[PR] Contributor Rewards accessible to all

[Flaborized]

roughly 70-90% of a human's sprite is covered up by clothing; the only parts that aren't are the face, arms, and legs, and you can replace your arms via traits already

i personally don't think the 'visual distinction' matters that much. all of the mutant races have tails, different head shapes, sometimes different speech sounds

I mean, if it wasn't important or visible people surely wouldn't want it, right? Like, we're talking about the *face* here, that's potentially the most important part of the design of a living humanoid creature, even if it's only like 30% of the sprite typically. I don't think that it not being always visible means necessarily it's not important! I think color choice does matter and is a significant part of the aesthetics of current species you can play as.

Goon's lore is not a rule; you don't have to have your cow character be "Mukau Bullhorn" from the cow dimension, or your lizard be "verbs-the-noun" that's just a 4th-gen gene-modded human from sleeper-ship colonization efforts. However, players still sometimes follow these cultural trends-- you'll find plenty of characters named "Seeks-The-Path" and "Mavis Moovenheimer" as part of the crew. Whether consciously or not, players find value in conforming their character to whatever mutracial identity they perceive as existing. I believe that, like Retrino, other players will (in the long run) continue to play characters that feel human visually and behaviorally.

And, as Solenoid already nailed in their post, Goon's lore also doesn't prevent you from playing your character as something outside of their assigned mutrace. Is that a wig, or real hair, or a pair of wings, or maybe just seaweed dangling from that crewmember's scalp? Is that a normal roach, or a moth, or a big ant (like the ones from A Bug's Life)? People will play freaks if they want to, not having blue skin isn't stopping them. Diagetically, it doesn't really make sense for this not to be available to crewmates roundstart, either; getting your skin color changed via genetics is probably pretty accessible, especially compared to the robot/plant arms you'd get from robotics/botany.

I think it's fine and cool that people can invent little headcanons for themselves or interpret mechanics in unique ways, but I don't think the fact that people will push customization options to their limits means we have no reason not to expand the limits; especially in a way that just takes a Cool Unique Thing lizards have and plops them down onto humans.

i agree with the above two posts, though in the case of potentially limiting it to a medal reward (especially given that we have better medal caching now) i think tying it to taking a bath in colorful reagent would be a good compromise

I don't think this meaningfully compromises much, the objection is to having humans being able to pick whatever color they want at roundstart, this medal would be trivially easy to get and practically everyone would have it (I think you could even force this medal on someone cuz you can toss people in baths? insert compressed flushed emoji here) I'm okay with it being a *sometimes* kind of thing, but this is effectively the same as just giving it to everyone for free.


I agree with the posts saying that it's not ideal to tie this to contributor as it is now. I said this in my last post but I wouldn't have added it in *general*, since I think you can already pull off some funny one-off gimmicks using genetics or tanning beds + light tubes if you're desperate, and I don't like making it a Regular Ol' Option for reasons I've written up here and in the last post.