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+--- Thread: Medbay (redo? overhaul? nerf? what do I call it?) (/showthread.php?tid=24849)
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Medbay (redo? overhaul? nerf? what do I call it?) - Mikeistaken - 01-20-2026
Medbay right now has the gameplay loop of, Scan, heal using one of your many powerful tools, send off.
What I want the gameplay loop to look like. Triage, Diagnose, Attempt treatment, Keep in medical for any potential secondary effects or if it wasnt the root cause, Release
What I prepose to help set it in the direction I mentioned
1. remove or nerf the medical scanner, right now it tells you about EVERY ailment that the patient might have, including but not limited to. Poison, Alergies, Physical force, Suffocation, Organ Problems, Bad lifestyle, Desiese, brain damage, eye problems and heart problems.
2. More Visible or audible systems to make up for #1
3. More tools to Diagnose problems to replace the all for 1 tool above
RE: Medbay (redo? overhaul? nerf? what do I call it?) - Cal - 01-20-2026
Yeah this is something I've personally mulled over in my head a lot, there's a clear wall between fast ss13 gameplay and satisfying doctor gameplay.
Personally, I wish doctors started with a full medical bag like the Mdir and they had to make use of the full toolset to diagnose and fix people. We *HAVE* tools that don't have uses. Penlights and stethoscope for two.
I also wish the menders weren't better than syringes/hypos in basically every way.
Maybe a small start would be requiring blood tests for detailed toxins testing. Putting a sample in a vial and then a centrifuge to examine exactly what's in someone's blood, perhaps?
It would make sense if Doctor medical training trait made you better at diagnoses as well - examining someone telling you they look sickly for poisoning, seem short of breath for oxygen, making you better at stopping blood flowing with just your hands, and not harm people by applying cauterization?
RE: Medbay (redo? overhaul? nerf? what do I call it?) - Mikeistaken - 01-20-2026
(01-20-2026, 11:22 AM)Cal Wrote: Yeah this is something I've personally mulled over in my head a lot, there's a clear wall between fast ss13 gameplay and satisfying doctor gameplay.
Personally, I wish doctors started with a full medical bag like the Mdir and they had to make use of the full toolset to diagnose and fix people. We *HAVE* tools that don't have uses. Penlights and stethoscope for two.
I also wish the menders weren't better than syringes/hypos in basically every way.
Maybe a small start would be requiring blood tests for detailed toxins testing. Putting a sample in a vial and then a centrifuge to examine exactly what's in someone's blood, perhaps?
It would make sense if Doctor medical training trait made you better at diagnoses as well - examining someone telling you they look sickly for poisoning, seem short of breath for oxygen, making you better at stopping blood flowing with just your hands, and not harm people by applying cauterization?
I like all of these suggestions, I dont like hyposprays and automenders either, but automenders are just like topical sprays so I dont think its very fair to get rid of them, and hyposprays, they can go IMO, just a faster syringe
RE: Medbay (redo? overhaul? nerf? what do I call it?) - Kotlol - 01-20-2026
Hyposprays are made to speed up injections...
Automenders is to stop people from just dunking chemicals on people.
As for medbay changes.... I disagree with the full revamping cause that will spiral QUICKLY into:
"Just cryopod em" or "Clone em" then you want to nerf those and now it's...
"Antag punched me to 40% health, better lay in medbay for 3 minutes."
What I recommend is actually an overhaul on the organ damage and damage system in general, rather then auto-mender / scanner changes.
Example: "You were beat up alot in the gut, thus your organs have damage, they will come up damaged but insted of damaged but you can survive till they die... organs that are damaged starts to slow down or get worst."
Damaged lungs? You recover less stamina and take more oxygen damage.
Damaged Liver? Double Tox Damage.
Damaged Kidneys? -- Well you get it.
And how do you fix those organs? By treating them with the right medicine or giving a prescription someone needs to keep track of.
Stuff to increase the doctoring but not increase medbay too much.
Of course to deal with organ damage permanently is to cyborg them as those cannot break unless they get emagged. But that requires a lengthy surgery procedure.
That's what I think. I already dislike how surgery works on how clunky it is. Even with the streamlining, but the tools and everything it just makes me go: I haven't done surgery in months.. shouldn't be.. AND I bodge it up even WITH a wiki.
But yea... if you want more doctoring... don't nerf it and make it a hassle.
Make it deeper. Simply by having to heal organs to keep a person really healthy helps MORE then you think.
People can ignore organ damage still but be at a smaller disadvantage/larger disadvantage.
The old is still there, mender, hypo and get out. But by adding more chances for other treatments... you get to do some actual doctoring.
