Pathology - Now With Friendly Aspects!

[Erev]

This thread aims to increase the friendliness of Pathology so that it is both has more beneficial uses as well as making it less frustrating to use.

Quality of Life Improvements:

• Pathogen Incubator - A machine that allows one pathogen to be continuously cultivated without additional effort. If you want to cultivate additional strains you either need to create more of these machines or do it the old fashioned way.
  
• Implement ihenn's Pathology Splice UI Patch - While it might actually slow down seasoned users it does offer an easier to use method of moving spliced bits around for those newer to Pathology.
  
• Remove the Random Fail Chance on Splicing - Currently written into the code is a 10% chance that something will go wrong even if you splice something correctly. Of that 10% a quarter of the time (2.5%) you will randomly lose your splice. This random failure chance should be removed as to not punish people who are actually doing their work correctly.
  
• Modify the Splice Prediction Tool - In theory this tool tells you whether your splice will succeed or fail but its chance of giving you a correct reading on this pass or fail chance depends on how much you've used the DNA analyzer. Sometimes it'll say fail even if it'll succeed and you can never get 100% reliability from it. Most senior Pathology users hardly look at this tool anymore but it would be good to make it function better for newbies. I would suggest that it should avoid false positives and negatives and instead remain on 'uncertain' if it rolls against giving you a correct reading. I would also suggest that 100% reliability should be something attainable after a reasonable amount of use of the DNA analyzer.
  

Additional Beneficial Symptoms:

• Quicker clotting - T2 symptom that causes wounds to close more quickly.
  
• Instant clotting - T4 symptom that causes wounds to close immediately.
  
• Blood regeneration - T3 symptom that helps to replace lost blood up to a healthy level.
  
• Limb regeneration - T4 symptom that regrows limbs over time.
  
• Overdrive - T2 symptom that increases your walk/run speed as if you had the chewed-up running shoes on. May require food in your system to sustain the speed.
  
• Resurrection - T5 symptom that will bring you back to life once. Upon this happening the disease is burnt from your system and you become immune. Requires the body to remain mostly intact.
  
• Better Healing - T4 and/or T5 versions of the various damage healing symptoms. Improves both amount healed and speed of healing. (It might be worth having a whole range of healing symptoms similar to how fever and chills works.)
  
• Rad Healing - T4 symptom that takes radiation and causes it slowly heal you instead of harm you as it decays. (The more that you heal in this manner the more your avatar looks like he's rotting.
  
• Electric Healing - T4 symptom that heals you when you get shocked. The more shock there is the more you heal.
  

Other Additional Symptoms:

• Slowed clotting - T2 symptom that slows the body's ability to naturally clot wounds.
  
• No clotting - T4 symptom that causes the body to be unable to be unable to naturally clot wounds.
  
• Blood destruction - T4 symptom that kills off blood cells resulting in hypotension.
  
• Blood overproduction - T4 symptom that causes too much blood to be made resulting in hypertension.
  
• Honking - T4 symptom that causes honking and transmits the disease to all that hear the honking. The range of this transmission is large - notably bigger than even farting.
  
• Swollen Feet - T2 symptom that causes currently worn shoes to be stuck in place. If no shoes are worn new shoes may not be added.
  
• Swollen Hands - T2 symptom that causes currently worn gloves to be stuck in place. If no gloves are worn new gloves may not be added.
  
• Swollen Head - T3 symptom that causes currently worn headgear to be stuck in place. If no headgear is worn new headgear may not be added.
  
• Vomiting - T2 symptom that causes vomiting and transmits the disease through touch.
  
• Green Vomit - T4 symptom that causes the infected to spew green vomit which transmits the disease through touch.
  
• Confused Intent - T3 symptom that randomly causes you to change intent.
  
• Partial Blinding - T3 symptom causing moderate eye damage.
  
• Blinding - T5 symptom that slowly makes you go blind.
  
• Partial Deafness - T3 symptom that makes you only hear shouting.
  
• Deafness - T4 symptom that slowly makes you go deaf.
  
• Clowning Around - T5 symptom that turns the infected into cluwnes. This will help us get further away from the old viruses.
  
• Meat Cube - T5 symptom that eventually turns the infected into meat cubes.
  

Pathology Related Events:

• The mining magnet may occasionally pull in wrecked ships/asteroids with cargo bins. Some of these bins may infect those around them when they are opened.
  
