On Cyberorgans, Synthorgans, and Surgery

[RelentlessGarbage]

Hey all. I have an idea for a PR (if not the expertise to code it), but before I do anything I’d like to gauge the community’s feelings on the matter.

While I don’t play as a doctor, as someone who occasionally finds myself manning the cloner in medbay, or darting in and out while dragging patients (or myself) in during a shift, I can’t help but notice that there aren’t a whole lot of surgeries going on. Now, maybe they’re happening when I’m not there – especially given how quick surgery is – or maybe I’m just unobservant, but it’s quite rare (for me) to walk past someone getting an organ transplant when I play on classic.

I’d like to ask how frequently the community sees things like organ transplants happening during a shift, on all servers (RP and Classic), with a particular exception given to limb replacements. Every eager Staff Assistant wants to have treads, we know that, and I get enough roboticists coming into botany asking for two chainsaws to know that people want item arms. I’m more so trying to gauge how frequently people either undergo voluntary or emergency organ replacement.

Basically, what I’m asking is: how relevant are the non-limb cyberorgans and synthorgans for roboticists and doctors? Do they see much regular use? And how often (in your experience) do people require emergency organ replacements?

[Kotlol]

It depends on the gimmick, surgeries can be as fast as 2 mins to taking forever like 15.
That is the main problem of it. It depends on the doctor and most doctors want to AVOID SURGERY.
Heck even roboticist try to avoid it, unless they really wanna do something evne then if they go for it... they mess up.

And you know the other thing of surgery that is risky?
"YOU MAY DIE"
Then being cloned with new organs.. so if you are transplating multiplue ones.. you regain your damaged ones or lose the ones you JUST REPLACED.
Now add the annoying "Cloning malfunction" and suddenly sponatnously replacing your organs isn't as attractive for the patient and the doctors just see no reason to and letting you die.

So let me say this... if you want people to undergo surgery more... make surgery more appealing and easier to do for doctors.
I once requested a surgery machine...but I think a surgery bench that "auto sustains" the patient will make doctors more willing to do surgery.
After all you just need to be laying on a table to do surgery... but the surgery tables just have a blood bag and a health scanner on it.. but in my opinion? Just make it so the patient remain stable "while on the bench" thus a way of removing the doctor who has to administer drugs or stopping the surgery to heal the patient.

No matter how much you want to "buff" or "change" organs and limbs and nerf cloning. Doctors do not enjoy surgery as much due to how much different tools and interactions you have.. PLUS having the random chance to FUCK UP might break your concentration on certain surgeries.

So to increase surgery use.. we just need to find ways to make it easier to do...
Heck have the surgery bench a "screen" to show wich surgery you are doing and at wich step you are. That lil help will go MILES!

[Frolicsome Flufficorn]

Tbh, I spent alot of time Memorising all the surgery combinations which I think speaks for itself. While its not a perfect system it does have its benefits especially from the cyber Appendix. I think that while there's a lot of issues with it such as; 1, People dont know the special techniques you can do to speed it up, and people dont know that Haemostats exist, and there's a lack of trust from people who do know how to do surgery to get it done by others (getting it done by others is far quicker and reduces the damage of each scalpel/scissor/saw etc hit by alot). But the Main issue from my perspective is that its for some reason heavily shamed upon by people to get these organ replacements. Like I see someone go to get their organs replaced and 7/10 Ill see someone basically call the person getting them either a power gamer or accusing them of only wanting them since they are a antagonist. Both of which heavily reduce the want to receive them from people. Idk, I think that this is just my view on the matter but I think the perception of people who get cyber organs is heavily tainted by people assuming they are getting them to power game. This isnt to say that the fact that they are hard to pull off and almost require the wiki open (the book exists but its kind a pain to use while doing whats meant to be a quick process, especially during organ failure replacements). Yeah thats about it, I would recommend change

[Decarcassor]

Basically, what I’m asking is: how relevant are the non-limb cyberorgans and synthorgans for roboticists and doctors? Do they see much regular use? And how often (in your experience) do people require emergency organ replacements?

In my experience cyber organs see plenty of use but 99% of it is self surgery and often at round start. As a doctor its much easier to try and heal failing organs than to have to do a transplant in an emergency.
In the particular case of classic, if you show up at medbay with dead organs I'll try to save you but you will probably end up dead, but maybe not for the reason you think. Its because to perform surgery I might have to first chase a couple of monkeys from the OR that the geneticists let out, then realise all the surgical tools have been misplaced or stolen and by the time I go to the fabricator to get new ones and remember the correct tool order for the surgery you need, you are likely dead from organ failure, or in such bad state that the surgery itself will kill you.

