[MERGED PR] Mobification and rework of the man-eating plant

[github_bot]

PULL REQUEST DETAILS

[AI][Critters][Hydroponics][Balance][Rework][Input-Wanted]





About the PR

This PR fundamentally reworks the maneater in a way that stays true to its former role and theme but removes out a bunch of jank and bullshit out of its behaviour and mechanics.

This fixes #13001

Beyond that, this PR also makes botany produce now support mob critters. They will get handled slightly different than items, but name-changes and quality status will be reflected properly. A new parent for botany-critter was created, `/mob/living/critter/plant`. A mob critter from this parent that is harvested calls `proc/HYPsetup_DNA`, enabling easy modifications from within the object. Also, it carries the contributors to that originating plant within `growers` for easy access within the AI-behaviour. The implementation and passing of the respectable plants gene also enables any critter of this parent to be scanned by a plantscanner and give out the respectable stats of the plant they originated from.

The maneater was changed drastically in it the way how it attacks and eats people:

https://github.com/goonstation/goonstati...6be9c78905

Instead of insta-stunning their victim and having an invisible action that gibs the person, the maneater now need to drain their victims stamina and eat them with a visible action bar while their victim is in an aggressive grab.

The maneater's attack deals 8 - 12 brute damage to the target and drains 50 stamina while imposing a 2 second desorient. If the target gets their stamina drained completely, the target gets stunned for 5 seconds. The stun cannot be refreshed or prolonged by the maneaters attack and borgs are immune to the desorient.

If stunned and the devour ability is avaible, the maneater grabs the target and upgrades the grab. Once that is completed, it uses its ability to devour the target. **This is an 8 second action bar that cannot be interrupted by moving the maneater.** The victim needs to struggle out of the grab or needs to be grabbed out by another person to cancel the ablity. The devour ability got a 20 second cooldown.

The maneater won't try to eat while another maneater is in direct contact to the target.

Once the target is devoured, all of their equipable items are moved into the maneater. If there are more than 6 of them in the maneater, it will try to vomit out an item each minute. If the maneater is gibbed or butchered, it will eject the items as well.

Also, the maneater, if no mobs, corpses or humans are avaible, will try to eat raw slabs of meat it can find. This can lead to some interesting use-cases:

https://github.com/goonstation/goonstati...ddb4762fde

If there are botanists/contributor near the maneater, it will occasionally commicate with them, using some quotes from Audrey II.

the maneater got baseline 120 health, 200 stamina, 10 stamina regen, 25% desorient resist and receives 25% more damage from fire. Also, its movement has a heavy penalty, compareable to someone being drowsy at all time.

Atrazine (weedkiller) was changed in its behaviour to work in a new way against mob/living/plant. It deals 3 damage per tick instead of the 2 and got a 0.3 skinpen against these plant-based mobs only. This means 1 unit plashed on a maneater converts into 2 damage over the duration.

The botany-side of the maneater was changed as well.

The maneater got a genome of 12 now.

Its health no longer scales with the plant health. Instead, each point of endurance increase its health by 3. Also, each point of potency increases its stamina by 3 and grants 0.1 stamina regenration, up to 30 stamina per second at 300 potency.

Due to the scaling-changes, blood infusions got severly nerfed. The Bonus from endurance was reduced from 10 - 30 to 4 - 8. The same number was applied to the growth time as well.

If any chemical-containing plant gets spliced into the maneater, each of its attack injects 3+(yield/20) of the corresponding chem mix into the target.

Hand-feeding people into the maneater now got an action bar as well. If a maneater is fed a person while being growing, it gains a bonus of 20 - 30 endurance.

https://github.com/goonstation/goonstati...d1e1d3ae2f

The maneater got a new snarl it uses instead of the sinistar-screams. The sound is a variation of [Hybrid Monster Growl](https://freesound.org/people/john129pats...s/146558/#) from [john129pats](https://freesound.org/people/john129pats/), published under the CC0 license.

What does that mean for the new role of maneaters?