• Random pathology events may cause an outbreak of a greater or lesser severity. This could be tied to late-joiners arriving on station.
  

Symptom Alleviation and Curing:

• More symptoms should be able to be temporarially alleviated by salicylic acid and similar drugs.
  
• The cure synthesizer should start with all modules available (it currently starts without fungus).
  
• The station should start with a few generic anti-pathogen kits that can quickly cure any pathogen with a low suppression threshold - perhaps a couple 5s and a 10.
  

Additional ideas - especially for beneficial symptoms - are much appreciated.

[amaranthineApocalypse]

-snip-

It's not a beneficial symptom idea, sorry

But instead of blood destruction, why not have internal haemorrhaging as a symptom.

From tier 1-3 it's just low to medium amounts of blood loss with no apparent source, but once you hit tier 4 you end up with haematemesis as well, and once you hit tier 5 you just start bleeding profusely out of everywhere.

Of course it could be countered by using proconvertin and possibly filgrastim as well.

[Vitatroll]

A lot of beneficial symptoms could just be activating certain beneficial genes, like human smes or resistance. Lazy, but effective.

[Boa Jacque]

Everything on this page so far is great -
all of it

Even if the more complex symptoms are possible, and there is no need to be lazy- another positive pathogen to add would be one that activated more and more of your positive genetics. (as it climbed the T scale)
"Positive genetics" could include everything listed as a resistance
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on a side note;
Since we're making pathology a bigger thing, lets throw in one "out" for the poor crew that might be subjected to them:

An extreme dose of radiation far greater than 'enough' to kill a spaceman should roll a decent per-tick chance to cure pathogens.
Maintaining 100+u of radium in the bloodstream should be sufficient, I think.

Alternatively- reduce the chance to cure to something low and just make it so that radium has a low chance to cure pathogens, with IV drips in mind.

[Mordent]

Alternatively- reduce the chance to cure to something low and just make it so that radium has a low chance to cure pathogens, with IV drips in mind.

I'm all for radiochemotherapy having a low chance of curing nasties. Baldness should be a side effect of high doses of radiation, too, while we're at it, or possibly a side effect of long-term exposure to low doses of radiation.

[Sundance]

I feel like pathology needs to find its feet on what it actually wants to be. The OP has some really solid suggestions. I feel like it needs to be tied in with Medical as much as possible to make it stand out as its own field. The blood ideas is good. Other stuff would be strengthing of limbs, strength and stamina enhancements, strengthening of the heart, eyes, butt, ears, voice, ability to resist heat/cold, ability to resist other pathogens, bone and organ stuff when Haine gets around to it, etc.

Here's some addendum idea's I've had around the general coding of pathology:

1. Certain players need to have more passive resistance if not complete resistance to certain megadiseases that pathology makes. Making a megadisease =/= the complete anahilation of the crew, but rather a very significant cull, like 75% if left untreated. The remaining 25% will have to be killed by other means, which may mean creating a seperate disease that would target their specific immune system. Could easily tie this immunity into blood types, removing blood type selection and randomising it every round. Currently it just doesn't seem balanced right.

B) Medical analysers need a pathagen upgrade that can scan players not only for supression use, but for preventive use. If a megadisease is passed through certain means, then medical doctors can then notify the crew "this is how not to get the disease" and suddenly the crew is actually using those gloves and masks.

C) Pathogens are unique in that they can pass on from player to player. But the problem with that it's carte blanche, you're literally fucking over everyone even if you trying to target one person. So I feel this could be reworked a little so that
1. If you're a good person then you can make beneficial disease with high infectability so it passes on to player to player.
2. If you're neutral and are trying to get benefits just for yourself, there should be a way to engineer the disease specifically for you, and would lie dormant in others.
3. If you're bad guy, bioterrorism could be engineered so that it targets specific people. So you may have a hit on the captain, you design a disease that passes dormantly from person to person until it reaches the Captain, who'd get a less than wholesome reaction from being infected.

[Mordent]

1. Certain players need to have more passive resistance if not complete resistance to certain megadiseases that pathology makes. Making a megadisease =/= the complete anahilation of the crew, but rather a very significant cull, like 75% if left untreated. The remaining 25% will have to be killed by other means, which may mean creating a seperate disease that would target their specific immune system. Could easily tie this immunity into blood types, removing blood type selection and randomising it every round. Currently it just doesn't seem balanced right.

...

