Newbie-Proof charcoal

[TDHooligan]

Right now charcoal has settled between Pentetic and Iodide as the everyman's tox treatment, and I don't think that's an issue. The issue is that a lot of newer doctors think that, because of that, it's OK to just slam 30 units of it into someone, even if they're being treated.

I haven't had a single serious TOX case without a doctor plunging 10+ units of charcoal into them, depleting all my synaptizine/atropine/saline/epinephrine, then going "I was just helping" when I get irritated at it.

I'd rather that this changed from "literally sabotaging my treatment" to "helpful, but not efficient"


Idea:
Charcoal no longer purges anything ordinarily available from the the Nanomed/medbay,
Charcoal depletes itself faster in the presence of these reagents too (so that it's not just an easy win to add to every mix)

[Kotlol]

Not a bad one.

When I used to doctor, I actually just stuffed players into the cryotube if they had too much different damages or tox/oxygen damage.
Then I started charcoaling and made this mistake a lot too.

Now-a-days if I get doctor (wich is rare), I tend to 1st mend, then charcoal or.... if something else is in there. Charcoal later.

The thing about medbay these days.. most players in RP or Classic want to spend as MINIMAL AMOUNT OF TIME in there to go back to what's going on in the station.
So much so that "Self treatment" is a problem for doctors for impatient players or... doctors do not have time for a quick treatment and thus players who are patient are just sitting in line for 10 mins till a doctor decides to either treat them or look at them... wich again.. envokes players to self treat cause that's 1/9th or 1/6 of the shift of you waiting for another player.

Anyhow side tagent aside. I do not see a problem with this or introducing a new chemical that does this.

[RelentlessGarbage]

Charcoal is a tough case. As it stands, it's a very general, low-risk purgative and tox clearing agent. On its own, it's quite nice and helpful, but as you said, it can become a problem if you have multiple drugs in the bloodstream at the same time and you don't want them to get purged. Since I'm a botanist, my best example of this would be trying to make plant splices with either Sunrise or Black venne to make produce full of helpful meds; while it'd be nice to have bananas that contained salycilic acid, atropine, and synaptizine, it'll never be worth doing because you'd have charcoal in the mix as well, which would clear away all of those useful reagents very quickly. (Yes, I have heard that there is a secret technique for removing specific reagents from plants, but most people don't know how to do that, myself included.)

I'd love it if charcoal were more selective in what chems it cleared out. It wouldn't really make any sense as to why charcoal binds to and clears out some chems and not others when you stop to think about it, but this is a video game, so it doesn't really matter. That could also make calomel more valuable as a purgative that clears EVERYTHING, in the rare case that someone is overdosing on medical chems and needs them cleared ASAP.

So yeah, I wouldn't be opposed to your proposed changes. It doesn't affect charcoal as a stand-alone medication, but it makes it less deleterious if it's added to medical treatments while also reducing its effectiveness if administered in that setting.

[Dhaidburt]

while it'd be nice to have bananas that contained salycilic acid, atropine, and synaptizine, it'll never be worth doing because you'd have charcoal in the mix as well, which would clear away all of those useful reagents very quickly. (Yes, I have heard that there is a secret technique for removing specific reagents from plants, but most people don't know how to do that, myself included.)

I feel like this may be the best reason to go ahead with this change. Charcoal being a newbie-trap for toxin damage is behavior that can be corrected, but cool stuff should be encouraged

[Superlagg]

TG does something like this with their basic tox med. Multiver, on its own, will heal tox and deplete every other chem in the mob, but, if you add in two other med chems, it stops depleting med chems altogether.

There's also its inverse, monover, where it'll only heal if its the only chem in the mob, and deal organ damage if there's anything else in there.

[Decarcassor]

I don't really think there is an issue here. The point of charcoal as previsously mentionned is to be be a readily available, generic purgative and tox healer. Charcoal not being effective but also detrimental in certain cases is also very deliberate. Whenever I play medical and some new doctor ask me about the basic of healing I always try to teach the the proper use of charcoal and its drawbacks.

Further more, the whole challenge of playing medical, is learning the different med interactions, organ damages and other diseases or weird space shit that can happen to the crew and how to deal with them correctly.
Changing charcoal so that it flushes bad chems and keep the good ones, would only encourage the behavior of pumping anything with green numbers full of charcoal and dumb down medbay's gameplay.

Go teach new doctors that they can use potassium iodide for basic tox healing too. That when a patient is still full of poison, calomel might be a better idea, and that the cryo tubes exists and what they do (its crazy how cryo has fallen out of style since it was slowed down).

That or play as silicon and don't worry about poison ever.

[Vocalpocal]

 (Yes, I have heard that there is a secret technique for removing specific reagents from plants, but most people don't know how to do that, myself included.)

If it makes you feel any better I don't know this method either and doubt it even exists

[Goat_Real]

If you wanted charcoal that healed toxins and didn't purge reagents that also fits into a hypospray, you can have people use potassium iodine.

I don't think that changing the way charcoal works would really benefit people in the long term. Sure, it would stop the short term issue of people accidently purging your medicines. However, it would create a long term issue of not having a chemical to deplete a smaller amount of reagents without hurting someone like calomel.

A better solution would be:
To teach people to either let people heal one on one so that you don't accidently interfere with other people's treatments.
OR
Teaching them to inject potassium iodine first, a chemical that you can just dispense a click of a button in the pharmacy, due to it not interfering at all with the other reagents in the body.

[Lord_earthfire]

We got a chem that heals tox without repercussion. It's called potassium iodine.

The wiki and multiple tutorials take charcoal as go-to treatment for tox. If you think that should change, thats the point to go.

The thing is: charcoal is the go-to tox treatment for new players. It gets rid of the damage and the source and is extremly powerfull because of it.

If you min-max your chem mixes to stack multiple chems, i think you deserve to get fucked over by the power of charcoal. Death mixes share the same fate, both for good reason.

Chem stacking does not need to be easier. Quite the contrary, to be honest.