Remove pathology until it's balanced.

[zjdtmkhzt]

I don't have much to add except:
My pull request just got merged.
https://github.com/goonstation/goonstati...-616984968

About the PR
Viewing a pathogen with a zoomed-in microscope will show each symptom's DNA string.

Why's this needed?
Makes patho easier for benevolent virologists, and does very little for malevolent virologists, as they'll likely include every symptom anyways.

It's not a very thematic or realistic method, but it's an easy code-change that helps a department that suffers a lot of public vitriol.

Oh, nice change, this makes it a lot easier to filter out the beneficial symptoms when you use the mutating method to get symptoms!
(And also to filter out the bad symptoms you don't want as an antag, I sometimes remove stuff like disorientation to be slightly less of an ass.)

In regards to curing, what do all of you think about the irradiation module? Would you rather it be removed completely? I was leaning more towards making it take a pretty long time and maybe making less cures, so there is an option to use it when the suppressant is hard to get for some reason, but normally you would use the regular cure making system for time reasons.
(Most of the suppressants are now pretty easy to get, imo. The worst ones are gastronomical (because you need a load of vending machine junk) and sedative, because after you run out of morphine you'll need to get a morphine plant. (Or a source of ketamine, but come on.))

Also, what if the health scanner showed an accumulated threat level for a pathogen, so you could usually tell at a glance if it is harmful or beneficial? Say, if you made a pathogen with 3 healing symptoms and sneezing it would show a high positive value. If you made a pathogen with just 3 instagibbing symptoms, a high negative one. But you could still make things stealthy by adding a mix of beneficial and harmful symptoms.
This would let people trust beneficial pathogens a lot more easily. I was actually already considering something like that a while ago, this was my WIP list of classifications.
spreadsheet

[MarkNstein]

I think reducing cures is a generally a bad approach, though making the irradiation module take longer is OK with me.
I think the health scanner "rating" would be a great addition, and hopefully stem initial panic of there being a pathogen.

[ZeWaka]

Also, what if the health scanner showed an accumulated threat level for a pathogen, so you could usually tell at a glance if it is harmful or beneficial?

Good idea!

[Lady Birb]

Also, what if the health scanner showed an accumulated threat level for a pathogen, so you could usually tell at a glance if it is harmful or beneficial?

Good idea!

Yeah this was discussed on discord. Pathogens with no negative symptoms should have a special message on health analyzers.

(note: please make chatspam symptoms like Shakespeare and fake deathgasping count as negative)

[zjdtmkhzt]

(note: please make chatspam symptoms like Shakespeare and fake deathgasping count as negative)

I mean, do those really need a mark on the health analyzer if the whole problem with them is how highly visible they are?

[Trustworthy]

Spreading symptoms should count as negative too, I feel, if this were added.

[zjdtmkhzt]

Why? The whole point of pathology is that it's easy to spread. If you forbid spreading symptoms for beneficial pathogens, you might as well do genetics.
Why would they even count as negative, they don't hurt you in any way.

[Mouse]

I'm almost tempted to suggest that the beneficial mutations symptom count as a negative one, unless a lot of mutations are removed. Skeleton makes you uncloneable unless they use genetics to turn you human (and the necroscan doesn't work iirc), metaneural haze and pseudonecrosis make it a lot more difficult for doctors to treat you, SMES will straight up kill you if you have a cyberheart or if your heart stops, the flashy skin mutation is just obnoxious as fuck, and I know there's a few others I'm forgetting.

[zjdtmkhzt]

Yeah, metaneural haze, pseudonecrosis and skeleton stuff should really be marked as harmful. There is precedent for this too with ethanol production.
As for SMES, it is beneficial the vast majority of times, so that is just sort of "sucks to be you, cyberperson", imo.

[aft2001]

It should be noted that, AFAIK, symptoms available to be put into a pathogen are randomly generated each round. Naturally as a result one is not guaranteed to be able to make a beneficial pathogen.