So yea.. add more organ damaging. It's very silly we can target body parts but in combat it BARELY does anything cept go around armor.
I wanna hit someone in the leg and a doctor ACTUALLY has to patch up a leg to get your speed back to full.
RE: Medbay (redo? overhaul? nerf? what do I call it?) - Mikeistaken - 01-20-2026
(01-20-2026, 01:11 PM)Kotlol Wrote: What I recommend is actually an overhaul on the organ damage and damage system in general, rather then auto-mender / scanner changes.
Example: "You were beat up alot in the gut, thus your organs have damage, they will come up damaged but insted of damaged but you can survive till they die... organs that are damaged starts to slow down or get worst."
Damaged lungs? You recover less stamina and take more oxygen damage.
Damaged Liver? Double Tox Damage.
Damaged Kidneys? -- Well you get it.
I like this Idea aswell, however I feel like it would be still majorly overshadowed by the physical damage, so im thinking, maybe stabbing weapons should deal extra bleed damage, blunt deals more organ based damage, and cutting/burning would deal topical damage, where cutting would inflict bleed but not as much as stabbing
RE: Medbay (redo? overhaul? nerf? what do I call it?) - Cringe - 01-20-2026
how would this play on classic? people dont want to stay in medbay, they want to get back to what they were doing.
also kinda hurts paramedic medic, running around to heal people, which i quite like.
RE: Medbay (redo? overhaul? nerf? what do I call it?) - Ikea - 01-20-2026
I'm for expanding medical however I'd much rather focus on complicating the treatment/symptoms then the process of diagnosis. Instead of the new player experience being "oh I scan them and they have X let me ask someone or look on the wiki for X" it's now "let me run through a checklist of everything first because I have no clue a wet cough is actually the flu before I even have a clue of what to do with them or how to ask". It just feels like a recipe to make medbay way more overwhelming and not as interesting gameplay wise compared to more ways people can get injured.
RE: Medbay (redo? overhaul? nerf? what do I call it?) - tamakona - 01-20-2026
The thing about medbay is that it kinda sucks for the person getting healed, who has to stand there doing nothing. It's also just routine maintenance that gets in the way of what you actually want to do, and given that rounds are getting shorter while mechanics are taking longer, medbay has felt a lot more punishing to stand around and wait around in lately. I don't think this should change as there should be some kind of punishment for playing recklessly and one that gets the crew to interact isn't necessarily bad.
I think this is one of the situations where the "nerf because OP" approach isn't the solution to achieve the desired effect. I think instead, buffs, or rather additions, to the list of afflictions to the crew is better and more fun for the game. Ailments that, similar to what you suggest don't show up in the health scanner and need to be diagnosed via symptoms, for example. But we can take it a step further, what if said ailment was only obtainable via doing something unusually risky? That way we can have the mundane injuries be treated quickly as they are now so people can quickly get back to work, but we also have the more variable gameplay, without it feeling like players go to medbay to get imprisoned against their will; they'll have to have willingly done something they're aware of risks a long stay in medbay.
One of the ideas I have is what if nanites could rearrange the positions of your organs, where you'd need to get organ surgery in a certain order to fix it. Mining would never pass up an opportunity for super materials, so it's likely they're gonna go butt heads with a few at least a few times a shift. The health scanner already doesn't tell you "The liver is in the wrong place!" and every mispositioned organ could come with a different symptom, and the pattern of the symptoms could matter too to tell you the order in which you do the surgeries, so it's different and unique for the doctor everytime. The only downside to this idea is that we've been sort of kicking the miners in the shin these couple of weeks, but it's just an example for the concept I suggested.
RE: Medbay (redo? overhaul? nerf? what do I call it?) - Vulwin_Gilran - 01-20-2026
Honestly I feel like limiting what your med scanner can actually detect is all that would be needed. Like for example if it couldn't detect the organ failure condition, you could still see the organ had moderate damage and that they are showing some symptoms of damage. So you can then use some tools to determine if they are entering failure, like for lung/cardiac the stethoscope has functions to detect a LOT of stuff even the presence of specific chemicals.
RE: Medbay (redo? overhaul? nerf? what do I call it?) - GARGATHUGANOKSREVENG - 01-20-2026
(01-20-2026, 11:08 AM)Mikeistaken Wrote: What I want the gameplay loop to look like. Triage, Diagnose, Attempt treatment, Keep in medical for any potential secondary effects or if it wasnt the root cause, Releaseok add pathology back
forcing people use syringes to identify reagents in the bloodstream or replace the hypospray altogether maybe sounds good(?) in theory but in execution it's just slow and annoying because of the waiting times which are amplified when you're lagging (more delay between clicks).
if you ever decide to force players into using syringes for things more, I should hope you add a way to select how much you want to inject/extract in one click, in a right click menu or something because the UI mechanical droppers have is horrible to work with.
RE: Medbay (redo? overhaul? nerf? what do I call it?) - Mikeistaken - 01-20-2026
(01-20-2026, 10:19 PM)GARGATHUGANOKSREVENG Wrote: ok add pathology back
Pathology was bad because it was only ever used for antaging, and I dont see what that has to contribute here
(01-20-2026, 10:19 PM)GARGATHUGANOKSREVENG Wrote: forcing people use syringes to identify reagents in the bloodstream or replace the hypospray altogether maybe sounds good(?) in theory but in execution it's just slow and annoying because of the waiting times which are amplified when you're lagging (more delay between clicks).
if you ever decide to force players into using syringes for things more, I should hope you add a way to select how much you want to inject/extract in one click, in a right click menu or something because the UI mechanical droppers have is horrible to work with.
I do agree that the wait times for syringes feel way too long for what it is, and that they should probably have a shorter time, but I would also like to note that syringes, much like force feeding, allows you to stack action bars on top of each other (click on them with the previous action bar and another one of the same type will run behind it) Mitigating the time for subsequent pulls but not the initial one
RE: Medbay (redo? overhaul? nerf? what do I call it?) - Lord_earthfire - 01-21-2026
(01-20-2026, 04:35 PM)tamakona Wrote: I think this is one of the situations where the "nerf because OP" approach isn't the solution to achieve the desired effect.
Thus isn't a "nerf because OP" approach. It's "nerf because it's boring". It's not fun to work with overpowered tools.
On topic:
Prolonging waiting times in medbay opens up opportunities to interact each other and disrupts the flow if the round for the person in medbay. Both things are desireable things in a game vased around social interactions.
Personally, i thunk the tools aren't the biggest reason. The health systems are too simple to make use of them.
Even if you don't have the scanner, just look at your health inducator and what you encountered recently and you can fix that. Stood in a fire or space? Sulf. Took a few toolbox hits? Styptic. Neither of both? Charcoal. All if that didn't help? Cloning or you actually do some doctoring.
There is not much variety or nuance here, and most attempts to make treatments more involved lead to quite some pushback.
TDHooligan made a great PR draft some time ago to address that. And i feel that's a direction to push further.
RE: Medbay (redo? overhaul? nerf? what do I call it?) - GARGATHUGANOKSREVENG - 01-21-2026
(01-20-2026, 11:14 PM)Mikeistaken Wrote: Pathology was bad because it was only ever used for antaging, and I dont see what that has to contribute herethen make it better, diseases are cool. the current disease system is really basic though
(01-20-2026, 11:14 PM)Mikeistaken Wrote: I do agree that the wait times for syringes feel way too long for what it is, and that they should probably have a shorter time, but I would also like to note that syringes, much like force feeding, allows you to stack action bars on top of each other (click on them with the previous action bar and another one of the same type will run behind it) Mitigating the time for subsequent pulls but not the initial onethis is why i specified lag
RE: Medbay (redo? overhaul? nerf? what do I call it?) - tamakona - 01-21-2026
(01-21-2026, 12:10 AM)Lord_earthfire Wrote:(01-20-2026, 04:35 PM)tamakona Wrote: I think this is one of the situations where the "nerf because OP" approach isn't the solution to achieve the desired effect.
Thus isn't a "nerf because OP" approach. It's "nerf because it's boring". It's not fun to work with overpowered tools.
Overpowered is relative, isn't it? The diagnosis is that it's boring because the tools are overpowered, so the original posts conclusion is that a nerf is the solution, hence "nerf because OP". Whatever the semantics are doesn't really matter though, I'm just saying that it isn't the solution; I think that's boring too. Instead, we should buff the difficulty of ailments. Someone just pointed out in a different post that even if the medical scanner was removed entirely, diagnosis is still simple and treatment is still sort of the same. If that isn't addressed, then a nerf doesn't do anything to make things less boring, and is just tedium for tedium's sake.
RE: Medbay (redo? overhaul? nerf? what do I call it?) - Lord_earthfire - 01-21-2026
(01-21-2026, 12:45 AM)tamakona Wrote: Instead, we should buff the difficulty of ailments. Someone just pointed out in a different post that even if the medical scanner was removed entirely, diagnosis is still simple and treatment is still sort of the same. If that isn't addressed, then a nerf doesn't do anything to make things less boring, and is just tedium for tedium's sake.
If you would have read the rest of my post, you would realize that i agree with this.