Fossils - A Cool Thing to Have

[LovelyMimic]

FOSSILS are found...

• Inside mining magnet asteroids, much like like artifacts and crates.
  
• Decent points have been made re:Mining loot already being too cluttered, though.
  

OR:

• Around a dig site accessible with the Long-Range Quantum Teleporter.
  
• I would love this, but it’s definitely the most labour-intensive (mapping a whole new area).
  

OR:

• Around lava moon.
  
• This was my least favorite idea, but it’s growing on me. It would probably need a small new surface area, and the number of catwalks between the dig site and the telesci entrance will strongly affect how often fossils and/or fossil-hunters end up falling into lava.
  

A QM merchant with a few would be nice. Gragg could sell them. “Weird rocks Gragg found inside bigger, tastier rock.”

THE REVIVAL PROCESS

Genetics would probably be the ones reviving them, although I don’t know how that ought to actually work. Kind of important though!

Maybe it’s a variant of the usual genetics base-pairs puzzle minigame?

---

THE FOSSILS THEMSELVES

Some fossils would be terrestrial animals, others would be alien lifeforms. How did this trilobite fossil wind up in space, on the other side of the Channel? Don't worry about it.

ALIEN FOSSILS:

(because they generated more interest as we discussed them on the discord)

ELECTRICITY-EATER

• Big, funky-looking, vaguely tick-like thing. Will happily park itself on a live wire and suck electricity out of it.
  
• Can obviously cause power issues on the station depending where it is.
  
• You may be best off letting it suck electricity out of power cells.
  
• Will zap kind silicons hugging it (with help intent or w/e), recharging their batteries a fair bit. Humans just get enough for pleasant tingling sensations.
  
• Humans who attack it are predictably zapped. Borgs who attack it get bitten, draining charge.
  
• Maybe particular well-fed ones can be coaxed into recharging mining equipment and tasers and stuff.
  
• Butchering one might yield a gland that functions as a small cell?
  

THERMOPHILE

• Doesn’t seem to eat. Only uncurled and mobile in very hot places. Might be sustained by heat?
  
• Will poop char in hot environments.
  
• Will poop diamonds in extremely hot environments.
  

INFOVORE

• This one would be rare, and pretty weird-looking.
  
• Infovorous: Eats the information content of, well, a lot of things:
  
• Nearby writing on paper is garbled over time, eventually becoming totally incomprehensible after prolonged proximity.
  
• Nearby speech is garbled.
  
• Nearby radio chatter, both incoming and outgoing, is garbled.
  
• The frequency and severity of these behaviors varies significantly depending on how well-fed it is (scrambling text being what counts as having “eaten” recently).
  
• Will excrete text onto the floor as it feeds. Mostly gibberish. But only mostly. Who knows, maybe it'll poop the winning lottery number if you you manage to feed it enough...
  
• Do not let this thing get to a human brain if you value that brain.
  
• Do not let this thing touch the Ai's neural net processor.
  

TERRESTRIAL FOSSILS:

(I actually took a stab at spriting some of these a little while back: https://forum.ss13.co/showthread.php?tid=9939)

HALLUCIGENIA

• Herbivorous.
  

• Touch a full-grown on grab intent and you’ll poke yourself on its spines, which are coated in several potent hallucinogens.
  
• Poke yourself recreationally, or butcher fully-grown ones and extract the hallucinogens from its flesh.
  

TRILOBITE

• Truly omnivorous. Not averse to eating corpses, if allowed to. That’s gross though. I’d prefer you fed them lettuce or something.
  

• Fatten them up enough, and it’ll molt its old exoskeleton, which can be processed into Chitin.
  
• A placid and easy-to-care-for pet.
  
• Kill and butcher one if you want that Chitin a bit sooner, or if you’re itching to cook some protein-rich trilobite steaks.
  

ANOMALOCARIS

• Carnivorous
  
• I haven’t sprited this one.
  
• I really like the idea of an anomalocaris just stalking the station and hunting down more or less every critter it can find.
  
• Maybe there’s a workable pun from its name, like I did with hallucigenia, but I think that a one-meter-long murder shrimp is also a workable concept on its own.
  

DODO BIRD

• Frugivorous (eats fruits)
  
• Seeing how their claims to fame are being extinct and being useless, these guys don’t need to do much other than maybe dump feathers occasionally, unless anyone has any good ideas.
  
• Meat will always taste terrible regardless of how well it’s cooked.
  

DINOSAURS

• of course there’d be dinosaurs are you kidding me
  

The above is neither authoritative nor exhaustive; Please critique and suggest stuff!

