Building Helpful Pathogens

[Jiminy Cricket]

I don't know where else to put this, so here goes.

The new Pathology changes are awesome. However, they're also very exploitable.

With the removal of the "Randomly destroy samples when doing anything" mechanic, it's trivial to boost all of the pathogen's attributes up crazy high. This means that the "Add more bad symptoms" roll with high Maliciousness means you can get access to T4 and T5 symptoms insanely fast, things that aren't viruses/parasites can be boosted to have five stages, advance speeds of 200+ easy, the list goes on.

From an earlier round today, I used the starting samples and ended up with the following in under fifteen minutes, with crazy fast advance speed/suppression threshold. If I was more patient, I could have several strains simultaneously with even worse symptoms.

4da|344|b3b|e44|127|083|306|3cc|3ccb3b|3cc4da|0834da|1273cc|4da306|0834da306|3cc3cc306|083e44344|b3b3cc306b3b|4da083e44344|b3b3cc4dab3b|b3b3ccb3be44|1271270834da306|b3b4da3441273cc

The pathogen appears to be violently... hiccuping?
The pathogen appears to generate a high amount of fluids.
The pathogen appears to react to hydrating agents.
The pathogen appears to be shivering.
The pathogen appears to produce a large volume of gas.
The pathogen appears to create bubbles of vacuum around its affected area.
The culture appears to be quite dramatic.
The pathogen appears to be rather displeased.
The pathogen appears to react with a pure intoxicant.
The pathogen seems like it might respond to strong sonic impulses.
The pathogen appears to generate a high amount of fluids.
The pathogen appears to generate a high amount of fluids.
The pathogen appears to be creating a constant field of radiating heat. The relevant membranes look like they might be affected by painkillers.
The pathogen appears to have the ability to bond with organic tissue.
The pathogen appears to have the ability to bond with organic tissue.
The pathogen appears to produce a large volume of gas.
The pathogen appears to be wilder than usual, perhaps sedatives or psychoactive substances might affect its behaviour.
A glimpse at an irregular nerve center of the pathogen indicates that it might react to psychoactive substances.
A curiously shaped gland on the pathogen is emitting an unearthly blue glow.
The pathogen appears to radiate a bubble of oxygen.
The culture appears to process proteins at an irregular speed.

For those of you who don't know pathology, that's a horrible hellplague that will spread across the station in minutes due to snapping/farting/sneezing. It'll cause plasma farts, teleportitis, horrible radiation, and eventually gibbing. I can't think of too much more to add that makes it more lethal.

For those of you wondering "Why would you even do this as a non-antagonist", there's "continually cure brute/burn/oxy damage" in there as well, and it'd be easy to remove the horrible death symptoms and leave the helpful ones with a non-annoying way to spread.

In short, it's even more trivial to murder the entire station with disease right now and it can be done way way way faster than ever before. I have a few ideas to rebalance it, but I'd like to bounce them off someone.

1. Adjust the way "Gain Symptom" mutations work when altering a pathogen. If you make it so that it can only add more T1/T2 symptoms, the puzzlework of Pathology remains and it takes a bit of effort and time to create a hellplague. 

2. Adjust the way altering the pathogen's attributes works: Make it alter the rolls by a much larger amount (10 to 20 to boost something, -3 to -5 for the other attributes) on a cooldown, similar to Genetics Research. Right now, you can click the boost attribute buttons like you're playing Cookie Clicker and come up with 200+ attributes in a few minutes, getting T4/T5 symptoms along the way. While this still allows for you to brute force nasty symptoms, it'll be a bit slower.

I don't know about the feasibility of changing the code like this, but these are my recommendations after toying with it.