These changes try to move the maneater away from an annoying but easy to be dealt with wall to a very menacing and threatening predator to lock down an area. On a baseline, its desorient and stamina drain enables you to move away from a single maneater when you get jumped by it and on many occasions evade the grab when you get stunned once. Also the stun is short enough that you wake up while being swallowed so you have a chance to break out of the grab. This goes so far that it will never be able to be aggressive grabed you if you got some basic amounts of stun resist.

In prolonged battles, the damage of the maneater begins to stack up and pose the main threat.

The maneater in this form is meant to be used in packs or to have single very highly-statted ones.

With many maneaters, the chances to get out of the grab quickly vanishes as the second or third one is able to stun you again before you move out far enough from the other maneater.

A high stat spliced maneater is meant to be a big station threat. Like old maneaters their health can get ludicrious high and a high potency maneater is neigh impossible to be stunned. In general, stuns should very much be discouraged to be used against maneaters. Also, while its main offensive capabilities cannot be scaled, it can be spliced to poison assailents.

The main weakness of maneaters lie in their speed. They are around half as fast as a crewmember and can be very easily be kited and bolted down in a room by the AI. Also, borgs are immune to the desorient and the potentional poison, making them somewhat capable fighters against them.

Why's this needed?

Firstly, this PR mobifies the maneater and goes a step further in mobifying obj/critter by giving botany support for critter implementation.

The main criticism of the maneater was that it was 1. not doing much and 2. insta-gibbing you in a bullshit way. This PR resolve both of these issues, making the maneater in general more responsive and fun to play with.

The scaling changes aim at leaving botanists the option to either have a good and effective pack of small maneaters or use up a good amount of time to try to have single very powerfull maneaters to lock down areas with. This adds flexibility to this mob and i look forward in people trying to splice it with weed to have an on-demand trip for botanists by punching it.


Changelog

Code:

changelog
(u)Lord_Earthfire
(*)The syndicate supplies its botanists with a majorly changed and more responsive man-eating plant strain! Check the minor changes for details.
(+)Man-eating plants don't insta-stun anymore. Instead, they got a stamina draining attack that stuns if you run out of stamina
(+)Man-eating plants now need to aggressive-grab their victims to devour them. They show a visible action bar.
(+)The items of it's devoured victims can be retreived by butchering/gibbing the plant. It can occasionally vomit them out as well.
(+)The scaling of the maneater got changed. Its health scales with endurance, its stamina and stamina regeneration with potency.
(+)Feeding meat/people to the maneater increases endurance now. Even if it is already out of its tray!
(+)If any chem-producing plant was spliced into the man-eating plant, it will inject its victim with this chemicals. The amount scales with yield.
(+)Atrazine now works as an effective skin-penetrating poison against maneaters
(+)Maneater seeds now start with "dominant genome", "inhibited potential" and "temporary spliceability" gene strains

PULL REQUEST DETAILS

[Brixx79]

Maneaters just got a Malboro's bad breath attack with the chem splice. I like!

[Decarcassor]

The ability to splice man eaters is huge. Will the seeds always be dominant then ? It would suck to spend your TC on a bunch of seed packets only for all of them to be recessive.

I can already think of some easy and effective splices for cheap man eaters swarms. Good stuff.

[Lord_earthfire]

The ability to splice man eaters is huge. Will the seeds always be dominant then ? It would suck to spend your TC on a bunch of seed packets only for all of them to be recessive.

I can already think of some easy and effective splices for cheap man eaters swarms. Good stuff.

No they will be subject to seed rng. This is intended, since they are 1 TC only. I feel for this low TC cost you should roll the dice for the really powerfull maneater.

If they would cost more, i would certainly make them spawn dominant-planttype-only.

[Silent Majority]

I feel under the proposed changed 2 to 3 should be the new cost. These are going to be significantly stronger

[Lord_earthfire]

I can see a cost of 2 with slight changes. In comparison, syndicate sponge capsules add 6 critters in the realm of space bears or ice spiders for 3 TC. Or wasp grenades add 25 wasps for 3 TC. And both of these are already not too often bought and considered niche.