[warcrimes]

QLRT needs more things to do, I'd go for options 2 + 3 + gragg

[Frank_Stein]

Those are very interesting creatures.

This seems like it's too much soley for genetics. I'd recommend adding it to either Research, or maybe some kind of offshoot of Botany, like Zoology?

Considering we have Safari gear and half the station already acts like an over excited mix of Steve Irwin and Crocodile Dundee, I can see it being a natural fit

[Grek]

somebody sprite this delicious hellbeast.

[atomic1fire]

Those are very interesting creatures.

This seems like it's too much soley for genetics. I'd recommend adding it to either Research, or maybe some kind of offshoot of Botany, like Zoology?

Considering we have Safari gear and half the station already acts like an over excited mix of Steve Irwin and Crocodile Dundee, I can see it being a natural fit

It would also be cool though if elements of space zoology could still be used to compliment genetics.

For instance some space zoologist tinkering would render cool new mutations for genetics.

Since fossils are heavily dependent on mining, you could have some more variety without opening it up to every single round.

[Frank_Stein]

Those are very interesting creatures.

This seems like it's too much soley for genetics. I'd recommend adding it to either Research, or maybe some kind of offshoot of Botany, like Zoology?

Considering we have Safari gear and half the station already acts like an over excited mix of Steve Irwin and Crocodile Dundee, I can see it being a natural fit

It would also be cool though if elements of space zoology could still be used to compliment genetics.

For instance some space zoologist tinkering would render cool new mutations for genetics.

Since fossils are heavily dependent on mining, you could have some more variety without opening it up to every single round.

Oh for sure. I like the idea of it being a kind of Botany thing, since they produce food which lends itself naturally into raising livestock.

Plus, right now they mainly interact with:

• Kitchen - Provide ingredients
  
• Chemistry - Provide certain chems
  
• Medical - Provide certain medicinal chems
  

I think ideally, you'd have a Zoo with basic critters, mining provides fossils, genetics extracts DNA and uses it to rebuild fossil creatures, and Zoology raises the creatures and gets resources and labor from them

So I've been trying my hand at spriting these past few weeks, and it seems to be going fairly decently. As such, I thought it might be nice to make a thread to post my sprites to as they occur.

I've mostly been drawing Cambrian animals so far. At some point I will have to actually make right-facing and dead versions. The former is pretty much effortless, whereas the latter will take a little bit of time.



(from top-left to bottom-right: Trilobite, pikaia, opabinia, hallucigenia, herpetogaster.)

OP has already made some great sprites for their own idea. I really like it

[Nnystyxx]

I would love to see the Botanists growing hallucinogenic animals to poke as a new alternative to cannabis and mushrooms.

[Xaviens]

Zoology branch would be hilarious. I can just imagine them cloning hordes of hamsters, just to put them all on tiny wheels, to power the station when engineering is MIA.

[LovelyMimic]

Botany is already the department for bee husbandry, so I agree that feeding and raising other sorts of animals would be a good fit, especially since they could grow all the necessary food.

How multidepartmental we want fossils to be as a potential feature is really limited less by flavor concerns than it is by how much stuff people are willing to sprite and code (and potentially map, depending on implementation). That said, this is a brainstorming thread, so don't worry too much about dialing back expectations: We're just throwing things at the wall and seeing what's cool

[Nnystyxx]

Botany is already the department for bee husbandry, so I agree that feeding and raising other sorts of animals would be a good fit, especially since they could grow all the necessary food.

How multidepartmental we want fossils to be as a potential feature is really limited less by flavor concerns than it is by how much stuff people are willing to sprite and code (and potentially map, depending on implementation). That said, this is a brainstorming thread, so don't worry too much about dialing back expectations: We're just throwing things at the wall and seeing what's cool

Many botany departments stick out to space and could be easily expanded, albeit not Destiny/Clarion most likely.

[LovelyMimic]

Huh, good observation, there totally is some room available there.

On another note, does this look like a plausible infovore?
The coloring's a little simplistic, but it's not really a finished product.

[Nnystyxx]

Huh, good observation, there totally is some room available there.

On another note, does this look like a plausible infovore?
The coloring's a little simplistic, but it's not really a finished product.

It's goddamn weird, which makes it a good candidate.

[Gannets]

I think this is all great.

Also, i think it could be a neat expansion to medsci, since that's kinda just genetics now.

[Newtonsolo]

can we make infovores wipe electronic data like data banks or diskettes?

[Nnystyxx]

can we make infovores wipe electronic data like data banks or diskettes?

throw an infovore into the dwaine nerd's den