Crate slowdown

[Largeamountsofscreaming]

Cargo has a pretty hefty list of options for cargo moving to include belt hell, the MULE, cargo tug, forklift, and cargo transporter. Most of these options go fairly underutilized as a trip to cargo rarely takes more than a minute assuming cargo is on the ball. I propose either:

1. Crates with any item at all, regardless of size or amount, cause push/pull slowdown similar to pushing a locker

OR

2. Crates have that effect permanently, regardless of any content or not

I'd like to hear thoughts on this, as I think this would be a simple fix what I would consider a very underutilized part of the station's infrastructure. It might not be unreasonable to removing this for Quartermasters with QM training, though I think using items like the forklift in the cargo bay could also add a new way to play. Fulfilling orders is a pretty mundane part of the job, I would say at least adding some decision to how to best get it from place to place would add a small bit of variety and unique gameplay.

[ZeWaka]

For those who remember, here is the 23 pages of discussion on this from 2017 (8 years ago): https://forum.ss13.co/showthread.php?tid=8175

[Largeamountsofscreaming]

For those who remember, here is the 23 pages of discussion on this from 2017 (8 years ago): https://forum.ss13.co/showthread.php?tid=8175

For what it's worth this seems like it affected a lot more than crates. I'm not sure how much that might change reaction but reduces the impact imo.

[Mikeistaken]

I would enjoy this change, however I belive there should be 3 teirs of slowdowns.
Empty to 10: slight slowdown
11 to 50: Slowdown equal to the middle of both
51 to max or atleast 1 corpse: Harsh slowdown like having 1 body in it is now.

I also belive if the sprite has wheels the slowdown should either be heavily negated or removed like trash carts and engi carts

[Lord_earthfire]

To be honest, i am not sure this will solve the problem.

Our maps are very small. Pathways aren't that often long enough for crate slowdown to be a massive hinderance.

The bigger problem is the cargo teleporter. At any point where distance would mattee, the cargo teleporter solves it.

If we want to make cargo transportation matter, we need to remove the accessability of cargo transporters at round start. Place one in cargo, have the handheld transporters in the crate fabricator, locked behind high conductivity materials, and rid every map of any roundstart cargo transporter and pads. Have engineers walk around and construct them by scanning the one in cargo.

[Agent reburG]

How about a higher stamina drain while sprinting and dragging something? 
Feels like stamina is fairly underused in interactions with anything outside chemicals and combat.

[Gomp]

I wouldn't much care if crates where slower to pull. You aren't usually pulling crates across the station and if you are, then you are probably a QM and if you are not then you can just ask a QM or a Borg.

[Frank_Stein]

I'm kind of the opinion that pulls and grabs oughta be merged, where you need to sacrifice at least one hand to move and object that is too heavy to carry. Pushing can remain

[Chasu]

I would enjoy this change, however I belive there should be 3 teirs of slowdowns.
Empty to 10: slight slowdown
11 to 50: Slowdown equal to the middle of both
51 to max or atleast 1 corpse: Harsh slowdown like having 1 body in it is now.

I also belive if the sprite has wheels the slowdown should either be heavily negated or removed like trash carts and engi carts

I could imagine a system like this, but instead of the amount of items, their weight classes/values are added together. i.e. lots of tiny objects are on the same slowdown tier as one bulky object

[JORJ949]

Like earthfire said I think the cargo transporter is also a big issue here, belt hell/mule/forklift/cargo cart aren't that useful when you can just instantly teleport the cargo to 90% of places that want it.

[Egregorious]

I like inconvenience for the sake of alleviating it, so I think crate inconvenience would be something I'd want to see tried. However people do have a point, the cargo transporter mostly obsoletes everything else to the point it would remain the only thing used for the most part.

The cargo transporter is rather an over-convenience in general in fact. It's easy, cheap, available and reliable which makes it a bit of a design problem. This is probably going off topic now, but it's also it's the biggest culprit in making artifacts virtually impossible to mess with for any antagonist not huddling in artlab or cargo, since there's no vulnerable period going from one part of the station to the other before they get safely ejected.

[Glamurio]

Repeating basically what I said in Discord:

Immediate concern here is that the main reason people don't use forklifts or belt hells is because those tend to be extremely inconvenient ways of transporting items, primarily because of their location. So my prediction is that if you make it slower to pull crates, people will still pull crates but just be more annoyed by how slow it is, rather than use other options. The real reason people drag crates instead of use mules isn't because it's easy to drag crates, it's because mules are hard to use.

The cargo transporter was a band-aid fix that was added precisely because the existing means of transport are so clunky, unreliable or hard to use that they're nigh-unusable to the layman. I don't see a world where anyone will bother transporting any sort of crate manually when they have one of those handy, so part of this change would have to be the removal or rework of those.

That being said, I'm not against making dragging crates more cumbersome, it just has to happen alongside a rework of existing mechanics of transport, I'd like to see a MULE refactor that makes it consistent, ensuring proper pathing, and being able to place custom pathfinding locations. More than anything though, it needs to have an easy to use clickable interface, nothing that's buried in a PDA. Of course that will only help for QM, but crates are used plenty elsewhere, so perhaps we can workshop a sort of "delivery service" mode that has MULEs come and pick up a crate and deliver it elsewhere.

Forklifts are also a cool idea, but these aren't widely available on the majority of maps, and suffer from some other jank too.