I personally have a hard time judging their power, because they are really slow and need 4-5 hits to down someone (if no stamcrits happen). From my testing i only got stunned if i wanted it to happen. And even then sometimes i was able to break out of the grab.

On the other hand, in tight spaces and with 2-3 or a single poison/beefed up one they essentially deny a room. Yes, they most likely wont kill anybody who doesn't try to fight them, but there are really hard to fight in a tight space.

In an open space, a flamethrower and keeping your distance turn them into grilled synthmeat without getting a single hit in.

On the other hand they make extremly good supports for a traitor now. I can see traitor with a maneater on his side and rampage gear being extremly effective.

[Kotlol]

The reason the critter stuff barely gets used or grenades is because they disrupt the ANTAGONIST TOO! Same with plants and Kudzu.
They are ment to distract the crew from one end so you can setup things in the other hand.

Or just fun chaos without you ever being seen as the possible suspect since let's face it... these things attack you TOO!

It's niche due to this... it's sometimes better to just use your TCs to buy a tool to get a job done, then an unreliable tool that might bite you in the ass.

[Decarcassor]

Maneaters seeds should remain cheap, because its not a tool you can just use immediatly. You need to put work and most importantly time into them. And the more you want to grow, the more work its gonna be.

The botanist traitor life already consist of putting way too much effort into convoluted splices that are less practical than anything else. I'd rather wait to see if anybody use the maneaters and how effective they really are before considering a cost increase. Especially if you can't be sure to have dominant seeds.

[Silent Majority]

Its trivial to get hell chem mixrs in botany to splice into them. Amd the design says 300+hp is possible.

A single macro phaser can deal 300 in all 5 shots if they land. That would mean a minimum of 12 macrophasers hitting 60 shots without missing costing 120,000 credits.

A problem this substantial would in all likelyhood not be engaged with. Do we want to create a mechanic to make people not engage?

Becausw if i was faced wirh 12 300 plus hell chem stun monsters id just builld a wall and pretend they weren't there, or pod nerd

[Lord_earthfire]

Its trivial to get hell chem mixrs in botany to splice into them. Amd the design says 300+hp is possible.

A single macro phaser can deal 300 in all 5 shots if they land. That would mean a minimum of 12 macrophasers hitting 60 shots without missing costing 120,000 credits.

A problem this substantial would in all likelyhood not be engaged with. Do we want to create a mechanic to make people not engage?

Becausw if i was faced wirh 12 300 plus hell chem stun monsters id just builld a wall and pretend they weren't there, or pod nerd

The thing is, getting hellmixed spliced in works only with 50% of the seeds (because of recessive plant gene rng). And splicing in a high enough yield is only possible with 50% of these. And then you haven't touched potency or endurance, so they will be glass cannons.

While yes, getting a single stat or a chemmix spliced in the maneater is possible, it is extremly hard to get multiple stats to high levels. The botany mechanics themselves prevent most of the insanity.

Besides, if a traitor wastes 12 TC and 40+ minutes and is countered by just walling off an area, i consider that an easy win, really.

And this is exactly how they are designed to work. They are very slow. And they are meant to challenge the normal way the station you would engage critters. If using phasers or stuns would prove effective, i would need to find a way to make it harder to kill them that way.

Flamethrowers are the way to go against them. They got better coverage against mutliple and deal more damage over time than macro-phaser. And they are hella lot cheaper to get.

I am currently adding in that atrazine is a very viable counter to them. It deals 3 instead of 2 damage each tick against plant-critter-mobs and will apply on touch only to plant-mob-critters with a skinpen value of 0.3. This way, splashing 60 units on a baseline maneater is enough to kill it.

[Tarmunora]

Besides, if a traitor wastes 12 TC and 40+ minutes and is countered by just walling off an area, i consider that an easy win, really.

