# Xenochimera - Preliminary Rework

A 'quick' rework to make them less sometimes-kinda-animals and more mostly-people, to pretty much buff them. No, seriously.

* Pretty much also makes them a bit more realistic.
- This involves both drastic buffs and nerfs. Things are going to be wild for a bit, much like with planned human/synth/protean changes.

# meta & history

Historical context is required to understand how a species came to be and where we should take it; This rework is framed to avoid mistakes / repeats of things we no longer want, whether because it is not the direction of our server & community or because it is frankly just bad.

The OOC justifications for the old ferality system (now to be turned into general agitation + other bundled mechanics) are pretty much:

- To justify the dev-side of how many advantages Chimera get
- regen, abilities, etc; Chimera are balanced by ferality, unlike Proteans, which have no downside/behavioral quirks at all other than what the player wishes to have.
- To add intrigue to a whitelist race
- chimeras aren't just human-plus-with-regeneration; ferality makes them have a real roleplay quirk, for better or worse, given what it is.
- To add danger and conflict
- whitelist species, even including crew Vox, are usually pretty docile. That's boring. We don't want crew being antags but we did want some conflict from it.

Historically, all these mechanics and more came from... **Vorestation!**

- Xenochimera was a race developed by a staffmember upstream.
- Xenochimera had feral mechanics.
- Xenochimera, upon port to old Citadel RP, had near-to-none restrictions on what they could be.
- Heads, then security, then exploration restrictions, then more were all added as Citadel RP transitioned from being a horny server with furry races to some semblence of an attempt at a proper Roleplay-with-ERP-allowed as opposed to a ERP-with-roleplay-included kind of server.
- While I cannot speak to how chimera went upstream, I have no doubt that, given it's Vorestation, it's purely non-antagonistic/there's basically no way *to have an antagonistic (not antagonist! antagonistic!) reaction from one* given the **direction** of that server is not particularly towards RP-*with-conflict*.
- We do not want this! One of the first things I did upon arrival was to start tearing down the walls of 'non-antags can't cause problems'. It's boring.
- We also don't want Xenochimera to be an 'antag character bait' whitelist. That's also un-fun; we care about realistic IC where we can within our environment/idea for how things go, and it's untenable within our canon for NT to be sending unstable crewmembers daily without care for other crewmembers.

And thus, the 'meta'-justifications and guidelines for this time around is the following (in no particular order):

- Xenochimera should be an employable species.
- Constantly going feral from getting hurt and slashing your fellow crewmembers is called 'belonging in a medical facility', not 'employable in an environment where people get hurt a lot'.
- Xenochimera should be capable of most roles.
- While it is interesting to have crew-role locking, whether for whitelists or for factions, I'm not particularly a big fan of making something so mechanically constraining they cannot do most roles; at least not in this manner. It's a subjective design take, but it's ultimately the take I have on it. This is mostly due to the fact that the methodology of role-locking is also in conflict with the first point.
- Security, Captain, HoS: Will still be restricted for balancing purposes; ICly this is going to be a similar reason for the Protean ban on these roles. Xenochimera will fundamentally still be on a different medical system and we're not really there yet in terms of being able to reconcile them with the rest of the roles.
- Heads of Staff: Will still be restricted, as this is an experimental change and it doesn't make sense to un-restrict this.
- Exploration: **Will be tentatively un-restricted.** Exploration is a nominally violent department. Our current codebase and circumstances simply encourage them to be the away team that's participating in combat. This is not the goal, and therefore we will not design around it.
- Xenochimera should have a mechanical system that describes their species intrinsics.
- Generally, any 'mechanical roleplay enforcement' should actually be a mechanic. Mechanical roleplay enforcement doesn't work; making a species' mechanics fit what it is *does*. This is why while things like moodlets are forever verboten, concepts like xenochimera stability, etc, are okay.
- The current ferality system is approaching that point, but ultimately okay as it does not do it.
- All mechanics should be, well, mechanics; not an on-off 'disengagement expectation' for chimera players to stop playing a person and hide in maintenance instead.
- The way to imagine the thematics of this system, is that while the person is in control of their body, their body is also inherently reactive and responsive in a way that *they are not able to control*.
- **Intelligence is not simply de-volved during a stress resopnse; It is not an evolutionary benefit to devolve higher thinking when under threat.**
- Xenochimeras must be unified with changelings, backend-wise.
- Quirky, I know. They're similar enough that it makes sense to develop them in union given we're in the middle of reworks for the latter (and *all* special / antag roles, really).
- This inherently makes balancing difficult and annoying. This is not a bad thing; the inherent chaos gained from fitting these systems together in a way that is fun to engage with is worth it from both a gameplay and lore perspective for me.
- This does not necessarily imply Xenochimeras are just 'lesser changelings'. It doesn't imply they're not, either. All this implies is that they're both adaptive, shapeshifting bioforms that arise from the assimilation of genetic material and concepts from other living things (or even design their own).

