc nullcrate meme.

This will improve the validity of nullcrate QM’s by incredible counts.

  • MULEbots are now easier to use, with UIs popping up upon clicking them. Load a crate, choose destination and send it.
    No more PDA fiddling.

  • Cargo Front Desk will now have a vendor that can be filled with various items by people with QM access and will act as a general store with a nice display section and a counter.

—INTEGRATING THE SERVICE AND SCIENCE DEPARTMENT INTO CARGO—
cuz Adamantium won’t sell itself.

  • A “Cargo Export Pad” will be placed next to Service Autolathe and inside Research Division. A pair of export scanners will be placed next to it.

  • This pad, when put an item with an export value on (prepared food, drinks, botany products, adamantium, maybe parts or other shit) will display the “payout” after these items are delivered to cargo.

  • You can’t warp in bombs, grenades or TTVs. Beakers wont spill and liquid content fruit won’t pop up. Emag it to disable the safeties for a gamer moment. When one is emagged, all synced pads will beep omniously

  • For example, a botanist places a 2000 cred export value batch of veggies on the pad. Upon clicking the pad, an UI shows displaying the total cargo budget (to check if this transaction is fit) and if the cargo budget can give the cut to the botanist, the pad beeps “You will earn 1500 credits after this transaction.” Upon clicking “send”, the pad withdraws 1500 credits from the Cargo Budget, and the products arrive inside Cargo Bay. The money is printed from the pad and the producer is happy to work more and more until he dies. Then, these products are either crated (or not) by technicians and sold via the shuttle. Cargo makes a NET PROFIT of 500 creds.

Of course, a single carrot wont be worth 2000 creds. This will be balanced alltogether.

  • Quartermaster level ID’s can disable exchange between pads to prevent funds from draining faster when required.

  • New pads built will require a multitool buffer connection to be connected to Cargo.


After these changes, cargo will almost always have a reason to help other departments because they are je- going to make net profit out of almost everything. I haven’t decided what they are allowed to do with their net profits. They could run a nice little general store but other than that, basically everyone playing this game hate cargo cuz they build a stupid fuckin tesla that goes loose in 10 seconds or order more guns than the entire soviet army ever had every single round and its irritating I know.

AS A LAST WORD, no demand with a lot of already available supply and cargo will never ever function properly. thanks for listening to my tedtalk buh bye

The cargonian in me weeps at the thought of being unable to hoard guns easily but overall these sound like really good changes that would make cargo more than a glorified assistant mafia. However it would probably be too much code to ever get implemented

Why the thing with super locks? It would be a extremely expensive thing to maintain for a company the size of nt especially when they want to maximize profits. Gameplay wise it would completely nuke cargos role for the revs in rev rounds as they would no longer be able to arm the revs without using extremely tedious methods so just mass producing improvised weapons would be more efficient thus removing cargo as a valuable thing to hold as the revs except for preventing sec from getting mindshields.

I see you hate armed cargo with a passion but it may be a necessary counterbalance to sec and on mrp when sec is chronically understaffed or non-existent a “cargo militia” is the thing keeping things from turning into a playground for traitors as they are the only ones who have any weapons of quality higher than shit. Also if you do this why not remove combustible lemons, add access restrictions to mechs dependant on what they are equipped with and so on. Cargo is not the department who has it easiest to get weapons. And science get weapons more powerful than anything sec can get their hands on.

yea home slice lemme tell you here n now

on MRP, security is more often than not completely fucking non-existent

like, we can have a fully staffed medbay and science department with 2 shaft miners, and then meanwhile in the same round we got a single atmos tech, no engineers, and not a single person in the security department

I don’t really “hate” armed cargo, but I don’t think there is a possible way of making Cargo into an actual department instead of an african child militia shitfest is hardcoded prohibitions.

You see, in any scenario that ordering guncrates are laxed, it WILL, inevitably, turn into a militia force armed more than security.

What do you suggest then?

