Medical Design Doc
Maintainer Design Flows
This section describes design flows that are meant to be upheld in the PR process. PRs that go against this section are subject to closing. Please do not edit this section unless you are a maintainer. Comments via sidebar are welcomed.
Medical (Department)
Medical is a department where one should be constantly making choices that may not always be optimal, quick but well-thought thinking is key, and there is a sense of accomplishment from overcoming the hurdles that are dynamically presented to you, often by other players who probably have you in their crosshairs as well.
Do note that the department also requires some consideration for the patients. Having to strike a balance between keeping the doctor interested as well as not making it so the patient doesn't ever get to practically play the round again is key.
Healing Source Categories
I get this question a lot and may refer to items as C# here so the 3 4 Categories are below.
- Healing that is not sourced from the dispenser or plants. Passive healing and white-kit contents are examples of C1.
- Healing sourced from Chemistry or Plants with a long-term deterrent. Syriniver, Libital, Aiuri are examples of C2.
- Healing sourced from Chemistry or Plants without a long-term deterrent. Salbutamol, Oxandralone, Atropine are examples of C3.
- Healing sourced from Surgery. Coronary Bypass, Tend Wounds, Eye Surgery are examples of C4.
moo I decided to make a new category dedicated to the longer process of surgery that is hard to conflate with items like sutures/regen meshes.
Medical Doctor/ Medical (Sub-Department)
Overarching Themes
Medical's focus should be on major issues that would require surgery / life-threatening decision making. While they CAN work on more minor ailments, it should be either on downtimes or at a risk of patient overload.
Surgery should be an active process that focuses less on tool-checks and RNG to completing mini-activities (Operation Game? Stardew Valley Fishing?) that would be available to both doctor and patient for faster thoroughput. This would keep both players in the game rather than tabbed out watching the latest runtime video.
Chemist
Overarching Themes
Chemistry should be where doctor's are in need of help: In the grand scheme, this means lower-middle end healing.
Chemistry as in the mechanics will be separated since it extends beyond the job of a Chemist, especially when talking about say Hydroponics/Botanists.
Reagents/Chemicals (Cobby)
Chemicals that heal should either hardcap at half sustainable damage (not preferred) or provide a longer term ailment that can be relatively non-problematic so long as they aren't
- taking the medicine constantly (what we'll call doping)
- Not requiring long-term exposure, as this would suggest the patient should have been seeking treatment from a doctor instead.
The goal here is to force the patient to decide between "quick-fixes" versus a more proper treatment, which now becomes out of scope for the chemistry realm.
Chemical Sources
- Chemical Dispenser/Synthesizers - If it can be made purely through here, it is REQUIRED to fall into C2
- Botany - If the reagent can be made straight from a plant OR a plant can be easily tailored to generate the reagent, it is REQUIRED to fall into C2
- Lavaland - No Restrictions Currently
Per-Class Reagents
There should be a maximum of 5 reagents per class, Category Independent (C2/C3s). This helps prevent chem-stacking as well as simply switching over to an equivalent to allow practical doping between meds of similar function.
Bar Drinks
I will no longer be accepting more bar drinks UNLESS they replace an existing one. This includes both fictional and nonfictional drinks.
Naming
The purpose of the naming convention is to allow for chem malleability if it requires balance (See: "We can't have this because that's not how it functions in real life!") while also letting people easily know at a glance what the class of the reagent is such as -ibital being your brute healers and -mol being your O2 healing.
New non-element chemicals are REQUIRED (regardless of function) to fall into the following naming convention.
- Root
- Suffix/Prefix pertaining to Class (function) and Damage Type.
- Combination functions such as Omnizine can be considered their own class.
Current Conventions are listed below.
| Class |
Prefix/Suffix |
| Brute Healing |
-ibital |
| Burn Healing |
-uri |
| Oxy Healing |
-mol |
| Tox Healing |
-iver |
| Organ Sustain |
-rite |
Desired State of Reagent Pipeline
Botany should be the main source of all reagents. No more synthesizers, dispenser, or any sort of magic chem machine. If something like that MUST exist, the reserves (currently handwaved as energy) should be reagent specific, non-renewable without botany, and not work unless only the pure reagent is transferred.
I would like to see the ability to pull out reagents not handled by a magic machine as well, and involve chemistry (department) to focus on extracting chemicals based on physical properties and chemical equipment one might see in a real world lab. This would create a clear separation of roles between the two departments, rather than one department becoming a better version by taking a few of the key items owned by the other.
This would mean chemicals have properties (random per [time] unless element?) that one would need to learn and abuse to aid in extraction.
Geysers would be replaced with uncommon/rare lavaland flora, which can be converted into seeds a botanist can then plant.
(Addendum by ArcaneMusic: To streamline plants being sole producers of chemicals, to do this less painfully, the re-implementation of seperated chemicals would be greatly beneficial, or at least considered down the pipeline.)
Non-Maintainer Design Flows
This section describes various design flows that are not yet incorporated into the maintainer-approved design. Working towards these flows does not guarantee merge, nor does going against these flows guarantee close. Please embed your personal note, resort to ### and below for heading tags, and preferably Title (Author) for easy reference. Titles can be set with YAML metadata. Ping Cobby on Discord to embed your note.
Medical Machinery (Edge)
Medical should become a primary consumer of power on the station given their machinery assists in keeping other players alive.
