From 98fb485505d7fd5f476a3455ba9a82772a61191d Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: SeaWyrm Date: Sat, 16 Aug 2025 15:52:39 -0600 Subject: [PATCH 01/14] Add virology design proposal --- .../medical/proposals/virology_proposal.md | 169 ++++++++++++++++++ 1 file changed, 169 insertions(+) create mode 100644 src/en/space-station-14/departments/medical/proposals/virology_proposal.md diff --git a/src/en/space-station-14/departments/medical/proposals/virology_proposal.md b/src/en/space-station-14/departments/medical/proposals/virology_proposal.md new file mode 100644 index 0000000000..8fa170bec1 --- /dev/null +++ b/src/en/space-station-14/departments/medical/proposals/virology_proposal.md @@ -0,0 +1,169 @@ +# Virology + +| Designers | Coders | Implemented | GitHub Links | +|---|---|---|---| +| SeaWyrm | SeaWyrm | :x: | TBD | + + + + +## Overview + +A take on how virology might be re-added to the game in a way that has depth and is interesting and enjoyable for everyone. + + +## Features to be added + +### Diseases + +A few (one to three, maybe) diseases will happen every shift, but most of them will be mild and ignorable - a runny nose, a slight cough, and so on. Moderate diseases, requiring some virology intervention, will be possible but uncommon. Severe diseases will be their own game mode. + +A disease will spawn in at a location or on an object. Anyone who walks through the location or touches the object will have a chance to catch the disease. + +A disease will be either bacterial, or virological. It will have: +- One or more symptoms from a weighted list, ranging in severity from "you get the sniffles" to "spontaneous combustion." These will include normal, sensible symptoms, but also (more rarely) silly space game symptoms. +- One or more methods of transmission. For instance, "surface contact," "airborne," "looking at someone." +- A mutation rate. +- A speed of progression. +- Incubation time and symptom onset time. Incubation time governs how long it takes for the victim to become infectious. Symptom onset time governs how long it takes for the victim to start displaying symptoms. Incubation time should be shorter, so that victims start spreading the disease before they know for sure that they have it. Speed of progression governs both of these, as well as the rate at which additional symptoms manifest. It should be possible to change the speed of progression via medical interventions. + +Bacterial diseases will also have a separate resistance level against each antibiotic. + +Viral diseases will also have a genetic code, similar to how different characters have different DNA patterns that the detective can find and match to their records. + + +### Damage and Immunity + +Diseases will not and should not behave like an "invisible health bar." + +Diseases will not harm the victim directly. All harm will be a secondary effect of the disease's symptoms. For instance, a fever will cause increasing amounts of heat damage. This means that a patient with a disease can be treated with normal medical interventions to control the symptoms, and if the symptoms are kept under control, will recover naturally. + +All diseases will behave like reagents in the player's bloodstream, but with much slower metabolism governed by their speed of progression. Each time the progression ticks, the bacterial or viral load in the bloodstream will increase, which will also increase the severity of symptoms. + +The victim's body will also produce 'antiserum,' which will diminish the amount of bacterial or viral load. These will accumulate slowly, but build up until they can overcome the disease. The numbers should center around a sweet spot where mild diseases will generally go away on their own, and severe diseases will grow quickly enough that they're likely to kill the patient before the patient generates enough antiserum to beat it back. + +Antiserum will be keyed to a particular disease. If a person has one disease, and catches another, they'll produce two distinct flavors of antiserum at two different levels. If they get over a disease, the antiserum will linger in their bloodstream, making them much less likely to catch it again. Virologists can also extract antiserum from a person's bloodstream and isolate it to produce a treatment for other patients. + + +### Diagnosis and Treatment + +The first step in diagnosis is simply observing and talking to patients to start to build a profile of the disease. Swab samples can be taken from patients and from objects and surfaces that are suspected of harboring diseases; the Disease Diagnoser Delta Extreme will take a swab sample and reveal if there is a disease present in the sample, and if so, whether it is viral or bacterial, but at this stage, that's the only thing it will reveal. Virologists will have to determine how severe the disease is the hard way. + +Bacterial diseases are straightforward: Chemistry will have three new reagents they can produce which serve as antibacterials. These will be roughly equivalent to each other - the main difference is that a bacterial infection can build up resistances to them, so for a particularly severe bacterial disease with a high mutation rate, it may be necessary to switch antibacterials. Antibacterials will attack the bacterial load in the patient's bloodstream just like antiserum. + +In the case of bacterial diseases, virologists might still be responsible for helping to track down the source of the disease and eliminate it, possibly with some janitorial assistance for those hard-to-clean surfaces. + +Viral diseases are more complicated. The virologists will need to piece together the virus's genetic sequence as best they can. The most effective way to do this will involve some legwork and detective skills: Tracking down contaminated individuals, objects, and surfaces, and taking lots and lots of swab samples. Each sample will have fragments of the virus's entire genome. These fragments will also be increasingly garbled based on how many steps they are removed from the original source. Virologists can also take blood samples, but these will have to have the person's own DNA factored out before they reveal anything about the virus. Blood samples have to be put in test tubes and centrifuged before they're useful. + +Virologists don't need to figure out the whole genome of the virus before they can start to produce treatment, but the closer their sequence is to the correct sequence, the more effective it will be. If the treatment sequence is too far off, it will either be ineffective, or downright harmful. They can also produce vaccines based on shorter fragments of DNA. These won't help patients who are already infected, but will prompt uninfected patients to start producing antiserum. The effectiveness of the vaccine is based both on how well it matches the viral DNA, and how long a sequence it uses; a vaccine based on, say, "A" would match pretty much any virus, but would be basically useless. + +Virology equipment will be able to produce test treatments, but only slowly. When a test treatment is determined to be effective, it can be sent to Chemistry for mass-production. + + +### Mutation + +Mutation rate is one of the things that can make a disease more dangerous. + +Bacterial diseases can only mutate to build up resistance to specific antibacterial agents. + +Viruses, however, can cause more problems. + +First of all, as viruses mutate, they will drift from the original virus's genetic code, making treatment less effective. Second, as the code mutates, the disease's symptoms and stats will also change. At worst, this can introduce new, more harmful symptoms. For more serious diseases, virologists will have to act fast and continue gathering samples to stay ahead of mutations. Treatment based on the original genome will still tend to be most effective overall, since it will best match the widest range of possible mutations, but as a disease spreads, that initial genome will become less and less relevant. + +This also affects antiserum! A rapidly-mutating virus might overwhelm the victim's immune system to the point where the antiserum they've accumulated becomes useless. + + +### Virology as a Role + +Since an average round will require little to no action from virologists, a virologist will by default act as a regular doctor. Since medbay is where it will most likely first become evident that a disease is on the loose, this does mean that they'll be in position to know when they have to start mounting a response. + +If there are no virologists on staff, a CMO might recruit from among the existing medical staff, or they might take on those duties themself. + + +### Prevention + +Depending on the disease's mode of transmission, surgical masks, (which already exist,) latex gloves, (which already exist,) and even tissues or handkerchiefs (which could be added) can be used to help prevent them from spreading. Space Cleaner will reduce viral load on a given surface or object, though it won't necessarily eliminate it entirely. For more severe diseases, biosuits and gas masks might be necessary. + +Anyone who leaves their used tissues on the ground is a bad person and should feel bad. Anyone who picks them up bare-handed is liable to contract whatever disease the person had. + + +### Quarantine + +Quarantine is fun, except for when it really, really isn't: Dividing the station up into "safe" and "infected" areas could lead to all sorts of interesting situations, and should be encouraged by giving the virology department a healthy supply of inflatable doors and barriers, as well as warning signs and holos to put up. Locking a given player into a tiny room for half the round should be discouraged, and isolated wards for sick people should probably not be provided. + +Unfortunately, it would be difficult for any system where infections can be passed from player to player to not have some incentive for players to lock each other up. + +For this design, it helps that diseases both have an incubation period where they can spread undetected, and multiple possible modes of transmission. Locking an infected person up still might seem like a good idea, but there are alternatives if the mode of transmission is identified, and it's less effective anyway since by the time symptoms show up, at least some of the damage is already done. The added uncertainty especially means that locking a particular person up is less undeniably a good idea, giving them more grounds to argue back or even justifiably resist. + + +### Bioengineering + +MOSTLY TBD +My only note here at present is that any antag who wants to engineer a horrible disease should be required to incubate it within their own body. That's the price for unleashing a plague upon the crew: You're the initial infected. + +This should naturally tend to reduce station-wiping diseases to the domain of DAGD antags, which is where it should be. And even the worst diseases shouldn't progress so rapidly that virology has no chance to catch them in time. Er, so to speak. + + +### Zombies and Romerol + +The components of zombism could and should be picked apart and added separately as (severe) symptoms and transmission modes within this system, possibly weighted to have a greater chance of occuring together. Romerol then simply becomes a particular strain of disease suspended within blood. Zombie gameplay remains similar, in that the blood of zombies can be used by virology to help pin down the virus's genome and thereby develop a treatment. Initial Infected rounds, likewise, work basically the same way, with II players starting out with a certain amount of viral load in their bloodstream, a deficiency in antiserum production, and a particularly long time until onset of symptoms. + + +## Game Design Rationale + +An important part of this is that virologists don't get to just sit in their department and swirl test tubes or whatever. They have to get out there and track down the disease's source, which will generally require interacting with crew members as well as poking about in various parts of the station. + +On the flip side, having a disease doesn't automatically mean running to virology - most diseases won't have enough impact to be worth doing anything about other than to carry tissues and maybe take off a layer of insulating clothing. Even somewhat more serious diseases might be manageable with regular medication, or topicals, or just gritting one's teeth/beak/whatever and tanking it. This means that having a disease is interactive for the victim; they're not just an object for virology to deal with. They have to make their own decisions about how and if to address their own symptoms, balancing the possibility that they've contracted something horrible that will lay waste to the entire crew with the probability that it'll go away on its own and be no big deal. + +The different modes of transmission also lead to decision-making for infected crewmembers, since they have to figure out what they can and should do to prevent spreading their disease to others. + +Since diseases cause problems through their secondary effects, in the form of symptoms, and since people will tend to get over any disease they can survive, there's flexibility and room for creativity in how players decide to handle a disease. Some diseases won't even be harmful or fatal - just inconvenient, or ugly. In which case, the whole crew might just end up going about their regular duties while trying to ignore their dripping pustules leaving puddles of yuk everywhere they go. This helps foster emergence as well as making diseases more interactive for non-viro crew. A good variety of symptoms, with potential interaction between them, can lead to emergence in its own right - any disease might present some novel and surprising conjunction of symptoms with unexpected consequences for the crew. + + +## Roundflow & Player interaction + +Though every round should have a mild disease or two, these should usually be ignorable or at worst inconvenient, whereas a severe disease counts as a round-defining major 'antagonist' and should be its own game mode. + +In a regular round, there should be a constant, low chance for a mild disease to spawn as an event. These will infect a particular object or location (tile) and afflict themselves upon anyone who touches or stands on their source, spreading from there as per their mode of transmission. The disease should infect one to a few people and cause mild inconvenience at best. The exact nature of the disease should be random, with at least some possibility that it will be severe enough for virology to take an interest - maybe one moderate disease appears every three to five rounds on average. Good janitorial coverage might reduce this. + +In a Plague Round, there will be a severe disease that spawns within the first 10 minutes or so. Other minor diseases might also show up via events. Like mild diseases, the severe disease will have a particular object or tile that is its source, though it might slowly spread out from that source to help ensure that the crew doesn't totally miss it all shift. The only real difference between a severe disease and a mild one will be the numbers: Severe diseases can have higher mutation rates, a longer infection period before symptoms appear, faster progression once symptoms do appear, more serious symptoms, or most likely a combination of those. + +Diseases start out small and weak, then escalate through spread and mutation. A quick and appropriate response on the part of the crew - not just virology, but the whole crew - can stop the disease in its tracks. On the other hand, the disease has the potential to lay waste to the entire crew and render the station downright uninhabitable if the crew can't stay ahead of them. + + +### Department Interactions + +- Medbay will be the front line against any serious disease. Not just the virologists, but the doctors responsible for treating the symptoms; the chemists who will need to help produce and distribute treatments and vaccines; and the paramedics, who have to face the risks of going out into the infected parts of the station to recover downed crewmembers. + +- Janitorial staff will also play a surprisingly strong role, since their efforts to keep the station clean will also help curb the spread of the disease. Also, if a disease causes projectile vomiting or something, their efforts will be doubly vital. + +- Security might have to be responsible for keeping a panicking crew in order, or stopping people from breaking quarantine. + +- Command, likewise, might need to take charge of organizing the crew to act together against the threat of disease. + +- Engineering could help with creating quarantine zones. Atmos could help especially against airborne diseases with scrubbers and holofans. They might also be able to do things like cool down the station if the majority of the crew have terrible fevers. + +- Possibly, some symptoms could be worth research points to Science? Which might lead to some interesting conflicts of interest. They should also get some relevant technologies to research - faster disease diagnosers, bluespace sample swabs, better bio-suits and the like. + +- Cargo will have to keep the supply of sample swabs and latex gloves flowing in. They're also implicated as the department most likely to be responsible for spreading the disease all over the place. Salvage will be less directly involved, but might get to be the last few crew members left on their feet if they were away for the worst of the disease. + +- Service has the least to do, but might have to navigate delivering food and drinks to quarantined parts of the station. + + +## Administrative & Server Rule Impact + +There is some potential for griefing in the form of players deliberately trying to infect others. This is ameliorated in part by the fact that players potentially making bad decision about whether to get something looked at is deliberately part of the disease's challenge - a griefer and an irresponsible character don't look all that dissimilar in practice. Combined with the fact that disease sources are rare, unpredictable and invisible, I think the potential for serious griefing is low. + +This might change if bioengineering new diseases is added - but see the note above on that subject. + + +# Technical Considerations + +The Disease Diagnoser Delta Extreme and the machine(s) that develops treatments and vaccines will need new UI. For treatments and vaccines, this could be as simple as a single text input to type the genetic code into, although it should probably also keep some record of previously-used codes and allow for quickly copying them into the text input for easy modification. The DDDE needs to indicate both viral and bacterial load: It would be fun to show bacterial load in the form of circular blots drawn on a virtual petri dish, with the presence and size of the blots indicating the amount of bacteria. Viral detection should also have something along those lines, although it's less obvious what. + +There will need to be an additional component for holding viral/bacterial load on objects as well as players. For objects, this is basically just a string for the genome, plus an integer amount. For players, the extra process of experiencing disease progression and generating antiserum needs to happen, but a lot of that can mirror or directly use the existing metabolism system. + + +# Addendum/Mediography + +"Doomsday Book" by Connie Willis is a marvelous work of science fiction about a time traveller who is stranded in the dark ages, cut off from resources, and has to deal with a severe disease. I encourage anyone and everyone to read it for inspiration on how virology might work, and for a general example of what good storytelling about diseases can look like. From b22db9bc3c796643332a3e875e5dd3687f2c1eba Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: SeaWyrm Date: Thu, 21 Aug 2025 12:57:34 -0600 Subject: [PATCH 02/14] Add a line about lymph nodes --- .../departments/medical/proposals/virology_proposal.md | 1 + 1 file changed, 1 insertion(+) diff --git a/src/en/space-station-14/departments/medical/proposals/virology_proposal.md b/src/en/space-station-14/departments/medical/proposals/virology_proposal.md index 8fa170bec1..cdf0deb2d7 100644 --- a/src/en/space-station-14/departments/medical/proposals/virology_proposal.md +++ b/src/en/space-station-14/departments/medical/proposals/virology_proposal.md @@ -44,6 +44,7 @@ The victim's body will also produce 'antiserum,' which will diminish the amount Antiserum will be keyed to a particular disease. If a person has one disease, and catches another, they'll produce two distinct flavors of antiserum at two different levels. If they get over a disease, the antiserum will linger in their bloodstream, making them much less likely to catch it again. Virologists can also extract antiserum from a person's bloodstream and isolate it to produce a treatment for other patients. +A new organ, 'Lymph Nodes,' will be responsible for metabolising antiserum. ### Diagnosis and Treatment From 4ad27cacedd1b147666b327ce9a8acdd9ad6bea9 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: SeaWyrm Date: Thu, 21 Aug 2025 12:57:53 -0600 Subject: [PATCH 03/14] Add a section about petri dishes --- .../departments/medical/proposals/virology_proposal.md | 5 +++++ 1 file changed, 5 insertions(+) diff --git a/src/en/space-station-14/departments/medical/proposals/virology_proposal.md b/src/en/space-station-14/departments/medical/proposals/virology_proposal.md index cdf0deb2d7..fab797e4bb 100644 --- a/src/en/space-station-14/departments/medical/proposals/virology_proposal.md +++ b/src/en/space-station-14/departments/medical/proposals/virology_proposal.md @@ -60,6 +60,11 @@ Virologists don't need to figure out the whole genome of the virus before they c Virology equipment will be able to produce test treatments, but only slowly. When a test treatment is determined to be effective, it can be sent to Chemistry for mass-production. +In addition to the DDDE, petri dishes will be available. A petri dish can be swabbed, and any bacteria present on the swab will be loaded into the petri dish. Once enough time has passed, the petri dish will reveal the presence, amount, and number of different types of bacteria that have grown in it. Reagents can also be added to a petri dish to observe their effects on the bacteria - this is one way to check if bacteria have developed resistence to a given