# basic concepts

Chimeras, unlike normal humans, are not a brain and a body; their entire body is *them*. This means that while their intelligence is, nominally in control, they possess subconscious

## agitation

**Agitation** is the measure of how stressed a chimera is.

Agitation results in:

- Scaling messages and feedback (including visual feedback) to get away from whatever's causing it.
- Messages / visual feedback escalates as agitation increases; anything approaching old behaviors do not appear until high agitation is reached.
- **Experimental:** The chimera should be able to *see* what is causing agitation.
- Hallucinations die until reworked; at most it should cause more alteration-like and not spawning-like hallucinations.
- Aka seeing someone with a gun as more dangerous / etc than they are, instead of seeing someone there that's not there.
- Again, there's no evolutionary benefit to seeing stuff that **isn't there.** Players can RP this out if they want themselves.
- A general decrease in precision for the controlling intelligence.
- Your aim and weapons stabilize is penalized.
- A general ramp-up and alteration of reflexive abilities and intrinsics of the chimera's body.
- Certain automated actions can/may occur.
- This includes automatically attacking those perceived to be attacking you.
- This is intentionally designed to be more friendly-fire prone than useful; the overall damage / etc isn't enough to make this some rambo mechanic, not to mention there'll be other *countermeasures* for that.
- Things like damage adaptation starts to go from making you look like a cool dude with lava scales to monstrous as your body starts prioritizing survival over your human form.
- A general ramp-up in the 'involuntary splash' of voluntary abilities and intrinsics, while buffing them.
- Certain abilities change form.
- Certain abilities are added.
- A general decrease in control of voluntary abilities and intrinsics.
- Ramping visible effects.
- Low - nothing
- Medium - people can occasionally examine and see weirdness; subtle alterations to speech / actions
- High - Shaking, visible on examine, potential changes to chat / etc.
- At high levels, can protect against some forms of suppression.

## attrition

**Attrition** is the measure of how much the chimera's body is failing to keep up with demands.

Attrition results in:

- Ramp-down in potency of abilities / intrinsics, reflexive or otherwise.
- The chimera's body is running out of energy and cells to do these things.
- Most abilities are actually technically *harmful to them to use*; energy and cellular matter are a resource.
- Ramp-down of passives like regeneration.
- Feeds towards agitation.
- *Slightly* suppresses negaties of agitation, so that high attrition will not doubly stack to make you too weak; though it intentionally still stacks a little, as this is definitely a lose-state.

## suppression

**Suppression** is the measure of how much the chimera's body is prevented from doing things.

- This is not really one value / tuple, and more of a couple of things that can happen from certain sources.

Examples of suppression effects:

- Poisons mess with their body; their regeneration and adaptation are hampered or even reduced in the latter case as their body attempts to purge it.
- Fire is **very very bad**.
- Being starved will weaken abiities.
- Being staggered will briefly reduce certain things like adaptation.