2. If you're neutral and are trying to get benefits just for yourself, there should be a way to engineer the disease specifically for you, and would lie dormant in others.
3. If you're bad guy, bioterrorism could be engineered so that it targets specific people. So you may have a hit on the captain, you design a disease that passes dormantly from person to person until it reaches the Captain, who'd get a less than wholesome reaction from being infected.

I love the idea of tying it into blood type, whether that be being able to target certain blood types only (e.g. mix blood of a certain type into the pathogen at some point in the process and it keys to that type). If you want it to affect yourself you can use your own blood, if you want it to affect your target then you can check their blood type in the medical records and either use their blood or find someone who has the same type and use theirs.

Tying into the number 2 point above, I think you should be able to have blood-borne diseases, namely ones that only transmit via blood transfusion/injection (or possibly if you have an open wound and bloody clothes). This way you could inject just yourself and those you trust with your "boon" pathogens, in much the same way as geneticists can hand out the good mutations to certain people.

Going back to the blood types thing, to avoid a single disease wiping everyone out you could have each pathogen only affect certain blood types anyway, or have reduced effectiveness against certain blood types (e.g. higher tier symptoms only occur in type A+. Type A- gets only up to middle-tier symptoms, and other types only get the low-tier symptoms). The type that it affects can be tweaked by letting it stew in a petri dish with a certain blood type for a while.

If you want you could have it gain potency to blood types over time in this way, letting the truly evil pathologists eventually make a super-virus. This should take in the order of tens of minutes to hours, though, maybe having each type it's keyed to taking longer (the first could take 1-3 minutes, the second 3-5 minutes, the third 5-10 minutes, the fourth 10-15 minutes, the fifth 15-30 minutes, the sixth 30-60 minutes, etc.). If it's released early you don't affect the whole crew, but the longer you wait the more diminishing returns it has.

[Nnystyxx]

I support pretty much all of what Erev said. More actual good reasons to use Pathology for the crew and more anti-frustration features (less RNG for instance) seem good. I don't like that a huge chunk of the already much-maligned Medbay is dedicated to hellviruses that range from annoying to crippling and never put out anything useful. (fuck, at least toxins can bomb a blob or something??)

[Burrito Justice]

Pathology really needs more depth and not just be a hellhole that no one touches because it doesn't do anything good for the crew. I like a lot of the ideas here.

[ferriswheel1]

I think the cure machine/Synth-o-matic is rather underused at the moment, which is a shame, because it has some cool hidden upgrades that will almost never get used. I'd really like to see pathology random events which would let friendly pathologists use their skills to cure people. Curing diseases is very difficult at the moment, so suppression kits sound like a great idea.

I had an idea for a CDC contract system, that let you accept contacts via the CDC to synthesize cures for pathogen samples to make some sweet cash. With a bit of tinkering and exploring, some shady bio-weapons contracts for the syndicate might become available, with a greater payout for more lethal pathogen samples. Maybe those space bucks could be put towards ordering better equipment for the lab?

if people wanted to make a incubator, here's some ideas for sprites:





Those are industrial fermenters, generally used to culture bacteria and whatnot. From what I remember from my Biology A-level, they need a constant flow of cooling water to prevent the bacteria from cooking themselves in their own metabolic heat.

You could fermenters working in a similar way to the cryo cells, with an attached freezer and water tank that need to be kept pumping in order to keep the pathogen growing within alive.

[Erev]

Wow! I'm glad that there seems to be some interest and I'm absolutely loving these ideas.

As to Sundance's idea about modifiable infectability we actually have that to an extent already. That is to say that if you do not have any 'transmission' symptoms then the only way to transmit the disease is blood to blood. That being said I totally support the idea of being able to be able to widen or narrow what the pathogen would infect. It could be 'everyone' or 'only X race' or 'specific person or persons' depending upon the symptom used. For everyone else it could either be immune or a carrier. This would take a bit more work than adding other more traditional symptoms however.

I love the reverse CDC/contract idea ferriswheel1!

I would also like to find a way to use the analyzer to more quickly and efficiently figure out if a symptom you are chasing is going to be good for bad. As-is looking for symptoms is very scattershot. Adding more symptoms means you are more likely to find a symptom but there should be a way to narrow in on 'this one is good' 'this one is bad' 'this one is transmittable' and such things. That being said I do not yet have a solid idea for how this would be done.

[Nnystyxx]

Making Medbay money through disease research could make it rewarding to do pathology's janky cure system