antibiotic. Petri dishes should be supplied to Virology, and possibly also Chemistry. + +Petri dishes can break, spilling their bacterial load onto the ground. They will also contain agar, a food reagent that will transmit any bacteria growing in the dish to anyone who eats it. If there are no bacteria, it is harmless. Agar could also potentially be a component in food or drink recipes for chefs and bartenders. + +Viruses will not interact with petri dishes. ### Mutation From e37edf02c796e75373f493576c55c331367b6542 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: SeaWyrm Date: Thu, 21 Aug 2025 12:58:11 -0600 Subject: [PATCH 04/14] Add a detail about bioengineering --- .../departments/medical/proposals/virology_proposal.md | 1 + 1 file changed, 1 insertion(+) diff --git a/src/en/space-station-14/departments/medical/proposals/virology_proposal.md b/src/en/space-station-14/departments/medical/proposals/virology_proposal.md index fab797e4bb..784ca6f840 100644 --- a/src/en/space-station-14/departments/medical/proposals/virology_proposal.md +++ b/src/en/space-station-14/departments/medical/proposals/virology_proposal.md @@ -109,6 +109,7 @@ My only note here at present is that any antag who wants to engineer a horrible This should naturally tend to reduce station-wiping diseases to the domain of DAGD antags, which is where it should be. And even the worst diseases shouldn't progress so rapidly that virology has no chance to catch them in time. Er, so to speak. +The same machine that creates treatments and vaccines can be used to do bioengineering, but that functionality is locked behind CMO's ID. CMO (or any antags who get their hands on CMO's ID) can use their ID to unlock it. The machine will keep a record of all bioengineering activity, including the IDs of the users, though this can be wiped by snipping the log wire or made to not record any new activity with an emag. ### Zombies and Romerol From f68efa3fdf6c567d1468181823340e4b02445780 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: SeaWyrm Date: Fri, 14 Nov 2025 11:38:35 -0700 Subject: [PATCH 05/14] Add mention of bleach being more effective than space cleaner --- .../departments/medical/proposals/virology_proposal.md | 2 +- 1 file changed, 1 insertion(+), 1 deletion(-) diff --git a/src/en/space-station-14/departments/medical/proposals/virology_proposal.md b/src/en/space-station-14/departments/medical/proposals/virology_proposal.md index 784ca6f840..481809dd7c 100644 --- a/src/en/space-station-14/departments/medical/proposals/virology_proposal.md +++ b/src/en/space-station-14/departments/medical/proposals/virology_proposal.md @@ -88,7 +88,7 @@ If there are no virologists on staff, a CMO might recruit from among the existin ### Prevention -Depending on the disease's mode of transmission, surgical masks, (which already exist,) latex gloves, (which already exist,) and even tissues or handkerchiefs (which could be added) can be used to help prevent them from spreading. Space Cleaner will reduce viral load on a given surface or object, though it won't necessarily eliminate it entirely. For more severe diseases, biosuits and gas masks might be necessary. +Depending on the disease's mode of transmission, surgical masks, (which already exist,) latex gloves, (which already exist,) and even tissues or handkerchiefs (which could be added) can be used to help prevent them from spreading. Space Cleaner will reduce viral load on a given surface or object, though it won't necessarily eliminate it entirely. Bleach will be twice as effective, but not immediately available. For more severe diseases, biosuits and gas masks might be necessary. Anyone who leaves their used tissues on the ground is a bad person and should feel bad. Anyone who picks them up bare-handed is liable to contract whatever disease the person had. From 34a222b8f66457828b2f0d921925feb8cd903aae Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: SeaWyrm Date: Fri, 14 Nov 2025 12:09:21 -0700 Subject: [PATCH 06/14] Add notes about diseases occurring in unsanitary areas --- .../departments/medical/proposals/virology_proposal.md | 4 ++-- 1 file changed, 2 insertions(+), 2 deletions(-) diff --git a/src/en/space-station-14/departments/medical/proposals/virology_proposal.md b/src/en/space-station-14/departments/medical/proposals/virology_proposal.md index 481809dd7c..2146b65edb 100644 --- a/src/en/space-station-14/departments/medical/proposals/virology_proposal.md +++ b/src/en/space-station-14/departments/medical/proposals/virology_proposal.md @@ -18,7 +18,7 @@ A take on how virology might be re-added to the game in a way that has depth and A few (one to three, maybe) diseases will happen every shift, but most of them will be mild and ignorable - a runny nose, a slight cough, and so on. Moderate diseases, requiring some virology intervention, will be possible but uncommon. Severe diseases will be their own game mode. -A disease will spawn in at a location or on an object. Anyone who walks through the location or touches the object will have a chance to catch the disease. +A disease will spawn in at a location or on an object. Anyone who walks through the location or touches the object will have a chance to catch the disease. Unsanitary objects or locations - trash, spilled liquids, corpses, spoiled food, miasma, and so forth - will be more likely to harbor diseases. A disease will be either bacterial, or virological. It will have: - One or more symptoms from a weighted list, ranging in severity from "you get the sniffles" to "spontaneous combustion." These will include normal, sensible symptoms, but also (more rarely) silly space game symptoms. @@ -131,7 +131,7 @@ Since diseases cause problems through their secondary effects, in the form of sy Though every round should have a mild disease or two, these should usually be ignorable or at worst inconvenient, whereas a severe disease counts as a round-defining major 'antagonist' and should be its own game mode. -In a regular round, there should be a constant, low chance for a mild disease to spawn as an event. These will infect a particular object or location (tile) and afflict themselves upon anyone who touches or stands on their source, spreading from there as per their mode of transmission. The disease should infect one to a few people and cause mild inconvenience at best. The exact nature of the disease should be random, with at least some possibility that it will be severe enough for virology to take an interest - maybe one moderate disease appears every three to five rounds on average. Good janitorial coverage might reduce this. +In a regular round, there should be a constant, low chance for a mild disease to spawn as an event. These will infect a particular object or location (tile), gravitating towards the filthier parts of the station, and afflict themselves upon anyone who touches or stands on their source, spreading from there as per their mode of transmission. The disease should infect one to a few people and cause mild inconvenience at best. The exact nature of the disease should be random, with at least some possibility that it will be severe enough for virology to take an interest - maybe one moderate disease appears every three to five rounds on average. Good janitorial coverage can reduce this. Extremely filthy stations, on the other hand, might generate extra diseases in sufficiently disgusting areas. In a Plague Round, there will be a severe disease that spawns within the first 10 minutes or so. Other minor diseases might also show up via events. Like mild diseases, the severe disease will have a particular object or tile that is its source, though it might slowly spread out from that source to help ensure that the crew doesn't totally miss it all shift. The only real difference between a severe disease and a mild one will be the numbers: Severe diseases can have higher mutation rates, a longer infection period before symptoms appear, faster progression once symptoms do appear, more serious symptoms, or most likely a combination of those. From 4206df069017cb36957a53f0aa56e9bbbd61ebf0 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: SeaWyrm Date: Fri, 14 Nov 2025 12:21:09 -0700 Subject: [PATCH 07/14] Add section about species-specific details --- .../departments/medical/proposals/virology_proposal.md | 7 +++++++ 1 file changed, 7 insertions(+) diff --git a/src/en/space-station-14/departments/medical/proposals/virology_proposal.md b/src/en/space-station-14/departments/medical/proposals/virology_proposal.md index 2146b65edb..e16085ddbb 100644 --- a/src/en/space-station-14/departments/medical/proposals/virology_proposal.md +++ b/src/en/space-station-14/departments/medical/proposals/virology_proposal.md @@ -156,6 +156,13 @@ Diseases start out small and weak, then escalate through spread and mutation. A - Service has the least to do, but might have to navigate delivering food and drinks to quarantined parts of the station. +### Species Interactions + +- Reptiles, arachnids and vulpkanin, as well as any other predatory species, should have a stronger immune response to diseases that come from eating raw flesh or (for reptiles in particular) drinking floor blood. Flood blood consumption is, after all, an important part of reptilian culture. Fresh kills should also not count as unsanitary - only after they've sat for a bit do bacteria have a chance to develop. + +- Diona should have a stronger immune response to diseases that come from the floor, and especially from infected puddles. This is to help counterbalance the fact that they can't protect themselves with shoes. + +- Vox should have a stronger immune response across the board, but especially to diseases that come from trash. ## Administrative & Server Rule Impact From 9b583d3358ac69de83f90d48a63e699cfbb62aaf Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: SeaWyrm Date: Mon, 19 Jan 2026 16:01:00 -0700 Subject: [PATCH 08/14] Flesh out bioengineering section --- .../medical/proposals/virology_proposal.md | 21 +++++++++++++++---- 1 file changed, 17 insertions(+), 4 deletions(-) diff --git a/src/en/space-station-14/departments/medical/proposals/virology_proposal.md b/src/en/space-station-14/departments/medical/proposals/virology_proposal.md index e16085ddbb..991ff0c87d 100644 --- a/src/en/space-station-14/departments/medical/proposals/virology_proposal.md +++ b/src/en/space-station-14/departments/medical/proposals/virology_proposal.md @@ -104,12 +104,25 @@ For this design, it helps that diseases both have an incubation period where the ### Bioengineering -MOSTLY TBD -My only note here at present is that any antag who wants to engineer a horrible disease should be required to incubate it within their own body. That's the price for unleashing a plague upon the crew: You're the initial infected. +For anyone who wants to dip their rubber-gloved arms into the dirty, grimy world of engineering their own viruses, thinking of a virus's genetic code as a mere string of letters is no longer sufficient. The code has to have meaning. -This should naturally tend to reduce station-wiping diseases to the domain of DAGD antags, which is where it should be. And even the worst diseases shouldn't progress so rapidly that virology has no chance to catch them in time. Er, so to speak. +Here's how that works: -The same machine that creates treatments and vaccines can be used to do bioengineering, but that functionality is locked behind CMO's ID. CMO (or any antags who get their hands on CMO's ID) can use their ID to unlock it. The machine will keep a record of all bioengineering activity, including the IDs of the users, though this can be wiped by snipping the log wire or made to not record any new activity with an emag. +A virus's genome is a series of alternating tags and modifiers. A tag will declare the 'field' being modified - mutation rate, or symptoms, or so forth. The modifier will then decode to a numeric or keyed value, which is added to the virus's base values for its fields. This code is interpreted linearly from the beginning of the string to the end. + +Of course, players won't see the tags and modifiers directly. They'll see an apparently-meaningless jumble of nucleotides: CAGAGTTAGACTAGA and so forth. It'll be up to them to figure out what means what. + +That task isn't as impossible as it sounds, though, because they'll have some tools to help them. But before those tools are of any use, they'll need to collect samples; nobody can sit around in a closed-off virology office and do all the work without interacting with anyone else. Once samples are acquired, the samples have to be sequenced in a gene sequencer, and then fed into the DDDE. (So far, this is identical to the process of developing a vaccine.) + +The sequenced DNA will have been chopped into shorter fragments, however, and won't represent a complete virus genome. The DDDE can parse each fragment and explain what it does, though incomplete fragments might not be parseable, or might be interpreted differently from the gene's representation in a virus's complete genome. + +For the sake of creating a vaccine, the virologist's only goal here will be to piece together fragments into a complete and accurate genome, or as close to one as they can get. Engineering gets more complicated - but it's essentially the same process, except instead of trying to match a particular genome, the virologist is trying to create a new one based on the fragments they've been able to find and whatever guesswork can fill in the gaps. It's unlikely that whatever exact mix of symptoms and severities they're hoping for will show up directly in the samples they take, so they'll have to figure out what they can do with the fragments they do have. + +To prevent players from gaming the system too heavily, the mappings between genes, and tags and modifiers should be randomized for each round. An experienced virologist should, nevertheless, be able to recognize some patterns - enough to offer a component of skill mastery, but not enough to allow bioengineering to devolve into copy-paste-this-genetic-code-to-make-superplague. + +Once the bioengineered virus's genome is complete, the vaccinator can be used to produce viral load - but it will only dispense this in the form of a vaccine, in which the viruses are dead and incapable of multiplying. To get around this, the virologist must disassemble the machine, revealing a vial with a small amount of viral load as one of its components. Once they have the live viral load, they'll want to increase its yield by incubating it in a host body, or else it'll be too weak to survive for long enough to do damage. Syndicate members can, for a token amount of TC, obtain an immuno-suppressant pill. Their easiest option will be to take the pill themself and use their own body as a bioreactor. They could also kidnap some hapless victim and force-feed them the pill, but their efforts will be wasted if the victim dies, or if the victim escapes and runs to medbay. Smaller animals, such as mice, monkeys and kobolds, can be used to incubate the virus without the help of immuno-surpressants, but the smaller they are, the less viral load they will produce, meaning the plague-engineer will need to accumulate several of them and keep them under control and alive until the virus has gained a foothold. + +Once the virus has incubated for long enough, the bioengineer can release their plague rats/victims/own sick self upon the station (if they're contagious) or else take the additional step of drawing blood and centrifuging it down to produce raw viral load in larger quantities. ### Zombies and Romerol From 4f9bb8355158cafc58df14921fdd327cd2ebc643 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: SeaWyrm Date: Fri, 23 Jan 2026 19:14:33 -0700 Subject: [PATCH 09/14] Clean up and reorganize the document --- .../medical/proposals/virology_proposal.md | 20 ++++++++++--------- 1 file changed, 11 insertions(+), 9 deletions(-) diff --git a/src/en/space-station-14/departments/medical/proposals/virology_proposal.md b/src/en/space-station-14/departments/medical/proposals/virology_proposal.md index 991ff0c87d..2c7044af2d 100644 --- a/src/en/space-station-14/departments/medical/proposals/virology_proposal.md +++ b/src/en/space-station-14/departments/medical/proposals/virology_proposal.md @@ -48,17 +48,21 @@ A new organ, 'Lymph Nodes,' will be responsible for metabolising antiserum. ### Diagnosis and Treatment -The first step in diagnosis is simply observing and talking to patients to start to build a profile of the disease. Swab samples can be taken from patients and from objects and surfaces that are suspected of harboring diseases; the Disease Diagnoser Delta Extreme will take a swab sample and reveal if there is a disease present in the sample, and if so, whether it is viral or bacterial, but at this stage, that's the only thing it will reveal. Virologists will have to determine how severe the disease is the hard way. +The first step in diagnosis is simply observing and talking to patients to start to build a profile of the disease. Swab samples can be taken from patients and from objects and surfaces that are suspected of harboring diseases; the Disease Diagnoser Delta Extreme will take a swab sample and reveal if there is a disease present in the sample, and if so, whether it is viral or bacterial. Bacterial diseases are straightforward: Chemistry will have three new reagents they can produce which serve as antibacterials. These will be roughly equivalent to each other - the main difference is that a bacterial infection can build up resistances to them, so for a particularly severe bacterial disease with a high mutation rate, it may be necessary to switch antibacterials. Antibacterials will attack the bacterial load in the patient's bloodstream just like antiserum. In the case of bacterial diseases, virologists might still be responsible for helping to track down the source of the disease and eliminate it, possibly with some janitorial assistance for those hard-to-clean surfaces. -Viral diseases are more complicated. The virologists will need to piece together the virus's genetic sequence as best they can. The most effective way to do this will involve some legwork and detective skills: Tracking down contaminated individuals, objects, and surfaces, and taking lots and lots of swab samples. Each sample will have fragments of the virus's entire genome. These fragments will also be increasingly garbled based on how many steps they are removed from the original source. Virologists can also take blood samples, but these will have to have the person's own DNA factored out before they reveal anything about the virus. Blood samples have to be put in test tubes and centrifuged before they're useful. +Viral diseases are more complicated. The virologists will need to piece together the virus's genetic sequence as best they can. The most effective way to do this will involve some legwork and detective skills: Tracking down contaminated individuals, objects, and surfaces, and taking lots and lots of swab samples. Each sample will have fragments of the virus's entire genome. To reveal these fragments, the sample must be run through a new machine: The gene sequencer. This will take a little while - maybe 30 seconds to a minute - to sequence the DNA from the sample, though multiple samples can be queued up and run in parallel. (The delay introduces downtime in the virology lab, incentivising virologists to go out into the station and gather more samples and information about the disease's spread.) The gene sequencer, when finished, will print its results out onto a slip of paper. The sequenced DNA, however, will take the form of a set of chopped-up, unordered segments of varying length and completeness. Older samples will have shorter segments, fewer segments, and a higher likelihood of having unreadable or incorrect nucleotides. -Virologists don't need to figure out the whole genome of the virus before they can start to produce treatment, but the closer their sequence is to the correct sequence, the more effective it will be. If the treatment sequence is too far off, it will either be ineffective, or downright harmful. They can also produce vaccines based on shorter fragments of DNA. These won't help patients who are already infected, but will prompt uninfected patients to start producing antiserum. The effectiveness of the vaccine is based both on how well it matches the viral DNA, and how long a sequence it uses; a vaccine based on, say, "A" would match pretty much any virus, but would be basically useless. +The paper slip from the sequencer is inserted into the DDDE, which will help the virologist organize the information they have and offer some information about what the fragments actually do within the virus (see below.) -Virology equipment will be able to produce test treatments, but only slowly. When a test treatment is determined to be effective, it can be sent to Chemistry for mass-production. +If the sample comes from a patient's blood, it will also have pieces of the patient's own DNA (the same code used by detectives) mixed in with the viral DNA. Virologists will have to sort out which fragments come from which source. Blood, incidentally, must be centrifuged and separated into components, one of which will contain the DNA sample. + +Virologists don't need to figure out the whole genome of the virus before they can start to produce treatment, but the closer their sequence is to the correct sequence, the more effective it will be. If the treatment sequence is too far off, it will either be ineffective, or downright harmful. They can also produce vaccines based on shorter fragments of DNA. The effectiveness of the vaccine is based both on how well it matches the viral DNA, and how long a sequence it uses; a vaccine based on, say, "A" would match pretty much any virus, but would be basically useless. Vaccines of course won't help patients who are already infected, but will prompt uninfected patients to start producing antiserum. + +Once the virologist has a promising sequence, they can take it to the vaccine generator, which will produce a small quantity of test vaccine. When a test treatment is determined to be effective, it can be sent to Chemistry for mass-production. In addition to the DDDE, petri dishes will be available. A petri dish can be swabbed, and any bacteria present on the swab will be loaded into the petri dish. Once enough time has passed, the petri dish will reveal the presence, amount, and number of