Fossils - A Cool Thing to Have

[LovelyMimic]

FOSSILS are found...

• Inside mining magnet asteroids, much like like artifacts and crates.
  
• Decent points have been made re:Mining loot already being too cluttered, though.
  

OR:

• Around a dig site accessible with the Long-Range Quantum Teleporter.
  
• I would love this, but it’s definitely the most labour-intensive (mapping a whole new area).
  

OR:

• Around lava moon.
  
• This was my least favorite idea, but it’s growing on me. It would probably need a small new surface area, and the number of catwalks between the dig site and the telesci entrance will strongly affect how often fossils and/or fossil-hunters end up falling into lava.
  

A QM merchant with a few would be nice. Gragg could sell them. “Weird rocks Gragg found inside bigger, tastier rock.”

THE REVIVAL PROCESS

Genetics would probably be the ones reviving them, although I don’t know how that ought to actually work. Kind of important though!

Maybe it’s a variant of the usual genetics base-pairs puzzle minigame?

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THE FOSSILS THEMSELVES

Some fossils would be terrestrial animals, others would be alien lifeforms. How did this trilobite fossil wind up in space, on the other side of the Channel? Don't worry about it.

ALIEN FOSSILS:

(because they generated more interest as we discussed them on the discord)

ELECTRICITY-EATER

• Big, funky-looking, vaguely tick-like thing. Will happily park itself on a live wire and suck electricity out of it.
  
• Can obviously cause power issues on the station depending where it is.
  
• You may be best off letting it suck electricity out of power cells.
  
• Will zap kind silicons hugging it (with help intent or w/e), recharging their batteries a fair bit. Humans just get enough for pleasant tingling sensations.
  
• Humans who attack it are predictably zapped. Borgs who attack it get bitten, draining charge.
  
• Maybe particular well-fed ones can be coaxed into recharging mining equipment and tasers and stuff.
  
• Butchering one might yield a gland that functions as a small cell?
  

THERMOPHILE

• Doesn’t seem to eat. Only uncurled and mobile in very hot places. Might be sustained by heat?
  
• Will poop char in hot environments.
  
• Will poop diamonds in extremely hot environments.
  

INFOVORE

• This one would be rare, and pretty weird-looking.
  
• Infovorous: Eats the information content of, well, a lot of things:
  
• Nearby writing on paper is garbled over time, eventually becoming totally incomprehensible after prolonged proximity.
  
• Nearby speech is garbled.
  
• Nearby radio chatter, both incoming and outgoing, is garbled.
  
• The frequency and severity of these behaviors varies significantly depending on how well-fed it is (scrambling text being what counts as having “eaten” recently).
  
• Will excrete text onto the floor as it feeds. Mostly gibberish. But only mostly. Who knows, maybe it'll poop the winning lottery number if you you manage to feed it enough...
  
• Do not let this thing get to a human brain if you value that brain.
  
• Do not let this thing touch the Ai's neural net processor.
  

TERRESTRIAL FOSSILS:

(I actually took a stab at spriting some of these a little while back: https://forum.ss13.co/showthread.php?tid=9939)

HALLUCIGENIA

• Herbivorous.
  

• Touch a full-grown on grab intent and you’ll poke yourself on its spines, which are coated in several potent hallucinogens.
  
• Poke yourself recreationally, or butcher fully-grown ones and extract the hallucinogens from its flesh.
  

TRILOBITE

• Truly omnivorous. Not averse to eating corpses, if allowed to. That’s gross though. I’d prefer you fed them lettuce or something.
  

• Fatten them up enough, and it’ll molt its old exoskeleton, which can be processed into Chitin.
  
• A placid and easy-to-care-for pet.
  
• Kill and butcher one if you want that Chitin a bit sooner, or if you’re itching to cook some protein-rich trilobite steaks.
  

ANOMALOCARIS

• Carnivorous
  
• I haven’t sprited this one.
  
• I really like the idea of an anomalocaris just stalking the station and hunting down more or less every critter it can find.
  
• Maybe there’s a workable pun from its name, like I did with hallucigenia, but I think that a one-meter-long murder shrimp is also a workable concept on its own.
  

DODO BIRD

• Frugivorous (eats fruits)
  
• Seeing how their claims to fame are being extinct and being useless, these guys don’t need to do much other than maybe dump feathers occasionally, unless anyone has any good ideas.
  
• Meat will always taste terrible regardless of how well it’s cooked.
  

DINOSAURS

• of course there’d be dinosaurs are you kidding me
  

The above is neither authoritative nor exhaustive; Please critique and suggest stuff!