Would giving Xenobio a gold slime roundstart fix it?

[Zilenan91]

I've heard a lot of complaints about how boring xenobio is, and I totally understand. It's virology but worse since the act of doing the things is 1000 times more tedious and shit, so would giving them gold slimes round start help to fix the problem?

[Atticat]

Instead of boring slimes I think xenobiology should involve breeding actually unique alien monsters that each have their own special capacity for causing havok if released.

[CPTANT]

This will lead to every round having hostile mobs everywhere eating everyone.

[Incoming]

Xenobio suffers because it was designed for a world where 90 minute rounds were typical.

There's been a "speeding up" of the pace of the game for some reason, but I really don't thing kowtowing to this crappy trend is the way to go. Yall need to calm down with your hyper escalation and "calling the shuttle to force the antag's hand" stuff. It makes the game predictable and samey when it's constantly reseting.

[Jacquerel]

Slimes are unique alien monsters, if unimaginative ones. They were introduced because originally it was "metroids" and someone said "they should breed unique monsters instead".
I wouldn't mind a second type of alien being added but the area will need expanding.

[onleavedontatme]

Xenobio suffers because it was designed for a world where 90 minute rounds were typical.

Kinda ironic considering I dont really like rounds that long most of the time

[MisterPerson]

Make the job less tedious and/or more interesting. No, I don't know how.

[lumipharon]

Xenobio is basically botany, only way slower, and requires even more constant attention.

For botany:
Can spam mutagen as fast as you want to get new plants/stat changes
Can get effectively infinite seeds for whatever plant that grow, for use later

For xenobiology:
Can only roll for mutations once per generation of slimes.
If your slimes die, then you lose all your progress and have to start from grey slimes again. Unless you have some rainbow slimes.

[onleavedontatme]

Least favourite part for me is the constant dragging between cells, fighting windoors every step of the way.

Not sure how to fix though.

[newfren]

Make it so the slime scanner can pick up a single slime and drop it back down wherever you want.

Check for sentience so you can't abduct player slimes/drop two sentient death machine buddies down wherever you want, and then it's not as good as a grey slime extract/gold slime extract for dropping hazardous mobs in a place.

Boom, 90% of windoor fighting is now gone - which is also 90% of the tedium.

[Doritos]

Wait I thought the big meme was that xenobio was OpieOP, and now it's underpowered? What happened?

Tbh xenobio is fine, they can do the most !!fun!! stuff and have one of the most destructive things in the game aside from bombs. (Which is mildly easy to access, requiring only 2 mutations)

Though if you really want to buff it less RNG is ALWAYS a good thing. Some way to manipulate slimes into the color you want/make them mutate more frequently.

[Ricotez]

it's a department capable of creating ZA WARUDO grenades, I don't think they need any kind of boost

but maybe more ways to avoid reliance on RNG when breeding slimes, like chemicals that you can inject in certain types of slimes to increase the odds they'll evolve into other types

[CPTANT]

Xenobio balance is fine. It can create powerful things but it requires work.

It's still boring as hell though.

[Davidchan]

I'd rather see Xenobio be more !SCIENCE! and less watching the lab animals fuck reproduce asexually. Something of a cross between genetics DNA modifiers and the Experimenter would be nice. Reduce grey slime mutate chances a bit (or just start of Xenobio with a stabilizer extract) so they are used primarilly for breeding.

Make the machine only work on adult slimes, so feeding and growing them up would be the first step with a strong recommendation to breed a few spares. Befriending the slime optional. Herd them into the machine, where you can do a variety of tests or experiments on them.

Successful tests would mutate the slime. Color change would be primary goal, other factors could be added in, code willing. Such as number of spawn on split, number of cores, potency of cores for those with varying effects.

Failed tests would injure the slime, likely making it resent the xenobiolgist and/or anyone else present in the room it can see. Extreme failures could lower spawn count, make it lack a (useful) core (I.E. the core will be a dud or used up upon processing), make the slime go berserk and escape the test machine to attack everyone. Hulk slimes that can slam down walls might even be possible, urging caution of the xenobiologist.

