Tweak/remove the recipe for Strange Reagent

[Cal]

Remove SR as a revive tool entirely and cause it to make aggressive non infectious zombies out of corpses and animate limbs like the movie.  Make them "come back wrong"

Add an in depth medical surgery to revive people without use of the cloner. Requiring healing the body and directly using paddles on their heart/brain or a robotic implant that restarts their heart. Or something

This would keep it in the domain of medical and remove people running around asking for the 2-3 precursors that are readily available anyway

Imo !!

[Torchwick]

Honestly use of a new cyber heart, maybe one specifically designed for revival could bring something more for robotics, too. Something locked behind the robotics fabricator and a bit of surgery - not too difficult, but not so easy that anyone can walk into medbay and do in 2 seconds. Gives a bit more utility to a cyberheart beyond the mechanical benefit it already provides. Could be locked behind certain ores so it isn’t something that can be accessed immediately?

[Danger Noodle]

SR is fine, I'm genuinely quite perplexed by some of the sentiment shared here. Cloning is an incredibly simple and much less involved process compared to SR and if you decide to go out of your way to fix up the corpse/purge it/fix the organs then... yea good job you got rewarded for putting effort by avoiding giving your patient debuffs. The recipe is on the simpler side but balancing by making it annoying to make is not good and will either not be hard enough so a vet/nerd can rush it with relative ease or will be such a slog you will never see it again.

Personally I'm on the team of making the functionality of SR a baseline feature for people with medical training and making SR do actually... strange things instead

[Asterion0]

While I don't often play medical and also run puritan, which doesn't bring you to your exploding corpse like cloning does, on classic I've almost never seen anyone use SR outside of I think a borg a couple times, maybe a doctor a long time ago. It's just easier to summon the portable sleeper, send it back, and clone the corpse 90% of the time if they don't already have a record.
However! SR is, as has been pointed out, really easy to make if you care to. Omnizine is available in the restricted medicine closet, donks, and (What I imagine was the intended source for SR), botany. Holy water is easily available from the chapel or bar, and also via botany (garlic), while unstable mutagen is an easy base chem dispenser chemical, and yet again, also available from botany (Mutagenic solution in the vendors).

I'd honestly be for either suggestion of "Add a chem to the recipe NOT available roundstart" or "Up the dosage requirements so roundstart sources can revive maybe 2 corpses." Either of these would fix the problem of every doctor making a batch capable of reviving 20 people using a single donk pocket in their freetime.
Or do like Cal said make it a cool little med training thing (potentially needing organs above X health if you want to go the robotics help required route) and make SR do some strange quirky thing instead

[GARGATHUGANOKSREVENG]

Remove SR as a revive tool entirely and cause it to make aggressive non infectious zombies out of corpses and animate limbs like the movie.  Make them "come back wrong"

Add an in depth medical surgery to revive people without use of the cloner. Requiring healing the body and directly using paddles on their heart/brain or a robotic implant that restarts their heart. Or something

This would keep it in the domain of medical and remove people running around asking for the 2-3 precursors that are readily available anyway

Imo !!

I don't have much to add besides my full support is on this idea, if they ever do alter SR, going down this path is way cooler and maybe they'll finally make surgery be used for more than just dismembering people

[WyrdDoe]

I strongly disagree with Cal's idea, not because I don't think it's fuckin' cool and has potential for fun horror (I do) but because anything that makes resurrection harder or more dangerous than it already is will just bury it even deeper under the incredibly easy dominant strategy of cloning. The only way to avoid this would be to make cloning harder, which I also do not want.

I dunno, I think it's fine where it is. The flavor of meticulously repairing a corpse for resurrection is something I've been picking through these last few weeks and in my opinion the creative and complex methods for fixing someone who's super broken are already satisfyingly thematic.

[Waffleloffle]

I don't really think it's a design flaw for cloning to be the dominant resurrection strategy? that kind of seems like The Point of it - it's easy to use but takes some time, and can't keep up with killing sprees. it's a big part of what helps keep goonstation as accessible as it is. if it was an issue I would assume it simply wouldn't be in the codebase to begin with

I'm all for more complexity in medical, for sure, but whenever making SR at roundstart is in vogue (this has happened before!) it just... gives me a weird feeling, I dunno. I don't like it but it's difficult to pin down why I don't like it aside from a general "the incongruity between the Make A Big Vat At Roundstart usage and the Rare Experimental Chemical flavor breaks my immersion and makes it less fun" sentiment

[Angel]