different types of bacteria that have grown in it. Reagents can also be added to a petri dish to observe their effects on the bacteria - this is one way to check if bacteria have developed resistence to a given antibiotic. Petri dishes should be supplied to Virology, and possibly also Chemistry. @@ -76,7 +80,7 @@ Viruses, however, can cause more problems. First of all, as viruses mutate, they will drift from the original virus's genetic code, making treatment less effective. Second, as the code mutates, the disease's symptoms and stats will also change. At worst, this can introduce new, more harmful symptoms. For more serious diseases, virologists will have to act fast and continue gathering samples to stay ahead of mutations. Treatment based on the original genome will still tend to be most effective overall, since it will best match the widest range of possible mutations, but as a disease spreads, that initial genome will become less and less relevant. -This also affects antiserum! A rapidly-mutating virus might overwhelm the victim's immune system to the point where the antiserum they've accumulated becomes useless. +This also affects antiserum! A rapidly-mutating virus's genome might drift from what the victim's immune system is trying to fight to the point where the antiserum they've accumulated becomes useless. ### Virology as a Role @@ -114,7 +118,7 @@ Of course, players won't see the tags and modifiers directly. They'll see an app That task isn't as impossible as it sounds, though, because they'll have some tools to help them. But before those tools are of any use, they'll need to collect samples; nobody can sit around in a closed-off virology office and do all the work without interacting with anyone else. Once samples are acquired, the samples have to be sequenced in a gene sequencer, and then fed into the DDDE. (So far, this is identical to the process of developing a vaccine.) -The sequenced DNA will have been chopped into shorter fragments, however, and won't represent a complete virus genome. The DDDE can parse each fragment and explain what it does, though incomplete fragments might not be parseable, or might be interpreted differently from the gene's representation in a virus's complete genome. +The sequenced DNA, as previously mentioned, will have been chopped into shorter fragments, and won't represent a complete virus genome. The DDDE can parse each fragment and explain what it does, though incomplete fragments might not be parseable, or might be interpreted differently from the gene's representation in a virus's complete genome. For the sake of creating a vaccine, the virologist's only goal here will be to piece together fragments into a complete and accurate genome, or as close to one as they can get. Engineering gets more complicated - but it's essentially the same process, except instead of trying to match a particular genome, the virologist is trying to create a new one based on the fragments they've been able to find and whatever guesswork can fill in the gaps. It's unlikely that whatever exact mix of symptoms and severities they're hoping for will show up directly in the samples they take, so they'll have to figure out what they can do with the fragments they do have. @@ -179,9 +183,7 @@ Diseases start out small and weak, then escalate through spread and mutation. A ## Administrative & Server Rule Impact -There is some potential for griefing in the form of players deliberately trying to infect others. This is ameliorated in part by the fact that players potentially making bad decision about whether to get something looked at is deliberately part of the disease's challenge - a griefer and an irresponsible character don't look all that dissimilar in practice. Combined with the fact that disease sources are rare, unpredictable and invisible, I think the potential for serious griefing is low. - -This might change if bioengineering new diseases is added - but see the note above on that subject. +There is some potential for griefing in the form of players deliberately trying to infect others. This is ameliorated in part by the fact that players potentially making bad decision about whether to get something looked at is deliberately part of the disease's challenge - a griefer and an irresponsible character don't look all that dissimilar in practice. Combined with the fact that disease sources are rare, unpredictable and invisible, and deliberate bioengineeering is difficult and slow, I think the potential for serious griefing is low. # Technical Considerations From 5231c8aede065f0819315cea956f703a1b21b93c Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: SeaWyrm Date: Fri, 23 Jan 2026 19:42:12 -0700 Subject: [PATCH 10/14] Add section on recordkeeping As suggested by GitHub user @ThanosDeGraf --- .../departments/medical/proposals/virology_proposal.md | 6 ++++++ 1 file changed, 6 insertions(+) diff --git a/src/en/space-station-14/departments/medical/proposals/virology_proposal.md b/src/en/space-station-14/departments/medical/proposals/virology_proposal.md index 2c7044af2d..74abf7b4d7 100644 --- a/src/en/space-station-14/departments/medical/proposals/virology_proposal.md +++ b/src/en/space-station-14/departments/medical/proposals/virology_proposal.md @@ -70,6 +70,12 @@ Petri dishes can break, spilling their bacterial load onto the ground. They will Viruses will not interact with petri dishes. +### Recordkeeping + +The vaccinator machine will automatically log all created vaccines to the medical records computer's database - something a would-be bioengineer will have to keep in mind if they're trying to be underhanded. Virologists can then use the computer to associate vaccines with patients they've been used on, similar to how the criminal records computer can be used to set crewmembers to wanted and so forth. + +Virologists should also be well-equipped with labelers, on top of which, swabs and petri dishes can have paper applied to them as labels similarly to how crates and lockers can. + ### Mutation Mutation rate is one of the things that can make a disease more dangerous. From 493e64b3743f5acc54f90857a5b20b15b28d27ca Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: SeaWyrm Date: Thu, 20 Aug 2026 22:53:35 -0600 Subject: [PATCH 11/14] Big revision --- .../medical/proposals/virology_proposal.md | 164 ++++++++++++------ 1 file changed, 107 insertions(+), 57 deletions(-) diff --git a/src/en/space-station-14/departments/medical/proposals/virology_proposal.md b/src/en/space-station-14/departments/medical/proposals/virology_proposal.md index 74abf7b4d7..57959fab78 100644 --- a/src/en/space-station-14/departments/medical/proposals/virology_proposal.md +++ b/src/en/space-station-14/departments/medical/proposals/virology_proposal.md @@ -11,101 +11,136 @@ A take on how virology might be re-added to the game in a way that has depth and is interesting and enjoyable for everyone. +Basic principles: + +* Diseases should be interesting to catch. They should drive gameplay and roleplay decisions. +* Most diseases should be minor, and possibly ignorable. +* Nevertheless, diseases should present in a way that doesn't immediately reveal how serious they are. Deciding if and when to go to medbay should be a non-trivial decision. +* Serious diseases are their own game mode, like Zombies. Otherwise, diseases should only become a major threat due to severe and prolonged neglect on the part of the players, and even then, only if they're unlucky. + +* Diseases grow and spread based on station hygiene. If the station becomes utterly disease-ridden in a non-disease game mode, it should be entirely the players' fault. +* Diseases should not behave like "invisible health bars." They affect their victims entirely through symptoms. +* Diseases get worse over time, but characters' immune systems get better at fighting back until the disease is eliminated (or the symptoms kill the character.) + +* Treatment starts with symptom management. +* Vaccine development requires legwork and decision-making: Virologists must track down infected people to get samples for their research. A round-start cure or a copy-pasted, routine solution is impossible. +* Diseases will mutate over time, becoming more dangerous and harder to cure. + ## Features to be added ### Diseases -A few (one to three, maybe) diseases will happen every shift, but most of them will be mild and ignorable - a runny nose, a slight cough, and so on. Moderate diseases, requiring some virology intervention, will be possible but uncommon. Severe diseases will be their own game mode. +Though every round should have a mild disease or two, these should usually be ignorable or at worst inconvenient, whereas a severe disease counts as a round-defining major 'antagonist' and should be its own game mode. + +Janitors should be the station's first line of defense against contagion. Diseases show up at unsanitary locations or on unsanitary objects: Trash, spilled liquids, rotten corpses (but not fresh ones), spoiled food, grimy tiles, and so forth. Players should have some agency in their ability to avoid disease by wearing appropriate protection, (For instance: rubber gloves, surgical masks,) and by staying away from unhygeinic locations. If a player catches a disease, they should find out only when symptoms develop; symptoms are what make the disease interesting and interactive. There should be no direct "oh, I have a disease, better run to medbay" - instead, it will be a player's job to figure out when and if a medbay visit is appropriate. Initial symptoms shouldn't usually reveal how severe the disease is, either. A slight cough or sore throat might be the only symptoms they'll get, or they might be the harbingers of deadly plague. Usually, though, it should be the former. The balance should be such that a player who gets a disease shouldn't feel that running to medbay for every runny nose is the pragmatic option. + +Diseases will not harm their victims directly. All damage will be a secondary effect of the disease's symptoms. For instance, a fever might cause the victim's body to heat up; it will not cause direct heat damage, though the heating effect might itself cause heat damage. This means that a patient with a disease can be treated with normal medical interventions to control the symptoms, and if the symptoms are kept under control, will recover naturally. This way, there is flexibility in how players can approach treatment, and also possibilities for emergent complexity: The disease that makes its victims heat up when the station is already overheating, the symptoms that compound with each other to create unique problems, and so on. + +Viral diseases will require a vaccine to be developed. Bacterial diseases can be treated with antibacterials. -A disease will spawn in at a location or on an object. Anyone who walks through the location or touches the object will have a chance to catch the disease. Unsanitary objects or locations - trash, spilled liquids, corpses, spoiled food, miasma, and so forth - will be more likely to harbor diseases. +### Contagion -A disease will be either bacterial, or virological. It will have: -- One or more symptoms from a weighted list, ranging in severity from "you get the sniffles" to "spontaneous combustion." These will include normal, sensible symptoms, but also (more rarely) silly space game symptoms. -- One or more methods of transmission. For instance, "surface contact," "airborne," "looking at someone." -- A mutation rate. -- A speed of progression. -- Incubation time and symptom onset time. Incubation time governs how long it takes for the victim to become infectious. Symptom onset time governs how long it takes for the victim to start displaying symptoms. Incubation time should be shorter, so that victims start spreading the disease before they know for sure that they have it. Speed of progression governs both of these, as well as the rate at which additional symptoms manifest. It should be possible to change the speed of progression via medical interventions. +Contagion should come in multiple possible forms, so that determining how to prevent the spread of diseases by practical means is part of the detective work required. If a disease isn't airborne, then facial masks should be useless against it, for instance. -Bacterial diseases will also have a separate resistance level against each antibiotic. +Diseases should be contagious before the arrival of symptoms in order to prevent incentivising game behavior that immediately shuts them down, such as anyone with a slight sniffle stuffing themselves into a biohazard suit so that they can't spread anything. They might still do that, but it's less of a binary spread/don't spread since they've already been spreading it for a bit. -Viral diseases will also have a genetic code, similar to how different characters have different DNA patterns that the detective can find and match to their records. +### Symptoms -### Damage and Immunity +Symptoms should range from mundane to bizarre, harmless to gross to inconvenient to extremely dangerous, and from serious to silly. There should not be symptoms with solely beneficial effects. Either they're paired with significant downsides - yes, zombism makes you stronger, but it also makes you a zombie - or they shouldn't be beneficial at all unless by circumstance. (For instance, having a fever when the station is too cold.) Symptoms should, in general, feel like they're part of a disease, even if it's a silly one. They shouldn't generally be so extreme that they distract from regular gameplay - no disease that makes you spew particle or shader effects that flood everyone's screen, for instance, or that constantly spam loud and annoying sound effects, unless maybe it's a *very* severe disease in its very late stages - but they shouldn't be invisible, either, at least to the player that has them. Overall, simple is better than complex, and it's better to err on the side of subtlety, though subtlety should also be modulated by disease severity. -Diseases will not and should not behave like an "invisible health bar." +Symptoms should also be readable. If it's not immediately obvious what a symptom does to you and how you might deal with its effects, it should at least be straightforward to figure it out. There can and should, however, be symptoms that strongly resemble each other, so that it might seem like a player has one when they have the other; though even these should be possible to tell apart eventually or under the right kind of test. -Diseases will not harm the victim directly. All harm will be a secondary effect of the disease's symptoms. For instance, a fever will cause increasing amounts of heat damage. This means that a patient with a disease can be treated with normal medical interventions to control the symptoms, and if the symptoms are kept under control, will recover naturally. +Symptoms' annoyingness should also be considered part of a disease's severity. A typical mild infection should not, for instance, reduce someone's movement speed to a crawl, or make them repeatedly drop what they are holding. These symptoms should show up only in circumstances where a player has already had generous opportunity to identify and prevent them from occurring in some fashion or another, so that they are punishment for the player's failure, not an arbitrary this-person-in-particular-doesn't-get-to-have-fun-anymore. (Ideally, they should also not actually be so annoying or inconvenient that they ruin the player's fun.) -All diseases will behave like reagents in the player's bloodstream, but with much slower metabolism governed by their speed of progression. Each time the progression ticks, the bacterial or viral load in the bloodstream will increase, which will also increase the severity of symptoms. -The victim's body will also produce 'antiserum,' which will diminish the amount of bacterial or viral load. These will accumulate slowly, but build up until they can overcome the disease. The numbers should center around a sweet spot where mild diseases will generally go away on their own, and severe diseases will grow quickly enough that they're likely to kill the patient before the patient generates enough antiserum to beat it back. +### Progression -Antiserum will be keyed to a particular disease. If a person has one disease, and catches another, they'll produce two distinct flavors of antiserum at two different levels. If they get over a disease, the antiserum will linger in their bloodstream, making them much less likely to catch it again. Virologists can also extract antiserum from a person's bloodstream and isolate it to produce a treatment for other patients. +Diseases should not be limited to just one symptom. As the disease progresses, more symptoms should be revealed. This is one way that diseases can worsen, and it ensures that just because a disease starts with a simple cough or sniffle doesn't mean it won't progress to something more serious. Obviously, diseases with more symptoms should be considered to have higher severity. That doesn't mean that disease progression necessarily *needs* to reveal progressively more dangerous symptoms, though. Mixing different symptoms keeps the disease unpredictable. Harmless but visually distinctive symptoms can add heightened drama by revealing that a character is without a doubt infected, or increase tension by heralding the imminent arrival of other symptoms. Inconvenient but non-dangerous ones can also compound with earlier symptoms to increase the amount of danger: A character who becomes unable to walk very quickly, for instance, might not be able to make it to medbay in time for their needed dose of whatever keeps their earlier symptoms in check, and a necessary chore turns into a dramatic struggle for survival. (Or possibly a farcical struggle for survival, which is also good as long as it's funny.) + +Good symptoms, therefore, should have lots of potential to affect each other either directly or indirectly. Emergent symptom interactions can help make even well-known and understood symptoms combine to create a unique and memorable disease. + + +### Immunity + +When a player catches a disease, their body immediately begins fighting back by producing antiserum. The disease's viral load will quickly ramp up and then taper off, while the antiserum will start off accumulating slowly, but build up until it can overwhelm the disease. How likely a disease is to kill the player before their own immune system can handle it is a big part of what differentiates serious diseases from mild ones: Mild ones will generally go away on their own, whereas serious ones will have both dangerous enough symptoms and fast enough growth that their victim is likely to lose the battle. + +Antiserum is keyed to a particular disease. If a player catches more than one disease, they will begin producing a second type of antiserum against the second disease. This way, players aren't strongly incentivised to cultivate and catch mild diseases in order to build up their immune system against major ones. This also provides a simple and emergent way for players to develop immunity: The antiserum lingers in their bloodstream, making it harder for later infections to get a foothold. + +"Lymph nodes" would be an appropriate organ to metabolize antiserum. -A new organ, 'Lymph Nodes,' will be responsible for metabolising antiserum. ### Diagnosis and Treatment The first step in diagnosis is simply observing and talking to patients to start to build a profile of the disease. Swab samples can be taken from patients and from objects and surfaces that are suspected of harboring diseases; the Disease Diagnoser Delta Extreme will take a swab sample and reveal if there is a disease present in the sample, and if so, whether it is viral or bacterial. -Bacterial diseases are straightforward: Chemistry will have three new reagents they can produce which serve as antibacterials. These will be roughly equivalent to each other - the main difference is that a bacterial infection can build up resistances to them, so for a particularly severe bacterial disease with a high mutation rate, it may be necessary to switch antibacterials. Antibacterials will attack the bacterial load in the patient's bloodstream just like antiserum. +The first step in treatment is symptom management. Patients who are kept alive long enough will recover, so depending on the severity of the disease, this might be all that is required, if anything. Beyond symptom management, both types of diseases can be directly attacked in slightly different ways. + +Bacterial diseases should be more common, and easier to treat. Doctors will have access to antibiotics that should be broadly effective against them. Strong enough bacterial infections might build up resistance to a particular antibiotic over time, requiring the doctors to use a different one. This makes chemistry a bit more interactive, since the chemists can usually just pick their favorite antibiotic to create, but might be called on to switch things up later. + +There should probably not be more than, say, three different antibiotics, with enough difference between them that different circumstances might make one or another easier to produce, but without any particular one dominating the others. Chemists should not generally feel pressure to make more than one of them. Maints chemistry should strongly favor one, however; the downside of tider DIY antibiotics is that it's more likely to build bacterial resistance due to lack of variety. -In the case of bacterial diseases, virologists might still be responsible for helping to track down the source of the disease and eliminate it, possibly with some janitorial assistance for those hard-to-clean surfaces. +In the case of bacterial diseases, some of the virology tools can still be helpful for tracking down the disease's source to eliminate it, possibly with some janitorial assistance for those hard-to-clean surfaces. -Viral diseases are more complicated. The virologists will need to piece together the virus's genetic sequence as best they can. The most effective way to do this will involve some legwork and detective skills: Tracking down contaminated individuals, objects, and surfaces, and taking lots and lots of swab samples. Each sample will have fragments of the virus's entire genome. To reveal these fragments, the sample must be run through a new machine: The gene sequencer. This will take a little while - maybe 30 seconds to a minute - to sequence the