Its funny you should mention that, because thats being worked on
Iāll say it again even though I just said it in the monster post. The capability of self-sufficiency without interacting with other departments is bad for the game.
- Bluespace miners did this
- Autodoc did this
- Dispenser in botany does this (and they have more than enough stuff available to them without it, theyāre just inferior to what they get via interation with others which is good)
- Ore Silo does this, and also contributes a lot to players not realizing theyāre consuming rare and very limited resources (although playing with 50 bluespace miners every round definitely compounded this)
- The sheer volume of medical supplies available at roundstart via the 8+ NanoMed vendors does this to chemistry and doctors both, and has resulted in the constant mentality of āJust use a fucking patchā instead of allowing doctors to do their job as they like.
The game is not supposed to be about rushing your personal project in isolation, and the failures of one department are supposed to have a rippling effect on the station as a whole.
Youāre directly financing xenobiology powercreep with real life money bounties and are responsible for this mess.
Iām not responsible for crossbreeds existing or the plans for future crossbreeds to have been added in the first place. Iām responsible for shutting down much worse crossbreeds that were initially on the drawing board before I took up the mantle of leading the completion. I have been in contact with the original programmer behind them, and also was encouraging the rework that made crossbreeds not so trivial and shut-in to obtain.
Game balance is always at the forefront of my approach to coding changes. The funding was posted nearly a full year ago and I have constantly shut down overpowered ideas and suggestions for the bounties that have popped up in the server.
If this thread was an attempted personal attack on me, you should really get more involved with me first (The Xenobio discord is public access via the bounties). More crossbreeds isnāt the problem, itās how theyāre obtained and how Xenobio operates as a whole.
The go to botany strategy was to rush chem dispenser board anyways.
They also fixed the problem of miners refusing to mine.
What are you implying by this? Are you suggesting it needs to change? I am curious to see what you have in mind.
No, the sleeper does this. TG removed it for that reason specifically.
Iām suggesting its addition was another nail in the coffin of players needing to visit cargo for supplies. Whether this one is actually getting pulled? Not sure.
I include the āinfinite chem sleeperā when I say overabundance of healing supplies. I did forget to mention it there though.
Also sleepersā days are numbered
No, Iām not taking cloning, and Iām also not taking cryo, but I will be tweaking how cryo works so that it can functionally replace sleepers, but will need to be manually loaded with chems without duplicating them into ludicrous amounts or overdosing patients inside of them (unless emagged).
I have always wondered why cargo is just such a dead department, the only time I really want something from cargo as a roboticist is:
Costume crates for honk mechs
Medkits & Fire suits for bots
More often than not when I request crates, I have to force a borg to get me the crates because any cargonians there are just arenāt even interested in doing their job. But, that may be because they either go SSD due to how little there is to do or something else.
To make departments need to go to cargo for materialsā¦ can get a bit much.
As a roboticist Iād end up spending more time begging cargo to give me 200+ iron sheets and 10+ sheets of every material than actually doing what I want to do.
Definitely - youād need a crate or other container any time you wanted to transfer any real amounts of mats. Ore Silo is by far the weakest point I have as far as problems with āQoLā changes removing interaction goes.
I also donāt have a major hateboner for it, but I do recognize the negative impact it had in addition to its QOL improvement.
Powercreep is a bit funny, since most of the power creep stuff is actually QoL stuff
Miners not having to start out with pickaxes.
Miners not having to smelt their ores into sheets at their smelter.
Ore Silo links.
The new autolathe GUI which is letting me produce over 100s of atmos bots very easily. (Can we get a similar GUI for the exosuit fabricator ;p)
If you want, what makes xenobiology so overly efficient is how easy it is to upgrade the machinery to tier 3, needing only iron and glass. Tier 2 is effectively round start, as the very first research done every time, industrial engineering, is t2 parts.
Of course, if you arenāt killing and grinding grey slimes for monkey cubes, there are the cross breed alternatives. If you want to make a fun change, reproductive extracts create live slimes of that color instead, itāll be comedy gold.
Iāll also mention one of my plans; industrial dark purple accepts plasma and gives out plasma
I was creating a circuit to auto injecting plasma, taking plasma and grinding plasma. Tho it is very hard, especially because of how stacks are calculated, so I might eventually try again with a couple of differences.
We should just remove the slime console
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You know what, fuck it, I agree.
The cells have disposal bins for a reason.
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In all seriousness, the rework looked pretty damn promising - Xenobio would be restricted to choosing a limited amount of crossbreed branches, and each one involved maintaining the stability of a non-sentient blob.
Youād have to keep it fed, happy and non-aggressive or else catastrophe on par with SM destruction was possible since it was essentially a blob.
Sadly, didnāt do much for not being a personal project though - it just slowed down production and reduced maximum capability per round substantially.
I think we must first take a step back and return to our origins in order to understand the concept and what SS13ās ābalanceā was intended to be.
Iām not joking about the disposal bins being there for a reason. What are they there for, the cells arenāt even good for hiding dead bodies. The lockers have biosuits for a reason too.
Stating who finances this is not a personal attack, neither is this thread. To make it clear, I want xenobiology nerfed by a lot, you just happen to be putting money to bloating it more and Iām pointing it out for the sake of this discussion so itās clear what motives are at play.
Would be a nice start. Without console thereās at least some risk involved of a slime glomping the scientist.
Ruko: ye lets remove the console XD
Everyone: yeah letās do that
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Until slimes recognize the scientist as their friend at least. (Or does that happen through the console? 
)
I meant the suggestion as a joke, and it only solves one part of the problem - while it adds risk, it does nothing to curb their self reliance.
Replacement of āCreate monkey cubeā effects would be a much better step in my opinion.
The more I think about removing the console though, the better the idea sounds just because itās simple and does solve half the problem about as well as the total rework. Iām gonna try doing Xenobio without the console sometime.
Monkey cubes in general need a cost increase, you can make thousands of them with just a few plant harvests in botany. More than anyone will use in several rounds. Actually, could swat two flies here if botany biogenerator didnāt get such massive discounts from upgrades.
Monkey cubes are an ideal supply for shifting into āAvailable only from Cargoā territory.
Iām busy with medical right now, but trying to make Cargo relevant is my next goal.
5 monkey cubes for 2000, you can buy an assault rifle and ammo for that.
To be perfectly honest, when was the last time that you saw a traitor abuse crossbreeds to murder people, or create a cool traitor gimmick with crossbreeds? I for sure have never seen that happen. 99% of all xenobiologists just create sentient mobs and golems, create grief and leave it at that. Which is really sad to be honest.
On top of that, crossbreeds are balanced around the fact that they are hard to mass produce. For example a botanist only needs to get his plant once, and then has an infinite supply of it. That is not the case for xenobiology. I would approve of a sentient monster/golem nerf because lets be honest, monster spam is just awful. But i do think that botany or mining can get destructive stuff alot faster and more reliable than a xenobiologist trying to use crossbreeds. I know that i am biased because i love xenobiology but i really believe that crossbreeds arenāt that big of a problem. I do hate sentient mob and golem spam though. And that was the main point of this thread anyways.
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