# affliction sources

## Agitation

- Stimulants
- Dangerous sounds being heard
- Heuristics are added to ensure Chimeras don't suffer much agitation if they *expect that they are free of harm from this.* As an example, firing a gun vs hearing a gun shot towards you.
- Being in pain
- Being injured
- People nearby having weapons carried, or held.
- Heuristics are added to ensure Chimeras don't suffer much agitation if it isn't used to threaten them. I will not say what heuristics this is but it'll definitely be a thing.
- Unrecognized, foreign, or inorganic materials in your body.
- Reagents
- Organs / Augments
- At large levels, their body might violently reject the thing to get it out o them. Cybernetic augments will be very hard for them to accept.
- Being in proximity to other chimeras
- Heuristics are utilized to make them able to tolerate each other, but still able to receive a bit of this, to a lot of this if the other chiemra is considered dangerous
- Sensing violence
- Outside of just sound
- Sensing grave injuries
- Not a paper cut, and not because a simple mob is hurt; they'll become agitated by other people being very, very hurt.
- This (along with many other sources) are highly gradual and limited; combined with all the changes this doesn't disqualify Chimeras from being medics.
- Sensory overload

## Attrition

- Regenerating health
- Using abilities
- Passively, at high agitation (all your passives being invoked by it)
- Certain damage sources

## Suppression

- Certain damage sources
- Fire & Heat
- Excess kinetic / concussive energy
- Sensory overload
- This also causes high agitation, in most cases, like flashes/flashbangs.
- Certain chemicals
- Painkillers
- Ethanol
- Others
- **While processing nutrition / biomatter.**
- Rest & Digest is real.

# intrinsic traits

## chemical & damage processing

This is outside scope as this preliminary project is just to get core stats and mechanics in, and not to rework the medical system for them, but eventually Chimeras **will not be able to be entirely 'fixed' with normal means.**

As an example, you can bandage them, but, internal damage doesn't respond to Bicaridine and other chemicals made now/in the future, as the biologies are just too different for them to work.

## regeneration

Chimeras will,

- Naturally have some health regeneration.
- After medical refactors, this is present as internal + external auto-seal being tangibly quick, whereas most people have relatively slow internal healing until a wound is sealed + a slow external seal rate.
- For now, this is going to present as *something akin to a but not exactly* -0.1 hp/s on **every wound at once**, as well as a relatively fast anti-coagulant effect.
- Wounds add attrition while being healed.
- Once a wound is fully sealed, internal heal rate for that wound accelerates over time.
- Be able to reform organs, with enough time.
- The only permanent organ that chimeras have is a 'chimeric core', which is an abstract organ. Unlike Prometheans, they do not have a real 'core'.
- Thematically, chimeric organs are basically their body deciding that 'thing needs done', and forming something to do the thing.
- Chimeric organs can be damaged, destroyed, poisoned, etc, along with the rest of their body.
- With enough time, their body will quite literally form new organs with available mass.
- **Not having any given organ does not kill them.** The shock of losing an organ that was being used to adapt to something can go as far as to incapacitate (losing lungs while breathing oxygen), but eventually the body will reform any necessary adaptations.
- tl;dr: Organs are an adaptation, not a biological requirement to continue living in *hospitable* environments.
- You might 'die' from lacking one, because your body cannot keep up with its environment without it.
- Bones are considered an organ for all intents and purposes.
- If a bone is broken, or removed (in the future med/organ/limb composition updates), chimeras will automatically start to regrow them.
- This regrowth takes a short while.
- Being un-moving, or splinted, or both, will speed it up drastically.
- Chimeras suffer less penalties from broken bones.
- Unlike normal people, they can move without needing bones for their muscles to pull on; it's more of a specialization.
- Be able to revive from the dead, with enough time.
- Chimera bodies **will** still regenerate while incapacitated, or even dead.
- The only way to stop this is regeneration suppressants, like heat / fire, and others.
- The controlling intelligence, while unconscious, can still control some bodily functions.
- A consideration was made for making regeneration **passive, and non-overridable**.
- The only reason this isn't done for RP purposes; the general theme of all this design is that the body is in control of subconscious functions, and it doesn't make evolutionary sense to not regenerate if you're dead. That said, I can see an argument that it's a bad idea to fully force this.
- If enough healing is done so that they *should now be alive*, they will revive from the dead in a weakened state.
- **Nutrition is no longer required for regeneration.**
- Nutrition just decreases attrition, nothing more. It makes regeneration far more effective as your body has materials to regenerate with, but the weakest forms of regeneration will be entirely passive.
- To make Chimera not immortal without a gib, attrition **will** delay, if not entirely stop revival after sufficient damage.
- This is especially the case if they are missing / having damaged 'required' organs; their body refuses to come back up if this is the case.
- Canonically, the chimera's body is in stasis; chimeras **cannot be killed without incineration of the remains.** For all intents and purposes in-game, though, you're not coming back up without someone assisting you.

