Intro
Hello! This is Wisty’s guide to virology! And by that I mean we’re playing the goodie two-shoes virologist! First off the virology page for the wiki is a must: Infections - BeeStation Wiki
But it’s more of a textbook for any missing gaps you have. As for the absolute basics, it goes like:
Theory
Viruses can be found in many places, most of the ones you’re gonna be dealing with is people and blood bottles. In people the virus is active and can be harmful or beneficial depending on its symptoms.
Viruses are made up of 1 to 6 symptoms. You can check these in your pandemic machine:
…or extrapolator (don’t forget you can use in hand (z by default) to change between scanning and extrapolating):
…both found in virology!
Each symptom will have varying numbers for each of the 5 stats (Stealth, Resistance, Stage speed, Transmission, and Severity). These levels get added together (might subtract if the level is negative) to form the final virus’ levels. For example a virus with 2 symptoms, with 2 and 1 resistance each, will make the virus have 3 resistance total. But if the symptoms have 2 and -1 resistance, it will end up with just 1.
Symptom levels are important because the overall virus levels will affect the thresholds for each symptom, and a good virus will have to get there. Mashing just good symptoms together willy nilly will probably get you a virus where none of the thresholds are met so the good symptoms are just kinda meh.
Practice
As a viro you’re doing 2 things. Curing viruses and creating them. I suggest you prioritise the first one.
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“Everyone is yelling at me, what do I do?”
That probably means someone (or the whole station) has a virus! But not to worry, curing viruses is easy.
If it’s not stealthy, scan someone infected with a health scanner and it’ll tell you the cure.
If it’s stealthy you need to extrapolate the virus (or extract blood with a syringe) from the person and analyse it in your Pandemic machine.
Then get the cure (either make it in your lab with your crate of chemicals or go annoy a chemist), feed it to the person you scanned (5-10 units is usually enough), and once they’re not infected, take a blood sample. If you put a cured blood sample (with anti-bodies) in the Pandemic machine, you can make 20 units of a vaccine every few seconds. Either give these to your CMO, chemist, or make them into pills yourself. Even 0.1 units per pill works!
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“Okay no one’s dying, how can I still help?”
Well, you want to make cool viruses!
Get an extrapolator, screwdriver it to get the stinky scanner module out, get at least a tier 2 at the medical protolathe (you need better scanning modules to get stronger symptoms, so check it often or bother scientists (normal scanner extracts symptoms up to 7, advanced to 8, phasic ALL)).
Now grab a biohazard bag from the orangy/green lockers in your office and go scan in maints for every dried blood puddle, crusty vomit, rotting gibbs and used syringes (people can also have dormant viruses) (also rats, but don’t extrapolate them, just grab them dead)! Extrapolate any viruses, don’t worry about extrapolating specific symptoms just yet.
Once you fill up your biobag, empty it on the ground at viro by dragging it’s sprite onto the floor. It will drop all the viruses in a neat pile. If you alt click said pile, it will bring up the menu on the right with every virus and rat you collected. You can then, with the extrapolator in hand, scan them from this menu and take any specific symptoms you want.
By the way, you can get most (not level 9) missing or hard to get symptoms using chemistry, check the “Mutagenic Chemicals” part of the viro wiki or the Virology part of the chemistry wiki. You can even do most of it in your office!
After that, creating a good virus just means having your extrapolated symptoms and adding each symptom onto a new beaker using a dropper (1 unit is enough) so they mix. Remember to add Formaldehyde to neuter symptoms if you just want their levels without effects before adding the symptom to the main virus. Add cryostylane and spacecillin to completed viruses so they don’t mutate/spread (respectively) and get the CMO notified on what you’re doing.
From here it’s up to you! Learning specifics might be trial and error, or learning from colleagues/your CMO. Remember to wear PPE when working with live viruses, read the SoP ( Department Standard Operating Procedure: Medical - BeeStation Wiki ) it’s here for your own good, trust me) and don’t get lynched!
If you want Wisty's Cool Virus (Trademarked) as an example to start off with:
- Necrotic metabolism,
- Self-respiration,
- Eternal Youth,
- Organ restoration,
- Mind restoration,
- Blob Spores (neutered).
You might need a tier 4 scanning module to extrapolate the blob spores symptom, or you can use Synaptizine on a virus with it, which removes a random symptom (hopefully not the one you want).
And most importantly:
