Genetics: A discussion

[Nerkson]

The reason I have made this thread is that a change was made today, July 12th :

• Physically Fit mutation stability cost change: -5 -> 5.
  
• Synchronized Vestigial Ballistics stability cost change: -15 -> 0.
  

I wouldn't say this was the last straw or that these changes are unwarranted or anything like that - it has been a constant thought in my head for a while now, but I think this would be a good time to talk about Genetics and what purpose it actually serves.

Genetics is one half of the mad space doctor power fantasy part of "Retro Future Space Adventures": You get to mutate people into epic heroes or powerful monsters, or in rare cases mutate innocent people into barely babbling puddles of goo. It inspires the idea of playing God. There's no real need for Genetics, these concepts are all bonuses to enhance the crews life. I would put genetics in the same category as say, the Chef or Botany. Both departments could be missing and nothing will change to fundamentally impact a round while departments like Engineering or Security can drastically affect a round by their presence or lack of.

Since I've started playing, genetics has undergone lots of changes and I cannot help but feel that Genetics is in a lost spot.

1. It's a complicated department that suffers from massive time gates and resource costs that aren't easily replenished - in many ways I'd say its similar to Botany and the knowledge of splicing plants and properly managing mutations (Except Botany can just use the stations budget while Genetics can't).
   
2. The people who play genetics are often screen-tappers who rarely engage with the crew - beyond screaming for Johnny Stafferman to come by because he has a rare gene they need. (I'm guilty of this as well - its way too easy to get lost in searching for the next gene that 20+ minutes go by and you wonder why there's a bunch of dead people splattered over the halls outside genetics).
   
3. Over time genetics have been nerfed more than anything - Stability went from 125 points to 100 points, and some of the more common genes that granted free stability now are zeroed out or cost stability.
   
4. The cost of engaging with genetics is too high. As a reminder, at 100 Stability abilities work 100% of the time but at 80% stability abilities only work 80% of the time. Below 50 stability, you start to run into issues where your speech is near always garbled and your genes begin downgrading to their harmful variants, and you begin mutating at random. If you don't pick the right genes, you will mutate. Why take these risks? The Director will get mad at you if you sell un-stabilized genes or sell genes considered Antag Bait.
   

Now you might be saying "Nerkson, you silly man! You can just use Stabilizer to remove the risks of stability downsides!" Well, that itself is kind of a weird problem as well. Right now Stabilizer is the most valuable chromosome. It means some genes don't get full benefit of empowered but most of the genes don't need the full benefit of empower to be useful - Anaerobic Lungs and Thermal can both be safely Stabilized and ensure you will never die in space from exposure. The Hulk gene just mutates down to Musculature if your health drops below 50%. You only empower genes that are native to a person because it incurs 0 Stability cost, and the other chromosomes might as well not exist at all. The number of times I've bothered using Weakener, Reinforcer, Energy Booster, or Camouflager can be counted on a single hand. Synch is used slightly more but it has a cost where only 6 total genes can be synch'd on a single person. Stabilizer and Power Booster are the only useful chromosomes, period.

You might also be saying "If you want to use Genes at their full impact, then you need to be willing to accept they won't work 100% of the time or you will have to taken on massive downside genes." My response is plainly that this isn't very fun. No one demands robotics have to blind you if you want to run very fast and be unable to be tripped. Eating a healthy meal from the Chef doesn't make you run slower because you're tired from eating a good meal. To me this feels like if getting 2+ robotic limbs caused them to sometimes try to kill you or if you get 2+ organs replaced you have a chance to suffer organ rejection and have the organs die at random.

As a kind of last point, I'll also argue most of genetics is useless. Dozens of genes to control how people talk, and I have never had a single person ask to be swedish. Another dozen genes that cause you to scream randomly or age randomly. Fun? I guess? But who buys "I always scream randomly" or "My fingers sound like a wind chime" regularly?

So, my question is simple: What purpose should genetics serve, and to what cost should it serve that? As it stands, I see the future of genetics being more nerfs - Anaerobic and Thermals could easily be nerfed in the future because they're just too useful and auto-include. People don't take downside genes because they're not fun to play as, and you're more than likely to earn the ire of people for even offering them.

Should genetics just be less powerful? Should genes have a time gate on them but be allowed to be more powerful as a result? Should the department encourage more interaction with the crew?

If you're asking me what I think might be neat, I wouldn't mind: separating genes you start with vs genes you get from the booth. Make your starting genes more compelling and put limits on what can appear - Seeing a person with five variants of speech genes is crippling when you tell them they're genetically the equivalent of a Hapsburg. Make gene booth genes diminish on a timer that can be refreshed at any time. 10 minutes is a fine number to start with because it encourages people to come back to genetics instead of it being a "Well I got my genes, time to go toss off to whatever else I wanted to do."

Thanks for your time.

[Lord_earthfire]

I think we removed enough stability sources thst we should 1ü0% assume someone to be under 100 stability if they pick one or two reinforced/empowered genes.

Woth hiw stability is right now, this makes active useable mutations unuseable. In an engagement you cannot take a 20 - 30% chance to have a misfire that potentionally takes you out of s fight. Above that, most active mutations are simply weaker than passive ones in general.

Even worse, most active mutations are usefull for antags, while passive mutations are most usefull for non-antags.

Thats why i think we should remove mutation misfire chance.

This makes the danger with stability apply evenly to passive and active mutations. And it makes it feasable go below 100 stability and pick up a few non-stabilized genes.

[Fuppy]

I honestly don't mind the nerfs that much. I remember when base stability got taken down from 125 to 100, and I felt a bit uneasy then. But all it really means is there's actual risk involved if you wanna take something empowered. Also you can still get away with taking empowered genes if the other genes you have are passive in nature as opposed to abilities with a cooldown. All the latest change does is remove weird exceptions to rules that you are quick to tell any new geneticist about, therefore making the job easier to step into.

As for the other things mentioned such as the lack of social interaction involved and the fact the job is a big time sink, I agree. I think even when you're having fun with genetics and getting all the fun genes for the crew you're ultimately sacrificing a lot of potential interaction, and this includes if you're like me and talk to people while you scan them. No matter which way you slice it you're spending a bunch of time pretty much playing a separate game from everyone else. Its why I light up whenever someone drops by to give me the port-a-gene. I can interact far more with the crew, talk with people in between scans, all while being able to gene nerd to my heart's content.

I think upgrades should honestly take far less time and effort to acquire. A lot of time in genetics is spent waiting for something you need to research. Sitting and waiting a few minutes for mutation storage to research is just not engaging gameplay in the slightest. It can provide some nice downtime if you need to go handle some stuff IC (eating, showering, etc) but otherwise it just serves as an unnecessary temporary roadblock when you could be doing more fun gene stuff. So yeah maybe that combined with other port-a-gene adjacent type tools that encourage you to roam around the station and interact with crew while you work.

I didn't really address everything you mentioned, but I'll close off by saying I think a lot of the useless genes are fine and I don't mind them being there as fluff... also I'm the guy who consistently buys/takes dactyl crystallization. Its fun hearing my silly snap.

[meaow589]

1) moderate agree in time waste if done by bad RNG , beginner but I see many round that genetic make a regen -anaerobic -hulk gene in 5 minute of round and it quite often when in high pop round where genetic have time to do their own thing instead go help medical team.
2)i mean it depend on what play style you are for me yes I not active with anyone if I play genetic unless they come to my department But you still can active interaction if you want trying to find person who has a good gene and invite them instead of yelling radio to come to their place also you can make your lab in the cafeteria if you want you just need 2 thing to make why not do it?
3)this one is strongly agree should had more gene to increase stability
And yeah other chromosomes are except stabilizer is rarely use
For my opinion I agree with you that nurf might cause a problem but in other view of time/interaction I think it fine.it make genetic be genetic stay in their office entire round as genetic is common and reasonable for me.

[Kotlol]

The thing about robotics is they have no research to improve upon like genetics, so it's install and done.

But... cyberorgans and cyberparts do have weaknesses themselves.. EMPs.

My problem with genetics is their slow and uninspired gameplay like robotics.
Genetics do have a lot to do still when researching genes. Robotics got nothing.
Genetics major problems is the fact... you are in your corner researching all the time.
Mostly on the same monkey over and over to get mutations to sell in the booth.

In "my opinion" there needs to be more ways to manipulate genes to get certain mutations to happen. But at a risk of killing the patient.
Like actual gene splicing. As we stand "RIGHT NOW", the only way your monkey will die if you give them too much bad genes they die or if they take too much rad damage. Good geneticists will never let their monkey die... bad ones will. So mostly they will never grab a new monkey.

And to encourage looking for certain genes and specific genes are only unlocked through this "gene splicing" methode. It will give genecists reasons to work on this.
And now monkeys are your resource in finding them and to balance it out...
We add "Gene bounties" so they can trade it for additional funding. It's time genetics does things and actually look through people's files to find genes to study and sell for more resources.
For example the "Bad genes no one wants" are now bounties and they give resources and unlock things.

If anything we just need more ways for genetics to work with other departments and make the trek abit less painful.

I mean something like: "Poisonous skin" or "Cleaning Sweat" would be fun mutations to add but only locking them behind splicing. Thus no one can spawn with them.
Thus giving genetics more to do and reason to exist.

[Mouse]

For what it's worth, a lot of what you see as nerfs to genetics are actually (rather controversial) buffs being reverted.  You started playing at a point where genetics was basically the most powerful it's ever been, and that has colored your perception of what it's supposed to be.