DNA from the sample, though multiple samples can be queued up and run in parallel. (The delay introduces downtime in the virology lab, incentivising virologists to go out into the station and gather more samples and information about the disease's spread.) The gene sequencer, when finished, will print its results out onto a slip of paper. The sequenced DNA, however, will take the form of a set of chopped-up, unordered segments of varying length and completeness. Older samples will have shorter segments, fewer segments, and a higher likelihood of having unreadable or incorrect nucleotides. +Viral diseases are more complicated, and are much easier to protect against than to directly treat after infection has already happened. The virologists will need to piece together the virus's genetic sequence as best they can. The most effective way to do this will involve some legwork and detective skills: Tracking down contaminated individuals, objects, and surfaces, and taking lots and lots of swab samples. Each sample will have fragments of the virus's entire genome. To reveal these fragments, the sample must be run through a new machine: The gene sequencer. This will take a little while - maybe 30 seconds to a minute, say - to sequence the DNA from the sample, though multiple samples can be queued up and run in parallel. The delay introduces downtime in the virology lab, incentivising virologists to go out into the station and gather more samples and information about the disease's spread. The ability to do it in parallel ensures that multiple samples taken together can still be useful. The gene sequencer, when finished sequencing, will present its results in the form of a set of chopped-up, unordered segments of varying length and completeness. Older samples will have shorter segments, fewer segments, and a higher likelihood of having unreadable or incorrect nucleotides. Contaminated sources might also have fragments that aren't part of the virus's genome. -The paper slip from the sequencer is inserted into the DDDE, which will help the virologist organize the information they have and offer some information about what the fragments actually do within the virus (see below.) +The DDDE can take the data from the sequencer and manage it in a way that will help the virologist organize the information they have and offer some information about what the fragments actually do within the virus (see "Bioengineering" below.) If the sample comes from a patient's blood, it will also have pieces of the patient's own DNA (the same code used by detectives) mixed in with the viral DNA. Virologists will have to sort out which fragments come from which source. Blood, incidentally, must be centrifuged and separated into components, one of which will contain the DNA sample. -Virologists don't need to figure out the whole genome of the virus before they can start to produce treatment, but the closer their sequence is to the correct sequence, the more effective it will be. If the treatment sequence is too far off, it will either be ineffective, or downright harmful. They can also produce vaccines based on shorter fragments of DNA. The effectiveness of the vaccine is based both on how well it matches the viral DNA, and how long a sequence it uses; a vaccine based on, say, "A" would match pretty much any virus, but would be basically useless. Vaccines of course won't help patients who are already infected, but will prompt uninfected patients to start producing antiserum. +One important part of this is that the virologists will have to take samples from a variety of sources, rather than a single patient over and over again. A single patient will only offer a single piece of the puzzle. They will also be incentivised to figure out the course of the disease's spread if they can, since the first infections will have the best data. -Once the virologist has a promising sequence, they can take it to the vaccine generator, which will produce a small quantity of test vaccine. When a test treatment is determined to be effective, it can be sent to Chemistry for mass-production. +Virologists don't need to figure out the whole genome of the virus before they can start to produce treatment, but the closer their sequence is to the correct sequence, the more effective it will be. If the treatment sequence is too far off, it will either be ineffective, or downright harmful. They can also produce vaccines based on shorter fragments of DNA. The effectiveness of the vaccine is based both on how well it matches the viral DNA, and how long a sequence it uses; a vaccine based on, say, the single-nucleotide sequence "A" would match pretty much any virus, but would be basically useless. It's up to them to decide when their information is good enough. -In addition to the DDDE, petri dishes will be available. A petri dish can be swabbed, and any bacteria present on the swab will be loaded into the petri dish. Once enough time has passed, the petri dish will reveal the presence, amount, and number of different types of bacteria that have grown in it. Reagents can also be added to a petri dish to observe their effects on the bacteria - this is one way to check if bacteria have developed resistence to a given antibiotic. Petri dishes should be supplied to Virology, and possibly also Chemistry. +Once the virologist has a promising sequence, they can take it to the vaccine generator, which will produce a small quantity of test vaccine. When a test treatment is determined to be effective, it can be sent to Chemistry for mass-production. Vaccines of course won't help patients who are already infected, but will prompt uninfected patients to start producing antiserum and thereby building up immunity. + +The only real way to treat patients who are already infected with a virus, outside of disease management, is to produce antiserum, which can only be done in the blood of an infected living host (see "Bioengineering" below.) + +For bacteria, petri dishes will be available. A petri dish can be swabbed, and any bacteria present on the swab will be loaded into the petri dish. Once enough time has passed, the petri dish will reveal the presence, amount, and number of different types of bacteria that have grown in it. Reagents can also be added to a petri dish to observe their effects on the bacteria - this is one way to check if bacteria have developed resistence to a given antibiotic. Petri dishes should be supplied to Virology, and possibly also Chemistry. Petri dishes can break, spilling their bacterial load onto the ground. They will also contain agar, a food reagent that will transmit any bacteria growing in the dish to anyone who eats it. If there are no bacteria, it is harmless. Agar could also potentially be a component in food or drink recipes for chefs and bartenders. -Viruses will not interact with petri dishes. +Viruses should not interact with petri dishes. + ### Recordkeeping -The vaccinator machine will automatically log all created vaccines to the medical records computer's database - something a would-be bioengineer will have to keep in mind if they're trying to be underhanded. Virologists can then use the computer to associate vaccines with patients they've been used on, similar to how the criminal records computer can be used to set crewmembers to wanted and so forth. +The vaccinator machine should automatically log all created vaccines to the medical records computer's database - something a would-be bioengineer will have to keep in mind if they're trying to be underhanded. Virologists can then use the computer to associate vaccines with patients they've been used on, similar to how the criminal records computer can be used to set crewmembers to wanted and so forth. + +Swabs and petri dishes should accept paper labels, also. -Virologists should also be well-equipped with labelers, on top of which, swabs and petri dishes can have paper applied to them as labels similarly to how crates and lockers can. ### Mutation Mutation rate is one of the things that can make a disease more dangerous. -Bacterial diseases can only mutate to build up resistance to specific antibacterial agents. +Bacterial diseases can only mutate to build up resistance to specific antibacterial agents. They have no actual genetic code. Viruses, however, can cause more problems. -First of all, as viruses mutate, they will drift from the original virus's genetic code, making treatment less effective. Second, as the code mutates, the disease's symptoms and stats will also change. At worst, this can introduce new, more harmful symptoms. For more serious diseases, virologists will have to act fast and continue gathering samples to stay ahead of mutations. Treatment based on the original genome will still tend to be most effective overall, since it will best match the widest range of possible mutations, but as a disease spreads, that initial genome will become less and less relevant. +First of all, as viruses mutate, they will drift from the original virus's genetic code, making treatment less effective. Second, as the code mutates, the disease's symptoms and stats will also change. At worst, this can introduce new, more harmful symptoms. For more serious diseases, virologists will have to act fast and continue gathering samples to stay ahead of mutations. Treatment based on the original genome will still tend to be most effective overall, since it will best match the widest range of possible mutations, but as a disease spreads, that initial genome will become less and less relevant as the separate instances of the disease mutate away from each other. Mutations might also make the disease less impactful, of course. -This also affects antiserum! A rapidly-mutating virus's genome might drift from what the victim's immune system is trying to fight to the point where the antiserum they've accumulated becomes useless. +This also affects antiserum! A rapidly-mutating virus's genome might drift from what the victim's immune system is trying to fight to the point where the antiserum they've accumulated becomes useless. Only the most severe diseases should mutate rapidly, as this makes them both more dangerous to catch, and significantly harder to vaccinate against. ### Virology as a Role -Since an average round will require little to no action from virologists, a virologist will by default act as a regular doctor. Since medbay is where it will most likely first become evident that a disease is on the loose, this does mean that they'll be in position to know when they have to start mounting a response. +Since an average round will require little to no action from virologists, the virology duties will fall under the responsibilities of existing medical staff rather than being their own role. Players especially interested in virology can still signal their interest by wearing clothes from the virology wardrobe, or by getting a different job title from HoP, or things of that nature. -If there are no virologists on staff, a CMO might recruit from among the existing medical staff, or they might take on those duties themself. +It is the CMO's job to coordinate virology work and ensure that the available doctors are appropriately balanced between patient treatment and virology duties. ### Prevention -Depending on the disease's mode of transmission, surgical masks, (which already exist,) latex gloves, (which already exist,) and even tissues or handkerchiefs (which could be added) can be used to help prevent them from spreading. Space Cleaner will reduce viral load on a given surface or object, though it won't necessarily eliminate it entirely. Bleach will be twice as effective, but not immediately available. For more severe diseases, biosuits and gas masks might be necessary. +As well as helping prevent oneself from catching a disease, players should be able to use protective equipment to stop themselves from spreading it, depending on its mode of transmission. Aside from things like surgical masks and latex gloves, this could include, for instance, tissues or handkerchiefs for a minor disease that causes something like coughing or sneezing. (Anyone who leaves their used tissues on the ground is a bad person and should feel bad. Anyone who picks them up bare-handed is liable to contract whatever disease the person had.) -Anyone who leaves their used tissues on the ground is a bad person and should feel bad. Anyone who picks them up bare-handed is liable to contract whatever disease the person had. +For cleaning surfaces, Space Cleaner should be somewhat effective, and bleach much more so - but less available. Janitors should not be immediately able to see how germ- or virus-ridden a given surface is, or else the upgrade path will be fairly pointless, since they can just keep spraying Space Cleaner until it's totally disinfected, and they'll have much less incentive to work with the medical department to find and eliminate disease sources, since they can locate them just fine on their own. ### Quarantine -Quarantine is fun, except for when it really, really isn't: Dividing the station up into "safe" and "infected" areas could lead to all sorts of interesting situations, and should be encouraged by giving the virology department a healthy supply of inflatable doors and barriers, as well as warning signs and holos to put up. Locking a given player into a tiny room for half the round should be discouraged, and isolated wards for sick people should probably not be provided. +Quarantine is fun, except for when it really, really isn't: Dividing the station up into "safe" and "infected" areas could lead to all sorts of interesting situations, and should be encouraged by giving the virology department a healthy supply of inflatable doors and barriers, as well as warning signs and holos to put up. Locking a given player into a tiny room for half the round should be discouraged, and isolated wards for sick people should probably not be provided. If they decide something like that is seriously needed, the station might consider repurposing genpop or something, in which case all the benefits of genpop over individual cells are in play at least. Unfortunately, it would be difficult for any system where infections can be passed from player to player to not have some incentive for players to lock each other up. @@ -114,33 +149,34 @@ For this design, it helps that diseases both have an incubation period where the ### Bioengineering -For anyone who wants to dip their rubber-gloved arms into the dirty, grimy world of engineering their own viruses, thinking of a virus's genetic code as a mere string of letters is no longer sufficient. The code has to have meaning. +For anyone who wants to dip their rubber-gloved arms into the dirty, grimy world of engineering their own viruses, thinking of a virus's genetic code as a mere string of letters is no longer sufficient. The code has to have meaning. The process of bioengineering revolves around unlocking that meaning piece by piece, and using those pieces however possible. -Here's how that works: +The first step should be the same as that for vaccine creation: Collecting samples. Would-be bioengineers shouldn't be able to sit around in a closed-off room any more than any other practitioner of virology. Once those samples are sequenced, the bioengineer should get imperfect information about each fragment's function in the virus's genome. Aside from the data being incomplete, fragments should also interact with each other to change each others' behavior, leading both to more emergence, more opportunity for interesting bioengineering results, and more difficulty in achieving a specific, desired result. Bioengineers will also have to factor out unrelated DNA from the sample's contributor, same as for regular vaccine development, or the information they get will be contaminated and innacurate. -A virus's genome is a series of alternating tags and modifiers. A tag will declare the 'field' being modified - mutation rate, or symptoms, or so forth. The modifier will then decode to a numeric or keyed value, which is added to the virus's base values for its fields. This code is interpreted linearly from the beginning of the string to the end. +Where vaccine creation only requires piecing the fragments into as complete a genome as possible, engineering is about taking the fragments and creating something new with them. Since they're limited to the fragments they're able to find, they probably won't be able to create exactly the virus they're hoping for. Instead, they'll have to figure out what they can do with the fragments they have. -Of course, players won't see the tags and modifiers directly. They'll see an apparently-meaningless jumble of nucleotides: CAGAGTTAGACTAGA and so forth. It'll be up to them to figure out what means what. +To prevent gaming the system, the mappings between code fragments and effects should be random for each round. There might, however, be recognizable patterns or the like, allowing experienced virologists to figure things out more quickly. Ideally, there is room for skill mastery, but no room for bioengineering to devolve into copy-paste-this-genetic-code-to-make-superplague. -That task isn't as impossible as it sounds, though, because they'll have some tools to help them. But before those tools are of any use, they'll need to collect samples; nobody can sit around in a closed-off virology office and do all the work without interacting with anyone else. Once samples are acquired, the samples have to be sequenced in a gene sequencer, and then fed into the DDDE. (So far, this is identical to the process of developing a vaccine.) +Once the bioengineer has come up with a genome they feel good about, they should be able to produce it in the vaccinator the same way a vaccine is produced. The only difference is the intent behind the genome entered into the system. This should not, however, be enough to create an actual disease: A vaccine isn't the same as a live virus. To make an actual disease, the bioengineer will have to extract the actual live, viral load from the vaccinator - possibly by disassembling it to get at an internal vial or beaker, making this step the one where someone up to no good is most likely to be caught - and then find a way to incubate it in a host body until it is strong enough to survive in the wild. -The sequenced DNA, as previously mentioned, will have been chopped into shorter fragments, and won't represent a complete virus genome. The DDDE can parse each fragment and explain what it does, though incomplete fragments might not be parseable, or might be interpreted differently from the gene's representation in a virus's complete genome. +The easiest host body to use will obviously be the bioengineer's own. A would-be plaguebringer will probably have to suffer the effects of their own creation, making this process primarily the domain of those who would die a glorious death - though milder diseases should not be outside the purview of regular antagonists, or maybe even mischievous crew members if the disease is more or less harmless. A more cautious but slower approach would be to capture several live mice, for instance, though they will be harder to extract useful amounts of viral load from before they die. -For the sake of creating a vaccine, the virologist's only goal here will be to piece together fragments into a complete and accurate genome, or as close to one as they can get. Engineering gets more complicated - but it's essentially the same process, except instead of trying to match a particular genome, the virologist is trying to create a new one based on the fragments they've been able to find and whatever guesswork can fill in the gaps. It's unlikely that whatever exact mix of symptoms and severities they're hoping for will show up directly in the samples they take, so they'll have to figure out what they can do with the fragments they do have. +It should not be possible to mass-produce live viral load the same way that vaccines can be mass-produced. The only way to do it should be to either find victims, or take the personal risk. -To prevent players from gaming the system too heavily, the mappings between genes, and tags and modifiers should be randomized for each round. An experienced virologist should, nevertheless, be able to recognize some patterns - enough to offer a component of skill mastery, but not enough to allow bioengineering to devolve into copy-paste-this-genetic-code-to-make-superplague. +Viral load in the host body will be constantly attacked by the host's immune system, but just like antiserum, the viral load should be extractable from a centrifuged blood sample. The bioengineer can either use that directly, or release the host or hosts into the station at large once the disease is established in them and let the virus spread on the strength of its own contagion - depending of course on how that contagion itself has been engineered. An engineered disease with severe symptoms but little to no contagion might be an effective assassination tool. Or a needlessly complicated one. -Once the bioengineered virus's genome is complete, the vaccinator can be used to produce viral load - but it will only dispense this in the form of a vaccine, in which the viruses are dead and incapable of multiplying. To get around this, the virologist must disassemble the machine, revealing a vial with a small amount of viral load as one of its components. Once they have the live viral load, they'll want to increase its yield by incubating it in a host body, or else it'll be too weak to survive for long enough to do damage. Syndicate members can, for a token amount of TC, obtain an immuno-suppressant pill. Their easiest option will be to take the pill themself and use their own body as a bioreactor. They could also kidnap some hapless victim and force-feed them the pill, but their efforts will be wasted if the victim dies, or if the victim escapes and runs to medbay. Smaller animals, such as mice, monkeys and kobolds, can be used to incubate the virus without the help of immuno-surpressants, but the smaller they are, the less viral load they will produce, meaning the plague-engineer will need to accumulate several of them and keep them under control and alive until the virus has gained a foothold. +Since antiserum is also extractable from blood, it should also be possible - in dire circumstances - to use this same process of deliberate infection and blood sample extraction to produce more antiserum that can be injected into