Machine upgrades could give more accurate readings of the slime, chances of mutation or test result predictions, to making bad things less likely to happen.

Traitor/Asshole science could throw a person in the machine and fuck with them that way, maybe require hacking or tweaking to allow them to fit, and emagging the machine could make !FUN! things happen and open the door for a few traitor specific slime colors or garunteed critical results that make monster slimes that attack everyone who hasn't befriended them.

The old fashion or 'natural' way of feeding them monkeys and crossing one's fingers could still exsist beside this, at a slower rate, but it'd obviously be a lot more fun of a job if you did something more than drag slimes and monkeys around a small glass room.

[Atticat]

Slimes are incredibly boring and unimaginative. Why can't we breed space monsters? What is tg's obsession with maplestory slimes?????? Xenobiology should be a zoo of wondrous and dangerous creatures.

[Zilenan91]

Because that would require a shitload of spriting and we only really have one dedicated spriter

[AnonymousNow]

No, it would not fix it, because it would just nix one of the goals xenobiologists go towards.

Xenobiology needs time to come to fruition. Without normal-length or longer rounds, which I hardly ever see nowadays, xenobiology just doesn't feel like it's worth doing.

[Zilenan91]

Anonymous, I don't think you chose the right server to play on. You want high RP, long rounds, with lots of investment. That's not what /tg/ is or has ever really been. It's not ever going to be that, either. Bay is quite nice for the type of thing you want.

[Incoming]

Anonymous, I don't think you chose the right server to play on. You want high RP, long rounds, with lots of investment. That's not what /tg/ is or has ever really been. It's not ever going to be that, either. Bay is quite nice for the type of thing you want.

[Zilenan91]

It was a legitimate suggestion. He wants things to happen to the game that are totally opposite to what everyone else wants, but that's totally okay. Everyone deserves an opinion, but why change what we have here when there's a server that already does most of what he wants already?

[Bluespace]

Cut the time slimes need to split/grow in half.
Increase slime extract to 3 instead of 2.
Increase base mutation chance for all slimes.

FIXED.

[Wyzack]

>thats not what /tg/ has really ever been

lol okay bud

[Super Aggro Crag]

zilenan maybe you should go back to league of legends you spastic fucking goblin since you obviously can't fucking fathom any sort of gameplay behind spamming clicks on enemies and watching your points go up

you sir, are a doo doo head!!!!

[FantasticFwoosh]

I had a idea in passive OOC chat with CosmicScientist about redrafting the concept of the xenobiology department away from slimes back in May, you can find the link to the thread that he put up here (but i would urge you not to necro it please since it is quite old)

Le link
> https://tgstation13.org/phpBB/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=3600

But besides that, given some time to think about the proposed changes, we could just rebrand in a very literal sense even if the title never changes, the xeno department to be the 'agricultural sciences department' and bastardise chemistry's access to mutagen so that dangerous magic mutagen juice stays in science and out of geneticists and foolish crewmembers hands (and instead in the hands of uncertain and unstable mad scientists)

On top of trading ample mutagen for seeds in order to give back more seeds and give mutagen rushers a kick in the meta nuts, they could handle the management, breeding, harvesting, recycling and discovery/creation of new life forms and livestock. The whole full fat suggestion deserves a thread but that's as much as ill say shorthand now as to what i think. Corgi mush biojuice for making carbon copy Ians or Runtimes anyone?

Im totally with you atticat, slimes are boring though useful, and often xeno is so isolated a job it often feels like nothing else matters except what you hear over comms, or inevitably when a traitor barges in and beats you up just to steal your easy science access. Hydro is still a time consuming pursuit but its on the main halls so you're never far from the action when things hit the fan.

[newfren]

That sounds absolutely terrible for anyone who actually tries at botany. It sort of sounds like you're merging botany and xenobio for no real reason?