## damage adaptation

Chimeras will automatically adapt to sources of trauma.
This comes with limitations and various effects, some examples of which...

- Chimeric bio-armor is special in that while it works underneath regular armor, it *amplifies* certain effects and translates it to a source of **suppression.**
- It's almost impossible to be armored against all sources at once.
- Bio-armor is a trade-off situation; being strong against piercing might reduce your blunt force shielding.
- It takes a bit for something to ramp up.
- A sudden bullet hit will go through easily, but after a few shots drawn out over time you'll have less susceptibility to high-pierce hits.
- Certain types of damage are **very** bad, and while adaptable, are far more destructive to do so.
- Incineration of any kind tends to obliterate bio-armoring; the chimera's body uses all its resources to attempt to shield from this, compromising other kinds of armor.
- Adaptation slows down from attrition and suppression.
- This is not limited to damage / armor.
- There is no more active bio-adaptation. **If you breathe any gas long enough, you will adapt to that gas-type.**
- **Chimeras cannot truly suffocate.** You will be knocked out from the lack of available breathing gas, and weakened by it, until your body adapts to not needing it. Unfortunately, this comes with downsides, as breathing gas is necessary for living beings for a reason; it's resource-intensive to keep up full activites without gas to breathe.
- Only some gases can be adapted to. While filtration of *nearly* all gases can be done, only certain ones like oxygen, CO2, nitrogen, and similar, can be used for a breathing gas.
- **Chimeras cannot die of space exposure.**
- They are able to adapt to any low, and most mildly high pressures.
- They **cannot** adapt to severe hypothermia. The reason they can survive in space is because space is not actually cold, and instead cools you by radiative cooling, which they can adapt to sufficiently.

## mimickery

Chimeras will be able to freely mimick the following:

- **Any** biological appearance (so non synthlimb sprite)
- **Anyone's biological appearance data, if they have a DNA sample from that person.**
- **Anyone's voice they hear, if they have a DNA sample from that person.**
- **The incorporation of traits from anyone they get a sufficiently large DNA sample from.**

Chimeras will not be able to freely mimick the following:

- **Faces (Cloning):** Chimeras can hide and change their face, but it will be too uncanny to pass as another person's under examination.

## psionics

I'm not going to tip-toe around the 'morphogenetics' thing anymore. Psionics is psionics is psionics and we're going to start calling it what it is. If we want it limited to similar-species, which I do think is cool, we can just do compatibility of mind / body checks and similar.

- Chimeras will be able to commune with anyone on screen.
- Requires one to be sufficiently organic in mind for clarity. Synthetic minds don't handle it as well.
- Much like with Prometheans, there will be a hidden 'attunement' system.
- If someone is too far away, this is how much you can communicate and sense them.
- Eventually, the biggest source of this that doesn't decay will be injecting a small node into them that acts like a biological transreceiver.
- Multiple chimeras cannot do this to the same person. Doing so will cause a rather painful response for all involved while the old one is overridden.
- Yes, I like chaos and consequences; how could you tell. Chimeras are not particularly safe for work.

## abilities

Most of the current abilities will be redesigned or taken out.
Here's some examples.

