Strange reagent zombies?

[poland spring]

considering the zombies in certain telesci locations it'd probably be best if it only zombified people with a ton of radiation in their system, keeping people from abusing this too easily

[Hulk Hogan]

considering the zombies in certain telesci locations it'd probably be best if it only zombified people with a ton of radiation in their system, keeping people from abusing this too easily

What we could do is this: Make a secret chem called Trioxin, instead of just using SR with radiation. We could make it incredibly difficult to create like the werewolf serum recipe in the source code. To become a zombie, you need tons of hard to find ingredients and patience. Secret recipes mixed with secret recipes to form a zombie serum. Or we could create a secret chem which is a highly potent version of Secret Reagent called Top Secret Reagent, which can heal you quickly, but has a chance to turn you into a zombie, as it messes with your dna.

[medsal15]

Are we talking about NPC zombies or player-controlled zombies?

[Frank_Stein]

What about making a failed SR resurrection turn the player into a crappy sorta-zombie, where instead of eating the crew and transforming them into a horde of unstoppable nightmares, they just kinda shamble around, bits of them are missing, accumulating damage and just like a mangled corpse that's suddenly alive for she reason.

Or it could just gib them and give the player control of one of the organs.

See, this is how I think you should go about it.

Player controlled, reanimated corpse. You don't have free reign to bite people and eat their brains, and in fact there's no transmissible quality to this zombie. They'd be more like ghouls from Fallout.

Make them nigh invulnerable, but with a speed penalty. They won't need air, have infinite stamina, are indifferent to cold, hurt by fire but slowly, chems don't affect them, and random organs and limbs fall out of them especially when they take brute damage. Give them some kind of speech filter to make them hard to understand, and call it a day from there.

[misto]

"nigh invulnerable" sounds a bit tuff even despite the limb loss, but having big stamina due to being insensate to pain sounds ok. could the limb/organ loss be countered with cyber or synth organs implanted later?

they should get bonus healing or other buff from eating brain-based foods from the kitchen still, though. and kuru immunity, of course

[atamusvaleo]

What about making a failed SR resurrection turn the player into a crappy sorta-zombie, where instead of eating the crew and transforming them into a horde of unstoppable nightmares, they just kinda shamble around, bits of them are missing, accumulating damage and just like a mangled corpse that's suddenly alive for she reason.

Or it could just gib them and give the player control of one of the organs.

So, if Strange Reagent is based off of Lovecraft's serum then this is more in line with his vision. 

In the story, the doctor experiments with his serum trying to get a perfect cadaver to resurrect, each time attempting on more and more recently deceased persons. He eventually realizes that his serum has in fact been working the entire time and all of the bodies have been resurrecting (even severed limbs!!) There's a great scene where he injects an officer who's been decapitated and the head begins yelling about the helicopter crash that killed it. All this just as a bomb shell drops through the tent. Ahhh! Got to love Lovecraft.

But, yeah! Have SR resurect people no matter what but they looked just as jacked up and beaten as when they died.

[NateTheSquid]

yeah but they could just get patched up after failed ressurection. i'll agree with this ^ if they can't be healed at all, cloned and probably cant talk

[atomic1fire]

I think it would be cool if this was somehow tied into the biodome.

We already know that they spent time doing research on zombies, only for it to go terribly wrong, so what if some enterprizing nerd could complete their formula and discover a somewhat stable zombie reagent.

Maybe it embeds the user with great strength and durability at the cost of needing prions (gained by eating brains, or brainburgers) to remain sane. An enterprising chemist could just keep eating brain burgers from monkeys to avoid spreading zombie. Maybe the zombie virus could counteract the effects of Kuru, with the only other cure being to inject the superpowered almost zombie with nanites so they get borged before they completely turn.

[vampirate]

I think this would be a solid addition.