As to the thread at hand - giving a gold slime to xenobio wouldn't fix any of the issues that xenobio has with slime management/tedious waiting around, it'd just mean that adamantine golems come way earlier into most rounds.

[FantasticFwoosh]

That sounds absolutely terrible for anyone who actually tries at botany. It sort of sounds like you're merging botany and xenobio for no real reason?

As to the thread at hand - giving a gold slime to xenobio wouldn't fix any of the issues that xenobio has with slime management/tedious waiting around, it'd just mean that adamantine golems come way earlier into most rounds.

On the contrary, people forget what botany actually does in providing food/chems for the station or the chef/Anybody else who asks in exchange for spouting pathetic dank memes/drugs all round or running a pet project that does not benefit the station at all. It would not affect the personal experiences of hydroponics players in obtaining mutagen since they would need to wait for a arguably more ready mutagen keg put in science specifically while chemistry can do thier own thing, that can be used for all purposes such as deliberate spider breeding and rushing plants for botany so they dont have to get their hands dirty at all and can focus on actually nuturing more plants at once.

(Botany brings a handful of seed to xeno - Xeno exchanges two full beakers of mutagen because they are the largest distributor on the station - Botany free to do whatever with mutagen, but xeno in a small patch can literally smother seeds in mutagen to force effects infinitely from that position between juggling livestock handling/routine xeno duties)

Giving gold slimes is a horrible idea, because there will be round ending hostile mob grenades ending every shift prematurely. Literally the formula to a five minute suicidal hostile mob grenade throwing golem militia is to run a self made flamethrower (screwdriver welder attach rod) in the R&D machine for a near instant large grenade casing and steal the rest of the departmental plasma, grind it down and farm slimes real fast and then arm them with toxins lab components and get bwoinked to armageddeon.)

Also terrible idea to give golems chainsaws and flashes by looting robotics for parts.

[Zilenan91]

Don't golems permastun people on harm intent punches? So wouldn't giving them weapons be worse?

[Bluespace]

Cut the time slimes need to split/grow in half.
Increase slime extract to 3 instead of 2.
Increase base mutation chance for all slimes.

FIXED.

[Zilenan91]

DING DING DING

[ShadowDimentio]

It might be that I'm an incredibly autistic person, but I like the way xenobio works now. I mean there's always room for improvement, but there's a good base already here. Some things I dislike though...

It's impossible for one person to handle all the responsibilities of xeno. It's, at the bare minimum, a two person job, and the person on slime processing duty is in for the most grueling monotony of their lives.

Xeno has little to contribute to the round and is terribly isolated. Xeno exists for xeno's own sake. It would be nice to see xeno take on a route more similar to R&D or viro where the endgame is something really good you could contribute to the round, such as a regeneration virus or upgraded parts.

Slimes are too random. The introduction of the slime scanner forever ago was a step in the right direction, but there should be more the xenobiologists can do to control what they want and what they get.

MONKEYS MOVE AND ARE SHIT. FOR GOD'S SAKE MAKE THOSE TWITCHY LITTLE FUCKERS STOP MOVING WHEN GRABBED I'M SO SICK OF THEIR SHIT.

Slimes should be more ravenous. A sentient slime is a rare and dangerous treat. They're terrifying, if normally short-lived. The non-sentient slimes are hardly a concern though-- unless a slime is hungry, it's not likely to do much. Change that to slimes being very hostile towards anything that isn't on their internal friend list, swarming them as a group until they're knocked over and latched on. Hell, make it so multiple slimes can attach to a person at once!

[callanrockslol]

Make more weird types of aliens that can be found in maint/the asteroid and brought back to the station in eggs or something

Xenobio suffers because it was designed for a world where 90 minute rounds were typical.

There's been a "speeding up" of the pace of the game for some reason, but I really don't thing kowtowing to this crappy trend is the way to go. Yall need to calm down with your hyper escalation and "calling the shuttle to force the antag's hand" stuff. It makes the game predictable and samey when it's constantly reseting.