- Toggled thermal sight, and automatic darksight is gone.
- You adapt darksight in dark areas, and eventually will gradually adapt thermal vision if you detect mobs around you in dark areas.
- Resonant / EMP screech are either redesigned, refluffed, or gone.
- Never made a lot of sense, and I don't really like them existing in a void. We either give Chimeras all sorts of fuckery like this or none at all.

Active abilities should be treaded with carefully, I rather dislike species turning into cooldown simulators. We want to prioritize the holistic experience more than who gets more buttons. In general, I frown on species (including antagonist) abilities that are just effectively a limiter for a passive action.

- Example: Fleshmend, on both chimeras and changelings. Why is it only an ability, and not an intrinsic? The burst version, maybe, but such capabilities should be somewhat inherent even if it is a triggered thing.

# changelings

New changelings are basically chimeras with some key differences.

- They have full control over their body; *they are* in control.
- Any ability that's hard to control / whatever basically has that nullified.
- Ideally, anything that is meant to be fluffy and 'obscured' would be very visible to them instead; it's comparable to someone using a prosthetic and having it simulate pain, versus a synthetic mind just accessing the numbers underlying everything.
- As a consequence,
- They, (much like regular chimera), do not feel pain in the same way. It's an afterthought to them given their full control of all of their reflexes.
- Their shapeshifting is perfect.
- They get full control of most 'automatic' / subconscious reflexes, and can amplify them.
- As an exmple, chitinous armor is just them willfully sending their body's adaptation into an overdrive mode where they grow armor plating without needing enough perceived trauma to do so.
- They can do feats that would require active control and planning / design beyond what evolution can do in most cases.
- Resonant screech, creating spiders / monstrosities, etc
- Their evolution is more extreme, as well as perfected.
- Things like bio-armor can adapt to more things at once, and *faster*.
- They get less weaknesses to their normal weaknesses.
- Regrowing things still takes time, but not nearly as much.
- Loss of organs generally slow them down but won't stop them; e.g. losing a lung reduces their stamina but won't cripple them.
- Limbs can be regenerated decently quickly. For balance reasons, their limbs are quite hard to chop off, as without instant limb regeneration, losing a limb is pretty much a lose-state.
- Less serious things like bone breaks are just irrelevant to them.
- Agitation doesn't do a lot for them, and is much less visible as they can train themselves to not show the inherent signs of it.
- Attrition is a thing for them still, but the scaling is less harsh.
- They can push themselves to their limits. Attrition is basically a resource for them, instead of a limiter.
- Suppression is a thing for them still.
- Many sources are reduced or nullified; e.g. electrical stuns and staggering blows (projectile hits and major melee hits) are much less effective.
- Sources that are more 'physical' like fire still affect them a bunch.
- As a last measure to make them powerful enough to take on fights as an antagonist, **they do not require nutrition to gain the boosts of nutrition.**
- We basically just handwave it and say they have stored nutrients always; this is basically a chimera/protean that can constantly regenerate its body mass.
- Alternatively we can make it so they can absorb large amounts of nutrients by attacking others, with a passive regeneration.

## abilities

Changelings actually have abilities.
It's out of scope to talk about what they are in detail, but they'll be there.

We're going to need some sort of resource for them, as agitation / attrition / suppression are not really meant to be a currency that you spend (though it can act like such in some cases).

They'll generally still have a good spread.

## transformations

Things like armblade, armor, etc, are transformations, and not 'active' / burst abilities.
Transforming generally has some kind of resource or maintenance cost to the user.

## regeneration

Because attrition is far less harsh, they'll by default just have less restricted regeneration.

- They are not penalized by wound amount and severity in the same way.
- They are able to raise from the dead *always*, without requiring nutrition.
- As said eariler, their regeneration is far faster, even for major things like missing organs and limbs.

## damage adaptation

Changelings have the inherent bio-armor of chimeras.