disease victims to help them recover. Obviously, this should not be a better solution to the problem than developing a vaccine. Since the antiserum can only be produced in an infected person's body, and since the quantity of antiserum is dependent on how long the person has been infected, it's unlikely that it would be in most situations, though. -Once the virus has incubated for long enough, the bioengineer can release their plague rats/victims/own sick self upon the station (if they're contagious) or else take the additional step of drawing blood and centrifuging it down to produce raw viral load in larger quantities. ### Zombies and Romerol -The components of zombism could and should be picked apart and added separately as (severe) symptoms and transmission modes within this system, possibly weighted to have a greater chance of occuring together. Romerol then simply becomes a particular strain of disease suspended within blood. Zombie gameplay remains similar, in that the blood of zombies can be used by virology to help pin down the virus's genome and thereby develop a treatment. Initial Infected rounds, likewise, work basically the same way, with II players starting out with a certain amount of viral load in their bloodstream, a deficiency in antiserum production, and a particularly long time until onset of symptoms. +The components of zombism could and should be picked apart and added separately as (rare, severe) symptoms and transmission modes within this system, possibly weighted to have a greater chance of occuring together. Romerol then simply becomes a particular strain of disease that causes all of the zombie symptoms together, suspended within blood. Zombie gameplay remains similar, in that the blood of zombies can be used by virology to help pin down the virus's genome and thereby develop a treatment. Initial Infected rounds, likewise, work basically the same way, with II players starting out with a certain amount of viral load in their bloodstream, a deficiency in antiserum production, and a particularly long time until onset of symptoms. ## Game Design Rationale +The ideal is for diseases to be interactive for everyone involved, to present interesting and meaningful decisions both mechanically and for roleplay, and to not arbitrarily limit someone's gameplay out of the blue: Getting infected is at least partially a consequence of a player's actions, and having a disease is often manageable with the right equipment or behavior. + An important part of this is that virologists don't get to just sit in their department and swirl test tubes or whatever. They have to get out there and track down the disease's source, which will generally require interacting with crew members as well as poking about in various parts of the station. On the flip side, having a disease doesn't automatically mean running to virology - most diseases won't have enough impact to be worth doing anything about other than to carry tissues and maybe take off a layer of insulating clothing. Even somewhat more serious diseases might be manageable with regular medication, or topicals, or just gritting one's teeth/beak/whatever and tanking it. This means that having a disease is interactive for the victim; they're not just an object for virology to deal with. They have to make their own decisions about how and if to address their own symptoms, balancing the possibility that they've contracted something horrible that will lay waste to the entire crew with the probability that it'll go away on its own and be no big deal. @@ -149,36 +185,37 @@ The different modes of transmission also lead to decision-making for infected cr Since diseases cause problems through their secondary effects, in the form of symptoms, and since people will tend to get over any disease they can survive, there's flexibility and room for creativity in how players decide to handle a disease. Some diseases won't even be harmful or fatal - just inconvenient, or ugly. In which case, the whole crew might just end up going about their regular duties while trying to ignore their dripping pustules leaving puddles of yuk everywhere they go. This helps foster emergence as well as making diseases more interactive for non-viro crew. A good variety of symptoms, with potential interaction between them, can lead to emergence in its own right - any disease might present some novel and surprising conjunction of symptoms with unexpected consequences for the crew. +Bioengineering presents mechanical challenge while limiting a player from creating perfect unstoppable deathplagues: They have to figure out what they can do with the pieces they've got. It's also not consequence-free for the bioengineer, since they'll likely have to suffer their own disease. Even bioengineered diseases will be different and unique from each other depending on what the player gets and what they do with it. Preferably, the genome code should also work in a way that allows for surprising and unexpected outcomes for the bioengineer themself, if they've done some guesswork or interpreted something wrong. -## Roundflow & Player interaction -Though every round should have a mild disease or two, these should usually be ignorable or at worst inconvenient, whereas a severe disease counts as a round-defining major 'antagonist' and should be its own game mode. +## Roundflow & Player interaction -In a regular round, there should be a constant, low chance for a mild disease to spawn as an event. These will infect a particular object or location (tile), gravitating towards the filthier parts of the station, and afflict themselves upon anyone who touches or stands on their source, spreading from there as per their mode of transmission. The disease should infect one to a few people and cause mild inconvenience at best. The exact nature of the disease should be random, with at least some possibility that it will be severe enough for virology to take an interest - maybe one moderate disease appears every three to five rounds on average. Good janitorial coverage can reduce this. Extremely filthy stations, on the other hand, might generate extra diseases in sufficiently disgusting areas. +In a regular round, there should be a constant, low chance for a mild disease to spawn as an event. These will gravitate strongly towards the filthier parts of the station, or possibly even fizzle if there's no sufficiently filthy place for them. The disease should on average infect one to a few people across the duration of the round from both its original source and from contagion, and should on average cause mild inconvenience at worst. The exact nature of the disease should be random, with at least some possibility that it will be severe enough for virology to take an interest - maybe one moderate disease appears every three to five rounds on average, say. Good janitorial coverage can reduce this. Extremely filthy stations, on the other hand, might generate extra diseases in sufficiently disgusting areas. -In a Plague Round, there will be a severe disease that spawns within the first 10 minutes or so. Other minor diseases might also show up via events. Like mild diseases, the severe disease will have a particular object or tile that is its source, though it might slowly spread out from that source to help ensure that the crew doesn't totally miss it all shift. The only real difference between a severe disease and a mild one will be the numbers: Severe diseases can have higher mutation rates, a longer infection period before symptoms appear, faster progression once symptoms do appear, more serious symptoms, or most likely a combination of those. +In a disease-focused game mode round, a severe disease should spawn, obviously. The only real difference between a severe disease and a mild one should be the numbers: Severe diseases can have higher mutation rates, a longer infection period before symptoms appear, faster progression once symptoms do appear, more serious symptoms, or most likely a combination of those. Like mild diseases, these can be created randomly, so that no two diseases are the same. -Diseases start out small and weak, then escalate through spread and mutation. A quick and appropriate response on the part of the crew - not just virology, but the whole crew - can stop the disease in its tracks. On the other hand, the disease has the potential to lay waste to the entire crew and render the station downright uninhabitable if the crew can't stay ahead of them. +Diseases start out small and weak, then escalate through spread and mutation. A quick and appropriate response on the part of the crew - not just virology, but the whole crew - can stop the disease in its tracks. On the other hand, a severe disease (or a sufficiently-neglected moderate one) has the potential to lay waste to the entire crew and render the station downright uninhabitable if the crew can't stay ahead of them. ### Department Interactions -- Medbay will be the front line against any serious disease. Not just the virologists, but the doctors responsible for treating the symptoms; the chemists who will need to help produce and distribute treatments and vaccines; and the paramedics, who have to face the risks of going out into the infected parts of the station to recover downed crewmembers. +- Medbay will be the main defense against any serious disease. Not just through virology, but also through the doctors responsible for treating the symptoms; the chemists who will need to help produce and distribute treatments and vaccines; and the paramedics, who have to face the risks of going out into the infected parts of the station to recover downed crewmembers. -- Janitorial staff will also play a surprisingly strong role, since their efforts to keep the station clean will also help curb the spread of the disease. Also, if a disease causes projectile vomiting or something, their efforts will be doubly vital. +- Janitorial staff will also play a strong role, since their efforts to keep the station clean will help curb the spread of the disease or prevent it from coming into existence in the first place. (Also, if a disease causes projectile vomiting or something, their efforts will be doubly vital.) -- Security might have to be responsible for keeping a panicking crew in order, or stopping people from breaking quarantine. +- Security might have to be responsible for keeping a panicking crew in order, or stopping people from breaking quarantine. For a disease like zombism, they might have to more directly protect the uninfected crew from those infected. - Command, likewise, might need to take charge of organizing the crew to act together against the threat of disease. - Engineering could help with creating quarantine zones. Atmos could help especially against airborne diseases with scrubbers and holofans. They might also be able to do things like cool down the station if the majority of the crew have terrible fevers. -- Possibly, some symptoms could be worth research points to Science? Which might lead to some interesting conflicts of interest. They should also get some relevant technologies to research - faster disease diagnosers, bluespace sample swabs, better bio-suits and the like. +- Possibly, some symptoms could be worth research points to Science? Which might lead to some interesting conflicts of interest. They should also get some relevant technologies to research - faster disease diagnosers, bluespace sample swabs, better bio-suits and the like. There could be overlap between disease and infectious anomalies, even, requiring coordination between science and medbay if the scientists want to keep the anomaly (and the patient) alive. - Cargo will have to keep the supply of sample swabs and latex gloves flowing in. They're also implicated as the department most likely to be responsible for spreading the disease all over the place. Salvage will be less directly involved, but might get to be the last few crew members left on their feet if they were away for the worst of the disease. - Service has the least to do, but might have to navigate delivering food and drinks to quarantined parts of the station. + ### Species Interactions - Reptiles, arachnids and vulpkanin, as well as any other predatory species, should have a stronger immune response to diseases that come from eating raw flesh or (for reptiles in particular) drinking floor blood. Flood blood consumption is, after all, an important part of reptilian culture. Fresh kills should also not count as unsanitary - only after they've sat for a bit do bacteria have a chance to develop. @@ -187,18 +224,31 @@ Diseases start out small and weak, then escalate through spread and mutation. A - Vox should have a stronger immune response across the board, but especially to diseases that come from trash. + ## Administrative & Server Rule Impact -There is some potential for griefing in the form of players deliberately trying to infect others. This is ameliorated in part by the fact that players potentially making bad decision about whether to get something looked at is deliberately part of the disease's challenge - a griefer and an irresponsible character don't look all that dissimilar in practice. Combined with the fact that disease sources are rare, unpredictable and invisible, and deliberate bioengineeering is difficult and slow, I think the potential for serious griefing is low. +There is some potential for griefing in the form of players deliberately trying to infect others. This is ameliorated in part by the fact that players potentially making bad decisions about whether to get something looked at is deliberately part of the disease's challenge - a griefer and an irresponsible character don't look all that dissimilar in practice. Combined with the fact that disease sources are rare, unpredictable and invisible, and deliberate bioengineeering is difficult and slow, I think the potential for serious griefing is low. # Technical Considerations The Disease Diagnoser Delta Extreme and the machine(s) that develops treatments and vaccines will need new UI. For treatments and vaccines, this could be as simple as a single text input to type the genetic code into, although it should probably also keep some record of previously-used codes and allow for quickly copying them into the text input for easy modification. The DDDE needs to indicate both viral and bacterial load: It would be fun to show bacterial load in the form of circular blots drawn on a virtual petri dish, with the presence and size of the blots indicating the amount of bacteria. Viral detection should also have something along those lines, although it's less obvious what. -There will need to be an additional component for holding viral/bacterial load on objects as well as players. For objects, this is basically just a string for the genome, plus an integer amount. For players, the extra process of experiencing disease progression and generating antiserum needs to happen, but a lot of that can mirror or directly use the existing metabolism system. +There will need to be an additional component for holding viral/bacterial load on objects as well as players. For objects, this is basically just a string for the genome, plus an integer amount. For players, the extra process of experiencing disease progression and generating antiserum needs to happen, but a lot of that can probably mirror or directly use the existing metabolism system. + +There will also need to be a way for disease instances to mutate across game time without it being computationally overwhelming. Since mutations are just a random replacement of a nucleotide or so, or possibly a removal or addition of one, this shouldn't be too big a deal. + +The hardest piece of this from a technical perspective is most likely bioengineering, since the genetic code will have to be matched up to functionality in a way that's randomizable each round, and the genomes themselves will have to be parseable. Genomes being parseable also means that they have to be parsed to determine their behavior, and mutations require that to happen whenver the disease's behavior is used, since it might have changed since the last time. It would make sense to hold off on implementing that until after the basics are established. + +### Here's one way it might work: + +A virus's genome is a series of alternating tags and modifiers. A tag will declare the 'field' being modified - mutation rate, or symptoms, or so forth. The modifier will then decode to a numeric or keyed value, possibly negative, which is added to the virus's base values for its fields. This code is interpreted linearly from the beginning of the string to the end. This is straightforward to parse, and can still have some interesting interactions when taken apart into fragments and then pieced back together. + +For added complexity, some fields could refer to specific positions in the genome for their values, or to the existing values for other fields. This has implications for mutation, since a single nucleotide replacement shouldn't usually be enough to radically change the whole disease's behavior, and since it might be possible to have horrible recursive loops that balloon out into something totally unparseable or game-breaking. The easiest solution to that last problem is: No, that shouldn't be possible. Random mutations might nevertheless have to be checked for sanity, depending on what *is* possible. # Addendum/Mediography "Doomsday Book" by Connie Willis is a marvelous work of science fiction about a time traveller who is stranded in the dark ages, cut off from resources, and has to deal with a severe disease. I encourage anyone and everyone to read it for inspiration on how virology might work, and for a general example of what good storytelling about diseases can look like. + +Of the many Star Trek episodes where the crews become infected, "Babel" from Deep Space Nine season one is a pretty good one and worth watching. One thing that's interesting and relevant is that for the disease in this episode, the first symptom that appears is the extreme, exotic one, but the second, deadlier symptom is just a fever - nothing fancy, but still potentially fatal. Its mode of transmission also mutates across the course of the episode. From 975991359f932514a1992f3703f316e65a404f01 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: SeaWyrm Date: Thu, 20 Aug 2026 23:28:29 -0600 Subject: [PATCH 12/14] Add more about symptoms and symptom progression --- .../departments/medical/proposals/virology_proposal.md | 8 ++++++++ 1 file changed, 8 insertions(+) diff --git a/src/en/space-station-14/departments/medical/proposals/virology_proposal.md b/src/en/space-station-14/departments/medical/proposals/virology_proposal.md index 57959fab78..06b8db48e2 100644 --- a/src/en/space-station-14/departments/medical/proposals/virology_proposal.md +++ b/src/en/space-station-14/departments/medical/proposals/virology_proposal.md @@ -54,6 +54,8 @@ Symptoms should also be readable. If it's not immediately obvious what a symptom Symptoms' annoyingness should also be considered part of a disease's severity. A typical mild infection should not, for instance, reduce someone's movement speed to a crawl, or make them repeatedly drop what they are holding. These symptoms should show up only in circumstances where a player has already had generous opportunity to identify and prevent them from occurring in some fashion or another, so that they are punishment for the player's failure, not an arbitrary this-person-in-particular-doesn't-get-to-have-fun-anymore. (Ideally, they should also not actually be so annoying or inconvenient that they ruin the player's fun.) +Though diseases should be generated randomly, and any combination of symptoms should be possible, they should ideally be weighted toward having symptoms that follow a common theme, or maybe a couple of themes. This helps them have coherent identities. Recognizing that certain symptoms are somewhat more likely to occur together, and preparing accordingly, also creates a way for medics to gain and use system mastery over time. The weighting should not be so strong as to prevent wacky nonsense combinations sometimes, and it certainly shouldn't be so strong that the exact same set of symptoms keep showing up together again and again and again. Diseases should be unpredictable more than they are predictable. + ### Progression @@ -61,6 +63,12 @@ Diseases should not be limited to just one symptom. As the disease progresses, m Good symptoms, therefore, should have lots of potential to affect each other either directly or indirectly. Emergent symptom interactions can help make even well-known and understood symptoms combine to create a unique and memorable disease. +While progression shouldn't introduce symptoms strictly in increasing severity, the earliest symptom or two should be relatively mild. This is important for the sake of player agency: Players get a chance to react to having a disease before the disease takes full effect, rather than getting lightning bolt-blasted with serious symptoms out of the blue. + +Symptoms should also be able to increase in severity themselves, either instead of or alongside the additions of new symptoms as the disease reaches new stages. A mild cough that turns into a hacking cough, for instance, or a light fever that becomes dangerous. + +At least one symptom in the progression should reflect the severity of the disease; a disease that has five different symptoms that make the player's nose a bit drippy in each of five different colors and does nothing else is not a severe disease, despite having a lot of symptoms. On the other hand, a severe disease doesn't have to threaten the player's life. Dumping gallons and gallons of slippery snot on the ground everywhere you walk (no matter what color it is) should probably count as severe, even if there's no way to die from it. Enough crew members with that symptom, and any captain would be justified in calling evac immediately. Not to mention an emergency janitorial squad. + ### Immunity From abdd403d25eb34c6f783f1eca6b2c64c61203606 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: SeaWyrm Date: Sat, 12 Sep 2026 17:44:53 -0600 Subject: [PATCH 13/14] Reword first section in a new style --- .../medical/proposals/virology_proposal.md | 20 +++++++++++++++---- 1 file changed, 16 insertions(+), 4 deletions(-) diff --git a/src/en/space-station-14/departments/medical/proposals/virology_proposal.md b/src/en/space-station-14/departments/medical/proposals/virology_proposal.md