# Virology
- **HEAVILY WIP**
## Intro
- Virology right now is boring as hell
- Nerfed into the ground due to powergame, never recovered
- Virology will be heavily RNG (weighted, ofcourse)
- Draft aims for longer-term virology play instead of making quick and dirty instant heal/kill viruses
## Spread
- Direct: Injection into blood. All viruses have this.
- Airbourne: Atmospherics floodfill for vulnerable (non internals) people around
- Contact: Upon brushiing against or hugging or otherwise touching a mob, try to infect them
- Prevented by full permeability
- **Colonization**: Colonize objects on cough/sneeze/contact
- Wash off with cleaner/water/soap.
- Prevented by gloves on contact
- **For colonization + airbourne, colonizing a mob will slowly penetrate regardless unless they wash themselves off, or have bio-impermeable gear.**
- Non-contact infection colonization will **only infect if the mob takes enough injury to bleed, and then touches the thing.**
- Simulates going through open wounds.
- Strengths: Transmitivity determines chance of infection, colonization determines strength of colonization
- Infection chance begins low
- Raises sharply with multiple attempts to infect in a short period of time
- For colonization, colonized items work the same way. Staying in contact with them for too long will be bad.
## Symptoms, Stages
- Symptoms suppressed by spaceacillin
- High severity/stage speed penetrates this, allowing symptoms to work with a reduced severity
- Symptoms get more severe/obvious as stages increase
- Some symptoms work from infection, others happen in late stages
- Mixing symptoms will still be a thing - symptoms give stat +'s and -'s.
- More varied symptoms
- Metabolic stress interaction - Your virus healing you but increasing stress, etc
- For healviruses, longer term and stressful symbiont-like repair that increases metabolic stress a lot
- Overly powerful healviruses may increase metabolic stress past safe levels
- Viruses should get less powerful as stress increases, to avoid cobbychem-like "my healvirus just killed someone because they got shot three times instead of two", so they will not be as effective but also won't literally kill people
- Rework metabolic stress - It'll be used in nanites too.
## Stats
- Transmitivity: How easy it is to directly transmit, or for colonies to transmit into people touching them
- High transmitivity allows for airbourne without sneezing
- Colonization: How strong and long lasting its colonies are
- Severity: Symptom severity
- Stealth: How easy it is to detect
- High stealth cough will only sometimes display the message **to other mobs** - the victim doesn't know they're coughing
- Speed: How fast it reaches full severity
- Resistance: Resistance to immunity
- **Tweaking base stats independently of symptoms**
- Should be nearly impossible to get a "perfect" virus - as some stats go up, others go down
- Alternatively, go full Plague Inc with it and have symptoms mutate sideways/up/down/etc and determine all stats
- Opposing stats:
- Stealth vs Severity
- Severity vs Transmitivity
- Resistance vs Speed
- Healviruses, and powerful healviruses should be possible
- Should take time to get good stats on healviruses.
- High stealth viruses won't be scannable by health analyzers
- Low stealth viruses will be scannable by name if identified, but will only display approximate stage and other datas
- Specialized machinery in virology can isolate a sample directly and analyze full data
## Contention
- Multiple viruses can infect one person
- They'll fight each other for resources, eventually killing each other
- **This does not provide immunity in the future, unlike now.**
- Partially suppresses each others' strength
- Stacking viruses makes it more obnoxious to cure them in a timely manner, but won't make them much more lethal
## Curing
- Curing is no longer done by a chemical basis only
- Suppress symptoms with the unique, analyzed chemicals required for a virus, keeping someone alive while vastly boosting their immunity gain.
### Immunity
- Immunity is gained when harmful virus symptoms act, representing your body fighting back
- Upon 50-75% immunity, bad symptoms start to wane
- Immunity increase deermined by resistance
- Good symptoms are immune to this
- Their virus will still be eradicated when immunity reaches full, but until then, they'll keep acting
- Viruses with no non-neutered bad symptoms will not ever reach 100% immunity.
- Antiboies generated upon full immunity
### Antibodies
- Antibodies can be extracted and replicated from a mob with full immunity to a virus
- Partial antibodies can be extracted at certain thresholds, helping *suppress* a virus without curing it
- Antibodies won't immediately cure, instead massively boosting immunity gain (like, within a minute or two at most)
- Viruses have a "likeness index"
- Alike viruses someone is immune to gain immunity at a vastly increased rate.
## Machinery
- Split from current "one machine" system
- Inspired from bay
- Antibody replicator - Extracts antibodies from a sample and replicates them, for when a virus is cured
- Disease Isolator - Extracts a disease from a blood sample, revealing all of its properties
- Potentially store metadata so extracting an early-stage disease won't reveal everything
- Gene splicer - Injects virus genes into virus samples. Can also bombard a virus with radiation, causing mutations in active symptoms, sometimes developing new symptoms in a tree, changing base stats, etc
- Viral splitter - Splits a virus sample into multiple gene samples
- Viral replicator - Replicates a virus sample.
- *Maybe combine these into just `Virus Replicator`, `Virus Analyzer`, `Virus Manipulator` (get some better names) so we don't have 4-5 machines*
- Combination virus/antibody replicator/grower
- Combination virus splitter + splicer
- Combination isolator + used for analysis
- Virology starts with some basic disease samples
## Extra
- Dead mobs slowly contaminating
- Infected meat causing viruses when eaten raw?
- These should be very weak viruses, we don't want a monkey in the halls to let out the bubonic plague
- Make monkies needed for research?
- To make this less CBT, maybe only make very high level symptoms require this
- Not "required" but you won't see stats + effects until this is done and you isolate a 100% stage virus?
- TBD
- A "pre activation injector" in viro that can only be used within range to a virus machine
- When injected, goes to 100% within a minute
- Makes curing way, way faster too
- That said, **if the monkey then infects someone, uh, GG, that's now a normal virus that's going to be normal cure difficulty**
- RIP you
- Better wear proper gear :)
- Synthetics
- We don't really want them virus-vulnerable
- 50% shitpost 50% serious: What if we made them incubators that get infected easily with no effects? They emit heat and just become walking petri dishes
- "And here's how I got killed by the CMO for walking into medbay"
- Random viruses from dirty areas
- **Very weak, nuisences**
- Random minor stat changes per mob, to simulate subtly different body responses
- Sometimes the flu/cold would be an issue.