- The armor is more able to adapt to multiple damage types without losing efficiency.
- The armor re-adapts far, *far* faster.
- The armor doesn't lose its adaptation at all.
- The armor causes less attrition to be used.
- The armor can be invoked by the changeling to manually tune it.
- The armor is less vulnerable to things that generally counter this sort of armoring.

## mimickery

Changelings can mimic anyone on sight, without cost; simple as.

# values tuning / spreadsheeting / nitty gritty math and algorithms

Wow, everything sounds, pick:

- awesome
- overpowered as shit
- impossible to code in a timely manner
- probably really unfun for whoever for some reason likes being maintenance gremlins that hide away all round

Sucks but as usual I wouldn't be here writing this if I didn't already half the API done in my head.

## value holder & core abstractions

Many of these mechanics require reactions.
We don't want these proccing on every /carbon for speed reasons, and many of these have uses later (cough cough organs augments dynamic ambience and proteans).

### core holder

`/obj/item/organ/internal/xenochimera_abstraction_holder` will hold all core systems.

It is an **abstract organ**, meaning it doesn't actually exist inside the person, can't be removed, can't be interacted with in IC, etc.

It is linked to their new brain organ, `/obj/item/organ/internal/brain/chimeric_core`

The biology system will probably end up changing this around a bit.

- A separate abstraction holder is used so that stats inherently reset per body; xenochimeras generally shouldn't be swapping bodies anyways, but.
- Chimeric core brains are also an abstract organ, as xenochimeras *are* their body, not a brain / core unlike Prometheans and Proteans.
- It'd be interesting to make them have an intelligence core that possesses their actual mind but it might be more interesting to you know, not do this, because the entire point of chimera is they're practically a self-contained hivemind.

### sound hooks

A way to specify what a sound is will be needed for reactions to things like gunshots.

`playsound(..., fluff_flag = SOUND_FLUFF_FLAG_GUNFIRE, fluff_specifier = SOUND_FLUFF_SPECIFIER_GUNSHOT_BULLET, fluff_intensity = 70)`

`fluff_flag` - A bitfield specifying what it is
`fluff_specifier` - A specific enum to match
`fluff_intensity` - 0 to 100. This is generally how 'intense' it is, separate from volume. This is modulated with range from the hearer / things like environment for things to knwo how dangerous it is.

The reason this won't use `volume` is because volume is based on sound file, not how intense it *should be*; it's a bad idea to link the two.

**Component signals will be used as the listening mechanism.**

### damage hooks

The `silicons/projectiles_hit_handling` branch adds fully modular and signal-hooked procs for handling inbound damage.

**Component signals will be used as the listening mechanism.**

Regeneration will directly iterate through damaged organs and perform processing on them.

### vision hooks

- Component signals will be used to hook into the user examining people.
- The core xenochimera abstraction holder will periodically scan the view of the person to determine who's around them.
- Things like darksight processing will happen per-tick on the person, as per before the NVG changes.

## agitation

Agitation is tracked multi-dimensionally.

### sources

Sourced agitation is batched per-source.

This means that there's diminishing returns for many sources that spam stacks of itself, and you cannot go into high agitation easily without things being very wrong.

Sourced agitation generally drops at a constant rate (going away entirely in ~5 minutes or so).
Sourced agitation has the source identified by a typepath, so we can grab constant tuning values from that typepath for that source.

/**
 * Holds data on an agitation source.
 */
/datum/xenochimera_agitation_source
    /// self-explanatory
    var/name
    /// self-explanatory
    var/desc
    /// maximum value
    var/maximum
    /// falloff rate, in units per second
    var/falloff_lin
    /// contribution mode
    var/contribution_mode
    /// additional falloff rate per second not having this added
    var/falloff_accelerate_lin

Add a certain value to a source with diminshing returns towards a maximum.
`abstraction/proc/add_sourced_agitation(source, amount)`

Bump a source to value if it's not there.
`abstraction/proc/bump_sourced_agitation(source, amount)`

Set a source to a value.
`abstraction/proc/set_sourced_agitation(source, amount)`

### total

The resulting agitation value of all sources are combined with algorithm based on source.

