Pathology: Quality of Life Improvements

[Embolism]

Pathology is great, yet there's almost never anyone doing it; much less anyone traitoring with it. The reason? Because it takes too long to make anything worthwhile unless you're lucky. I also find that, while researching, you don't get a lot of feedback for what you are doing; and it is often difficult to know exactly what a symptom does without testing it on yourself. So here are some suggestions to improve the quality of life of pathologists...

Add a pathology health analyzer upgrade. Adding it to a health analyzer allows it to see the strain name of every pathogen an individual is infected with and the stage they are at. This could also come as a PDF scanning program for medical doctors.

Add a way to acquire more pathogen samples. This could be tied to QM, dispensed by the PathoMatic, or both (preferably both). It is not uncommon to be missing tier 1 symptoms (and therefore building blocks for further tiers) in the starting samples, plus it would also make it easier to splice symptoms into a different microbody or strain.

Make zoomed in descriptions of symptoms unique for their tier, and no symptom should be missing a description. I've discovered quite a few symptoms in the same tier that share zoomed in descriptions (although in same cases they seem to be the same symptom despite having a different makeup: a bit difficult to tell on monkeys), and many that don't have descriptions at all. The latter is a particularly annoying because it makes it difficult to tell which description matches up to which makeup when you're observing a pathogen with multiple symptoms spliced in. And no, none of the symptoms that share descriptions and tiers include anything about "maybe this will react with X".

Make the Pathogen Manipulator more user friendly. Things like the "Return to Menu" option (there's nothing in the menu, the only purpose it serves is annoyance when you press it by mistake) and requiring you to close all slots before manipulation can take place serve no purpose than to make life a bit harder. Other things that would be nice include automatic re-targeting of a spliced piece of DNA ( the spliced section becomes the new target so you can keep adding on to it without having to manually change targets), the ability to splice without a source (to remove or rearrange DNA without adding new pieces), and a "research mode" that lets you lock down two vial receptacles and automatically load the contents of the last receptacle when a vial is inserted (so when using the DNA Tester you can add more material without having to switch to the Load/Save DNA menu).

Let traitor Medical Doctors and Directors order a vial of pathogen that always contains one or more high tier symptoms. The main problem with using pathology to traitor is it takes quite a while to create the disease of your dreams, and Goonstation rounds tend to devolve into chaos too quickly for pathology traitoring to have significant impact. I'm not asking for a fully-developed pathogen here, just something better than the sample vials so you can release a disease before the station gets blown up.

Restrict Pathology access to Medical Doctors and command staff. As it is Medical Doctors are almost a "weaker" version of Roboticists and Geneticists (when not a traitor) because they don't have any access the other two professions don't have, and while working in Pathology I'm a bit annoyed that half the station can come and go as they please in an area that's supposed to be well-quarantined.

[Cirrial]

This all sounds fantastic and I wish I'd been here before pathology got nerfed to the point of being what looks like a hollow shell of what it once was.

Not only that but Pathology doesn't even see much use in curing diseases when massive outbreaks of horrifying disease afflict the station, the one time that this should really be a thing in demand. Of course, maybe I just haven't seen the rounds where a biosuited medical doctor bursts through the doors screaming "I WILL SAVE YOU ALL" while spraying vaccine foams or whatever.

[Noah Buttes]

I really like all of these ideas, and would love to see them implemented.

[cgrn10]

This all sounds fantastic and I wish I'd been here before pathology got nerfed to the point of being what looks like a hollow shell of what it once was.

It was never nerfed, this is just how it is.

The only thing I agree with here is more samples because yeah lock out. I think marq will be getting to that some day, like when he gets around to tying it into other things and adding in the mutatis cell. Also the medical doctor high tier thing would be useful.

Pathology is locked to only med access and up??

Finding out some symptoms tier is easy, just isolate it and look at the tier.

[Embolism]

This all sounds fantastic and I wish I'd been here before pathology got nerfed to the point of being what looks like a hollow shell of what it once was.

It was never nerfed, this is just how it is.

The only thing I agree with here is more samples because yeah lock out. I think marq will be getting to that some day, like when he gets around to tying it into other things and adding in the mutatis cell. Also the medical doctor high tier thing would be useful.

Pathology is locked to only med access and up??

Finding out some symptoms tier is easy, just isolate it and look at the tier.

Yeah but "med access and up" includes Geneticists and Roboticists and possibly some other jobs that have Medbay lobby access.

It's not finding the symptom tier that's the problem, it's the fact that different symptoms in the same tier sometimes have the exact same description.

[cgrn10]

This all sounds fantastic and I wish I'd been here before pathology got nerfed to the point of being what looks like a hollow shell of what it once was.

It was never nerfed, this is just how it is.

The only thing I agree with here is more samples because yeah lock out. I think marq will be getting to that some day, like when he gets around to tying it into other things and adding in the mutatis cell. Also the medical doctor high tier thing would be useful.

Pathology is locked to only med access and up??

Finding out some symptoms tier is easy, just isolate it and look at the tier.