I'm not sure how the random selection works, but having guaranteed (albeit random) beneficial symptoms available would probably help with the overall problem of pathology being a literal and metaphorical blight on the station. Perhaps a set of guaranteed albeit simple beneficial symptoms that are available every round, with more powerful symptoms randomly determined at the start of the round? E.G. A symptom that slowly heals brute damage would be guaranteed to be available, but a symptom that makes it so you don't have to breathe would *not* be guaranteed.
The same should go for negative symptoms.

Again, I'm not 100% sure as to how symptoms are determined, so the entire previous paragraph may be irrelevant.

I also believe that adding more symptoms would probably be a good idea, particularly beneficial ones, on top of changing the list of mutations that the Beneficial Mutation symptom adds.

[MarkNstein]

It should be noted that, AFAIK, symptoms available to be put into a pathogen are randomly generated each round. Naturally as a result one is not guaranteed to be able to make a beneficial pathogen...

I think you mis-understand how the symptom randomization.
There's a large block of commented code in 
GitHub\goonstation\code\modules\medical\pathology\pathogen_dna.dm
that explains it, and I'll summarize.

The more T1 symptoms there are, the more they game can have of each other tier. Every T1 gets a 3-char DNA sequence at random. T2 is made from taking every T1 DNA, and prepending and appending it with T1 DNA. We have 8 T1 symptoms so far, allowing for 56 T2 symptoms (8 permute 2). So long as the code has fewer than 56 T2 symptoms, it assigns each symptom one of the 56 generated sequences. We have 11 T2 symptoms currently.
Generating T3 is similar. Take each assigned T2 DNA sequence, and add T1 DNA seq (before and or after) to make as many sequences as possible. Then assign a random sequence to a T3 symptom. The math gets harder at this point, because I spared some details about collisions, but I'm fairly certain we don't have enough symptoms to worry about locked symptoms.

Counts, because it was part of my research:
T1: 8
T2: 11
T3: 10
T4: 12
T5: 11

[aft2001]

Ahh I see - so in summary there isn't really the issue of locked symptoms - at least, until more symptoms are added, anyways. Thanks for the explanation!!

Well heck, that makes balancing issues a bit more of a pickle to resolve!

[GORE]

It should be noted that, AFAIK, symptoms available to be put into a pathogen are randomly generated each round. Naturally as a result one is not guaranteed to be able to make a beneficial pathogen...

I think you mis-understand how the symptom randomization.
There's a large block of commented code in 
GitHub\goonstation\code\modules\medical\pathology\pathogen_dna.dm
that explains it, and I'll summarize.

The more T1 symptoms there are, the more they game can have of each other tier. Every T1 gets a 3-char DNA sequence at random. T2 is made from taking every T1 DNA, and prepending and appending it with T1 DNA. We have 8 T1 symptoms so far, allowing for 56 T2 symptoms (8 permute 2). So long as the code has fewer than 56 T2 symptoms, it assigns each symptom one of the 56 generated sequences. We have 11 T2 symptoms currently.
Generating T3 is similar. Take each assigned T2 DNA sequence, and add T1 DNA seq (before and or after) to make as many sequences as possible. Then assign a random sequence to a T3 symptom. The math gets harder at this point, because I spared some details about collisions, but I'm fairly certain we don't have enough symptoms to worry about locked symptoms.

Counts, because it was part of my research:
T1: 8
T2: 11
T3: 10
T4: 12
T5: 11

We have 8 T1 symptons but was there not a recent change that there are only 6 base-pairs left? Leaving us with 6 of 8 T1 symptons each round.

[zjdtmkhzt]

That change removed two t1 symptoms that didn't really do anything completely (moaning and hiccups). They are effectively not in the game anymore, I think. But all the other 6 t1s are there every round, so you can get every symptom every round.

https://github.com/goonstation/goonstati...ms.dm#L397

The intent was to make finding symptoms using the dna analyzer less grindy and to make it less RNG to get all the building blocks you need at the start of the round.

[Mouse]

Yeah, metaneural haze, pseudonecrosis and skeleton stuff should really be marked as harmful. There is precedent for this too with ethanol production.
As for SMES, it is beneficial the vast majority of times, so that is just sort of "sucks to be you, cyberperson", imo.

The problem is less cyberhearts and more that it prevents defibs from working, and they're the only way to fix a stopped heart so.