[Egregorious]

Personally I would like genes to be more inconsistently dispersed on a round-to-round basis. I think the problem with powerful genes is just that they show up too often, mainly caused by the fact that once people get a hang of the job it's pretty easy to be consistent about it. I'd also like to see the geneticist have more reason to interact with the crew.

This is more thinking out loud than it is well thought through, but my idea to rejig genetics would be to make genes less available so that they can potentially be more powerful. As well as doing so in a way that encourages geneticists to interact with crew more than monkeys. I'd try the following:


1. An activated or stored gene is rendered 'spent' after it has either been sent to the booth or made into an injector. It cannot be sent to the booth or made into an injector once it's spent. It can still be added to an occupant and otherwise functions as usual. Genes purchased from the booth will also be 'spent'.

As it stands, once you find a gene you have functionally infinite copies of that gene. I don't think this is necessarily a good thing, because it makes finding subsequent copies of that gene pointless, and ensures that once a gene is found it is no longer rare, making them far more consistently available round-to-round. I think limiting how much the genes can be handed out this way would make the good genes rarer on a per-player basis while not making them unobtainable.

I don't think injectors would need to grant spent genes. Technically it would allow duplicating genes infinitely, but not only does it need to be chained to do so, there's a cooldown and a material cost. That's a good amount of time and work for a process that's probably slower than looking for extra copies elsewhere.

2. Introduce a DNA "Extractor"; an item similar to an activator in its creation and use, instead of activating a gene in the potential pool it would pull out a copy of the gene from someone's potential pool. If placed back in the computer, the gene gets added to mutation storage.

This is basically just making it so there's a jankier functionality of the mobile gene booth available consistently. Alongside activators, it's intended to encourage the geneticist to leave their room and look for specific crew members, without the unfortunate expectation that even if you find who you're looking for they might be too busy to want to follow you back to the gene booth just to give you the gene you want.

The player's gene from which a copy was made should probably also be considered 'spent' to avoid this being a duplicator.

3. If an NPC mob is created or scrambled it only gets maybe half or two thirds the mutations in its potential pool compared to a player controlled mob. If a player controlled mob is created or scrambled, it gets the usual amount.

Monkeys are too efficient for how uninteractive they are to sift through constantly. I geneticists should be encouraged to check through records and interact with crew more than look at monkeys all shift.

The other option I see is to make player gene pools higher quality than monkeys, but that seems like more work for the same outcome.


Hypothetically these changes would turn every genepool into more of a lootbox than it already is, since every subsequent copy of a gene you find would still be useful in adding extra availability to the booth. Player pools would be more efficient to engage with than monkeys and therefore it would hopefully encourage geneticists to seek out crewmembers more often.

The 'good' genes would be more of a crapshoot to obtain during a round because a single master-copy isn't all you need to fill up the gene booth. Also, two geneticists working on the same gene wouldn't wind up feeling as redundant.

However, this would be making genetics even more complicated.

[JackMoloney]

I think genetech balance is all over the place.

Passive good mutations only start turning into bad ones when below 41 stability, so you can be an absolute passive monster with the right combination of genes. This is also what happens most often from my experience -- I don't see genetechs running around with optic energizer, most of the time, its a juiced up hulk. In addition to this, a lot of passive mutations are really good with just their base effect, such as the mentioned Anaerobic Metabolism. There is almost zero reason to empower it realistically.

Negative mutations are also in disparity -- While the downsides of some are light (blindness and deaf, which can be fixed with equipment and other mutations), others are EXTREMELY bad, especially in combat use. Motor Neuron straight fucks you up with random stuns and damage. Narcolespy does the same, save for said damage. Stupefication as well. And the worst part is that the previously mentioned "light" bad mutations give WAY MORE OR THE SAME AMOUNT OF STABILITY AS THE HORRIBLE ONES! And the horrible ones are on the same level as the pre-nerf Trippy trait, where sometimes, you get unlucky several times in a short moment and you just get utterly obliterated.

Power mutations aren't much better. You are pretty much required to offset them so that you don't obliterate yourself on failure with bad mutations. Adrenaline rush? Superoverdose! Jumpy? Stunned for 7 seconds! Healing touch? Put yourself into crit INSTANTLY! Even having a 5% chance for these downsides is horrible. Having the chance start at a lower stability than 100 would be much preferable. And considering a lot of powers are weak or unusable without their empowered effect, that really puts it into perspective. On the flip side though, some of these, such as jumpy, clearly need to be nerfed with a longer cooldown or less distance, or a completely different effect (such as being able to jump over tables). There also need to be more synchronized effects, as it was created specifically for powers, and yet only 6 have any synergy.

As for crew interaction: Just make 33/66 rarity genes more common in them, or just make a list of otherwise common, trashy genes that only monkeys/NPCs can get. Makes a bigger incentive for going out and getting scans, and also makes them more worthwhile instead of getting 4 speech mutations, 3 bad mutations, glowy and apocrine.

