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# System prepended metadata

title: Swarmers 2024

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## Swarmers 2024

### Ideal Swarmer Gameplay Summarized
1. Swarmer midround rolls. Ghosts are polled to become swarmers. Lets say 6 ghosts sign up.
2. The midround executes with enough ghosts to form a swarm. A droppod carrying 6 swarmer basic mobs inhabited by ghosts lands on the station, in maintenance.
3. Swarmers stick together and eat the part of the station they have landed in, leaving nothing in their wake.
4. Eventually, the prescence of swarmers is confirmed after someone begins to wonder where xenobio went.
5. Through a series of skirmishes with the crew, the swarm is eventually wittled down to nothing or the round ends due to other threats overshadowing the space termites.
### Goals
* Reintroduce a unique threat to the station which contrasts existing antagonists
    * Swarmers will not be given effective conventional weapons to protect themselves
    * Ideally, the nonviolent breaching nature of swarmers will lend a use for noncombat modsuits like what security has currently.
* It would be really cool if swarmers would move into an area, methodically deconstruct it to the plating, then eat even that, leaving empty space behind.
    * Ideally, swarmers leave behind a unique trail of deconstruction, allowing a sort of deduction of their prescence
* Encourage swarming behavior
    * They are called swarmers, yet they never once swarmed. Curious. See 'Leader' below for remedy.
    * The swarmer radio channel will not be reimplemented, as swarmers have no use for it when working in a swarm
* Make eating stuff more fun, less trial and error
    * See 'new deconstruction' below
    * Instead of the frustrating whitelist, only plating and walls give material points.
        * plating gives more material than walls, but plating cannot be eaten until everything on it has been removed(items, structures)
### Non-Goals
* Encourage 'vault raiding'
    * Material stacks no longer give 50 usable points per full stack. Stack eating encourages ignoring all of the perfectly intact walls around you to B-line for the ore silo.
* Swarmers cannot be an existential threat (a threat which cannot be comfortably known to be defeated)
    * No more replication. Swarmers are strongest after they eat their first room and reach max material points, its all down hill from there
    * Instead, the swarm can revive their teammates using points(see below)
## Swarmers in depth
A swarmer, at a glance, is very similar to its previous iterations.
The first, most glaring change is the swarmer leader
### Leader
Upon spawning a swarmer team, one of the swarmers is chosen at random to become the leader. The leader swarmer has control over the points budget, and also decides where the swarm is going. This is because **the rest of the swarmers will lose their ability to do much of anything aside from running around if they move too far from the leader.**
The leader also gets a cool hat for differientation.
When the leader dies, a surviving swarmer will assume leadership. This continues until the last swarmer is it's own leader until it too dies.
The leader is slightly slower than the rest of the swarmers, but its still able to keep pace with running humans.

### Death
Swarmers die when their health reaches 0. When this happens, the swarmer will deactivate, anchoring itself to the position it died at. Swarmer corpses cannot be moved by crew or their fellow swarmers.
To revive a swarmer, the lead swarmer has to purchase a "revive all swarmers in swarm"
The idea here is that a retreating swarm may decide to later retrieve their fallen comrade in a brilliant 'saving private ryan(but with epic walkcycles)' type beat

As a swarmer, you click objects to eat them.
### Click!
This section describes the on-click decision tree of swarmers.

#### New Deconstruction
Items, structures and turfs, when clicked, gain a swarmer-deconstruction counter. Adding a consecutive counter takes longer than the first, so deconstruction is best done together. Destructible items and structures will be destroyed after 5 to 7(Number subject to change) counters are added, while walls and turfs will require more.
**To eat plating, at least one neighboring turf must be a space tile** - this is so swarmers start at the edge of the station and move inwards.
**To eat walls, at least one turf in a certain radius must be a space tile** - this is to prevent spacing a large portion of the station without eating a large portion of the station

#### Clicking mobs
* Clicking a carbon 
    * will check if theres anything in their exosuit slot, if so, you will add a deconstruction counter to that item. when the count reaches maximum, the exosuit will be destroyed.
        * This is to encourage crew to use ranged options from a distance in space.
    * otherwise will check if there are any limbs with BODYTYPE_ROBOTIC, if so, you will add a deconstruction counter to a robotic limb at random. When the count maxxes out, your metal limb goes bye bye
    * otherwise will attack them. Its a very low damage attack, but is likely to cause bleeding wounds.
        * This should only be a viable option with enough swarmers against a single target. The usual course of action will be to flee
* Clicking a silicon
    * Adds a counter to the silicon mob. If the silicon sticks around and gets it's count maxxed, the cyborg/ai **gets eaten alive**, leaving it's MMI/posibrain on the ground(swarmers wont be able to eat those)
        * To do: Nematodes achievement

### Material points
Material points are pooled and spent by whoever is leader.
#### Abilities for sale
* Repair all swarmers(in range) by X hp
* Revive stationary swarmer corpse(we are so back)
* Upgrade all swarmer's max HP by X hp
* Temporary speed boost for escaping raids
* Temporary hitscan disablers
* some other stuff

## Misc. considerations
* Station Announcement : Swarmers don't get ratted out by a station wide announcement. If swarmers are doing what they should be doing, which is eating everything, then the crew will find out once they've done noticable damage.
* There is the slight issue of swarmers having the ability to run laps about the station causing tile wide breaches everywhere they can instead of sticking to one area
    * Not sure of how to prevent this other than to somehow bind the swarm to one area which is then expanded from. I'd like to keep the swarm unbound and allowed to flee to begin somewhere new.
* The swarmer language which will be brought back is "A language only consisting of musical notes". I could mimic some bird calls with electronic/digital samples to be played during their deconstruction so that the swarmers eating a department sound like an electronic flock of birds.
