(Weekly blobuff post warning)Reduce how much damage a blob takes from chemicals.

[DJ-Fireball_did_this]

You probably all know the story by now. Blobs have no real defenses against hellsmoke, which usually instantly destroys the core. Nobody likes this. Everytime it happens the server seems to collectivly go "wow that was fucking stupid". There's been many proposed fixes to this, but so far the concept of nerfing chems against them alone doesn't seem to come up much.

First off, this just makes themetic sense. Blobs are made of exotic matter or some shit, not normal chemicals like a normal cell. They basically have infinite mass and barely interact with the chemicals the station is made of or that are in the air. If they're really just supposed to be made of the same substances as tradional cells but on a massive scale, the game has honestly done a poor job communicating it.

There's been some other proposed solutions to this, and I'll document why they probably wouldn't work.

Nerf chemsmoke - No, it's seemingly fine for everything else and a critical part of Goonstation.
Raise the blob's nuclear health - It already has a shitload of health, and every other membrane would have the same amount of health.
Reduce the amount of damage a core can get from any single source - A "single source" generally isn't a problem with anything except hellsmoke or a canbomb. Changing all of the anti-blob weapons seems pointless.

Ideally, nerfing the damage of chemsmoke specifically, would go straight to the source of the issue and change little else. Other things might need changes, but I'm not sure they should be lumped into this.

[RichardGere]

Someone else also suggested to cap the damage blob can take from any one source. That could probably remove nucleus sniping out of the equation (the one where you instantly delete the nucleus, not actually a hellmix), although you'd probably have to be very careful when deciding what the cap should be since chem nerds could just deliver the same thing in bursts instead.

You gave a reason why nerfing chemsmoke probably wouldn't work, then suggested nerfing the damage of chemsmoke. That means you're still nerfing chemsmoke, unless you're proposing to nerf the damage of every single chem in the game that deals BURN. That would create a cascade of potential balancing issues that would all need to be addressed (the flamethrower would be affected by this).

Why are hellmixes so strong? Well, they not only delete blob tiles (nucleus with fire resistance can shrug it off however) but they also delete the floor underneath, making it impossible for the blob to spread unless they get the bridge upgrade. This could be addressed without touching hellmixes, but I am not so convinced we shouldn't.

Earlier I think someone (mbc?) jokingly proposed to remove propellant. And uh, maybe? Propellant, smoke powder, and the chems associated with hellmixes are all easily mass produced, and let you cause immediate and practically permanent damage to large parts of the station. If a chem nerd wants to end the round at 10-15 mins or so, they can do exactly that by mass producing hellmixes.

[DJ-Fireball_did_this]

Earlier I think someone (mbc?) jokingly proposed to remove propellant. And uh, maybe? Propellant, smoke powder, and the chems associated with hellmixes are all easily mass produced, and let you cause immediate and practically permanent damage to large parts of the station. If a chem nerd wants to end the round at 10-15 mins or so, they can do exactly that by mass producing hellmixes.

Yes, but that would significantly alter chemsitry as it applies to a round as a whole. I'm trying to come up with a way so that it only changes how it applies to blobs, but is the same for everything else. In theory if only blobs had a different reaction to pyro and otherwise dangerous chemical smoke, then the application of it in every other respect would be the same.

[RichardGere]

Earlier I think someone (mbc?) jokingly proposed to remove propellant. And uh, maybe? Propellant, smoke powder, and the chems associated with hellmixes are all easily mass produced, and let you cause immediate and practically permanent damage to large parts of the station. If a chem nerd wants to end the round at 10-15 mins or so, they can do exactly that by mass producing hellmixes.

Yes, but that would significantly alter chemsitry as it applies to a round as a whole. I'm trying to come up with a way so that it only changes how it applies to blobs, but is the same for everything else. In theory if only blobs had a different reaction to pyro and otherwise dangerous chemical smoke, then the application of it in every other respect would be the same.

Thing is, even if you make specialized interactions between blob tiles and certain chemicals, you'd either dumpster flamethrowers or keep hellmixes at roughly the same power.

[GORE]

Any change for testing is better than no change in fear of breaking the broken system even more,...

Reverting code to a previous blob version should be easy enough,...

[Mouse]

Why are hellmixes so strong? Well, they not only delete blob tiles (nucleus with fire resistance can shrug it off however) but they also delete the floor underneath, making it impossible for the blob to spread unless they get the bridge upgrade. This could be addressed without touching hellmixes, but I am not so convinced we shouldn't.

Earlier I think someone (mbc?) jokingly proposed to remove propellant. And uh, maybe? Propellant, smoke powder, and the chems associated with hellmixes are all easily mass produced, and let you cause immediate and practically permanent damage to large parts of the station. If a chem nerd wants to end the round at 10-15 mins or so, they can do exactly that by mass producing hellmixes.

One way to address this might be to have smokes that melt open a path to space get rapidly vented into space, although that might involve atmos code which I've been led to believe is kind of a nightmare.

Aerosol propellant honestly should be removed, imo.  Going through walls doesn't really make any sense, and it's bloody difficult telling where the edge of the cloud is.

[vampirate]

would kinda make sense to make fire res and wall pieces chem resistant at least too.

As for hellsmoke and flamethrowers. Flamethrowers pen touch, so you could just make all chemical damage done to blobs touch based from smoke. Then flamethrowers would penetrate the resistance