index 06b8db48e2..6590a1f255 100644 --- a/src/en/space-station-14/departments/medical/proposals/virology_proposal.md +++ b/src/en/space-station-14/departments/medical/proposals/virology_proposal.md @@ -31,13 +31,25 @@ Basic principles: ### Diseases -Though every round should have a mild disease or two, these should usually be ignorable or at worst inconvenient, whereas a severe disease counts as a round-defining major 'antagonist' and should be its own game mode. +In any place where a large number of living creatures are stuck together in a small area, diseases are a fact of life, and space stations are no exception. Especially those space stations that tend to get trash and puddles of unknown slop all over the floor. Or random corpses rotting in a corner of maints. -Janitors should be the station's first line of defense against contagion. Diseases show up at unsanitary locations or on unsanitary objects: Trash, spilled liquids, rotten corpses (but not fresh ones), spoiled food, grimy tiles, and so forth. Players should have some agency in their ability to avoid disease by wearing appropriate protection, (For instance: rubber gloves, surgical masks,) and by staying away from unhygeinic locations. If a player catches a disease, they should find out only when symptoms develop; symptoms are what make the disease interesting and interactive. There should be no direct "oh, I have a disease, better run to medbay" - instead, it will be a player's job to figure out when and if a medbay visit is appropriate. Initial symptoms shouldn't usually reveal how severe the disease is, either. A slight cough or sore throat might be the only symptoms they'll get, or they might be the harbingers of deadly plague. Usually, though, it should be the former. The balance should be such that a player who gets a disease shouldn't feel that running to medbay for every runny nose is the pragmatic option. +Fortunately, most diseases are minor: Barring disease-focused game modes, a typical player experience will be that they start showing a mild symptom - say, a light cough - and then it goes away after a little while. Maybe they wear a face mask to help prevent it from spreading, or maybe they don't and a couple other people in the department catch it too. -Diseases will not harm their victims directly. All damage will be a secondary effect of the disease's symptoms. For instance, a fever might cause the victim's body to heat up; it will not cause direct heat damage, though the heating effect might itself cause heat damage. This means that a patient with a disease can be treated with normal medical interventions to control the symptoms, and if the symptoms are kept under control, will recover naturally. This way, there is flexibility in how players can approach treatment, and also possibilities for emergent complexity: The disease that makes its victims heat up when the station is already overheating, the symptoms that compound with each other to create unique problems, and so on. +This is common enough to be no big deal. -Viral diseases will require a vaccine to be developed. Bacterial diseases can be treated with antibacterials. +Sometimes, the player will find that the disease is a bit worse than they thought. They'll develop a fever, perhaps. They might decide to go to medbay. At medbay, the doctors will keep the symptom in check - say, by making sure the patient doesn't overheat - and once it subsides, that's that. They might keep the patient around for a bit, but most likely they can give them something to help and send them on their way. + +Alternatively, they might decide they can handle it on their own, either by finding some way to keep their own temperature down (for instance,) or maybe just by gritting their teeth/beak/whatever and suffering through. It's up to them to determine if and when a medbay visit is warranted. + +This is less common, but still not unusual. Still common enough that if it happens, players don't feel the need to start sounding the alarm. It's probably not a terrible death plague. + +If they're too negligent, and spread it around too much, it might mutate into something that's actually a bit of an issue. Not round-defining, but maybe serious enough for medbay to have to sit up and pay attention. Maybe virology comes into play, maybe not. + +In extreme cases, where the crew are wading through sewage as they walk down the hall and sneezing on each other for laughs, this might become a real, serious issue. The disease might spread, grow and mutate until a significant portion of the station is infected. The symptoms might go from inconvenient, to genuinely life-threatening. That, however, is in the hands of the players. If it gets to that point, it's because they collectively let it get to that point. + +Or it's a disease-based game mode, of course. + +Regardless, catching a disease or not isn't totally the whim of the RNG gods. Players have some agency here. They can reduce the risk of getting sick by avoiding the filthier parts of the station, or by wearing protective gear, like rubber gloves. ### Contagion From 948cc9fb091101dfdad3fe61014946c3a5b0635e Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: SeaWyrm Date: Sun, 27 Sep 2026 20:41:34 -0600 Subject: [PATCH 14/14] Big rewrite --- .../medical/proposals/virology_proposal.md | 170 +++++++++--------- 1 file changed, 86 insertions(+), 84 deletions(-) diff --git a/src/en/space-station-14/departments/medical/proposals/virology_proposal.md b/src/en/space-station-14/departments/medical/proposals/virology_proposal.md index 6590a1f255..745c097b68 100644 --- a/src/en/space-station-14/departments/medical/proposals/virology_proposal.md +++ b/src/en/space-station-14/departments/medical/proposals/virology_proposal.md @@ -31,117 +31,103 @@ Basic principles: ### Diseases -In any place where a large number of living creatures are stuck together in a small area, diseases are a fact of life, and space stations are no exception. Especially those space stations that tend to get trash and puddles of unknown slop all over the floor. Or random corpses rotting in a corner of maints. +In any place where a large number of living creatures are stuck together in a small area, diseases are a fact of life; space stations should be no exception. Especially those space stations that tend to get trash and puddles of unknown slop all over the floor. Or random corpses rotting in a corner of maints. -Fortunately, most diseases are minor: Barring disease-focused game modes, a typical player experience will be that they start showing a mild symptom - say, a light cough - and then it goes away after a little while. Maybe they wear a face mask to help prevent it from spreading, or maybe they don't and a couple other people in the department catch it too. +For game purposes, however, most diseases should be minor, barring disease-focused game modes. + +A typical player experience should be that they start showing a mild symptom - say, a light cough - and then it goes away after a little while. Maybe they wear a face mask to help prevent it from spreading, or maybe they don't and a couple other people in the department catch it too. This is common enough to be no big deal. -Sometimes, the player will find that the disease is a bit worse than they thought. They'll develop a fever, perhaps. They might decide to go to medbay. At medbay, the doctors will keep the symptom in check - say, by making sure the patient doesn't overheat - and once it subsides, that's that. They might keep the patient around for a bit, but most likely they can give them something to help and send them on their way. +Sometimes, the player will find out that the disease is a bit worse than they thought. New, worse symptoms will develop - a fever, for example. Nothing major, but maybe they decide to go to medbay, where the doctors will take action to protect them from the effects of their symptoms - something to stop them from overheating, for example. Medbay might keep the patient around for a bit, but most likely they can give them something to help and send them on their way. Alternatively, the player might decide they can handle it on their own. Maybe they think of a way to take care of their own symptoms, or maybe they just decide to grit their teeth/beak/whatever and suffer through. Either way, the symptoms will eventually subside. -Alternatively, they might decide they can handle it on their own, either by finding some way to keep their own temperature down (for instance,) or maybe just by gritting their teeth/beak/whatever and suffering through. It's up to them to determine if and when a medbay visit is warranted. +This is less common, but still not unusual. Still common enough that if it happens, players don't feel they need to make a big deal out of it. Maybe it's a terrible death plague in its early stages, sure, but usually it isn't. Even from a meta point of view, "I have a fever" does not imply "Violet alert! This is a plague round! Quarantine the station! Arm the virologists with shotguns and kill anything that sneezes!" -This is less common, but still not unusual. Still common enough that if it happens, players don't feel the need to start sounding the alarm. It's probably not a terrible death plague. +If the players are too negligent, and allow a less-mild disease to spread too much, the disease might mutate into something that's actually a bit of an issue. Maybe serious enough for medbay to have to sit up and pay attention. Maybe virology comes into play, maybe not. -If they're too negligent, and spread it around too much, it might mutate into something that's actually a bit of an issue. Not round-defining, but maybe serious enough for medbay to have to sit up and pay attention. Maybe virology comes into play, maybe not. +In extreme cases, where the crew are wading through sewage as they walk down the hall and coughing on each other for laughs, the disease could go completely out of countrol. The disease might spread, grow and mutate until a significant portion of the station is infected. The symptoms might go from inconvenient, to genuinely life-threatening. That, however, is in the hands of the players. If it gets to that point, it's because they collectively let it get to that point. -In extreme cases, where the crew are wading through sewage as they walk down the hall and sneezing on each other for laughs, this might become a real, serious issue. The disease might spread, grow and mutate until a significant portion of the station is infected. The symptoms might go from inconvenient, to genuinely life-threatening. That, however, is in the hands of the players. If it gets to that point, it's because they collectively let it get to that point. +Or, of course, because it really is a disease-focused game mode. -Or it's a disease-based game mode, of course. +Whether or not a player catches a disease in the first place shouldn't be solely due to the whims of RNG. Players who interact with unhygienic things and fail to use appropriate protective gear - or to at least wash their hands with soap afterward, as the case may be - should be more at risk, whereas players who take precautions against disease should see those precautions pay off. -Regardless, catching a disease or not isn't totally the whim of the RNG gods. Players have some agency here. They can reduce the risk of getting sick by avoiding the filthier parts of the station, or by wearing protective gear, like rubber gloves. ### Contagion -Contagion should come in multiple possible forms, so that determining how to prevent the spread of diseases by practical means is part of the detective work required. If a disease isn't airborne, then facial masks should be useless against it, for instance. - -Diseases should be contagious before the arrival of symptoms in order to prevent incentivising game behavior that immediately shuts them down, such as anyone with a slight sniffle stuffing themselves into a biohazard suit so that they can't spread anything. They might still do that, but it's less of a binary spread/don't spread since they've already been spreading it for a bit. - - -### Symptoms - -Symptoms should range from mundane to bizarre, harmless to gross to inconvenient to extremely dangerous, and from serious to silly. There should not be symptoms with solely beneficial effects. Either they're paired with significant downsides - yes, zombism makes you stronger, but it also makes you a zombie - or they shouldn't be beneficial at all unless by circumstance. (For instance, having a fever when the station is too cold.) Symptoms should, in general, feel like they're part of a disease, even if it's a silly one. They shouldn't generally be so extreme that they distract from regular gameplay - no disease that makes you spew particle or shader effects that flood everyone's screen, for instance, or that constantly spam loud and annoying sound effects, unless maybe it's a *very* severe disease in its very late stages - but they shouldn't be invisible, either, at least to the player that has them. Overall, simple is better than complex, and it's better to err on the side of subtlety, though subtlety should also be modulated by disease severity. - -Symptoms should also be readable. If it's not immediately obvious what a symptom does to you and how you might deal with its effects, it should at least be straightforward to figure it out. There can and should, however, be symptoms that strongly resemble each other, so that it might seem like a player has one when they have the other; though even these should be possible to tell apart eventually or under the right kind of test. +Different diseases should have different methods of contagion. -Symptoms' annoyingness should also be considered part of a disease's severity. A typical mild infection should not, for instance, reduce someone's movement speed to a crawl, or make them repeatedly drop what they are holding. These symptoms should show up only in circumstances where a player has already had generous opportunity to identify and prevent them from occurring in some fashion or another, so that they are punishment for the player's failure, not an arbitrary this-person-in-particular-doesn't-get-to-have-fun-anymore. (Ideally, they should also not actually be so annoying or inconvenient that they ruin the player's fun.) +Determining how a disease spreads, and therefore what will stop it from spreading, is part of the detective work required to combat it. Players who catch a disease might take a few obvious precautions, but there shouldn't be a single, simple go-to solution that will perfectly shut down a disease's spread every time. -Though diseases should be generated randomly, and any combination of symptoms should be possible, they should ideally be weighted toward having symptoms that follow a common theme, or maybe a couple of themes. This helps them have coherent identities. Recognizing that certain symptoms are somewhat more likely to occur together, and preparing accordingly, also creates a way for medics to gain and use system mastery over time. The weighting should not be so strong as to prevent wacky nonsense combinations sometimes, and it certainly shouldn't be so strong that the exact same set of symptoms keep showing up together again and again and again. Diseases should be unpredictable more than they are predictable. +Diseases should also be contagious for a period of time before a player starts noticing symptoms. Once they know they're sick, it should already be too late to keep it perfectly contained. +Methods of contagion should mostly be straightforward, but with a possibility of occasional sci-fi wackiness: Diseases that spread through eye contact, for instance, or that infect some of the words a person says, making other people who say those same words liable to catch it. -### Progression -Diseases should not be limited to just one symptom. As the disease progresses, more symptoms should be revealed. This is one way that diseases can worsen, and it ensures that just because a disease starts with a simple cough or sniffle doesn't mean it won't progress to something more serious. Obviously, diseases with more symptoms should be considered to have higher severity. That doesn't mean that disease progression necessarily *needs* to reveal progressively more dangerous symptoms, though. Mixing different symptoms keeps the disease unpredictable. Harmless but visually distinctive symptoms can add heightened drama by revealing that a character is without a doubt infected, or increase tension by heralding the imminent arrival of other symptoms. Inconvenient but non-dangerous ones can also compound with earlier symptoms to increase the amount of danger: A character who becomes unable to walk very quickly, for instance, might not be able to make it to medbay in time for their needed dose of whatever keeps their earlier symptoms in check, and a necessary chore turns into a dramatic struggle for survival. (Or possibly a farcical struggle for survival, which is also good as long as it's funny.) +### Symptoms -Good symptoms, therefore, should have lots of potential to affect each other either directly or indirectly. Emergent symptom interactions can help make even well-known and understood symptoms combine to create a unique and memorable disease. +Symptoms are the most important part of a disease. Without them, a disease is invisible, intangible, and may as well not exist. The only harm caused by a disease is through its symptoms. -While progression shouldn't introduce symptoms strictly in increasing severity, the earliest symptom or two should be relatively mild. This is important for the sake of player agency: Players get a chance to react to having a disease before the disease takes full effect, rather than getting lightning bolt-blasted with serious symptoms out of the blue. +Symptoms should range from mundane to bizarre, harmless to gross to inconvenient to extremely dangerous, and from serious to silly. -Symptoms should also be able to increase in severity themselves, either instead of or alongside the additions of new symptoms as the disease reaches new stages. A mild cough that turns into a hacking cough, for instance, or a light fever that becomes dangerous. +There should not be symptoms with solely beneficial effects. Either they're paired with significant downsides - yes, zombism makes you stronger, but it also makes you a zombie - or they shouldn't be beneficial at all unless by circumstance. (For instance, having a fever when the station is too cold.) -At least one symptom in the progression should reflect the severity of the disease; a disease that has five different symptoms that make the player's nose a bit drippy in each of five different colors and does nothing else is not a severe disease, despite having a lot of symptoms. On the other hand, a severe disease doesn't have to threaten the player's life. Dumping gallons and gallons of slippery snot on the ground everywhere you walk (no matter what color it is) should probably count as severe, even if there's no way to die from it. Enough crew members with that symptom, and any captain would be justified in calling evac immediately. Not to mention an emergency janitorial squad. +Symptoms should feel biological in nature. They should feel like they're part of a disease, not just wacky, random nonsense. That's not to say that symptoms shouldn't be wacky; just that they should be biologically wacky. They're being caused by tiny reproducing entities hijacking the machinery of the body they're inside, or by the body's own response to that hijacking. Even if they're really weird tiny reproducing entities. +Symptoms can cause visual and auditory effects, but they shouldn't be so garish or extreme that they distract other players from regular gameplay unless the mere fact of the disease itself is also that distracting; symptoms that display strobing lights, screen-covering shaders visible to other players, or that produce loud, shocking noises should only show up when the whole station is falling apart to the disease. -### Immunity +Symptoms should be readable: If it's not immediately obvious what a symptom does to you and how you might deal with its effects, it should at least be straightforward to figure it out. There can and should, however, be symptoms that strongly resemble each other, so that one might be mistaken for the other at first. -When a player catches a disease, their body immediately begins fighting back by producing antiserum. The disease's viral load will quickly ramp up and then taper off, while the antiserum will start off accumulating slowly, but build up until it can overwhelm the disease. How likely a disease is to kill the player before their own immune system can handle it is a big part of what differentiates serious diseases from mild ones: Mild ones will generally go away on their own, whereas serious ones will have both dangerous enough symptoms and fast enough growth that their victim is likely to lose the battle. +A disease's symptoms, like the other aspects of the disease, should be random, though they could be weighted so that particular symptoms tend to appear or not appear together. Diseases should have anywhere from one or two to a few different symptoms. -Antiserum is keyed to a particular disease. If a player catches more than one disease, they will begin producing a second type of antiserum against the second disease. This way, players aren't strongly incentivised to cultivate and catch mild diseases in order to build up their immune system against major ones. This also provides a simple and emergent way for players to develop immunity: The antiserum lingers in their bloodstream, making it harder for later infections to get a foothold. -"Lymph nodes" would be an appropriate organ to metabolize antiserum. +### Progression +Diseases get worse over time, and one way that happens is through new symptoms showing up: Just because a disease starts with a simple cough or sniffle doesn't mean it won't progress to something more serious. A mild disease might be limited to one or two symptoms, but more serious diseases will have more nasty surprises for their victims lying in wait. -### Diagnosis and Treatment +Although the most dangerous symptoms should generally show up later in the disease's progression, the symptoms don't have to follow a strict ordering in severity. It's more interesting and dramatic if it's possible, for instance, that a distinctive but harmless symptom shows up