Syndicate Black Market Ice Cream

[Newt King]

We've all seen the ice cream flavors that wait at centcomm for those lucky enough to escape alive with enough time to spare to eat them. The ones that can be flavored ANY chem, even the secret/unmakeable ones. What I think would be cool is if the trader on the syndie listening post would sell individual cones, each random just like the ones on centcomm, smuggled illegally to aid in mischief. Obviously they would have to be either ludicrously overpriced, or if it was an added npc require a payment more.... Valuable to the traitor. The reason I suggest this as a traitor addon rather than accessible to all crew is mainly because it would facilitate some more interesting traitor shenanigans while hopefully preventing regular crew people from using it as an opportunity for flooding the station with werewolves/zombies etc, and I think steep pricing would be a good way to give traitors some amazing possibilities without having them ascend to godhood every round. I love the addition of the ??? Pills and the hobo wines, but I'd love to see a difficult (and not exploity) way to obtain a substance that truly could be ANYTHING. Or hell, there could be other ways to make it balanced. Maybe only a certain number are in stock per round, or maybe the merchant only takes traitor telecrystals as payment. But think of the possibilities: a wicked doctor with a syringe gun finds painbow fluid in his ice cream cone! Or maybe a simple animal loving traitor happens upon ice cream that causes people to explode into beagles!
I know technically you can obtain some random ice creams, but as it is now it is incredibly time consuming and feels more like an exploit, and attempting to do so as an antagonist more often than not will just lead to you wasting most of your round. Essentially what I am suggesting is offering those who can best make use of it (traitors) a legitimate method of gambling with chemical roulette, at high enough stakes to not detract from the value of poison bottles/stimpacks and with restrictions in place to prevent having every single player fishing for superchems every round. I'd love to see it become available, as a potential enhancement for traitor gimmicks rather than a replacement.

[Terminal Entropy]

One telecrystal seems a little much. Maybe you spend 2-3 and buy a cone crate full of randomized ice creams. Throw a syndicate ice cream social!

[Newt King]

They'd certainly be the most lively ice cream socials ever! Yeah I pulled some numbers out of my ass to kinda illustrate where I was going with the idea, but truth be told if something like that got implemented I wouldn't care what the cost was, as long as it was something that kept things balanced. The party crate does sound good, and a bit more stylish to boot. Maybe it comes with some syndicate-issue party hats and some (nonweapon) vuvuzelas,

[Natsumehack]

One telecrystal seems a little much. Maybe you spend 2-3 and buy a cone crate full of randomized ice creams. Throw a syndicate ice cream social!

The ice cream should also should be named after normal ice cream flavors, and have to be analyzed before you know what is in it.

Don't want any party goers to see ice cream labeled Cyanide, and scream bloody murder that X is giving out traitor ice cream.

[Marquesas]

The list should also be limited, you don't want people eating omnizine or werewolf serum!

Now this sound like a lazy man's poison bottle.

[Natsumehack]

The list should also be limited, you don't want people eating omnizine or werewolf serum!

Now this sound like a lazy man's poison bottle.

If anything, the harder to make the to chem the rarer the chance of it showing up would be baseline.

Even then, it should be a mix of every thing you can make into ice cream, from helpful, to deadly, so we just not getting, boxes full of poison every time we order

[Newt King]

Yeah the point I was going for was to have a chance of any chem at all appearing, with some possible balancing measures to keep rare chems like serum rare, but still have a chance of getting chems that might otherwise never be found. And pooling from literally every reagent would naturally have a higher chance of getting unremarkable ones like Oxygen-flavored ice cream. More of a chemical game of roulette in mind than a stylized poison bottle option with slightly more exotic poisons, if it were that way there would be less value in buying traitor poison bottles. Kinda like how wizards have their every flavor beans, that essentially already do this. I'm just suggesting making one or the other slightly more accessible to muck around with, the trade off being something substantial enough where getting something exceptional out of the ordeal requires you to work for it. Either that, or another possibility could be the ability to buy individual randomized injectors that work like stimpacks do, but are unlabeled and contain 15-20 units of any random chem. You'd have to inject yourself with it to find out what is in it, and to be able to extract it. That could be an interesting way to add an element of risk to the purchase. Maybe that injector you just gave yourself had werewolf serum, or maybe you have baby spiders inside you now.