1. `BASE` sources are all max()'d, as the baseline agitation you are at.
- These are very 'weakly stacking' when spread across sources, but also have the potential of being very bad for you because they have no inherent below-linear scaling.
- Damage (*not pain*) goes in here.
- Hunger goes in here.
- Long-decaying baselines for environmentals like bullet sounds.
2. `ADD` sources are all added ontop.
- These are **very** strong.
- **Receiving damage or pain** goes in here.
- Sensory overloads of any kind tend to be in this so that they're enough to tip someone over.
- Fast-decaying but spikes for environmentals like bullet sounds, being slammed into things from airflow, etc.

### velocity

Agitation is very fast to go up, and somewhat slow to go down.
After agitation is calculated, your actual agitation stat is brought up to it if it wasn't there already.
For decay to happen, calculated agitation has to go down, and you start to go down with 0.7 source 0.3 destination linear interpolation.

This means that while things may or may not fall off in a timely manner, the chimera will still experience things long enough to have the full 'ride' of their agitation.

Which might be a good thing for them, as agitation will ramp up their abilities.

### *example* values

These are examples.

If, 140 is the threshold of the most volatile effects,

Someone fires a 40 damage gun at you.
- +20 base from close range gunfire
- +30 capped add from close range gunfire
- +40 base from having 40 x 1 damage on chest
- +40 uncapped add from taking 40 damage to chest
- = 40 base + 70 add = 110

This is enough to cause instability & things to go out of wack, accuracy loss, etc.

This happens again.
- +30 base from close range gunfire
- +30 capped add from close range gunfire
- +80 base from having 80 x 1 damage to chest
- +80 uncapped add from taking additional 40 damage to chest
- = 80 base + 80 add = 160

This is probably where the system starts instructing you that your body is unstable, get away, etc etc.

It takes a few minutes for 1. the adds to decay enough, and 2. the 'average' to go down enough, for you to stop experiencing the effects of this much agitation.

The agitation reduces your accuracy, but for the time being you have increased reflexive abilities, not to mention you probably won't take the full 80 damage because bio-armoring triggered after the first shot to absorb like 10-20% of it; you still take the agitation though.

## attrition

Examples only. These are probably overpowered values, it's just an example.

- Attrition can be say, 0 to 100.
- Each wound being sealed adds 0.5 x damage healed per tick, or something.
- Wound sealing rates are malus'd by a multiplier of max(0.1, 1 - (100 - attrition) / 100), from their default of 1 hp/s.
- Food / nutrition can decrease attrition by a set rate while being processed. Nutrition in particular is drained.
- Xenochimera, much like everyone else, will have very little *drastic* negative effects from starvation; this means they can't die of hunger, but might be very agitated by it.
- Considering this is their main way of reducing attrition in a meaningful timeframe, you should probably eat.
- Needing to regrow organs massively boosts this for a while; there might be a stat that says "I recently regrew an organ" or something, so that emergency heals still work while regrowing organs but it still messes you up for a bit afterwards while your body recovers from the exertion.
- Any remaining abilities *may* use this as a semi-resource on-top of their cooldowns.
- or may not, who knows.

## suppression

This is also multi-faceted.

This is not one stat, and more of a set of things that happen.
Examples include:

- Being burned suppressing healing by a set amount.
- Being burned immensely penalizing your bio-armoring.
- Being burned increasing effective attrition / boosting it.
- Being hit with electrical stuns disrupting certain abilities and functions.
- Being hit with rubbers, bullets, hard hitting attacks, etc, disrupting certain abilities and functions, especially reflexive ones.
- Agitation responses (**both good and bad**) being lessened / somewhat suppressed from certain chemicals.

## bio-armor

- Starts at 0%
- While taking damage, determines a delayed value to set it to. It slowly ticks towards this value.
- There's a 'total mitigation strength'.
- This embodies both mitigation and hardness.
- The chimera's body adapts mitigation if there's high damage attacks, and hardness if there's *high piercing attacks*. It'll always try to make *some* hardness.

