Xenobiology is currently the most overpowered department, yet it is still being expanded and more tools are being added to it in form of further slime breeds. It can produce an infinite stream of golems and sentient mobs of various types, most of which are dedicated combat mobs with no other purpose.
They do all this without ever leaving their lab, they have no need for the outside world aside from upgrading their machines a singular time. There’s no departmental cooperation to achieve this power, no player interaction whatsoever. No resources are being spent as they create all they need right inside their lab. No resources are needed to jump start this factory either, they have everything they need from the start.
Just a player closed in their lab for the entire round, spamming countless monsters upon the station that are expected not to grief unless told to.
What I propose is removing xenobiology self sufficiency by removing their ability to replicate resources they use for slime production, namely plasma and monkey cubes. After that, they will be forced to interact with people outside their little secluded room to get their powergaming toys and monsters.
Honestly, I fully blame crossbreeding as a concept and believe that it’s inherently extremely bloating.
I think old-school xenobiology was in a healthy state, and if you want to expand it, it should be HORIZONTAL movement; as in, adding something else to interact with instead of bloating what exists (e.g. that blob thing.)
when even one of the primary developers behind crossbreeding rants about it being a complete failure and a mistake you know something’s gone wrong.
Haha yes I will have to pray that a botanist is active, not a traitor, not a bitch AND can follow simple instructions without taking too much of my time!
Good news for you, the stronger of the crossbreeds have yet to be implemented.
If the non antag keeps spamming monsters, even when they self antag, he starts racking up blame on himself. Furthermore, the RD, security, HoS and Captain have full rights to say “no, bad boy. Don’t”
And at first sight of monsters, dunk on his ass.
I’m gonna shoot my self in the foot and point out that cringe station 13 (tg) recently fucked over yellow slimes and some other stuff, go check it out and enjoy making the game less fun.
The actual saddest part is that often xenobios rarely have impact with the extra stuff they spend their time doing
they trap themselves in an endless loop of means to ends. The stuff that you do see is actually the simplest from non-crossbreeds (golems, gold cores, yellow cells and red potions if lucky.)
Nobody is saying just ruin the job. But the reality is that it is a VERY big power point. To the point where if a revolution happens or a cult, the order of priorities should be: Cargo > Xenobio > the rest. And that’s because of mob spam.
BUT,
Is actually true.
So honestly, what it needs is a way to ACCELERATE their stuff but through interactions with the rest of the station. Maybe keep things as they are, but add new bigger incentives to interact.
As a xenobio main
Crossbreeding was a mistake
But there’s more to it than that.
The stuff from crossbreeding is UNBELIEVABLY STRONG
but it fucking SUCKS to mass produce
I can hand out 20-30 stabilised light pinks
but that is boring
and even if i do that nobody fucking knows what they do
like everyone knows hehe meth funne
but nobody knows this shit
I chuck boxes of regeneratives at medical and have to spend more time than it took making them to explain what they do
I hate it
So much.
I also consider gold slimes and making the mobs from gold slimes sentient a self debasing waste of a xenobiologists time
Like sure you got a change carp that will just run around being a shitter
Big whoop
In that time I couldve made three golems replate the entire station in BS floor tiles, harvest four sets of ash drake armor, and handed out recurring purple to all of medical
this
I could TOTALLY go to botany and give them a crystalline silver, making their job approximately 3x as fast, but what for. Why?
For the selfish, they have nothing to offer me back
For the selfless, what’s the point. They don’t know how to use it.
Bigger incentives to interact without gimping the entire job would be welcome
first because it encourages people to learn what the job can do for them
and second because it lets me do more than just ctrl click on monkeys for an hour
I want to help people, but nobody knows how to use the insanely powerful shit I dump on their doorstep
One time I managed to get the opportunity as xenobiologists while cultists were running around.
Cult was winning but they completely ignored xenobiology and I tipped the scales with golden sentient monsters; this was before I even knew cross breeds were really a thing.
My only regret is that it wasn’t me who was becoming a sentient monster and getting the opportunity to btfo cult. Obviously some cult were mad I btfo’d them, accepted potion and caused trouble, but eh, hoes mad, you know?
It was a lot of fun.
If some changes are going to be made, make sure you actually know what you’re doing before going unga bunga mode; that’s all I ask.
Copying and pasting the wiki’s explanation with a few minor changes helps most of the time
“This makes nearby plants grow a bit faster and prevents weeds/pests from growing, don’t break it dumbasses”
well that works i guess but you have two choices
Choice 1: Alt tab to the wiki, scroll down to the crossbreeding section, hunt through the dropdowns to find the one you want, copy it, go back to the game tab, paste it in, make any alterations for say, nuanced use or something, shove that text box back in the corner, run over to whoever, yeet the box at them, hit the say button, hope and pray they notice and got all that, and then run back to your lab and mix up a new batch of whatever
Repeat
or
Choice 2: prepare, in advance, a notepad document with short blurbs and summarays for every crossbreed and potion you would ever want to distribute. Alt tab, scroll down, copy and paste, tab back, run up to them, throw it at them, say it, pray they notice, and leave
I did choice 2 and also posted it on forums, and nobody read it
I read your guides, just not too thoroughly.
Ironically someone was like “wall of fame, ny1?”
and when I was in favor of it, I was gonna mention that guide but the thread died.
It is a shame people do not make good use of mhelp.
When browsing through websites, use ctrl + f
With blue space miners gone Im actually surprised people arent demanding more industrial crossbreeds from Xeno.
Seems like when people think about Xeno they just think about the big monsters and stuff and not all the other myriad ways in which Xeno is ridiculously op.
As a person who somewhat knows xenobio, I just agree with RDS.
Yeah xenobio is super powerful and can do anything, but it needs set up plus rounds usually end by the 1 hour mark so not much time for a proper xenobio
Currently the only resource being spent is time, and a total Xenobiology rework was in progress until somewhat recently (now that I look it has been more than a couple of months)
There was a team working on completely re-doing how crossbreeds were obtained, and crossbreeds are the primary issue with Xenobiology’s power levels.
If we compare Xenobio to the two other departments I like to target (Botany and Mining) they’re generally much slower to reach the point of ridiculous power unless the department is actually manned by two people working together as intended.
It would require a significant rework of some of their resources, but I second the sentiment of removing self-sufficiency of every department period, not just xenobiology. Cargo is almost completely unutilized by other departments at this point, and “QoL” has been used an excuse to remove inter-department reliance by salty players that just want to rush rush rush rush rush instead of allowing for necessary interactions to take place, including negative ones.
Xenobio never had that dependency in the first place, but I don’t think that was a good design choice.
TL;DR
I agree with the core sentiment of your post, but I don’t think powercreep is the problem necessarily - it’s being totally self sufficient and also able to acquire stuff relevant to every department without ever leaving, even if it does take a long time to get appropriately set up and functioning.
Putting a bottleneck on production so that it requires the cooperation of others is a good way to limit their output.