Issue with mass producing SR as well is, as someone else mentioned before, it bypasses some of the downsides of cloning, such as no cloning defects, also SR revival is in most cases faster than cloning. Yes, you need to heal all the damage on the body, but that's a much faster process than cloning that can take up to several minutes if a body wasn't pre baked, depending how damaged the body was.
This also leads to a problem of possible metagaming, let's say I am dying, but now I know med bay will with 100% certainty have SR, if I want to be revived faster, it would make sense to succumb so my dead body has less damage dealt to it and will be more easily revived, instead of struggling for as long as possible.
I do not support cal's idea of changing SR's effect, instead I believe SR effect should be just slightly reworked to be made more... strange, like let's say it makes your skin pale and rotten, maybe using SR on failed revivals, such as DNR bodies or bodies too damaged, instead of exploding them, they become a non infectious zombie mob.
I also believe SR should be turned into a secret chemical, because of it's lore of wew, being a weird wacky secret chemical made by some high ranking scientist, and also have it recipe changed to be a little harder, maybe requiring a few thematic chemicals, like synthflesh (easy to get, but still slightly more work to make), replacing unstable mutagen with stable mutagen (also not super hard but slightly harder to make).
Basically, SR is *not exactly* just a sidegrade, in ways it is somewhat better than cloning, I would argue it feels more often than not SR revival is faster, but keeping SR's current effect is fine imo, but would be nice to have some extra flavour of strangeness, and a more engaging recipe.

[Lord_earthfire]

also SR revival is in most cases faster than cloning. Yes, you need to heal all the damage on the body, but that's a much faster process than cloning that can take up to several minutes if a body wasn't pre baked, depending how damaged the body was.

Due to prebaking clones and the "eject clone" button, SR is in 90% of the cases slower than cloning.

And for the amount of effort you need to do to make SR, you could just order a second cloning pod or two.

People here do the error of comparing baseline cloning with a procedure that takes preparation. Put the slightest effort into cloning and it literally beats everything. Like geck, multipke cloning records remove cloning defects out of the equation entirely.

[Kotlol]

As much for themeing I like Cal's idea. Execution wise NOPE.

There is still a certain difficulty for this procedure that I have to respect.

BUT I GOT ONE SIMPLE NERF IN MIND FOR SR! And this one isn't a real nerf more a... "Well you signed up for this."

SR does NOT work on Athiest's. You can take this trait and not blow up from farting on the bible... I also believe bible smacking doesn't heal em.
Well SR contains Holy Water soooo... "NOPE"
I know Athiest trait is kinda a "funny trait" , but... in this case... You can only go cloning.

But that's as far as I consider a minimal change. As I said before.. I do not like SR as a "standard procedure" and more something "faith based" aka "chaplain based."
And Science can already make holy water without a chaplain. (Wine, Mercury and Water). Sooooo for the holy processs we already eliminated the holy guy and it works on people who do not believe in the holy guy... thematic that just feels wrong.

THAT SAID....now that I think of it.. shouldn't SR have better effects in the chapel for the chaplain too? I know I am in the camp of: "I would like the chaplain to do more as an alternative to medbay and such." Now there's a fun discussion... Should we buff SR for the chaplain/chapel? Not nerfing it... and make athiests unreactive to it?

[ju45he]

I think the bulk of the problem is just that you can get a rounds supply of a "rare/valuable" chemical with a little effort at roundstart. Increasing the threshold to something like 10u and getting rid of medbays roundstart omnizine should encourage people to go to botany instead.

Replacing it seems unnecessary to replace SR with some medical feature, and would also replace the only way for most antagonists to revive a friend without going to cloning and taking a big risk of getting caught.

[Frank_Stein]

It's a chem, right? Most chems eventually decay in the system.

How about whatever you revive with Strange Regent only stays alive as long as has it in the system?

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Remove SR as a revive tool entirely and cause it to make aggressive non infectious zombies out of corpses and animate limbs like the movie.  Make them "come back wrong"

Would love to be able to use it on things like limbs, maybe even on food. Revive a dead plant, or build a monster out of monkey steak meat

[Angel]

As much for themeing I like Cal's idea. Execution wise NOPE.

There is still a certain difficulty for this procedure that I have to respect.

BUT I GOT ONE SIMPLE NERF IN MIND FOR SR! And this one isn't a real nerf more a... "Well you signed up for this."

SR does NOT work on Athiest's. You can take this trait and not blow up from farting on the bible... I also believe bible smacking doesn't heal em.
Well SR contains Holy Water soooo... "NOPE"
I know Athiest trait is kinda a "funny trait" , but... in this case... You can only go cloning.

But that's as far as I consider a minimal change. As I said before.. I do not like SR as a "standard procedure" and more something "faith based" aka "chaplain based."
And Science can already make holy water without a chaplain. (Wine, Mercury and Water). Sooooo for the holy processs we already eliminated the holy guy and it works on people who do not believe in the holy guy... thematic that just feels wrong.

THAT SAID....now that I think of it.. shouldn't SR have better effects in the chapel for the chaplain too? I know I am in the camp of: "I would like the chaplain to do more as an alternative to medbay and such." Now there's a fun discussion... Should we buff SR for the chaplain/chapel? Not nerfing it... and make athiests unreactive to it?

Honestly I really like this suggestion, anything to give chaplain more stuff to do.

[Mouse]

do strangelet loaves still exist

if so, put a chem in them that's needed to make sr

[TDHooligan]

the key issue is that having 200U of SR on backorder is bad (especially as you need... 1u per corpse)

SR being a revive only while it's in your system would go hard.
I'd be thinking on a criteria to make it permanent that will take some time (that isn't just another chemical doctors will stockpile)