I don't think we should be designing mechanics that encourage traitors to spend the majority of a round doing entirely benign job tasks (statting up plants), and then roll the dice to see if it'll even do anything. It really doesn't sound engaging for either the traitor, or the crew, especially since, as was mentioned, when faced with 'nigh-unstoppable maneaters', the answer will just be to wall them off or weld them in closets.


I'd rather see more focus on being able to boost them via feeding them in their pots, rather than having them be spliceable.

[Lord_earthfire]

Ao the concerns i am mostly reading here are mostly cover the spliceability of the maneaters and the consequences caused by this.

If i read it correctly, there are the following problems with it:

• Due to plant rng, you run into the risk of throwing away a ton of TC on useless plants and run into the risk to have prepared splices for nothing
  

• Splicing can add very high stats very quickly. This would enable to have 12 maneaters with very high stats which are extremly hard to fight against.
  

• Splicing van be far superior to the other stat boosting alternatives when it comes to growing
  

Admittably, we are here at the skill ceiling. Splicing stats into new plants is very advanced (more advanced than splicing chems) and is very often not used because of the difficulties of finding the right seeds. So we are taking about a mechanic i can see only a handfull of botanists will employ to an effect which would make you see extremly tanky, unstunable maneaters.

So if i make any changes that would remove point 1, splicing stats would instantly become the meta for them.

Removing point 3 completely would require me to revert the spliceability, which is a hard no from my side. At best,  all plant mechanics should be tied into botanys systems. That means if a seed or plant exists, it should be manipulated by most of botanies mechanics (splicing/infusion/plantscanner, tray chemistry...)(don't ask me how i think about kudzu seeds...)

This means if i cannot remove spliceability and need to change point 2 and 3, i would need to nerf the spliceability and increase the effect of feeding the maneater meat. And to remove point 1, i need to make the planttype dominant.

For the splicing changes, i an thinking about the following change:

• All genes of the maneater seed are dominant. 
  
• Splicing it once introduces the splice disabler (-100% splice chance) gene to the resulting seed.
  

This way, you are guaranteed able to splice chem mixes into any maneater, if you want. On the other side, you have a hard time splicing stats in and at most you will only splice in half the stats of the other plant inside.  And chain splices are stopped by the splice disabler gene.

Also, this will require a few changes to the growing process of the maneater:

• the maneater will require 25% more time to grow.
  
• The bonus to stats by feeding corpses get increased to 30 - 40 endurance
  
• Blood in the tray now increases potency over time
  
• Feeding the maneater slabs if meat is possible even beyond the first stages of the growth process. Each slab of meat add 2 - 4 endurance to the plant
  
• The stat changes still happens even if the maneater has left the tray. So a maneater sucessfully eat people or gets fed meat still continues to grow (make sure to use the plant scanner on your maneater mob to check the progress ).
  

These changes are aimed to firstly add more time to take care of the maneater (so you can feed it more meat/people and have more time for tray chemistry to do its magic) and secondly severly increases the stats if you want to actively take care of the maneater.

With these changes, even non-veteran botanists that feed the maneater can reach powerfull plants without splicing shenanigans. And veteran botanists have a harder time gunning for extremly high stats, but can better use the other mechanics to improve their maneater.

[Frank_Stein]

Besides, if a traitor wastes 12 TC and 40+ minutes and is countered by just walling off an area, i consider that an easy win, really.

I don't think we should be designing mechanics that encourage traitors to spend the majority of a round doing entirely benign job tasks (statting up plants), and then roll the dice to see if it'll even do anything. It really doesn't sound engaging for either the traitor, or the crew, especially since, as was mentioned, when faced with 'nigh-unstoppable maneaters', the answer will just be to wall them off or weld them in closets.


I'd rather see more focus on being able to boost them via feeding them in their pots, rather than having them be spliceable.

Yee. Feeding them different meals to boost certain traits and give abilities

[Silent Majority]

Feeding them a kudzu person to give them kudzu pass?

[Brixx79]

I think feeding them synthmeat vs meat should have different effects since synth is pretty easy to get. Especially for botanists. Or at least a lower increase than the real deal.