Example stats:

Maximum mitigation of 40%, 3.5 tier, at 10% spread.
Maximum spread mitigation of 10%, 2 tier
Penalized mitigation on `fire` (**not** laser / burn entirely), with maximum of 30% with 3 tier globally at the cost of 0% spread.
Adaptation speed is linear 15 seconds.

The chimera is rapidly hit by 5 20 damage bullets.
This is enough to instantly max out their desired mitigation towards bullet (40%, 3.5 tier).
The spread 'splashes' this mitigation towards `melee` and `laser` at 10% efficiency, with higher tier for former than latter because melee is more adjacent to bullet than laser is.

This is adapted to in the span of the next 15 seconds.
At the end of this period, they have all of the desired adaptations. The initial 100 damage was not mitigated because it takes some time for them to form all this.
If they receive different damages in the time, the armor will shift to what their body detects is effective.

- This does mean that mixed damage types are more effective against chimeras, as their armor is automatic, non-controlled, and only most-efficiently adapting towards one damage typ at a time.
- *As well as new / experimental changelings.*

The armor fades away over time while not being attacked, with a small grace period.

- The armor is both stronger and weaker than 'normal' armor.
- Unlike normal armor, it intercepts damage at a lower level of the damage processing API than normal armor, which inherently makes it powerful, as it tends to intercept certain things armor usually won't (whether due to oversight or intentional things).
- However, damage absorbed this way still counts as damage for stats like agitation and suppression, as your body is still being hit by the attack; it's just less lethal than usual to you.

## psionics / commune attunement

**`Hilariously experimental plans. Expect changes and messing around; this was originally thought up for Promethean telepathy.`**

Attunement works similar to how Prometheans' will (maybe with a `/datum/hivemind_participant` & `/datum/hivemind` thing, who knows).

- Anyone within LoS is always able to be communed **at** (specific wording).
- Communing at someone *successfully*, or merely being in their presence, as well as things that bring you within close proximity (grabs, melee, item usage, etc) will increase your attunement with them.
- Attunement falls out at a rate proportational to the level.
- This means strong attunement falls out quickly.
- Having a chimeric node in you (injected by a chimera) when those are implemented, will lock your attunement at a minimum of a function of your distance from the chimera.
- On-top of attunement, **distance** is also a factor in what you can do (successfully).

Example values;

Attunment goes from 0 to 1000

0+: can send a 'ping', which can be responded to by the receiver; can 'ping' levels to see if they're on it (with their consent, unless attunement is high enough, *or* they are unconscious).
0+: can send a 'beacon ping', which makes receivers *vaguely* sense where you are, with accuracy dependent on distance and attunement. For most purposes, this is only enough to let someone know that you are alive, or on a planet somewhere.
50+: unidirectional telepathy; fragmentation and distortion happens at lower values. high values allow for loud-moding your text.
500+: sensing where target is in respect to yourself

If you have been in proximity of someone for say, a minute or a few minutes, and have 1000 attunement; after they leave your presence and without having a receiver organ,

- Attunement has fallen to 500 after 15-30 seconds. You can no longer track them inherently.
- Attunement decreases to 50, gradually, over the next 5-10 minutes.
- Attunement completely falls off to 0 (no more pinging) 10 or so minutes after that.

If they have been in proximity for say, 5-10 minutes,

- 500 after the same rate; the top-end of attunement is a *very* steep falloff.
- 50 after **30-60** minutes
- 0 after longer than the course of the round.

This is because the longer you are in proximity, especially close proximity to someone, they gain an additional number that dampens attunement falloff.

This means if you're always around someone you tend to be attuned for a long time, but for strangers you talk to for like a minute, you can only ping them and try to talk to them for a slight bit after.

Distance modulates effective attunement. This prevents you from talking cleanly across the overmaps, while allowing for things like pinging a planet for the presence of someone you know.