Make it harder to accidentally release pathogens

[Sundance]

Under normal circumstances you never need to infect a monkey or anything to actually do research, and even when you do want to test a symptom for the wiki or something, you can easily just make the pathogen non-contagious.

Preface: I don't play pathology, but therein lies the problem, and a possible solution.

Yes, under normal circumstances you wouldn't need to infect the monkey.

But most pathologists do because they want to see the effects of their pathogen visually. It's all well and good when you have a T4 in the petri, but to demonstrate it (and for morbid entertainment) you'd want a monkey. That's literally what they're there for. Poor bastards.

But in terms of making the pathogen contagious, yes it's extremely irresponsible for the pathologist to do so, BUT they still do it. Sometimes out of "heh, eat shakespeare crew" attitude, or other times, I would imagine, they'd want to test it's actual contagiousness.

SO

What if there was a change to make the pathogen contagious - but only to specific things?

How? A few changes to code:

1. Blood type is now randomized at round start and removed from the start up screen. It has minor interaction with MSG - let's just change that to something else, as blood type has absolutely no use otherwise. You could even weight it if the coder is bothered, i.e: 40% of the crew have AB, etc.

2. Monkeys all have a unique blood type, separate from humans. For simplicity sake, it's best for the blood type to come up as "Monkey" rather than O or AB, etc.

3. Pathogens can now be tweaked to target specific blood types, with a pathogen that's highly contagious (affecting +1 or 2 blood types) being more difficult to make.

This changes pathology in three big ways.

1. Pathologists can now test the contagiousness of a pathogen with ease.

2. Pathogens are less lethal overall. If a T5 breaks out, it'll obliterate some players, while some are immune.

3. Nefariousness is now smarter. You check your blood type on the medical records. You check the shithead captain, your target. You concoct a virus that YOU are a immune to but the captain is not. Watch him suffer while twirling mustache. Watch as your virus then jumps to the poor chef who also dies in agony.