second-to-last, just a short while before the final, most lethal one. Now the player (assuming they've seen others experience these symptoms before them) knows their time is running out. Or maybe it's the last symptom that's the harmless one, indicating that the disease has almost run its course and the player can breathe a sigh of relief. -The first step in diagnosis is simply observing and talking to patients to start to build a profile of the disease. Swab samples can be taken from patients and from objects and surfaces that are suspected of harboring diseases; the Disease Diagnoser Delta Extreme will take a swab sample and reveal if there is a disease present in the sample, and if so, whether it is viral or bacterial. +The earliest symptom or two should still be relatively mild. This is important for the sake of player agency: Players get a chance to react to having a disease before the disease takes full effect, rather than getting lightning bolt-blasted with serious symptoms out of the blue. -The first step in treatment is symptom management. Patients who are kept alive long enough will recover, so depending on the severity of the disease, this might be all that is required, if anything. Beyond symptom management, both types of diseases can be directly attacked in slightly different ways. +At least one symptom in the progression should reflect the severity of the disease; a disease that has five different symptoms that make the player's nose a bit drippy in each of five different colors and does nothing else is not a severe disease, despite having a lot of symptoms. On the other hand, a severe disease doesn't have to threaten the player's life. Dumping gallons and gallons of slippery snot on the ground everywhere you walk (no matter what color it is) should probably count as severe, even if there's no way to die from it. Enough crew members with that symptom, and any captain would be justified in calling evac immediately. Not to mention an emergency janitorial squad. -Bacterial diseases should be more common, and easier to treat. Doctors will have access to antibiotics that should be broadly effective against them. Strong enough bacterial infections might build up resistance to a particular antibiotic over time, requiring the doctors to use a different one. This makes chemistry a bit more interactive, since the chemists can usually just pick their favorite antibiotic to create, but might be called on to switch things up later. -There should probably not be more than, say, three different antibiotics, with enough difference between them that different circumstances might make one or another easier to produce, but without any particular one dominating the others. Chemists should not generally feel pressure to make more than one of them. Maints chemistry should strongly favor one, however; the downside of tider DIY antibiotics is that it's more likely to build bacterial resistance due to lack of variety. +### Immunity -In the case of bacterial diseases, some of the virology tools can still be helpful for tracking down the disease's source to eliminate it, possibly with some janitorial assistance for those hard-to-clean surfaces. +Diseases should play out as a race between the disease itself and the character's immune system. Either the disease's symptoms overwhelm the character, or eventually their immune system overwhelms the disease itself. Assuming they survive, the character should have some lingering immunity to prevent them from immediately re-catching it. -Viral diseases are more complicated, and are much easier to protect against than to directly treat after infection has already happened. The virologists will need to piece together the virus's genetic sequence as best they can. The most effective way to do this will involve some legwork and detective skills: Tracking down contaminated individuals, objects, and surfaces, and taking lots and lots of swab samples. Each sample will have fragments of the virus's entire genome. To reveal these fragments, the sample must be run through a new machine: The gene sequencer. This will take a little while - maybe 30 seconds to a minute, say - to sequence the DNA from the sample, though multiple samples can be queued up and run in parallel. The delay introduces downtime in the virology lab, incentivising virologists to go out into the station and gather more samples and information about the disease's spread. The ability to do it in parallel ensures that multiple samples taken together can still be useful. The gene sequencer, when finished sequencing, will present its results in the form of a set of chopped-up, unordered segments of varying length and completeness. Older samples will have shorter segments, fewer segments, and a higher likelihood of having unreadable or incorrect nucleotides. Contaminated sources might also have fragments that aren't part of the virus's genome. +Immunity to one disease shouldn't help against other diseases. There should be no incentive for players to catch a really mild disease so that they can build up immunity against a more serious one. -The DDDE can take the data from the sequencer and manage it in a way that will help the virologist organize the information they have and offer some information about what the fragments actually do within the virus (see "Bioengineering" below.) -If the sample comes from a patient's blood, it will also have pieces of the patient's own DNA (the same code used by detectives) mixed in with the viral DNA. Virologists will have to sort out which fragments come from which source. Blood, incidentally, must be centrifuged and separated into components, one of which will contain the DNA sample. +### Diagnosis and Treatment -One important part of this is that the virologists will have to take samples from a variety of sources, rather than a single patient over and over again. A single patient will only offer a single piece of the puzzle. They will also be incentivised to figure out the course of the disease's spread if they can, since the first infections will have the best data. +In most cases, treating a disease is simply a matter of keeping the symptoms under control until the patient's own immune system fights it off. -Virologists don't need to figure out the whole genome of the virus before they can start to produce treatment, but the closer their sequence is to the correct sequence, the more effective it will be. If the treatment sequence is too far off, it will either be ineffective, or downright harmful. They can also produce vaccines based on shorter fragments of DNA. The effectiveness of the vaccine is based both on how well it matches the viral DNA, and how long a sequence it uses; a vaccine based on, say, the single-nucleotide sequence "A" would match pretty much any virus, but would be basically useless. It's up to them to decide when their information is good enough. +As a serious disease worsens and spreads across the station, however, it'll eventually become clear to the medical department that something more proactive will need to be done. -Once the virologist has a promising sequence, they can take it to the vaccine generator, which will produce a small quantity of test vaccine. When a test treatment is determined to be effective, it can be sent to Chemistry for mass-production. Vaccines of course won't help patients who are already infected, but will prompt uninfected patients to start producing antiserum and thereby building up immunity. +Once the call has been made, the first step will be simply observing and talking to patients to start to build a profile of the disease. The medics will want to get a clear understanding of what the symptoms are and how the disease spreads, but also where it originated and who caught it first. -The only real way to treat patients who are already infected with a virus, outside of disease management, is to produce antiserum, which can only be done in the blood of an infected living host (see "Bioengineering" below.) +Virologists will also want to start taking swab samples (or something like that) from the disease's victims. Their goal is to get a wide array of samples, and not just from inside medbay: They should be going out into the station to sample other people who have caught the disease, as well as surfaces and objects that might be contaminated, and to interview people to help narrow down the disease's origin. -For bacteria, petri dishes will be available. A petri dish can be swabbed, and any bacteria present on the swab will be loaded into the petri dish. Once enough time has passed, the petri dish will reveal the presence, amount, and number of different types of bacteria that have grown in it. Reagents can also be added to a petri dish to observe their effects on the bacteria - this is one way to check if bacteria have developed resistence to a given antibiotic. Petri dishes should be supplied to Virology, and possibly also Chemistry. +Alongside this, they will be analyzing their samples with the virology equipment. The analysis machine should take some time to finish running, to help encourage the virologists to go back out into the station to find more sample sources, but it should also be possible to analyze multiple samples at once, since the virologists will have a lot of them and will continue collecting more. -Petri dishes can break, spilling their bacterial load onto the ground. They will also contain agar, a food reagent that will transmit any bacteria growing in the dish to anyone who eats it. If there are no bacteria, it is harmless. Agar could also potentially be a component in food or drink recipes for chefs and bartenders. +The analyzed samples will contain fragments of the disease's genetic code, possibly with inaccuracies, and possibly contaminated with DNA from the patient, or from other sources. The virologists must use these to figure out the virus's genome as best they can. No single sample will contain the whole genome, even in fragments, so the virologists will want to take a variety of samples from a variety of sources. -Viruses should not interact with petri dishes. +Samples from things or people who caught the disease earlier in the disease's history should have fewer inaccuracies than samples from later on. However, older samples should be more fragmentary and have more pieces missing. This creates a tension where virologists have to decide how much time to spend tracking the origin down, and when to do the best they can with the information they have. +Since diseases don't show their symptoms until some time after their victim has caught them, it may not even be possible for the virologists to figure out exactly where the disease started. The player who caught it first might not themself know. Between that and the disease's mutations, it probably won't be possible for virologists to get an exact match; such a thing might not even exist. Their task is to get close enough fast enough to start producing a reasonably effective vaccine before it's too late for it to matter. -### Recordkeeping +To produce a trial vaccine, virologists will have to input their best guess into the vaccine producer, and then give it a bit of time and/or resources. This should only produce a small amount of vaccine - enough for one patient, maybe. Enough to test its effectiveness, but not enough to easily vaccinate the whole station. Virologists might produce multiple trial vaccines before they create one they're happy with. Once they do, mass-producing it from the trial sample should be a different process, possibly conducted by the chemistry department, and expensive enough that it's worth trying to get it right the first time. Some of these things might still happen in parallel, with the virologists offering a poor vaccine quickly and then spending time developing better, more effective ones. -The vaccinator machine should automatically log all created vaccines to the medical records computer's database - something a would-be bioengineer will have to keep in mind if they're trying to be underhanded. Virologists can then use the computer to associate vaccines with patients they've been used on, similar to how the criminal records computer can be used to set crewmembers to wanted and so forth. +The computers used to develop vaccines should keep good records of what the virologists have and haven't tried, what the analysis results were from past samples, and ideally allow the virologists to add notes for when and where each sample was taken. Sample swabs should also accept paper labels. -Swabs and petri dishes should accept paper labels, also. +Vaccines, of course, are not a cure. Those vaccinated will get a head-start on building up their immune system against the disease, but if they've already caught it, it won't do them much good. ### Mutation -Mutation rate is one of the things that can make a disease more dangerous. - -Bacterial diseases can only mutate to build up resistance to specific antibacterial agents. They have no actual genetic code. - -Viruses, however, can cause more problems. +Diseases will mutate over time. -First of all, as viruses mutate, they will drift from the original virus's genetic code, making treatment less effective. Second, as the code mutates, the disease's symptoms and stats will also change. At worst, this can introduce new, more harmful symptoms. For more serious diseases, virologists will have to act fast and continue gathering samples to stay ahead of mutations. Treatment based on the original genome will still tend to be most effective overall, since it will best match the widest range of possible mutations, but as a disease spreads, that initial genome will become less and less relevant as the separate instances of the disease mutate away from each other. Mutations might also make the disease less impactful, of course. - -This also affects antiserum! A rapidly-mutating virus's genome might drift from what the victim's immune system is trying to fight to the point where the antiserum they've accumulated becomes useless. Only the most severe diseases should mutate rapidly, as this makes them both more dangerous to catch, and significantly harder to vaccinate against. +This will impact both the way the disease behaves - it may acquire new symptoms or change its mode of contagion, for instance - and how well virology can attack it, since a mutated virus will have a slightly different genome. The more time the disease has for its separate strains to diverge from the origin, the harder it will be for virology to make a vaccine that's effective against all of those strains at once. ### Virology as a Role @@ -153,53 +139,67 @@ It is the CMO's job to coordinate virology work and ensure that the available do ### Prevention -As well as helping prevent oneself from catching a disease, players should be able to use protective equipment to stop themselves from spreading it, depending on its mode of transmission. Aside from things like surgical masks and latex gloves, this could include, for instance, tissues or handkerchiefs for a minor disease that causes something like coughing or sneezing. (Anyone who leaves their used tissues on the ground is a bad person and should feel bad. Anyone who picks them up bare-handed is liable to contract whatever disease the person had.) +Players should be able to use protective equipment not just to avoid catching diseases, but also to stop themselves from spreading one. Aside from things like surgical masks and latex gloves, this could include, for instance, tissues or handkerchiefs for a minor disease that causes something like coughing or sneezing. Obviously, at the other end of the spectrum, there are biohazard suits. + +Janitors can help prevent diseases by keeping the station clean in general, but should also be able to disinfect surfaces, potentially stopping a disease right at the source. Space Cleaner and bleach are the obvious tools for this; bleach should be more effective, but less available. + +Janitors should not, however, be able to immediately tell whether or not a surface is disease-contaminated - much less how contaminated it is. They should have to work with the virology department on this. Virologists can test a sample swab to see if there is a disease present, and then pass that information back to the janitorial staff. -For cleaning surfaces, Space Cleaner should be somewhat effective, and bleach much more so - but less available. Janitors should not be immediately able to see how germ- or virus-ridden a given surface is, or else the upgrade path will be fairly pointless, since they can just keep spraying Space Cleaner until it's totally disinfected, and they'll have much less incentive to work with the medical department to find and eliminate disease sources, since they can locate them just fine on their own. +Any tool that can immediately reveal whether something is diseased without having to sample and analyze should be top-tier technology, if it exists at all. ### Quarantine -Quarantine is fun, except for when it really, really isn't: Dividing the station up into "safe" and "infected" areas could lead to all sorts of interesting situations, and should be encouraged by giving the virology department a healthy supply of inflatable doors and barriers, as well as warning signs and holos to put up. Locking a given player into a tiny room for half the round should be discouraged, and isolated wards for sick people should probably not be provided. If they decide something like that is seriously needed, the station might consider repurposing genpop or something, in which case all the benefits of genpop over individual cells are in play at least. +It'd be hard to have diseases and not have players attempting to quarantine each other. Locking someone up in a tiny room for a long time, however, isn't much fun - we already have genpop to avoid exactly that. -Unfortunately, it would be difficult for any system where infections can be passed from player to player to not have some incentive for players to lock each other up. +Dividing larger parts of the station up into "safe" and "infected" areas, however, has the potential to be much more interesting. -For this design, it helps that diseases both have an incubation period where they can spread undetected, and multiple possible modes of transmission. Locking an infected person up still might seem like a good idea, but there are alternatives if the mode of transmission is identified, and it's less effective anyway since by the time symptoms show up, at least some of the damage is already done. The added uncertainty especially means that locking a particular person up is less undeniably a good idea, giving them more grounds to argue back or even justifiably resist. +To discourage the former and encourage the latter, isolated wards for sick people should not be included in station maps. Instead, virologists should be equipped with things like inflatable doors and barriers, warning signs or holos, and other tools of that sort. Setting up larger quarantine zones might also be a task for security to get involved in. + +For this design, it helps that diseases both have an incubation period where they can spread undetected, and multiple possible modes of transmission. Locking an infected person up by themself still might seem like a good idea, but there might be alternatives depending on the mode of transmission. Besides that, by the time symptoms show up, at least some of the damage is already done. This gives players some grounds to argue back or even justifiably resist if anyone tries to lock them away. ### Bioengineering For anyone who wants to dip their rubber-gloved arms into the dirty, grimy world of engineering their own viruses, thinking of a virus's genetic code as a mere string of letters is no longer sufficient. The code has to have meaning. The process of bioengineering revolves around unlocking that meaning piece by piece, and using those pieces however possible. -The first step should be the same as that for vaccine creation: Collecting samples. Would-be bioengineers shouldn't be able to sit around in a closed-off room any more than any other practitioner of virology. Once those samples are sequenced, the bioengineer should get imperfect information about each fragment's function in the virus's genome. Aside from the data being incomplete, fragments should also interact with each other to change each others' behavior, leading both to more emergence, more opportunity for interesting bioengineering results, and more difficulty in achieving a specific, desired result. Bioengineers will also have to factor out unrelated DNA from the sample's contributor, same as for regular vaccine development, or the information they get will be contaminated and innacurate. +The first step should be the same as that for vaccine creation: Collecting samples. Would-be bioengineers shouldn't be able to sit around in a closed-off room any more than any other practitioner of virology. -Where vaccine creation only requires piecing the fragments into as complete a genome as possible, engineering is about taking the fragments and creating something new with them. Since they're limited to the fragments they're able to find, they probably won't be able to create exactly the virus they're hoping for. Instead, they'll have to figure out what they can do with the fragments they have. +Once those samples are sequenced, the bioengineer should get imperfect information about each fragment's function in the virus's genome. They might also have to factor out contaminating DNA, just like if they were hunting for a vaccine. -To prevent gaming the system, the mappings between code fragments and effects should be random for each round. There might, however, be recognizable patterns or the like, allowing experienced virologists to figure things out more quickly. Ideally, there is room for skill mastery, but no room for bioengineering to devolve into copy-paste-this-genetic-code-to-make-superplague. +Where vaccine creation only requires piecing the fragments into as complete a genome as possible, however, engineering is about taking the fragments and creating something new with them. Since the bioengineer is limited to the fragments they're able to find, they almost certainly won't be able to create exactly the virus they're hoping for. Instead, they'll have to figure out what they can do with the fragments they have. -Once the bioengineer has come up with a genome they feel good about, they should be able to produce it in the vaccinator