[KikiMofo]

Yeah the point I was going for was to have a chance of any chem at all appearing, with some possible balancing measures to keep rare chems like serum rare, but still have a chance of getting chems that might otherwise never be found. And pooling from literally every reagent would naturally have a higher chance of getting unremarkable ones like Oxygen-flavored ice cream. More of a chemical game of roulette in mind than a stylized poison bottle option with slightly more exotic poisons, if it were that way there would be less value in buying traitor poison bottles. Kinda like how wizards have their every flavor beans, that essentially already do this. I'm just suggesting making one or the other slightly more accessible to muck around with, the trade off being something substantial enough where getting something exceptional out of the ordeal requires you to work for it. Either that, or another possibility could be the ability to buy individual randomized injectors that work like stimpacks do, but are unlabeled and contain 15-20 units of any random chem. You'd have to inject yourself with it to find out what is in it, and to be able to extract it. That could be an interesting way to add an element of risk to the purchase. Maybe that injector you just gave yourself had werewolf serum, or maybe you have baby spiders inside you now.

The reason the beans are only in the wizard shuttle is to keep everyone from getting hands on them. I don't know if coders would put in readily accessable ice cream if they took away beans from being easy to get.

[Newt King]

God dammit I was in the middle of typing a response and my phone decided to dump it. Anyway, I get why the prospect of ice creams/beans being more accessible makes people uneasy. Perhaps my suggestion from my last post might be a nice middle ground for limiting abuse but still having potential for some rare/gimmick chems. An injector sold only to traitors through some fashion, with no label and similar to DNA injectors cannot be emptied into a container. Perhaps could even be accomplished by making the act of using the injector deliver a randomized chem into you like some artifacts do, and not having the injector "contain" any liquid so you can't game it with a reagent scanner. Then it would be a true roulette, as you are essentially gambling with your round that the chem you have to pull out of your body to use isn't one that will kill you. Optionally I guess you could make it able to inject others like a DNA injector, but that kinda takes the danger element out of it, and making it only work as a self-injection would mean more traitors subjecting themselves to horrible or hilarious consequences for the slight chance that they might become more powerful, and more comedic failure is never a bad thing. I absolutely agree that regular crew shouldn't have access to truly random chems, just look at what happened when rat bites used to cause necrovirus

[Natsumehack]

Maybe even have rare chems only found this way. It would be a little interesting to have a clownue chem, that is only found this way. This would make a great way to add lots of gimmicky chems you can't make that does silly things.

[Newt King]

There is a cluwne reagent already, but I like the way you're thinking. I loved it when they added the ??? Pills and the hobo wines, and I'm of the mind that adding more gimmicky reagents to work with is always a good thing.

[KikiMofo]

There is a cluwne reagent already, but I like the way you're thinking. I loved it when they added the ??? Pills and the hobo wines, and I'm of the mind that adding more gimmicky reagents to work with is always a good thing.

The ??? pills and hobo wines have a certain set of chems they can have in them. They aren't like centcom ice cream or beans which can have any and all regents in them. Also Beans were nerfed so that you mostly get just sugar or bilk and stuff because back when they weren't nerfed people would find single beans in the goodie bags hidden around and end up destroying the whole station, With a single bean. You can see how people might not want those easily accessable.

[Newt King]

Yeah I kinda figured that was the case. Maybe even if the prospect of adding any source of 100% random chem regardless of difficulty to obtain is still not favorable, a decent alternative could be a random injector that pools from a list of chems that are rare or unmakeable, but have effects that are more gimmicky rather than including truly abuseable things like werewolf serum or zombie virus, or round-fucking ones like the deadlier airborne viruses. That way poison bottles have their niche as effective harmful chems, while these could serve as some kind of Syndicate Ned's Non-FDA Approved Tonics, which could contain innocuous things like ants or jenkem or may even contain such sought after commodities as painbow fluid, anima, or maybe even some new chems that Ned's had sitting around since space Woodstock and is pretty sure are expired guys

[Toybasher]

There is a cluwne reagent already, but I like the way you're thinking. I loved it when they added the ??? Pills and the hobo wines, and I'm of the mind that adding more gimmicky reagents to work with is always a good thing.

Is the cluwne reagent a "Find only" recipe like ??? pills or hobo wines? Or is it craftable? Going on a cluwney-rampage with a syringe gun full of it seems absolutely brilliant.

[Terminal Entropy]

Is the cluwne reagent a "Find only" recipe like ??? pills or hobo wines? Or is it craftable? Going on a cluwney-rampage with a syringe gun full of it seems absolutely brilliant.

Painbow fluid (and rainbow fluid) is admin-spawnable only, or can be obtained from an Admin chem dispenser.