Yeah but "med access and up" includes Geneticists and Roboticists and possibly some other jobs that have Medbay lobby access.

It's not finding the symptom tier that's the problem, it's the fact that different symptoms in the same tier sometimes have the exact same description.

Example? I've never seen this.

[Noah Buttes]

Well, just a couple rounds ago, I accidentally unleashed an ice statue plague on the station thanks to this.

[Pacra]

Well, just a couple rounds ago, I accidentally unleashed an ice statue plague on the station thanks to this.

It was a pretty good plague to be quite honest

[Embolism]

Yeah but "med access and up" includes Geneticists and Roboticists and possibly some other jobs that have Medbay lobby access.

It's not finding the symptom tier that's the problem, it's the fact that different symptoms in the same tier sometimes have the exact same description.

Example? I've never seen this.

I come across it quite a lot. Off the top of my head there's T2 "The pathogen appears to generate a high amount of fluids" , T5 "The culture appears to have an irregular lack of liquids, but a very high amount of hydrogen and oxygen", and also a bunch of T4 and T5 symptoms that don't have a description at all.

[Noah Buttes]

Well, just a couple rounds ago, I accidentally unleashed an ice statue plague on the station thanks to this.

It was a pretty good plague to be quite honest

Unfortunately, I wasn't TRYING to do that, I was trying to heal everyone with my benevolent virus.

And I just tried to INTENTIONALLY create another plague during a traitor round, but even with far more time (70 minutes) I was unable to do so.


It's far too luck-based right now.

[Mageziya]

And on that note, there's very little motivation to mess around with pathology as a non-traitor. The supposed use for non-traitors, besides curing a pathos that someone else made (Are random event pathogens spreading around the station a thing? I don't think I've ever seen it.), is to create a super-buff pathogen that would turn everyone into super-nerds or something along the lines of that. The problem with that is, from my understanding (The wiki doesn't have a list of symptoms) is that there are barely any beneficial symptoms. There's no good justification for doing pathos as a non-traitor other than to learn how to do it for when you actually are traitor.

The other big problem is the sheer amount of time it takes. It basically has the same feedback loop that genetics have. Geneticists spend all round getting superpowers, and then don't use them due to not being traitors. Traitor geneticists rarely do genetics work, unless it's to leech off the work of a serious colleague. Pathology takes so long that for a traitor to make any use of it they'd have to spend almost all round sitting in the room, so most ignore it.

It also doesn't help when, in my experience, pathogen samples sometimes don't grow, but you have to wait 5 minutes or so for the sample to even begin growing, at which point if you have a bad sample you've wasted your time. Attempting to juggle multiple samples only gets annoying as you have to deal with the sample nutrition-depletion rates, and then you accumulate more petri-dishes as you progress, compounding things. Even more-so, manipulation destruction doesn't help, as the safer you are with manipulating the pathogen, the longer it takes as you're required to grow more versions of the pathogen to avoid losing everything.

So, I basically have two suggestions: One: More beneficial symptoms. Two: A traitor only item for doctors and the MD that can be attached to petri-dishes and ramps pathogen growth rate way the hell up and uses the same rate of resource consumption as normal growth rate. I'm talking near-instant growth of a sample to usable levels.

[Frank_Stein]

What if genetics and pathology were kinda combined?

Like, say you find a mutation you want to spread from genetics. Create an injector, do some science with it, and give a disease that mutation. Now people who catch that disease have that mutation.

[BaneOfGiygas]

Just thought I'd throw this in here, the only times I've ever really seen awesome pathology-viruses are when admins will them into existence. I'm not sure if this is just because not many people are bothering with the thing, because it's inaccessible, because it's a new system, or some combination thereof, but you can't deny that it is going without much of any significant usage.

[Noah Buttes]

Mutations are also pretty garbage right now too.


They don't actually seem to affect symptoms in any significant way no matter what the stats are.

[cgrn10]

Just thought I'd throw this in here, the only times I've ever really seen awesome pathology-viruses are when admins will them into existence. I'm not sure if this is just because not many people are bothering with the thing, because it's inaccessible, because it's a new system, or some combination thereof, but you can't deny that it is going without much of any significant usage.

It's pretty much going to stay that admins are going to make the cool viruses, It takes me 40 minutes to possibly get an actually strong virus that does things out there, and it still lacks half the things the admin viruses had had. I also haven't touched in ages.

What if genetics and pathology were kinda combined?

Like, say you find a mutation you want to spread from genetics. Create an injector, do some science with it, and give a disease that mutation. Now people who catch that disease have that mutation.

I'd prefer viruses don't make people blind aswell, they can already reduce them to burning near-paralyzed messes on the floor.

And with Super nerd viruses, the healing one's actually heal quite a damn lot for being eternally attached to your soul pretty much (because like 3 people know the suppressants to everything) but It couldn't hurt to have more.

With the virus having the same description that really doesn't matter -at all- they serve the same purpose IE couging/sneezing do the same exact thing pretty much.