Jelly people are currently a round start race that were enabled sort of as a temporary joke by the last headmin team. As they are, without any significant rework, they are very likely to be immidately disabled again. There are, however, a sizable portion of people that actually like the race or like the idea of a jelly person starting race.

The purpose of this design doc is to propose changes to jelly people that will make them a more interesting and varied species, something on tier with the "plasmaman" in terms of gameplay uniqueness. I'd also like to clarify that this jelly person species would be seperated from the xenobio base species and subspecies, so that it can be worked on in a vacuum to xenobio.

I would like to thank the various players that contributed ideas to make this design doc.

Design Goals:
----
Provide a unique gameplay experience for a starting species.
Do not make them significantly stronger combat wise compared to other species. Make them "different".
Make the species simple enough to understand that anyone can pick up and play it.

The General Premise:
----
The design of the race is centered around two main ideas: A race that is heavily station bound, and also very dependent on food management. In a way, you could think of them as "anti-plasmamen". They tend to do well in spaceproofed environments with easy access to food, and suffer tremendously during breaches or space walking. In addition, slimes maintain their toxin damage inversion.

The Mechanics:
----
**The Goo System**

Rather than having blood or nutrition, jelly people have them tied into eachother as a general "goo" level. This is somewhat similar mechanically to how slime jelly works now as blood, and generates from nutrition & toxin damage, but it has a few differences.
- Goo levels from a side bar menu (similar to the ones xenos have for plasma), and can also be seen in your game chat bar area, where you would see the round time.
- Goo can go from 0%-250%, with varying effects based on your goo level. Low levels have dire consequences, while exceedingly high levels have mostly down sides.
- ALL types of damage (including stamina damage) will do EQUAL parts damage to your goo levels. Toxin Healing will do 2X damage to your goo.
- Healing chems for brute/oxy/burn will restore goo, at the cost of **reducing the effectiveness of that healing**. This makes slimes harder to recover from normal damage, this will be relevant later in the doc.
- You can raise your goo level either by eating food, or consuming toxic substances that also heal your toxin damage.
- Goo will naturally decrease over time, like nutrition does. This means your "blood" levels will also naturally decrease over time, leading to dire consequences if you don't manage your goo levels.
**Low Goo**
- Below 60% goo and lower, your limbs will start to contract, starting with one arm, then one leg, and another leg, Going above 60% goo will reverse this process over a short period of time. The full contraction process stops at 30%. As an upside to this, *you cannot be dismembered via normal means.*
- At 30% goo and below, instead of becoming just a torso and head, you revert into a xenobio-style slime head with only the ability to consume food near you, slide around, and be picked up by other players. If you consume enough food to go above 30% goo, you revert back into your humanoid form. Your items are absorbed into you, and will reappear when you become a humanoid again.
- At 0% goo, there is nothing left of you but your slime core. Your slime core functions as brain and a head (as well as all your other organs compressed), but can be revived by other players by splashing toxic chemicals on it.
**High Goo**
- Above 150% goo, you become fat and start suffering from slow down. By going back to 125% goo you lose the fat status effect.
- After a short period of time above 200% goo you blob out, losing your legs and instead getting a slimey slug tail to support your huge mass. You are *very* slow, and all your clothing falls off of you (except your hat). In the blob state, you can equip *any* large sized or smaller item to your pockets, ID, backpack, and belt slots as a method of storage... in addition to getting **an extra pair of hands**.

The goo system makes up the bulk of the hunger management gameplay loop for slimes. The GUI that tells you your goo level should also show you each threshold, and what they do.

**Death as a Slime**
Dying as a slime person by any means will revert you to your core form and release all your goo into the environment. When dying, all of your items and organs are compressed into your core. Your core is very dense, and requires two hands to hold, but can easily be dragged. By picking up and using your core in hand, other players can access your inventory and clothing.

Suit sensors that were on before you turn into a slime head and/or directly into a core will remain on when inside your core.

Splashing toxins onto the core will give it enough goo to revive from stasis and turn into a head slime. If you died from brain damage, this will make your brain atleast healthy enough to stay alive.

**Malleable Slime**
Due to the malleable properties of slime people, they take 50% less damage from brute, burn, and oxy. This is balanced out by the fact that their second health bar (goo) is likely to run out far faster than their normal health bar in normal combat scenarios, and they are *exceptionally* weak to stamina damage, as it knocks goo out of their body. Goo is not subject to this damage mitigation.

Slimes are immune to organ damage, as it's relatively easy for slimes to repair their own organs with goo.

**Hot Slime, Cold Slime**
Slimes have their cold damage modifier taken away, so they take regular amounts of cold damage - with a huge catch. When cold, slime people will "freeze up", which disables all their limbs until they can get back into a hotter environment. Temp gun and other sources of cold will also cause this status effect.

In addition to this, slimes takes additional damage from low pressure due to fluid tension being the only thing holding them together

Sources of water (fire extinguisher, showers) will deal ticking punch damage to slimes, dealing brute damage and lowering their goo at 2X the rate.

On the flip side, slimes do very well in hot environments. Rather than taking damage from heat and fire, slimes will instead lose goo at a fast pace due to evaporation. Goo is a bit easier to recover than regular burn, so this is mostly an upside. In addition to their general heat resistance...

Slimes take reduced damage from overpressured rooms, due to their liquid bodies being more incompressable.

**Misc/Cosmetic Passives and Flavor Stuff**
- You can cosmetically change everything but your name at any mirror, since you are malleable.
- You can see food that you eat as a transparent, shrinking overlay in your body (since you are transparent).
- A slow, dripping slime texture overlay that is only hidden when wearing a full space suit / modsuit. Serves as a visual representation of you losing goo over time.
- An ability that let's you latch onto people, and over the course of a minute, copy their entire appearence and voice (albeit you will still appear slimey). Doesn't work on other jelly people. Meant to be a kind of parlor trick.
- Jelly people leave a slimey trail of foot prints when walking without shoes.

The flavor stuff may come in a later update, rather than all at once. None are necessary for the core gameplay of the species.
**Addenum**
Obviously it can be hard to balance all of this, please give me feed back on what numbers you expect to see, and a good deal of play testing will have to be done to figure out how to get this relatively in line with our other species.