Synthorgans and limbs on the other hand you never ever see, aside from the ones you get from the green thumb traits. And for very obvious and simple reasons. Synthorgans provide no benefits over normal organs aside from slightly increased health and are more difficult to procure than the readily fabricator available cyberorgans. Synthlimbs have the very convenient trait of being attachables without surgery, but how often do your limbs blow up ? Nobody wants to ask botany for limbs, wait for them to grow, then have to go to medbay for amputation, when they can just walk into robotics at roundstart and ask for cyber limbs.

But the Main issue from my perspective is that its for some reason heavily shamed upon by people to get these organ replacements. Like I see someone go to get their organs replaced and 7/10 Ill see someone basically call the person getting them either a power gamer or accusing them of only wanting them since they are a antagonist. Both of which heavily reduce the want to receive them from people. Idk, I think that this is just my view on the matter but I think the perception of people who get cyber organs is heavily tainted by people assuming they are getting them to power game.

I tend to be that guy in medbay who calls out eager surgery enthusiasts. But not because of the power gaming aspect of it. Its because 99% of the time its some non medical crew rushing in medbay hacking every door and vendor to perform self surgery as fast as possible and doing their damn best to not interact at all with any doctor.
And I know why they do it this way. Because when you know what you are doing is just simpler and faster than to ask a doctor, if there is any around who may or may not know what they are doing.

All in all, I'm not a big fan of self surgery, beyond simple shrapnel removal.

[RelentlessGarbage]

Hm. This is actually more or less what I expected, believe it or not.

While I unfortunately don't really have a proposed solution for how to improve surgery as a process (I'd need to play as a doctor to be comfortable making those suggestions), I did have a few ideas for making synthorgans more relevant. Since surgery (as I'm understanding it) is mostly an elective process, and people with organ failure are far more likely to simply be cloned rather than undergo surgery, then I'd propose having Synthorgans give buffs to their user that scale depending on how high the potency stat of their parent plant was. I've got a couple of fun ideas for that, but I won't get into them here. Basically, since having synthorgans around for regular or emergency organ transplants isn't really a "thing," even though they can technically be considered a direct upgrade from regular organs, having them potentially give cool buffs could incentivize them to be grown and given to Medbay. (That is not to say synthorgans are useless - synthlimbs in particular are a godsend in my opinion, and the other synthorgans allow for mass-cooking of certain meals that would otherwise require an unfeasible amount of human or cyber organs.)

I was not aware of how prevalent self-surgery was. I've seen it done to remove bomb shrapnel or bullets, but I was not aware that people replaced their organs via self-surgery. That's pretty grody, actually...and given that most of the people coming into Medbay to try and do surgery on themselves probably don't have the medical training trait, I'd imagine they take up a lot of medical supplies just patching themselves up.

The stigma about cyberorgan transplants is also not surprising, but I think it's a little unfair given that SS13 is a nightmarish hellscape of death, and every crewmember could use a leg-up in terms of staying alive. Also, since traitor items exist, I'd figure that antags would be less inclined to get cyberorgans - after all, they can already buy power with their TC. But who knows.

Suspicions about other people doing surgery on you are also understandable...I wonder, perhaps there could be a "Licensed Surgeon" medal/achievement with an associated piece of clothing that players could redeem if they had proven themselves to be competent surgeons? Maybe like an Adventure-Zone or debris field thing, where you have to enter a Surgical VR simulation and successfully operate on a bunch of patients, and if you complete the challenge you get the medal. You wouldn't know if the person operating on you is an antag, but at least you'd know that they can do surgery correctly.

In any case, thank you all for voicing your opinions. I'd love to hear more people chip into this discussion, please keep the comments coming!

[Lord_earthfire]

From the replies here, i seem to gather that organ failure most often results in very fast dying patients. It's a kinda very known fact that organ failure is often very unnoticeable but when you notice it, you are near deaths door.

So i suspect when we get organ failure in a better spot, surgeries and organ healing would be also more occuring.

[RelentlessGarbage]

From the replies here, i seem to gather that organ failure most often results in very fast dying patients. It's a kinda very known fact that organ failure is often very unnoticeable but when you notice it, you are near deaths door.

So i suspect when we get organ failure in a better spot, surgeries and organ healing would be also more occuring.

As someone who plays with Frail Constitution, getting seriously injured (i.e. shot by a Nukie) can lead to ALL of your chest organs going into failure and dying simultaneously, even if you heal the raw BRUTE/BURN/TOX/OXY damage. This happened to me the other day, and the only option to save me was to shove my near-dead body into a borging artifact.