To acomplish that goal and to make the medical system more interesting stasis beds should be fragmented into diffrent machines that individually use a lot of electricity. Each machine should be a little bit superior on their own to what stasis beds currently offer, to discourage overuse of formaldehyde.
Types:
All of the machines are immobile unless stated otherwise
Stabilizers:
Stabilize the organ and provide temporary HP to it as long as you are hooked up to it.
Life Support:
Prevent you from dying under a fixed amount of hp. Don't prevent you from going into crit, nor do they stop metabolization.
- Basic - 300 HP immobile
- Mobile - 300 HP mobile
- Advanced - 1000 HP immobile
Other:
- Dialysis - purges body of chemicals, becomes quicker with better parts.
- Radiation stabilizer - prevents body from taking toxin damage from rads
- Temperature stabilizer - tries to stabilize the body to it's preffered temperature (thinking about lizards and cryot, hercuri etc.)
- Plasmaman stabilizer- a fancy shower that doesnt require the poor guy to be on the floor, but on bed. Prevents plasmaman from burning
New virology (EdgeLordExe)
Biggest goal is that there should never be some best method or best gene combinations.
Each round should be a new challenge
Viruses and bacteria
Some genetic capacity for the ‘carrier’
Bacteria
- More complex
- More capacity for genetics
- Easier to detect
- Easier to treat
Viruses
- Very simple
- Very little capacity
- Easy to spread
- Harder to detect
- Harder to treat
Can discover new/different base viruses/bacteria to work from
Viruses allow 2-4 gene sequences
Bacteria allow 4-8 gene sequences
Samples
"Samples" will be active virology samples scattered throughout the station in various place.
Examples of locations to obtain samples:
- Public tables
- Toilets
- Vents
- Machines
- those moisture trap things kryson wants to add
- Assistants
Samples could potentially infect crew as well, and can be obtained from crew who could potentially have inert microbes that could contain useful genetic info.
Capacity
The base carrier/virus/bacteria can only hold X numbers of pairs
Symptoms have varying pair lengths
example:
- virus of 20 pairs
- coughing 6 pairs
- sneezing 5 pairs
- fever 10 pairs
Can't fit all 3 symptoms
Blocks
Assembly of viruses is done by combining blocks
Blocks have combinations of symptoms, often undesirable combinations.
Symptoms
Symptoms are genes or combinations of genes
Symptoms have pseudorandomness between rounds
As per current virology symptoms should combine to determine factors such as resistance, infectability etc
Genes need to be discovered/isolated and their effects identified by the player
Access to an off-station database of commonly known genes such as coughing, sneezing etc.
For the symptom to activate it needs to reach it's target organ (e.g Sneezing needs to reach lungs before it can take effect.).
Of course there are symptoms that don't have a target organ/body part. In this situation the symptom will activate as soon as it can.
As per IRL genes can have errors but still work.
harmless symptoms have higher tolerance for errors before they ‘deactivate’
deadly symptoms should have low tolerance for errors and deactivate really easily from mutations.
Harmless symptoms should be usually just a single gene
Deadly symptoms should require a combination of 2-3 genes that may need to be discovered separately
Grief/meme symptoms are a midway between harmless and deadly, being (incredibly) annoying and having an effect other than fluff text (e.g. revitiligo darkening skin)
No direct overlap between viro symptoms and genetics mutations.
Harmless:
- Coughing
- Sneezing
- Runny nose
- Itchy eyes
- Tiredness
Deadly:
- Fever
- breathing/lung issues
- Brain swelling
- Bleeding
- Organ failure.
Grief/meme:
- Polyvitiligo
- Race mutation symptoms (like vox pox from VG)
- Hair symptoms (hair growth and balding)
- Finding genes
Living things should have some benign viruses/bacteria in them
From these benign viruses/bacteria you should be able to extract gene sequences for identification
Viro has a databank of known sequences and a sequence can be compared with some likeliness factor.
I.e; sequence A1 is 90% similar to known sequence “Coughing”
The less accurate a gene is, the less powerful the symptom.
Limb/organ spread
Viruses and bacteria's should spread in a more realistic way. For example if someone injects the victim with the virus in the arm, the infection starts there.
From there it can spread to adjacent body parts (Arm->Torso), or if the body part contains organs, it has a chance to spread to the organ aswell.
Transmission stat should determine the chance to spread to other body parts and organs.
Additionally it should be possible to quickly cure someone if all infected organs/body parts are removed. (Get bit by a zombie, time to cut off your arm mate)
Start locations
- Airborne viruses start off in the lungs
- Touch viruses start off in a random body part ?
- Fluid viruses start off in tounge/eyes/ears
- Blood viruses start off in heart ?
Mutations
Whenever someone contracts a virus it mutates all gene sequences.
The idea of this is to make deadly symptoms less powerful if just released in an untargeted manner.
Traitors
Traitor virologists shouldn’t have objectives that encourage them to release deadly plagues.
But maybe a freezer full of unknown symptoms as a starter kit as an uplink purchase with some exclusive symptoms?
Monkey retrovirus
Nanites
Some interactions with nanites in the body (hostile reactions? rejection?)
Genetics
Add some interactions with genetics, such as random human mutations that increase/decrease resistance
Possibly a retrovirus to deliver a dna activator payload
Maybe a virus that copies a specific mutation along?
HackMD
