# FTL Jumping and New Mining ### Objectives: 1. Add content to the game that moves the round forward without reliance on Antagonists. 2. Make the station more like a deathtrap with a crew trying to keep it afloat, rather than something that runs just fine without them. 3. Make being in Prison much more interesting. 4. Give job content to some jobs that really lacked anything to call its own (Captain/Prisoner/Paramedic) 5. Add more positive player-interactions that encourage people (like Atmospheric Technicians) to leave their department more often. ### Non-Goals: 1. Change Mining into a big rush to get everything done. Mining is a job with a high skill floor requirement and it’s fine to have one, but it should still be a job that new miners should be able to survive in if they try. 2. Turn Antagonists into a secondary act of the game, this should be considered 'everyday' content as much as Cooking. ## Part 1: Jumping ### The Engine Engineering now has a new engine, literally called the Engine. It handles jumps, and must be upgraded between each jump with fresh parts from Cargo. If the engine is not functional, it cuts all power generation in half, as it’s running on the backup machine. ### The Backup Machine The backup machine is a simple, highly-resistant and incredibly expensive machine on the station that handles sections not having power. It has enough fuel to properly 'power' itself for years, so it is never interacted with in a round. It acts as just an environmental thing. The bonus it provides to being up is that areas without power will have a red-dimmed lights on rather than turning off entirely, similar to any building that has lost power. ### Jumps Jumps are performed by the Captain every 40 minutes, or forcefully every 50 minutes, which jumps the station to a whole new sector of space. The station starts at Jump 0, where there will have no Planet for miners to go to, and no events can occur. This will forcefully start 10 minutes after roundstart. Jumping has an option between 2 spots, which has a range of differences. ### Differences between locations you jump - Controller - - Nanotrasen controlled: less shuttle time, little to no events. - - Syndicate controlled: more shuttle time, higher chance of getting syndicate events (stormtroopers, comms agent) - - Pirate controlled: more shuttle time, chance of getting pirate events increase. This has a risk/reward factor with pirate events ranging from shuttle insurance, to free loot from an abandoned/destroyed wreck, to actual pirates boarding you. - - Neutral: No special effect. - Side-Effects - - Meteor Infested: Can roll meteor events - - EMP area: Can suffer power shutdowns, SM meltdowns, Greytides, Ion storms - - Solar Flare: Causes human-afflicting and radiation events (heart attack, mass hallucination, market crash, radiation storm, leak is more of a general one) - - Nebula: Crew pinpointer, GPS’ and NTOS is non functional on-station. - - Radioactive Nebula: Replaces the Station Trait, requires shields to be built before radiation starts affecting crew. - Planet - - Icemoon - - Lavaland - - Jungle - - Radioactive Wasteland - Mining Objective - - Talked about more later, this is just something that should be noted when choosing which destination to select. ### Why jump? - Each jump allows miners to discover new planets, new events, good or bad, to come by the station, and occur. - If a jump is not done 10 minutes after engines are booted (40 mins always) it auto launches, unless the engine is broken. ### Space Space is unaffected and is static throughout the round, mostly because having to reload an entire planet is already enough to add, imagine having to reload all space Z levels including ghost spawns like oldstation? It’s not very sensical, but I don’t wish to remove or change space exploration as it currently is. The ramifications of it are simply too much for it to be worth it. ## Part 2: Random Events During non-jump periods, random station events can occur, mostly inspired by Orion Trail. This replaces the current random event system, so things from immovable rods, to pirates, to comms blackouts, can all be changed and edited depending on the controller and side effects of the current location of the station. The idea is that nearly every event will allow the Captain to try to avoid it at some cost. An Illness can be avoided by using the Cargo budget to purchase some experimental vaccines before it breaks out, which might fail and cause it anyways, just as an example. New event ideas: - Blackhole: The station is too close to a blackhole and a jump will be done soon, cutting the duration short. The station may shake in a very minor way. - Spaceport: Temporarily opens Cargo to new Import items. ## Part 3: The Planet The planet miners land on each jump is a different biome with their own fauna and flora that makes visiting each one worthwhile in a