Its gone from 20 minute rounds to over an hour an a bit to back to around 30-45 minutes over the last few years, a lot of the mechanics are designed for longer rounds but xenobiology is probably the most suffering given that it has some fairly hard limits to how fast you can do it unlike research/mining/viro/toxins/whatever else.

[Incoming]

It's impossible for one person to handle all the responsibilities of xeno. It's, at the bare minimum, a two person job, and the person on slime processing duty is in for the most grueling monotony of their lives.

We've a machine that extracts slime cores now, and have for like... a year? I can do xenobio solo pretty easy, and often prefer to.

[ShadowDimentio]

I go MAXIMUM OVERFAST as xenobio. I don't have enough time to feed the slimes, kill the babies that split, and feed the corpses into the machine.

[Davidchan]

It's impossible for one person to handle all the responsibilities of xeno. It's, at the bare minimum, a two person job, and the person on slime processing duty is in for the most grueling monotony of their lives.

We've a machine that extracts slime cores now, and have for like... a year? I can do xenobio solo pretty easy, and often prefer to.

The machine can process multiple slimes at once too, at least when upgraded. Kill an entire cell of slimes, locker them and drag them up to the processor and let it work while you go back to your chores fun

[Cheimon]

I go MAXIMUM OVERFAST as xenobio. I don't have enough time to feed the slimes, kill the babies that split, and feed the corpses into the machine.

So your complaint is that if you want to work really fast, you can't do it alone?

That doesn't sound like a problem.

[FantasticFwoosh]

Don't golems permastun people on harm intent punches? So wouldn't giving them weapons be worse?

golems can weaken people reliably with hits to the mouth for a permastun but for a quick death they'll need a weapon (or to grab the person into a chokehold and whale on them)

Yeah consensus in the thread seems to be generally that slimes are baaad. Also you don't need to upgrade the machine to load in multiple slimes anymore, it just prolongs the processing and upgrading speeds it up and maximises the amount of cores given, so you could reliably shove all your dead slimes in at once after leaving them in the killing chamber and dragging them out later while you are waiting for your next batch to stop feeding off the monkeys and split.

[PKPenguin321]

I go MAXIMUM OVERFAST as xenobio. I don't have enough time to feed the slimes, kill the babies that split, and feed the corpses into the machine.

the problem is you're not going balls-out slime genocidal maniac
when i play xenobio the floor is littered with dead slimes and i kill whole pens at a time
it's messy but super fast and can be done solo

[Oldman Robustin]

Best fix for Xenobio of all time:

1) Give each cell a console
2) Give the console the ability to quickly euthanize a slime and/or teleport it to a pad outside of the cell, the same pad/console can also teleport in monkeys/monkeycubes (automatically making the cube into a monkey)
3) Move all the xenobio machines into the center of xenobio where everyone puts them anyway
4) Make the slime vendor able to store blood/water/plasma/potions and inject those reagants into any other slime cores stored in the vendor

Cuts out the most tedious aspects of xenobio without giving scientists an easy path to golems/gold slime armies/etc. every round.

[CPTANT]

Best fix for Xenobio of all time:

1) Give each cell a console
2) Give the console the ability to quickly euthanize a slime and/or teleport it to a pad outside of the cell, the same pad/console can also teleport in monkeys/monkeycubes (automatically making the cube into a monkey)
3) Move all the xenobio machines into the center of xenobio where everyone puts them anyway
4) Make the slime vendor able to store blood/water/plasma/potions and inject those reagants into any other slime cores stored in the vendor

Cuts out the most tedious aspects of xenobio without giving scientists an easy path to golems/gold slime armies/etc. every round.

Yeah a lot of aspect of the game have gotten convenience additions (such as the RCD or RPD for engineering) doing so for xeno wouldn't be bad.

