Tips N' Tricks & Little things you learned that are game changing.

[Erik]

We all know these small little tricks, and other things that are total game changers and make things easier! What are some of the small little game changing things that you've learned?

I'll kick it off with a good tip for security or detective players!

• The forensic scanner can be used to lookup DNA & Fingerprints! Simply use it in-hand and enter the DNA or Fingerprint to receive a direct result! No more running around to consoles!
  

[lambskin]

The scientist PDA has a signaler program built into it, which can be activated even if you aren't holding your PDA in your hands.

[Noah Buttes]

• You can use pens to write on morgues by clicking on the morgue while wielding the pen in-hand.
  
• Donuts are actually a good source of general purpose healing for security officers. When eaten by security members, donuts restore extra amounts of health. Frosted donuts restore even more.
  
• If you have a small amount of alcohol in your system, you're less likely to mess up when performing surgery. Being too drunk makes you worse at surgery, though.
  
• Hair-dye bottles apply color to a victim's hair instantly. This is a great way to show your displeasure with someone.
  
• Debris field drones don't target syndiepods.
  

[Erik]

• You can (re)name pods by using a champaign bottle on it.
  

[Mageziya]

Click dragging to open containers was probably the most fundamentally game changing that I learned when I started playing this game again. That, and the auto-equip button. They're still two things I try to tell new players about whenever I encounter them, though they're hard to describe by text.

Other fundamental new-player control tips like that:

-You can move objects that you're pulling by clicking on a ground tile, this can allow to get out of situations where you accidentally trap yourself. Similarly, you can move over crates by click-dragging yourself over them.

-If you're in a scrolling list (Such as the ghost observe list, the AI track list, or a the wizard teleport list), pressing a key will take you to the first entry with the same first letter as that key. Pressing again takes you to the second entry, and so on.

Some medical tips:

-Every med doctor has a porta-nanomed controller in their PDA. This is huge for healing people outside of medbay, and also means that you don't need to carry as much crap as you usually do. You can also save space when doing this by shoving your ID in your PDA slot and wearing it in your ID slot. Though hope at that point that you don't get PDA bombed, as you'll be double screwed.

-With heart surgery, know that hearts are the reagent container for all reagents in a person. When you cut out a heart, you also remove all the chems in their body, this includes any healing chems you used to prep before surgery. Simply don't add healing chems until the new heart is in. Once the new heart is in, make sure to use salbutomal on the patient, as this will reduce the OXY damage taken from not having a heart, and prevent the patient from entering crit, which would ramp up OXY damage and likely escalate into death. I had a few people die on me after transplants before I realized that salbutomal prevented that.

-You can adjust the amount of chems that hyposprays inject. Just use it in hand and you can adjust the hypospray for a wide array of values. The most common uses for this are lowering the inject value to 2 on a hypospray filled with omnizine (With the omnizine taken from the MD locker) so that it be used for healing scratches, or alternatively setting it to inject all on a hypospray filled with epinephrine and using the massive injection as a weapon.

-Cryo is not just for healing massive damage off of people, you can use it to heal minor scratches off of people where using any of the available medication would be a waste. Say, a patient has 15 BURN damage and 15 BRUTE damage. A brute and burn patch would be an egregious waste in this situation, so cryo would be optimal for healing the patient. This does deplete the cryodox, but cryo is rare enough that I have literally never seen a cryo-tube run out of it, and you have a spare beaker.

-The reagent reserve tanks in medbay are freaking godly, and I very rarely see anyone use them. They're large beakers filled to the brim with healing chems, a great source of epinephrine and anti-tox/charcoal. Alternative, if you tighten you grip on a beaker (by using the beaker in your hand), you can use the syptic and silver sulfazine containers as effective patches by dumping them on yourself. (Which is great when you're in medbay, dying, there's no doctor, you're somehow in the operating theater, and you don't have med access. Before you ask, this has happened to me several times before.)

Random Tips:

-Wear a hat as a clown, it makes the shoes far less of a brutal hell as it helps you get up. Everyone knows this, but it took me a while to realize. Same goes for if you've been cluwned.

-Try taking mutadone as a cluwne, it removes the crippling genetic defects that make playing as a cluwne a living nightmare.