round. These planets are smaller than our current Lavaland size, to make up for the fact they are only spending 40-50 minutes on each planet. The planets will also have a base from previous expeditions, which means things like comms agent bases are still able to exist as well. People on planets will show up on sensors as long as NTOS is active on the planet. ### Pre-Jump Once a jump becomes ready to activate, an announcement will play. If crewmembers are on the planet during this time, the announcement will also broadcast how many crewmembers they scanned. This gives some time for people on the planet to coordinate with others and ensure no one is being left behind, and getting out before it's too late. ### The Auxiliary Base Between each planet, the Auxiliary base (if launched) will stay at the planet, and a new one will be placed, with the new mining objective at its location, to be built for the new planet. This turns the aux base from a one-time thing into a thing that miners (or anyone helping miners) must interact with in order to get the objective completed. #### Miners On top of having to scan and find boulder vents to get the largest source of materials for the station, miners also have an objective to complete, which you can read more of here: <https://hackmd.io/@sClqlHM0T4yZfn-qa5KnAg/rJkxxIA6a>. Their loop consists of completing boulders, hunting megafauna, and completeing the objective in 40 minutes or less. #### Paramedics Paramedics will be able to remotely control a mini mech on the planet, one that will take damage overtime outside of the lavaland which its atmosphere is built for. This odysseus mech will have a crew pinpointer module and corpse holder, allowing paramedics to recover dead miners on the station and bring them to the base, even sacrificing its own life to bring a miner up through the mech pad for quicker movement. #### Atmospheric Technicians Atmos techs will be able to go to the planet and set up vacuums that will allow them to bring massive amounts of gas to the station, useful in refilling tanks of gas if they run out for any reason. Lowering the amount of roundstart gas would also help benefit this. ### Prisoners & Labor Camp Labor camp is removed entirely. Instead prisoners will have access to asteroid mining in which they have a magnet they use to pull asteroids into a secluded location, have very cheaply made space suits, and dig through the asteroid. The materials they mine can be turned in for prisoner points, the perma version of currency. This currency is used in all of perma’s vending machines, possibly even for minor mining/magnet/scanner upgrades as well. These points can also be used to serve your labor camp sentence. If this works well it can replace Genpop/Brig cells. This has the bonus of properly separating regular mining’s ores sitting in walls and perma’s ores have to be dug out of boulders by hand. ## Part 4: Removals Every good thing has a cost, these are things that have to be sacrificed for this overhaul to function. - IceBox, everything laid here doesn’t function properly when the station is not a station. - Antagonist round events. Since our goal is to make a system that allows for the round to move forward without reliance on antagonists, antagonists should be kept separate from the ongoings of this system, and should instead stick to Dynamic, this includes Morphs and Lone Ops. # Basically, the massive to-do list ###### (do you really think this will happen? lol, it's just 5 AM rambling on how I would like to improve the game.) ## ##### In order of difficulty and how self-contained it is (for gradual additions): - Remove Icebox. - Remove all antagonists from round events and move them to Dynamic. - Add remote-controlled mini-mechs that Paramedics remote control on planets - Add the Backup machine, making lights turn dim-red instead of shutting off when power is lacking. - Add vacuum items to Atmospherics to collect station gas, and lower the amount of gas in the roundstart tanks. - Make all round events something that is told in advance to Command personnel and make the Captain able to try to avoid it with some downside (explained earlier) - Add Mining 'objectives' as per <https://hackmd.io/@sClqlHM0T4yZfn-qa5KnAg/rJkxxIA6a> and make the Auxiliary base spawn with it. - Add asteroid mining, add a new vending machine for prisoner mining stuff, and make all prisoner vendors use prisoner points, remove labor camp. - Add Ice/Jungle/Wasteland planets and correlating fauna, flora and megafauna. - Add the ability to jump and see pros and cons to each destination, either through the comms console or a new console in the captain's office & mining bay, with controllers, side effects, leaving planets behind, moving to new planets, and round events depending on said location, as well as the Engine and its effects on power generation while it's offline. ###### tags: `TGstation`