# The North Star Design Intent
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### __Purpose__

This document exists to provide some general guidelines for keeping the North Star's general design intent intact, while allowing for future contributors to get creative with reworking departments, making large scale changes, or other significant contributions to the project.

If you're changing something purely because "it's present on metastation", please consider if it's being added because it improves the overall design of the North Star, or if it's just what you're used to.

#### **Relevant Links:**
[The TGstation Forum Thread](https://tgstation13.org/phpBB/viewtopic.php?p=657252#p657252)
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### **General**

For the ship's overall design, it should be kept looking and feeling like a ship. There are specific design styles that are present that should be consistent across the entire vessel.
* Service, passive roleplay areas, and construction or project zones should always be more spacious that individual work-related departments.

* Players should be encouraged to use elevators and travel the main halls primarily.

* Stick with existing decal styles, while they can vary between departments, single areas should have a single cohesive style.
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### **Maintenance**

Maintenance has a specific style of catwalked (the turf, not the sybtypes of lattice) tiles in walkable areas with pod floors used off the designated path.

*CRITICAL: You should always be able to take two points in maint and find a path between them. Maintenance should never be entirely cut off from the rest of the station, very very very tiny areas can be handwaived but nothing major.*

* While pitfalls are encouraged, be careful with open-air zones, use firelocks, maintenance bulkheads, or other atmos-blockers to ensure that a single breach or flood doesn't screw the entire ship up.

* Do not make maintenance safe or comfortable. It should stay labyrinthine and threatening. Don't put traps or threats on the path (shocked grilles especially)

* Landmines are great threats, but put them in areas you'd need to expend effort into getting into (bolted doors, barricades, etc)

* Totally useless fluff rooms are great. Don't touch the abandoned hangar on the fourth floor it has some pretty fun environmental storytelling. I'll expand this when I get some proper lore written.

### **Specifics**

* Medical - surgery rooms should be the main focus for doctors, we should never have players doing stasis surgery. Keep the asylum.

* Science - keep focus off xenobio, having it be large encourages people doing every single project ever when the design intent is aimed more towards smaller more focused projects.

* Robotics - this department is separate and has special access to the SAT. Keep it close to the AI and emphasize their role of silicon maintenance and care. Science has their own little workshop and exofab if they need it anyhow.

* Kitchen/Bar/Botany - Keep them large, give people a lot of space for projects and roleplay possibilities.

* Dorms - They're far more interesting when they're not 2x2 squares. If you want to rework anything, ensure they have a focus on individuality.

* Theater - I like the movie theater/stage design, it could be in a more public area but prodiving the clown and mime the opportunity to big shows has paid off well.

* Virology - It's separate for a reason, they should have increased autonomy from medical as to help traitors do evil things and allow some interesting opportunities for RP. There's a public quarantine room that could lead to some fun moments.

* Engineering (General) - Keep the lobby small, we don't want engies bumming around the lobby bored, have them be out fixing things.

* Engineering (Supermatter) - Please don't vent the SM waste gas to space. Have it go through a chamber for cooling and then routed to atmos. This gives atmospherics an actual purpose in-game and provides those players with a constant supply of job content (Plasma and O2).

* Cargo - The cargo shuttles docking within the ship is a great aesthetic, change cargo around, but ensure that you're keeping that big space for ships to land inside.

* Security - Actual security is pretty bog-standard, but the departmental offices have been replaced by checkpoints on each floor. I like these.
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*That's it, really. This isn't a hard guideline, just what I think contributors should keep in mind when taking a crack at changing the map. Try to keep the spirit of the ship in mind, and best of luck.*