-Paper and pen can get past speech barriers, such as when you're a monkey, a cluwne (I think), a diplomat, have too many accents, or a geneticist with a lack of foresight.

-The Chaplin's bible is a container that you can shove stuff in. This took me way too long to find out about.

-The point of PDA bombs is to soften up assassination targets right before you go in for the kill. Just using it to randomly bomb people does nothing, as people can generally be healed afterwards, and have any lost limbs reattached. It can, though, dick over certain departments. Observing the location of people before you bomb them, if you're not planning to kill them, and bombing when they're in the right location can do maximum dickery to and even cripple a department (If it,say, breaks a window and vents the air from the place.)

[Frank_Stein]

• Uniforms can be swapped with the use hotkey or by clicking the inv icon in the lower left, leaving pocket contents and ID slots intact
  
• You can click drag the PDA to yourself to open the window for it if it's in an easy access slot (Pockets,belt,ID) rather than use it in your hand
  
• Windows such as the PDA popup or text boxes can be dragged to the right and closed, saving those locations for the next time they pop up and not obstructing your view
  
• Cigarettes will still deliver reagents even if it's not in the mask slot. You can actually smoke at least 5 cigarettes at once by placing lit ones in the pockets, hands, and mask slot.
  
• Disposals units will indicate if there is an item inside them based on a one pixel sized blue light icon. 
  
• using the *spin/*twirl command with any kind of cup or beaker will spill the contents into the floor. Useful for cups, since you normally can't pour them out, and can create slick spots for tripping people
  
• The salt shaker gives an infinite amount of salt. You can fill a glass with it then *spin it to create salt piles. Useful, but much slower if you don't have chemistry access during a wraith round.
  
• Just as you can add pieces by opening a pod with a crowbar, you can also take them away or replace them. Useful for sabotage
  
• As long as you keep the window for it open, you can still pull things out of and place them inside a bag/box that has a mousetrap grenade assembly inside it
  
• Mousetrap grenade assemblies instantly detonate rather than waiting for a five second timer
  

[Grifflez]

• You can 'kick' someones weapon away after chair-diving onto them by right-clicking and picking up the item in question, then throwing it before the game realizes you are stunned and thus cannot hold items.
  

[Noah Buttes]

• You can 'kick' someones weapon away after chair-diving onto them by right-clicking and picking up the item in question, then throwing it before the game realizes you are stunned and thus cannot hold items.
  

If I recall correctly, this was confirmed as an intentional feature in order to provide some level of defense against butcher knives and daggers.

[ZeWaka]

• You can right click windoors to toggle if they stay open.
  
• Engineer (and maybe heads) PDAs and the pda module vending machine have remote monitors for the PTL and engine.
  
• All bibles share the same inventory. Great for sending items to criminals to bust out of the brig.
  
• Swap out the oxygen tank in a pod for a plasma-filled tank. Kills the occupant VERY fast if they breathe it.
  
• Teperone at 1u in a hypospray is great for recovering from running past breaches.
  
• Pills filled with cyroxadone and cryostylane are great for recovering from injuries, works in space as well.
  
• For nuke mode, sending in a dude to pose as a miscreant staff assistant walling your target off is fantastic.
  

[Noah Buttes]

Stealth storages can fit in pockets.

[Vitatroll]

Some fundamentals:
- Slide: Lie down, get up, but tap a directional key before you fully stand. This lets you 'slide' under some things.
- Drag: If you ctrl+click something while standing, then click on an open space beside it, you 'drag' it to that position. You can even 'drag' your own body by ctrl+clicking on yourself.
- Welding tank in your way with no space to 'push' it? Ctrl+click it, lie down, and 'drag' it into the tile you're on. This works on a lot of things, like displaced windows, canisters, etc.
- The v key (wasd) will equip whatever you're holding into it's appropriate slot. Even if the slot is occupied.
- The c key (wasd) activates items in hand. Try this with everything.
- 1-4 switches intents. This can be of great help.
- Alt+W whispers. I just learned this. Holy shit.