In my experience, it's rare that you end up noticing organ failure unless there's some kind of tip-off, which typically only happens if there's an obvious symptom, such as your character moaning after hearing the CentComm announcement for Appendicitis, and those more obvious symptoms tend to show up once things are getting bad. Now, if you have a health analyzer, even someone with Frail Constitution can catch and reverse organ failure (due to the obvious warning you get) - but that's not a luxury most people have.

So yeah, I'd agree that the way that organ failure occurs right now means that there isn't much time for people with failing organs to get to medbay and successfully undergo surgery. Hence, not a lot of surgery, a whole lot of cloning.

[Kotlol]

So we all agree:
Surgery is annoying, complex and hard like the actual thing. Wich is nice, but we need more.

Organ failures are hard to pick up and when they are found... the patient might as well be DEAD and be cloned anyway.

It's funny how most people complain about medical being too boring and want to change menders every time and want to do more "doctoring" by adding things to the cloner to make it less attractive.

But all it does is introduce SR players and still the same healing applies.

So some doctors feel like Medbay revolves around: "heal booboo's, help players out of crit, clone when dead or SR when puritan."
And since diseases aren't as much as a thing in the game... they don't get to make much medicine to cure said diseases, thus making pharmacy just a glorified: "Stypic powder dispenser"

In my book, make surgery more accessable and give more scenerios to make it happen and to do that.. we just need some pathogens that can only be treated with constant medication or organ replacement.
Now I don't say: "Make it all infectious" more like... some pathogens can be obtain by doing x-y-z.
Like miners uncovering virus within the materials and the moment someone without protect gear touches it, they get infected.
And then add: "Cloning does not remove the pathogen"
Thus if someone dies of this organ destroying pathogen, cloning will just reset the organ death timer and only medicine holds it off till the organ fails again.

Eh... but this ain't a suggestion forums.

IN my opinion... Surgery needs to be made more ACCESIABLE 1st. NOT CHANGED! Accesiable!
Seriously as I said in an early post having a screen next to you saying on wich step of the surgery you are would help newbie doctors and veteran doctors alike.
If the surgery table has a screen showing: "You are doing: "heart surgery" your next step is: "Saw open the chest" will be most welcome.

[Goat_Real]

So some doctors feel like Medbay revolves around: "heal booboo's, help players out of crit, clone when dead or SR when puritan

Reminder that strange reagent no longer works on puritans.

If the surgery table has a screen showing: "You are doing: "heart surgery" your next step is: "Saw open the chest" will be most welcome.

As for the surgery suggestions, I believe we could have a seperate tab on surgery computer (That really should be used more because it's really cool) that allowed the surgeon to find surgeries in a database and/or get recommended surgeries based on the patient's health conditions. The medical scanner already shows what the recommended course of action for organ failures so it wouldn't be too out of place. Maybe it would give a list of tools that the surgeon will need at the top to help them get prepared too.

[Kotlol]

So some doctors feel like Medbay revolves around: "heal booboo's, help players out of crit, clone when dead or SR when puritan

Reminder that strange reagent no longer works on puritans.

If the surgery table has a screen showing: "You are doing: "heart surgery" your next step is: "Saw open the chest" will be most welcome.

As for the surgery suggestions, I believe we could have a seperate tab on surgery computer (That really should be used more because it's really cool) that allowed the surgeon to find surgeries in a database and/or get recommended surgeries based on the patient's health conditions. The medical scanner already shows what the recommended course of action for organ failures so it wouldn't be too out of place. Maybe it would give a list of tools that the surgeon will need at the top to help them get prepared too.

Yep basicly what I suggest is having the "guide on hand in game but it tracks what you have to do" That alone would eliminate 90% of surgery's annoyances. Heck if the surgery table also auto administers drugs into said patient or a button that will start a mender in the surgery table, it would eliminate the need of a second doctor or stopping mid surgery to heal up the patient.

More QoL stuff rather then redoing the whole system or making surgery just a few button presses by a surgery machine.

It would be great to have someone PR it

[Decarcassor]

So we all agree:
Surgery is annoying, complex and hard like the actual thing. Wich is nice, but we need more.

I think there is a slight but crucial misunderstanding here. Surgery itself is not complex at all. Just cutting, snipping and sawing in various order. Jam the new organ in and suture, done. Its the circumstances around surgery that can be a bit problematic. Namely why and how peoples do surgery and the general state of medbay classic or RP flavored.

As mentionned before, organ damages tend to be hard to notice if you don't have the right tools. Because damaged organs tend to not really do anything until they are critical at wich point they can start killing you really badly depending on which organ is affected. So more medium organ damage symptoms that are noticeable could be an improvement on that front maybe.