the same way a vaccine is produced. The only difference is the intent behind the genome entered into the system. This should not, however, be enough to create an actual disease: A vaccine isn't the same as a live virus. To make an actual disease, the bioengineer will have to extract the actual live, viral load from the vaccinator - possibly by disassembling it to get at an internal vial or beaker, making this step the one where someone up to no good is most likely to be caught - and then find a way to incubate it in a host body until it is strong enough to survive in the wild. +Once the bioengineer has come up with a genome they feel good about, they should be able to produce it in the vaccinator the same way a vaccine is produced. The only difference is the intent behind the genome entered into the system. This should not, however, be enough to create an actual disease: A vaccine isn't the same as a live virus. To make an actual disease, the bioengineer will have to take extra steps to extract the actual live, viral load from the vaccinator - possibly by disassembling it to get at an internal vial or beaker, making this step the one where someone up to no good is most likely to be caught - and then find a way to incubate it in a host body until it is strong enough to survive in the wild; there should be very little viral load produced this way. 1u, perhaps: The bioengineer gets one shot at incubating it without having to redo the whole process of generating a sample from the beginning. -The easiest host body to use will obviously be the bioengineer's own. A would-be plaguebringer will probably have to suffer the effects of their own creation, making this process primarily the domain of those who would die a glorious death - though milder diseases should not be outside the purview of regular antagonists, or maybe even mischievous crew members if the disease is more or less harmless. A more cautious but slower approach would be to capture several live mice, for instance, though they will be harder to extract useful amounts of viral load from before they die. +The easiest host body to use will obviously be the bioengineer's own. This is good! Creating a death-plague is serious business, and should require sacrifice. Those who which to spread disease without themselves dying a glorious death should have a much harder time of it: For instance, a more cautious but slower approach would be to capture several live mice, though they will be harder to extract useful amounts of viral load from before they die. Monkey and kobold cubes, the obvious choice for getting ready-made victims, should have downsides in practice: For instance, maybe the monkeys and kobolds have no real immune systems to speak of, since they're not intended to last very long post-hydration, and will die even faster than mice. The bioengineer could also kidnap crew members, trading their own immediate safety for an increased risk of getting caught. -It should not be possible to mass-produce live viral load the same way that vaccines can be mass-produced. The only way to do it should be to either find victims, or take the personal risk. +There should be no easy, risk-free approach to this. It should not be possible to mass-produce live viral load the same way that vaccines can be mass-produced. The only ways to do it should be to either find victims, or suffer the effects of one's own creation. -Viral load in the host body will be constantly attacked by the host's immune system, but just like antiserum, the viral load should be extractable from a centrifuged blood sample. The bioengineer can either use that directly, or release the host or hosts into the station at large once the disease is established in them and let the virus spread on the strength of its own contagion - depending of course on how that contagion itself has been engineered. An engineered disease with severe symptoms but little to no contagion might be an effective assassination tool. Or a needlessly complicated one. +Syndicate agents should get access to some kind of immuno-suppresant to help ensure their disease's host doesn't kill off the disease before it can establish itself. -Since antiserum is also extractable from blood, it should also be possible - in dire circumstances - to use this same process of deliberate infection and blood sample extraction to produce more antiserum that can be injected into disease victims to help them recover. Obviously, this should not be a better solution to the problem than developing a vaccine. Since the antiserum can only be produced in an infected person's body, and since the quantity of antiserum is dependent on how long the person has been infected, it's unlikely that it would be in most situations, though. +In addition to just releasing the infected host into the station and letting contagion do all the work, the bioengineer should be able to extract the increased amount of viral load from the host's bloodstream so that they can find more creative delivery systems. Or so they can target a specific victim. ### Zombies and Romerol -The components of zombism could and should be picked apart and added separately as (rare, severe) symptoms and transmission modes within this system, possibly weighted to have a greater chance of occuring together. Romerol then simply becomes a particular strain of disease that causes all of the zombie symptoms together, suspended within blood. Zombie gameplay remains similar, in that the blood of zombies can be used by virology to help pin down the virus's genome and thereby develop a treatment. Initial Infected rounds, likewise, work basically the same way, with II players starting out with a certain amount of viral load in their bloodstream, a deficiency in antiserum production, and a particularly long time until onset of symptoms. +Zombism is a disease, albeit one with some very strange and particular effects. + +To integrate zombies into this system, the symptoms of that disease should be picked apart and treated the same as other symptoms, albeit rare ones. Romeral is then simply a particular strain of disease that combines the zombism symptoms all together. Ambuzol is any vaccine that attacks the genome of that disease. + +This way, zombie gameplay remains very similar, in that virologists will need lots of zombie corpses to extract blood from in order to make a vaccine. The difference is that instead of mixing it with chemicals, they're sequencing it to puzzle out its genome. + +For Initial Infected, they simply start out infected with a strain of zombism that won't show its symptoms too quickly but also won't be too weak to survive the II's own immune system; maybe II start out immunosuppressed to make this more straightforward. The version of the disease that II have should ideally be identical to what they pass along to their victims, though there might be some aspects, like the ability to succumb to the infection, that have to be handled as special cases. + +Breaking the disease into symptoms also allows for variant zombies and zombie-adjacent diseases, both in zombie rounds and in general. ## Game Design Rationale The ideal is for diseases to be interactive for everyone involved, to present interesting and meaningful decisions both mechanically and for roleplay, and to not arbitrarily limit someone's gameplay out of the blue: Getting infected is at least partially a consequence of a player's actions, and having a disease is often manageable with the right equipment or behavior. -An important part of this is that virologists don't get to just sit in their department and swirl test tubes or whatever. They have to get out there and track down the disease's source, which will generally require interacting with crew members as well as poking about in various parts of the station. +Another important part of this is that virologists don't get to just sit in their department and swirl test tubes or whatever. They have to get out there and track down the disease's source, which will generally require interacting with crew members as well as poking about in various parts of the station. -On the flip side, having a disease doesn't automatically mean running to virology - most diseases won't have enough impact to be worth doing anything about other than to carry tissues and maybe take off a layer of insulating clothing. Even somewhat more serious diseases might be manageable with regular medication, or topicals, or just gritting one's teeth/beak/whatever and tanking it. This means that having a disease is interactive for the victim; they're not just an object for virology to deal with. They have to make their own decisions about how and if to address their own symptoms, balancing the possibility that they've contracted something horrible that will lay waste to the entire crew with the probability that it'll go away on its own and be no big deal. +On the flip side, having a disease doesn't automatically mean running to virology - most diseases won't have enough impact to be worth doing anything about other than to carry tissues and maybe take off a layer of insulating clothing. Even somewhat more serious diseases might be manageable with regular medication, or topicals, or something along those lines. This means that having a disease is interactive for the victim; they're not just an object for virology to deal with. They have to make their own decisions about how and if to address their own symptoms, balancing the possibility that they've contracted something horrible that will lay waste to the entire crew with the probability that it'll go away on its own and be no big deal. The different modes of transmission also lead to decision-making for infected crewmembers, since they have to figure out what they can and should do to prevent spreading their disease to others. @@ -214,57 +214,57 @@ In a regular round, there should be a constant, low chance for a mild disease to In a disease-focused game mode round, a severe disease should spawn, obviously. The only real difference between a severe disease and a mild one should be the numbers: Severe diseases can have higher mutation rates, a longer infection period before symptoms appear, faster progression once symptoms do appear, more serious symptoms, or most likely a combination of those. Like mild diseases, these can be created randomly, so that no two diseases are the same. -Diseases start out small and weak, then escalate through spread and mutation. A quick and appropriate response on the part of the crew - not just virology, but the whole crew - can stop the disease in its tracks. On the other hand, a severe disease (or a sufficiently-neglected moderate one) has the potential to lay waste to the entire crew and render the station downright uninhabitable if the crew can't stay ahead of them. +Diseases start out small and weak, then escalate through spread and mutation. A quick and appropriate response on the part of the crew - not just virology, but the whole crew - can stop the disease in its tracks. On the other hand, a severe disease (or a sufficiently-neglected moderate one) has the potential to lay waste to the entire crew and render the station downright uninhabitable if the crew can't stay ahead of it. ### Department Interactions - Medbay will be the main defense against any serious disease. Not just through virology, but also through the doctors responsible for treating the symptoms; the chemists who will need to help produce and distribute treatments and vaccines; and the paramedics, who have to face the risks of going out into the infected parts of the station to recover downed crewmembers. -- Janitorial staff will also play a strong role, since their efforts to keep the station clean will help curb the spread of the disease or prevent it from coming into existence in the first place. (Also, if a disease causes projectile vomiting or something, their efforts will be doubly vital.) +- Janitorial staff will also play a strong role, since their efforts to keep the station clean will help curb the spread of the disease or prevent it from coming into existence in the first place. Not to mention, they'll be vital if a disease causes projectile vomiting or something. - Security might have to be responsible for keeping a panicking crew in order, or stopping people from breaking quarantine. For a disease like zombism, they might have to more directly protect the uninfected crew from those infected. - Command, likewise, might need to take charge of organizing the crew to act together against the threat of disease. -- Engineering could help with creating quarantine zones. Atmos could help especially against airborne diseases with scrubbers and holofans. They might also be able to do things like cool down the station if the majority of the crew have terrible fevers. +- Engineering could help with creating quarantine zones. Atmos could help against airborne diseases with scrubbers and holofans. They might also be able to do things like cool down the station if the majority of the crew have terrible fevers. - Possibly, some symptoms could be worth research points to Science? Which might lead to some interesting conflicts of interest. They should also get some relevant technologies to research - faster disease diagnosers, bluespace sample swabs, better bio-suits and the like. There could be overlap between disease and infectious anomalies, even, requiring coordination between science and medbay if the scientists want to keep the anomaly (and the patient) alive. - Cargo will have to keep the supply of sample swabs and latex gloves flowing in. They're also implicated as the department most likely to be responsible for spreading the disease all over the place. Salvage will be less directly involved, but might get to be the last few crew members left on their feet if they were away for the worst of the disease. -- Service has the least to do, but might have to navigate delivering food and drinks to quarantined parts of the station. +- Service has the least to do, but might have to navigate delivering food and drinks to quarantined parts of the station. They'll also have to consider the possibility that their food or drink becomes contaminated. ### Species Interactions -- Reptiles, arachnids and vulpkanin, as well as any other predatory species, should have a stronger immune response to diseases that come from eating raw flesh or (for reptiles in particular) drinking floor blood. Flood blood consumption is, after all, an important part of reptilian culture. Fresh kills should also not count as unsanitary - only after they've sat for a bit do bacteria have a chance to develop. +- Reptiles, arachnids and vulpkanin, as well as any other predatory species, should have a stronger immune response to diseases that come from eating raw flesh or (for reptiles in particular) drinking floor blood. Flood blood consumption is, after all, an important part of reptilian culture. Fresh kills should also not count as unsanitary - only after they've sat for a bit do diseases have a chance to develop. - Diona should have a stronger immune response to diseases that come from the floor, and especially from infected puddles. This is to help counterbalance the fact that they can't protect themselves with shoes. -- Vox should have a stronger immune response across the board, but especially to diseases that come from trash. +- Vox should have a stronger immune response across the board, but especially to diseases that come from trash. If they're able to eat trash, they shouldn't constantly be getting sick because of it. ## Administrative & Server Rule Impact -There is some potential for griefing in the form of players deliberately trying to infect others. This is ameliorated in part by the fact that players potentially making bad decisions about whether to get something looked at is deliberately part of the disease's challenge - a griefer and an irresponsible character don't look all that dissimilar in practice. Combined with the fact that disease sources are rare, unpredictable and invisible, and deliberate bioengineeering is difficult and slow, I think the potential for serious griefing is low. +There is some potential for griefing in the form of players deliberately trying to infect others. This is ameliorated in part by the fact that the system already encompasses the possibility for players to make bad decisions - someone griefing isn't going to have an easy time doing something that's too far outside the scope of expected player behavior. Combined with the fact that disease sources are rare, unpredictable and invisible, and deliberate bioengineeering is difficult and slow, I think the potential for serious griefing is low. # Technical Considerations -The Disease Diagnoser Delta Extreme and the machine(s) that develops treatments and vaccines will need new UI. For treatments and vaccines, this could be as simple as a single text input to type the genetic code into, although it should probably also keep some record of previously-used codes and allow for quickly copying them into the text input for easy modification. The DDDE needs to indicate both viral and bacterial load: It would be fun to show bacterial load in the form of circular blots drawn on a virtual petri dish, with the presence and size of the blots indicating the amount of bacteria. Viral detection should also have something along those lines, although it's less obvious what. +The Disease Diagnoser Delta Extreme and the machine(s) that develops treatments and vaccines will need new UI. For treatments and vaccines, this could be as simple as a single text input to type the genetic code into, although it should probably also keep some record of previously-used codes and allow for quickly copying them into the text input for easy modification. The DDDE needs to indicate viral load. There will need to be an additional component for holding viral/bacterial load on objects as well as players. For objects, this is basically just a string for the genome, plus an integer amount. For players, the extra process of experiencing disease progression and generating antiserum needs to happen, but a lot of that can probably mirror or directly use the existing metabolism system. There will also need to be a way for disease instances to mutate across game time without it being computationally overwhelming. Since mutations are just a random replacement of a nucleotide or so, or possibly a removal or addition of one, this shouldn't be too big a deal. -The hardest piece of this from a technical perspective is most likely bioengineering, since the genetic code will have to be matched up to functionality in a way that's randomizable each round, and the genomes themselves will have to be parseable. Genomes being parseable also means that they have to be parsed to determine their behavior, and mutations require that to happen whenver the disease's behavior is used, since it might have changed since the last time. It would make sense to hold off on implementing that until after the basics are established. +The hardest piece of this from a technical perspective is most likely bioengineering, since the genetic code will have to be matched up to functionality in a way that's randomizable each round, and the genomes themselves will have to be parseable. Genomes being parseable also means that they have to be parsed to determine their behavior, which, given the possibility of mutation, will have to be re-parsed many times. It would make sense to hold off on implementing bioengineering until after the basics are established. ### Here's one way it might work: A virus's genome is a series of alternating tags and modifiers. A tag will declare the 'field' being modified - mutation rate, or symptoms, or so forth. The modifier will then decode to a numeric or keyed value, possibly negative, which is added to the virus's base values for its fields. This code is interpreted linearly from the beginning of the string to the end. This is straightforward to parse, and can still have some interesting interactions when taken apart into fragments and then pieced back together. -For added complexity, some fields could refer to specific positions in the genome for their values, or to the existing values for other fields. This has implications for mutation, since a single nucleotide replacement shouldn't usually be enough to radically change the whole disease's behavior, and since it might be possible to have horrible recursive loops that balloon out into something totally unparseable or game-breaking. The easiest solution to that last problem is: No, that shouldn't be possible. Random mutations might nevertheless have to be checked for sanity, depending on what *is* possible. +For added complexity, some fields could refer to specific positions in the genome for their values, or to the existing values for other fields. This has implications for mutation, since a single nucleotide replacement shouldn't usually be enough to radically change the whole disease's behavior, and since it might be possible to have horrible recursive loops that balloon out into something totally unparseable or game-breaking. The easiest solution to that last problem is: Don't let loops or recursion be possible, duh. Random mutations might nevertheless have to be checked for sanity, depending on what *is* possible. # Addendum/Mediography @@ -272,3 +272,5 @@ For added complexity, some fields could refer to specific positions in the genom "Doomsday Book" by Connie Willis is a marvelous work of science fiction about a time traveller who is stranded in the dark ages, cut off from resources, and has to deal with a severe disease. I encourage anyone and everyone to read it for inspiration on how virology might work, and for a general example of what good storytelling about diseases can look like. Of the many Star Trek episodes where the crews become infected, "Babel" from Deep Space Nine season one is a pretty good one and worth watching. One thing that's interesting and relevant is that for the disease in this episode, the first symptom that appears is the extreme, exotic one, but the second, deadlier symptom is just a fever - nothing fancy, but still potentially fatal. Its mode of transmission also mutates across the course of the episode. + +The Red Dwarf series V episode "Quarantine" breaks this document's policy that viruses should not have beneficial symptoms, but it's also mandatory for Virology to get gingham dresses in their clothing vendors or something, and this episode is why.