Medical/Chem:
- Beakers can be 'tightened' to splash 10u at a time by activating them in hand.
- You can often transfer the contents of one container into another by click-dragging. This has other, more robust properties.
- A hypospray only accepts certain 'good' reagents. Furthermore, using a hypo never causes addiction. By the way, meth is 'good' for you.
- Robust-eez contains meth. Combine this fact with the above and you can have a full hypo of meth with no science whatsoever. SPEED, KEEDZ!
- Sugar has a 4% chance of breaking down into 1u of epi. Combine that with the speed boost and soda is a genuine life saver.
- Microwaved donks produce omnizine when eaten. Beyond that, if immediately 'syringed' out, it's enough for making around 14u of strange reagent.
- Medical marijuana: White weed requires a potency >30 and endurance >30 and <50. Infuse saltpetre for potency, and space fungus for endurance. It's only a 20% chance, so ammonia and mutagen in the pot help in getting it to show.
- Alternatively, White Lotus can be grown via strange seeds in the russian sat. Need luck, though.
- Geneticist can quick-clone people by ejecting them early (swipe card on the pod) and then healing them. Mannitol, styptic and charcoal I think.

Robusting/Various:
- Lockers make amazing shields.
- Click dragging someone into a trash chute will shove them in it.
- Grabbing somebody and clicking on surgical tables forces them to lie down on top of it.
- Buckling somebody onto a bed makes them lie down.
- People who are prone can be thrown with a level 1 grab.
- Want to dump somebody's stuff on the ground? Take their uniform first.
- Toxins is the slowest way to make ttv bombs. If you had a TTV, you could make a capped TTV bomb with nothing but maint access, all faster than toxins.

Guess I'll do more later. Pizza time.

[Superlagg]

If you use a screwdriver to disconnect a TV and then reconnect it, the TV becomes a console that connects to many more cameras across the station. Handy for making sure the coast is clear before you hide bombs all over the station!

[Noah Buttes]

- Toxins is the slowest way to make ttv bombs. If you had a TTV, you could make a capped TTV bomb with nothing but maint access, all faster than toxins.

I know what you're referring to, and I feel smug about it.

[Grek]

Vending machine drinks have a number of useful properties:
-Coffee makes you run faster, warms you up and helps negate stuns. It also partially negates changeling stings!
-Chicken Noodle Soup and Honey Tea the cure cold, the flu and food poisoning.
-All alcohols decay into Ethanol. Ethanol + Charcoal = Antihol, a chemical which negates Ethanol but is much less effective at curing toxin damage than regular charcoal.
-Beer is over 3 times more effective at curing toxin damage than charcoal, but is only effective only when chilled.
-Limeaid and Orangeaid cure drunkenness and vision/hearing problems respectively.
-Chocolate, Space Cola, Robust-Eez, Grife-O, Dr. Pubber and Spooky Dan's all contain reagents that decay into sugar. Sugar makes you go fast and supplies you with epi to keep your heart beating, but can put you into a coma if you drink too much. Two sips is the safe limit!
-Robust-Eez and Grife-O are both addictive and bad for you, but contain powerful stimulants. Use at your own risk!
-Dr. Pubber is a powerful tranquilizer. If someone drinks a whole bottle, they will be KO'd for a long, long time.
-In the event of sugar poisoning, administer tea. It removes an equal volume of sugar, converting it into sweat tea.

[Noah Buttes]

-Beer is over 3 times more effective at curing toxin damage than charcoal, but is only effective only when chilled.

Actually, that's not true.

The relevant code is

Code:

            reaction_mob(var/mob/M, var/method=TOUCH, var/volume_passed)
                var/mytemp = holder.total_temperature
                src = null
                if(!volume_passed) return
                if(!ishuman(M)) return
                if(method == INGEST)
                    if(mytemp <= T0C+7) //Nice & cold.
                        if(M.get_toxin_damage())
                            M.take_toxin_damage(-5)
                            M.updatehealth()
                        if (prob(25)) boutput(M, "<span style=\"color:blue\">Nice and cold! How refreshing!</span>")
                    else if (mytemp > T0C + 30) //Warm & disgusting.
                        M.emote("frown")
                        boutput(M, "<span style=\"color:red\">This beer is all warm and nasty. Ugh.</span>")

The key here is that this is called on ingestion rather than per mob life.

in other words, you lose -5 tox damage PER SIP rather than per TICK. Charcoal works per tick, so, in theory, it will be way more effective.

However, if you can make a way to rapidly ingest lots of cold beer, you're right.