Nanite Asteroid QoL Ideas

[Kamikaze Mongoose]

Nanite asteroids are fun because nanites are capable of some satisfying damage, but nanites are very buggy/lackluster right now and only achieve a fraction of their maximum power. In fact, they're far more likely to slaughter themselves or remain inert at the magnet than they are to run free and bust up the entire station:



* Nanites destroy each other when they cluster and it's especially bad on Donut 3, Kondaru, and Cog 2 where they pile up on windows before going inside the station.
* I believe the reason is because nanites function like buzzsaw drones and initially beeline towards people but sometimes trigger a movement pattern where they fly away and around which destroy tiles they run into during this period. This is when nanites kill other nanites and it greatly thins their overall numbers unintentionally.
* If nanites deconstructed tiles like flock drones convert tiles/objects, it would circumvent the teamkilling. When not chasing players, they could path towards tiles/objects and use a charge bar to destroy them. 


* Nanites don't aggro or path well unless a player is very, very close. On Cog1, you're lucky to get 5+ nanites on station from an asteroid of 20+ because a random miner got scared and ran back to station with them following him. The rest will sit around the magnet until someone gets a pod and destroys all of them safely.
* If nanites prioritized deconstructing things until players came into aggro range, this would allow them to work their way to/around the station and eventually into range of the players.


* Bonus idea from Dabs McCoy: Add a rare chance for a nanite swarm to be hidden in an ordinary rock wall alongside radioactive and explosive rock walls.



Thanks for reading! Extra ideas, support, or constructive criticisms in the comments are highly encouraged!

[MetricDuck]

* Nanites destroy each other when they cluster and it's especially bad on Donut 3, Kondaru, and Cog 2 where they pile up on windows before going inside the station.

I don't disagree nanites could be made more interesting but I think this at least has already been fixed: they should be immune to their own projectiles.

[George_Manning]

I would support these changes (except the random chance instead of radioactive/ explosive spots, because nanites can harm the whole station) if:
1:
Nanite sprite is made actually clickable
2:
Nanites don’t do that weird dead-but-not-actually-dead thing
3:
Nanites decon things slower, so you have a chance to stop them
And 4:
Nanites take longer to spread out, so they’re not instantly a station wide problem