IMO: Some good genes need to be nerfed, some bad genes need to be buffed (to have not as bad effects) and power genes need a lot of work.

[BatElite]

Come on, if you're not willing to make a 1-in-20 gamble then how little risk are you willing to accept? Even (especially!) in combat situation it's too good odds not to try, unless you don't actually believe genes are going to make a difference in a fight.

I can't really speak to the balance of specific genes, since geneticist is just not a role I've been able to play properly recently (too much drive to walk out and help medbay or roam the station), but as to one point:

1. The people who play genetics are often screen-tappers who rarely engage with the crew - beyond screaming for Johnny Stafferman to come by because he has a rare gene they need. (I'm guilty of this as well - its way too easy to get lost in searching for the next gene that 20+ minutes go by and you wonder why there's a bunch of dead people splattered over the halls outside genetics).

There's several factors in this I feel:
-The genetics UI is pretty huge and quite wide in particular. At least on a 1080p monitor there's not really a place to put it that doesn't obscure a huge part of the visible area or chat. If geneticists weren't incentivised to ignore goings-on (they are), the UI leaves them either blind or deaf anyway. From what I understand the more efficient way to do genetics is to ignore the whole pair matching activity altogether, so why is it still even there?
-There's nothing for geneticists to do their jobs with The last attempt at making that happen (AFAIK) was with the handheld analyzer, which tells you nothing that the computer can't and if you did want to use that information you'd have to go to the computer anyway. You can't even really hand out genes yourself because it takes 20s and ?? materials per injector.
-Ironically, there being so much of a tech tree and fishing for specific genes means that you need to take as much time as possible if you want to get anywhere with it. At the same time, the waiting periods aren't really long enough to encourage folks to go take a hike and come back later. You can leave pretty much any other department, piss around for a bit and not really miss out on anything important.

[JackMoloney]

Come on, if you're not willing to make a 1-in-20 gamble then how little risk are you willing to accept? Even (especially!) in combat situation it's too good odds not to try, unless you don't actually believe genes are going to make a difference in a fight.

The issue is that the gamble happens very often. Genetechs often have a lot of stabilized abilities for use, and even when empowering them, they usually have about 2-3. Considering that the gamble failure result often ends up being death (especially in a combat scenario/with combat oriented powers), you can see the issue. And even then, if you are an antag with gene abilities, you only have to fail once to lose.

Also, realistically, its probably not going to be a 5% chance and something higher, since useful powers take up triple or double as much.

[Asterion0]

I would largely agree that current genetics is very much a not paying that much attention to the game role right now, since half the time when I run geneticist it's to moreso sit there and not do much, except later into the round if I may decide to actually go out and do stuff instead of sitting around only half playing the game. The downside to that though is that if I go out to interact with crew or see/use the powers I spent maybe 30 minutes getting, I know nothing of what's happening but will probably be able to deal with most issues since at that point it's not terribly difficult to get at least a few powerful genes that aren't obvious or easily countered, even with the current stability since most of them still have noticeable effect when unempowered. Especially in the case of certain antags where genetics can just hard counter some powers with genes and they have nothing to do about it since it was fully up to random chance whether or not they were obtained, and usually have minimal downsides to being distributed freely or used against those antags. 

To completely be an idea guy proposing what's (probably) a nightmare to code, I would like an entirely different system for genetics that isn't the current click and wait approach we have now:
Everyone has a 'string' of DNA, similar to how each gene currently is, and it has to be directly altered to get genetic powers, except the geneticist isn't directly told that a power is gained, relying on the person being scanned to see the ability, hopefully promoting more interaction and a form of proper 'testing'. On spawn there's maybe 4 or 5 predetermined stable/inert DNA strings everyone spawns with (outside of mildly mutated changing a part of it maybe) and each genetic power now has a random sequence that needs to be found and coded in to be added as a power.
EX: Spawn string is something like AACC-CACA, and cryokinesis is GGC while jumpy is CGGA, so the geneticist needs to change the DNA string to include those in it for them to get the ability. This could allow a form of 'chaining' the codes together to fit more abilities into a single DNA string than normal, while also allowing negative genes to appear if they don't manage it properly and put two powers next to each other that just so happen to be the start and end of a negative gene, and creates a cap for how many genes one person could possibly have. 
For rarer or more powerful genes, you could also make it so after 'registering' (inputting a specific power's code into somewhere on the computer) you gain research points, which can be used to unlock experimental enzymes that don't occur naturally. This would also effectively be able to gate the more potent negative/positive genes behind some level of work instead of random chance.

Overall though I'm unsure how much an idea like this would go over with most people, since it's a very large step in a completely different direction from how genetics currently acts, along with there probably being some major downsides I'm not recognizing in it probably.