Pathology Feedback

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Yeah, the spread via clouds is working a lot more efficiently than I had anticipated, due to the servers having such a ludicrous amount of players, none of which are really taking care to avoid them.
Personally, I am not very attached to the visuals either, but what do you think could replace them for airborne spread, in a way that is still clearly visible?

I actually have a few ideas for this. First of all, instead of every pathogen being a musty green, the contents of the pathogen should change its color. Just like how chems do it. If not, then make every pathogen have a random color associated with it, so that people can call out, "The purple pathogen is a healer".

Another thing, would be to have seperate textures for the gas cloud. Kind of like the sprite for the blowing smoke cloud, though less obnoxious. Of course, you can really use any sprite. But make sure that the sprite can be clicked through, otherwise we'll have the same problem of not being able to interact with small things under them.

Yeah, each pathogen already has a color anyway based on its suppressant, so i could see this working nicely. The downside would be that it would not interface with the smoke system, maybe custom pathogen smoke decals are the way to go.
I don't think I can really make actual smoke clouds change color dynamically or make them click-through, so that may be necessary. :thinking:

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Very much liking the changes so far. It feels fairly easy to get a Good healing virus up and running, but perhaps like a annoucment console to that a healing virus would be tested among the crew. Also for the farting and sweating mechanics, they dont really make much sense and yeah they are annoying, like others have said.
There also seems to be a problem in curing because not many people know how to cure a virus at all. Perhaps make it a bit easier to see where you need to go to get cured, and easier to make a cure?

To be honest, I don't really see a way I could make curing any easier than it already is now, I think this is mainly an issue of noone being familiar with the mechanics yet.
That and the fact that people could have like a dozen different diseases, so you'd need to do twelve times the work, but that should be a problem of the past now with the new changes that allow only one pathogen per person.

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Here are a few thoughts I have that are more related to how Pathology as a department can function, rather than the specific mechanics.

My biggest desire is for Pathology to *make money*. By coordinating with Cargo, viral samples can be requested, and by exporting cures/vaccines and maybe even reports on the pathogen, money can be made. This could very well be the primary gameplay loop of Pathology outside of outbreaks - order sample, perform actual research, synthesize drug/cure, maybe fill out form (maybe a special kind of paper object? idk), and export for D O S H. Currently the only real way to make money is Mining and getting lucky on the market, though Botany can be helpful regardless. And, importantly, this makes Pathology less of a Toxins "your purpose is to create WMDs" and more Mining "your purpose is to do stuff and make money and maybe occasionally cause chaos".

That'd be *on top* of healing pathogens, of course. I think they're great, though I don't like just how infectious they seem to be. Could there be publicly accessible methods of alleviating some annoying symptoms like those farts or whatever?

And, lastly, how about an Access Lock? Specifically a Pathologist (assuming that is a planned job) can swipe their ID on a device or an access control panel for the doors to lock and unlock it, as can the MDir. An MDir's lock should also have higher priority - that is, a pathologist cannot override an MDir's lock, but an MDir can override a pathologist's lock.

Yeah, making money with pathology is something I could see, not sure how well it could work though. You can't really scale it up, since a stronger pathogen isn't really any harder to make a cure for than a weaker one, so the price would just be something pretty low, to prevent abuse.
Not sure if it could really work well, and I don't wanna break the economy. Maybe there could be something like the CDC asking for a cure for a pathogen and there is a time limit to send back a cure, or the money you get depends on your speed.

Yeah, the smoke and sweat spreading symptoms are just a bit annoying at the moment, I'll just be toning those down specifically.

A few maps already have a lockdown button in patho! I'd love to see it added to more maps though, and maybe with an access lock and in a way where you can lock from the outside. But the main thing would be restricting access right now, so that there's less people running around in there each round.

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Did some testing last night, managed to successfuly isolate 2 good tier 2 symptoms, and a tier 1 spreading symptom, and then subsequently created a working pathogen that spread amongst the monkeys.

NB: I'm assuming changlings are immune to diseases as I tried to infect myself while a changling, but it didn't affect me at all, neither did rolling in the monkey pathogen fart clouds with no clothes on.

Overall, very much liking how much clearer everything is, as well as being able to identify which dna strands are what.

Yes, I believe vampires and werewolves are immune, changelings might be too? Either that or you already had a virus of that strain, or maybe you had viral resistance you were not aware of.