Also while the steps of surgery aren't particularly complex themselves, they require a proper set of tools at hand as well as available replacement organs. Now I'm sure its usualy not a big issue on RP where depending on the pop medbay might have an army of over prepared doctors just waiting for some action and the RP rules keeping things somewhat orderly. But on classic, medbay is almost always a complete mess 5 minutes into the round. The exemple with monkeys and stolen tools was not a joke. Thats how classic medbay feels most rounds. All doors hacked, random non medical crew coming and going, taking anything that isn't nailed down. If you plan to do any surgery on classic, you better keep a secret stash of surgery tools somewhee, because the ones in the OR will vanish. And there is no garantee that you will be able to print cyber organs, because anyone will walk in medbay to use the fabricators and they might be out of material. Thats really what will kill you if you walk in classic medbay with critical organs.

Having a surgery robot attached to surgical tables and providing tools that can't be stolen by passing monkeys or staffies, could solve this particular issue. Maybe its an idea worth exploring.

As for synthorgans, it sure would be nice of they where a bit more appealing. But you don't want to make them too apealing to the point where robust gamers start breaking into botany instead of medbay to get them every round. Having a unique special thing for each synthorgan would be awesome as a direct equivalent to cyber organs, but would involve a lot of work. Alternatively you could give all synthorgans self healing scaling of potency, to go along the increased health from endurance. Maybe less exciting but likely easier to make happen.

[RelentlessGarbage]

Also while the steps of surgery aren't particularly complex themselves, they require a proper set of tools at hand as well as available replacement organs. Now I'm sure its usualy not a big issue on RP where depending on the pop medbay might have an army of over prepared doctors just waiting for some action and the RP rules keeping things somewhat orderly. But on classic, medbay is almost always a complete mess 5 minutes into the round. The exemple with monkeys and stolen tools was not a joke. Thats how classic medbay feels most rounds. All doors hacked, random non medical crew coming and going, taking anything that isn't nailed down. If you plan to do any surgery on classic, you better keep a secret stash of surgery tools somewhee, because the ones in the OR will vanish. And there is no garantee that you will be able to print cyber organs, because anyone will walk in medbay to use the fabricators and they might be out of material. Thats really what will kill you if you walk in classic medbay with critical organs.

This makes sense. Surgery is balanced to be straightforward so long as you have the know-how and the supplies. But in classic, you can wind up with critical supplies going missing in medbay pretty early on, and getting more can mean a trip to the QM. And for a lot of people, having the wiki open isn't something they want to manage when they also have to focus on keeping the patient on the table alive. As you suggested, giving the surgery table a set of surgical tools that can't be taken out of the room (acting like wall-mounted defibrillators that spring back to the table or are chained to it) would at least mean you'd at least have the tools available at all times, if not the fabricator materials for cyberorgans. And adding in surgical instructions on the health monitor screen of the surgery table, like Kotol suggested, would also be a good addition to ease doctors into doing surgery.

As for synthorgans, it sure would be nice of they where a bit more appealing. But you don't want to make them too apealing to the point where robust gamers start breaking into botany instead of medbay to get them every round. Having a unique special thing for each synthorgan would be awesome as a direct equivalent to cyber organs, but would involve a lot of work. Alternatively you could give all synthorgans self healing scaling of potency, to go along the increased health from endurance. Maybe less exciting but likely easier to make happen.

Yeah, my thought on the whole synthorgan buff thing is that they start out being nearly equivalent to regular organs, but if you really juice the potency you can start getting cool effects. And I mean REALLY juice the potency - as I've written the ideas now, organs max out at power at 550 potency, and some of the more interesting/powerful effects only show up around 250 potency and above. That leaves making them as something only a prepared botanist can really do, and the additional splicing requirements for getting certain synthmeat mutations makes it hard for tiders to try and make them without also breaking into chemistry, the bar, or secured medical lockers. (Also worth noting that it would only take one synthmeat plant at 550 potency to make all of the other full-power synthorgans, so it's not that demanding.) If someone really wants a maximum-strength synthorgan, they'll need to have upwards of a thousand saltpetre, the understanding for how to properly splice/mutate plants, and plenty of time - more than enough time for the botanists in the department to murder them with chainsaws hotbox them with rainbow weed politely usher them out.

But that's besides the point of the post. Let's hear more voices from the crowd!

[Dhaidburt]

Very rarely have I seen organ replacements in my time in medbay, though that's on the RP servers. Not once has a synthorgan been used, since botany doesn't generally grow those for medbay. I recently did a double-eye surgery that was delayed since we were waiting on materials from mining and not once did I think to ask botany for syntheyes.

It's really only appendicitis and pancreatitis that gets people, everything else is just limbs. I think that stems from how easy it is to repair minor injuries to organs, and how little that minor damage can affect people.