And that is coming from the entire sec department 90% of the time (I think)

Armed cargo is on mrp a extremely necessary thing. As i mentioned there is no sec most of the time. Already when things go sideways we often times are severely under armed. Thus functionally removing the only way for the station to get guns (Or weed figthing crates as botany doesn’t exist half the time either) would severely limit the stations capabilities in most things. This is from the atmos tech that has to deal with up to 40 carp a round and is insanely thankful that cargo can give him anything to fight them with other than melee. The inability to open restricted crates would remove the entire point with for example Russian surplus as sec would never need such things

Whell one big problem is that it has to be somewhat laxed so it does not fuck upp revs.
One way if doing it would be to give care other things to do. As curently as nobody asks for anything from cargo so the cargo techs mostly just sit there waiting for an excuse to buy guns as that is one of the few things they can do that is interesting after like 40 minutes and all of the bounties that are going to be claimed are claimed and there are no more boxes on the station.

personally i think cargos just fine as it is partner

also

null crates and spec ops crates are designed to be disguised as a normal crate for something like a firefighting equipment crate or something

so having it be a huge really ominous red crate will instantly fucking give you away, instead of the current sort of disguise that they get with the light blue and white striped emergency crate

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Some of the changes are good, some are bad. I can probably code or port the bank machines, sure someone could code export pads, but the seals and resprited null crates are unnecessary and should not be added. The entire point is that it’s a stealth shipment. Bright red seals aren’t stealthy and would get caught by whatever customs IC NT would have. Also if you haven’t noticed, there are very few near-indestructable things in this game, and for good reason.

Also how about cargo sec actually do their job and make sure cargo don’t buy contraband and then hardcoding in a prevention to something extremely necessary in certain game modes and instead encouraging some rp as the cargo sec is there to watch cargo and prevent the cargo militias formation when it isn’t necessary. Thus unbreakable crates (A grate barricade btw) would be unnecessary and player interactions would be increased. All that is necessary is a single sec officer doing their job and 0 coding required. If you don’t want gun cargo play cargo sec and make sure it doesn’t happen

its actually a balance change to prevent buying extra funds if you get a hacked console.

Its no big deal honestly, crates could arrive disguised but only open with an emag but still be lava/blast resistant.

Not going to happen unless maybe once in a million shifts. Opinion discarded.

edited the syndie crate part stop complaining about that
also seals
also cargo self rewarding mechanism

If this level of hardcoded acses restrictions where to be added I would find it interestung if the Russian suply crates where changed bo be made out of wood and be quite easy to break (or just lack the hardcoded restriction part). As that would make it so that revs still can get some kind of guns if they manage to get control of cargo.
Thought of this a cuple of hours ago and just did not have a chance to post it I saw that you edited the unbreakable crates out and I aprove of that.
And the cargo making money system you propose I fin verry good as curently it is almost betree for cargo to refuse orders and try to force pepole to use their budget card form a pure mechanics standpoint

read the qm stamp part again its literally “buy privately” but requires a qm stamp.
also i do agree on the russian crate part, not for balance but for the fun.

Yea Russia crates are fun and I kinda whant to see then used more.
and making budget cards more relevant for departments bying stuff would be nice. But it would still be a need for cargo to have something to do after the first 30 or so minutes so the qm is not sit ring there with a pile of money and wondering what to do with it when most depertments now use their budget cards for bying stuff. Otherwise all of this would still not stop cargo from becoming an armed mob and at most postpone it for a bot longer into the shift.(I personaly when I play Qm wait untill I need to be armed (traitor on the lose with guns and no sec) before I even consider bying guns but I know some pepole are not as restrained)

Yeah, and that will be supplying the station with stuff they are missing in (as I stated) and building themselves a nice commisary/store or stocking up in surplus stuff. Also, validity of guncargo QMs should be made clear. Completely stopping Cargo from bearing arms is a good way of killing the job and being called /tg/ 2.0

dont touch my botany