Thoughts and suggestions on medical department

[Egregorious]

- Automenders, cryo, cloning is the standard. It gives no buffs and infact doing this constantly starts doing decay, making it easier to reinstate those wounds.
You aren't fixing the problem, you are patching it.

- Actual doctoring will take more time and effort, but it has no side effects and downsides and may even give buffs.
Insted of your brute damage being mended away, doctors remove it and strengthen your body. Causing your tissue to be able to resist damage better for a short while.

- If you don't want durability problems, you got to robotcists to get organs replaced. You will be locked out of chemical buffs.
Simple as this.

[...]

In my opinion.. we need the simple tasks so the station can function.

I think you're making very good points, I also think the system in place to make the gameplay function like this already exists; organ damage.

The trouble with organ damage in this respect currently is that it doesn't matter unless below a critical threshhold, and it gets dealt with incidentally by basic healing chems. However, theoretically it is an advanced damage system that causes more permanent deterioration to accumulate over time, which potentially isn't solved by basic doctoring of the four damage types.

This is what I would try to change to make organ damage function as an advanced doctoring mechanic:

- Remove or limit the organ damage that basic chems and cryo can heal, and probably add them to more advanced and specific chems. Perhaps you need something specific like salbutemol to heal lung damage etc. Tie this into buffs if you like, perhaps all organs start out at less than maximum health, and getting them to maximum health makes that organ function better, essentially providing buffs.

- Add more and earlier threshholds at which organs start introducting debuffs. Perhaps a lightly damaged lung reduces stamina regen a little, getting worse as more damage threshholds are hit. This simulates advanced doctoring providing 'maintainance' to people's bodies; they need their organs seen to to keep themselves functioning at 100% after taking damage too many times.

- Make damage to limbs also apply organ damage to certain organs. Damage to the right arm can affect the right lung, damage to the legs might affect the intestines etc. This means organ damage is more likely to ramp specifically based on where someone took damage, and makes organ damage a psuedo-positional damage type. Alternatively: treat limbs as organs, with higher damage lowering punch effectiveness, or making it easier to be disarmed, or just flat out give that arm a chance to drop things when it's in critical condition.

- Probably ensure organs are fairly tanky. If they're going to be taking consistent damage and not being incidentally healed you don't want them to be dying all the time and needing to be flat out replaced too often. When someone takes significant organ damage, they should more likely just be hit with debuffs rather than a dead organ. You want them to be fixable by doctors more often than you want their necessary removal - not that you never want them needing to be removed.


In my mind, this would help keep an easily managable level of doctoring - where most doctors can simply heal the four damage types to keep people upright and going about their business - while advanced doctoring of organ damage lets people keep functioning at 100% even after they've accumulated debuffs through organ damage by taking regular damage over time. It also means that this maintainence only affects those that take damage, and thus keeping out of trouble is still a good way of maintaining 100% bodily functionality.