# Species System
blah blah im not even trying at this point here's your design doc for the thing i doubt anyone will code other than me
- **Implementation of all of these can technically be separate, other than biologies needing to be injected before all of them.**
- **Implementation of 'traits' rework can be entirely separate if needed.**
- this basically lets us split up a massive project into chunks of updates to appease players without having to do it all at once.
## biologies
- organic
- synthetic
- nanoswarm
- chimeric
- promethean
you can guess what each of these is
these all have different default handling of health, to be done by (undecided method)
## physiology
limbs all have a biology.
- /datum/global_physiology at the /carbon level
- /datum/local_physiology at the /organ/external level
/datum/physiology_modifier now has target biologies to target.
only limbs of that biology get it applied to their local physiologies.
## brains
everyone is housed in their brain (duh)
brains have a biology.
this biology determines what your brain can 1. survive in and 2. control
## species
species (and potentially whitelisting in the case of protean/chimera) now determine what primary physiology you can pick
this is abstracted, you aren't actually picking your physiology, you're basically picking your primary physiology + brain type
this in turns determines what limbs you can pick.
## organs
too complex to talk about in this draft. tl;dr composition and organ biologies and all kinds of yikes abstraction levels
## augmentations
for all biologies, you can have a /datum/robolimb augmentation.
this does different things on different biologies (e.g it shields nanoswarm less than say, chimera)
this basically represents you being a cyborg where most of the outer bits of your body are a prosthetic but you still have blood and flesh / whatever underneath.
this is different from synthetic - normal people can have entirely prosthetic limbs or augmented limbs.
in most cases, people would have fully synthetic limbs and augmented chest/head, as people (not MMIs/positronics) still need their organs to live.
health system wise (for later): augmentations change outside physiology but not inside, and how we model this is you can still take "proper" deep tissue / organ damage on augmented areas, but the outside layer basically acts like an overshield. however, having your arms half broken is obviously not great for you. as an example: proteans just fully have this as an overshield, but they can't really operate with this outer layer broken unless they actively eject it and fall back onto their nanoswarm - which is by far, an inferior physiology to fully prosthetic augmentations.
## Traits / Quirks / Etc
and now the moment you've all been waiting for:
### custom species
is removed as a species datum.
every species will have the ability to have a different species name.
Every species will support the same level of customization codewise, but not necessarily the **amount**.
custom species will be automatically transitioned to human species base with their options retained as best as possible, including their species name.
### traits, points, augments, features
customization on citadel rp will always be a priority at a certain level - a lot of our niche is focused on this, and, frankly, if it makes the player feel better without causing a ton of issues, `why not`?
with this in mind, we'll probably do the following:
- single point pool for traits / whatever. starting amount determined by species
- traits are for global/intrinsic modifiers that can't be "taken away" from someone. for now, it'll also have limb/whatever specific physiology stuff, but in the long term, we want traits and augments to be different
- in-fact, even stuff like bio-reactors will eventually be transitioned to the composition of someone's organs.
- traits have a list of mutually-exclusivity enums, allowing you to designate certain groups as "pick one of this".
- traits can also have species whitelist / blacklists, and species has the same for traits.
- we'll probably need a better system for replacing traits with their species variants: see, Auril flight
- species can have a list of "forced" traits much like languages that are always taken
- cultures cannot, unlike with languages, as it doesn't make sense to overload cultures even more instead of just having snowflake cultures be subspecies.
- cultures: learned opinions. species: physicality & physiology.
traits will come with a few classes:
- **intrinsic / stat modifiers**: multiplicative modifiers to what someone's capabilities are.
- for "base" / core stats as well as global modifiers to damage/speed, this must cap out at +- 15%. e.g. if someone's already taking 20% more damage from burn, it'd be 1.2 * 1.15 = 1.38.
- these generally apply multiplicatively, hence why they're so hardcapped
- furthermore, this prevents too much minmaxing.
- **features**: things that are less quantitative and more qualitative, or at least feel that way
- general: more forgiveness to things like genetic/radiation/augmentation damage/capacity overrun, better senses, colorblindness, slightly better nightvision, claws, glowing, etc
- synthetics: bio-reactors, higher charging capacity, inbuilt sensors, etc
- organics: metabolism modifiers, chemical incompatibilites / dependencies, etc
- a lot of these are better off as hardware/augmentation/organs later
- **uniques**: things that greatly change the paradigm of what someone's character is, can do, or experiences.
- each species has a separate **unique limit**
- flight - would still require wings later on
- honestly i want to murder flight in its current form but we'll leave it alone i guess
- vetalan
- species uniques / exclusions like:
- no flying prometheans but they can glow superbright, be limited stargazers/luminescents, have species modifications, etc
- ngl these are probably due to be cut. most of these can easily just be subspecies except for vetalans and we really don't want to overload uniques with stuff that **should** be a subspecies thing.