[onleavedontatme]

https://github.com/tgstation/-tg-station/pull/12725

[Jazaen]

In other words, you could move slimes between pens and feed them from a console? Neat. Could you also add a slime scanner to it?

[onleavedontatme]

In other words, you could move slimes between pens and feed them from a console? Neat. Could you also add a slime scanner to it?

That should be possible yeah

[ShadowDimentio]

For the LOVE OF GOD someone put some biobags in Xeno on a table or something. I NEED THEM.

[TheNightingale]

They're in the L3 biosuit lockers.

[ShadowDimentio]

CONSOLES NEED THE FOLLOWING

-Process slimes function
-Scan slimes function
-Blast doors on the cold room
-R&D upgrades
-Faster way to load monkey cubes

Then it'll be good.

Until then, it's still useless.

[callanrockslol]

CONSOLES NEED THE FOLLOWING

-Process slimes function
-Scan slimes function
-Blast doors on the cold room
-R&D upgrades
-Faster way to load monkey cubes

Then it'll be good.

Until then, it's still useless.

> Useless

Jesus christ you are a dumb motherfucker, you can already remotely dump the slimes right next you you without moving and the slime processor is movable anyway.

[FantasticFwoosh]

CONSOLES NEED THE FOLLOWING

-Process slimes function
-Scan slimes function
-Blast doors on the cold room
-R&D upgrades
-Faster way to load monkey cubes

Then it'll be good.

Until then, it's still useless.

> Useless

Jesus christ you are a dumb motherfucker, you can already remotely dump the slimes right next you you without moving and the slime processor is movable anyway.

> Load slimes > Hover over to slime processor with ded slimes > Drop slimes > Alt click and pick (or click to grab the top of the pile like a scrub) and shove all the slimes in there at once and leave them to churn up, 5 slimes takes about 10 seconds to load in > Collect cores after, and probably never bother putting them in the fridge like a xenobio pro (like me) take your desired slime cores from the lagtastic pile using ALT and put relevant ones in your bag for activation.

Also the console is onpurposefully inefficient in what i would call 'lab monkey work' in order to encourage a secondary scientist or a hired science assistant (generally a bad idea but they are expendable) to go into the pens to collect monkeys to the much more superior monkey processor machine and run the slimes through the grinder (may occasionally task them if they are trustworthy to go activate some slimes with a desired reagent on your behalf while you continue to man the console)

Providing you can give your assistants enough guidance and lay out the reagents and the lab to be idiot proof (hide all the ground plasma in your bio bag pro tip) xenobio can be a very productive department.

[ShadowDimentio]

The one benefit the console has over me doing it manually is easier monkey handling for both placing monkeys and processing corpses. Besides that, I can do it faster manually, with the added bonus of being able to scan the slimes and keep the best ones.

[FantasticFwoosh]

The one benefit the console has over me doing it manually is easier monkey handling for both placing monkeys and processing corpses. Besides that, I can do it faster manually, with the added bonus of being able to scan the slimes and keep the best ones.

In the rare instance you require a particular colour, my own personal method is to kill adult slimes in a kill chamber directly (and all the subsequent baby slimes at conception with extinguisher blast #No.2), and feed two slimes of the same colour (if availible) to a pen at a time, it makes farming really easy, and you can spread out and fill all your pens in about eight minutes and double your intake.

You can modify upon this method by having your assistant scan them for you and apply whatever changes are needed (giving stimulants to adult slimes that in theory increase the core count of the babies for instance) and moving the adult desired for processing rather than breeding into the interim area seperate to the other one. (seeming as your loyal assitant should only really be going in there when slimes are feeding/fed.

A good assistant is a slimeperson assistant assuming you and everyone in science isnt slimepeople already given that the ability to make clones makes them twice as expendable when monkeys are really short. (grim stuff but the sacrifice of science for xenobio maintenance and a era of ever increasing budget cuts to non frontline sciences.)

[iamgoofball]

Would making upgraded processors speed up slime load time help with the issue?