Prosthetic enhancement, because the flesh is weak

Game Talk The Drawing Board
1

This is a concept that I have been planning on creating for awhile now, and I’d like to get some feedback from the community. This change is designed to add new features to the game, enhance the bionics system, update bionics lore-wise, and encourage more varied character progression.

The basics of it:

  • Some bionics become wearable. Worn bionics cause minor encumbrance, and require a UPS for power. They can always be installed later.
  • Bionics are installed to individual body parts. Some CBMs can be installed to more than one location, prompting the player to choose. Power storage CBMs are not tied to body parts or CBM limits.
  • Cyborg kits can be found in the world, each corresponding to a body part, (arm, leg, torso, head). Limb kits can be installed twice. At least one kit is necessary to install CBMs.
  • Number of allowed bionics is limited by number of cyborg kits installed.
  • Some powerful bionics require prosthetics to be installed, and will not work with cyborg kits.
  • Players can install prosthetic arms and legs in place of cyborg kits. Prosthetics allow slightly more CBM installations and more powerful types.
  • Having two matching prosthetic limbs will eliminate mutations affecting those areas.
  • Prosthetic limbs must be repaired, and do not heal or allow medkit usage. They cannot get infected.
  • Prosthetic torsos can rarely be found in hospitals, but cannot be installed manually.
  • New “robotics lab” laboratory finale. Augmentation machines found there can install the bionic torso. Requires all limbs be prosthetic before using. (Possibly combine this finale with the existing CBM storage room finale?)
  • Rare braincase item can be used with augmentation machines if the player has a bionic torso. Crosses the “Robot” mutation threshhold. Merely harms the player if they have crossed another threshhold already.
  • A Robot character gains immunity to parasites, infection, fungus, disease, wet morale, mutations, and nausea. However, food no longer has any morale effects, every body part needs manual repair, and the player suffers stat penalties for having low power.
  • To be added much later: different kinds of prosthetics. (ex: robo-spider legs, robo-tentacle arms)

Nerfing bionics should be minimal. Anyone who sticks to cyborg kits should still have access to the majority of CBMs, and the advanced CBMs should not be picky about what prosthetic they can be installed to unless it makes no sense (monomolecular blade in a prosthetic leg). Maximum bionic limits ideally won’t be too restricting, but still encourage the player to upgrade more. I’ll have to experiment and take suggestions on what they should be set to. I plan to attempt all of these ideas myself, but I want to know that it is going to be worth the time that I put into it.

2

It’s a really cool idea and I think it would be fun to play with. I’m a little concerned with how invasive it’s going to be to the rest of the code, but that’s juat a matter of whether it’s done right or not.

This strikes me as several independent sets of changes rather than one big change, if they get developed like that, it’ll be great. all at once would be messy.

Modules assigned to body parts, does this include if you wear a cbm extender? e.g. you want to wear a fusion blaster instead of installing it, so you wear a big thing on your arm that it attaches to, right?

I see no reason to exempt power storage cbms from any limits we impose, if anything they’re the worst offender and need to be reigned in the most.

Other than making things harder to find, what’s the point of the ‘cyborg kits’? It seems like you get roughly the same effect by just limiting the number of CBMs you install per body part.

On that subject, ‘two cbms per body part’ is a bit simplistic, why does a fingerlaser and a fusion blaster take the same space?

I like the prosthetics idea, and love allowing more CBMs if you’re more roboticised.

(all the other prosthetics stuff) cool, no complaints.

I’m thinking low power would deactivate CBMs involuntarally, and NO power would result in death, it’s your primary weakness.

The main area where we’re contemplating bionics nerfing is disallowing installation of infinite bionics, there’s physically not enough room to put the things. That should happen regardless of this set of changes. however, full-cybernetic body parts, and even moreso full cybernetic bodies should allow quite a lot of CBMs to be installed, plus obsoleting quite a few of them. (expanded digestion? pointless, subdermal armor? your dermis is armor now.)

very cool overall. looking forward to more.

3

Yeah, I’ll be adding this in parts. The first step will be to add in prosthetic limbs without any changes to bionics. After that I’ll add in wearable bionics, and so on.

Wearable CBMs would count as clothing rather than as a bionic, so they wouldn’t count toward any CBM limits. They’d work just like the wearable flashlight for example.

I would like to limit how many power storage CBMs a player can have, but it would be an entirely separate limit from CBM limits. You could have 3 bionics for example and 5000 maximum power. That power limit would increase alongside the number of cyborg kits and even more alongside the number of prosthetics. Since power storage limits are going to be a separate limit from maximum CBMs allowed, im going to add this part in much later so it won’t be a core addition. I’ll get around to it though. I also have no idea what the power limits should be and I probably won’t until everything else has been added first.

The point of cyborg kits is mostly lore-related. It’s meant to justify how the player is able to perform self-surgery. The idea is that they are modular medical devices designed to monitor bloodflow, treat neuropathy, or whatever else by automatically augmenting the body part they were designed for. Here’s the description I wrote for one of them:
“A cast-like machine that installs a series of connection ports, subdermal wiring, and nerve fittings connected to an internal power supply into your arm. Intended for medical purposes, but you can wire bionics into this thing easily… relatively speaking.”

X number of CBMs per body part is a bit simplistic. I guess adding hand and foot slots for CBMs is doable so I’ll try that.

Low power shutting off CBMs and no power resulting in death is a good idea.

Subdermal armor will probably still have a use. Either that or prosthetics might have some other kind of non-cbm upgrade available. I imagine that the prosthetics that players will be finding will mostly be civilian models made with lots of plastic parts and such. Some others could definitely become obsolete though.

4

because the flesh is weak

There is no good. There is no evil. There is only flesh.

5

One thing I’ll throw out: any prosthetic/cyborg/etc limb with more than about 1 ST than the torso needs some work.

Otherwise, using significantly more ST over multiple body parts (“Lemme deadlift this car here”) fails at the weakest body part: your arms and/or legs tear from the torso.

Power storage is itself a bionic and should take some space; I’m thinking a “power-storage casing” similar to the vehicle storage-battery casing, so players can upgrade their power supplies relatively easily. Otherwise, I’m afraid that folks will regard power-storage mk 1 as useless, since it takes up space that could be used for a mk 2.

6

It’s way more common than mk2. It would make sense to have both the “makeshift” early/middle game mk1 and the rich, blinged out mk2.

7

justifying self-surgery

It doesn’t really do that, since it needs its own justification…
now if you want to let CBMs be relatively easily swappable, and the cyborg kit being the thing that’s hard to install, that would make sense.

8

If the Cyborg kit is the only hard part to install, then that would take out the fun of faulty bionics. The idea is that the cyborg kit is an automatic device that is easy to install, but installing things after it is difficult. Prosthetic limbs could be the opposite of that where getting the limb to work is difficult, but once in allows for easy bionic swapping.

Swappable power storage casings is a good idea. I guess power storage bionics should take up slots, but I would have to balance it so that less-augmented survivors can still get enough power, without more-augmented ones having enough batteries to stay powered for weeks.

Maybe I could implement both. Prosthetics and installed kits would have a very small base amount of power that could be added to with dedicated modules.

9

I love the ideas Synthetic is throwing out!

10

Good ideas in here, I’d say.

For prosthetics you could also consider making various qualities of them. From low-income insurance prosthetics that only barely retains non-prosthetic limb functions all the way to secret military stuff with built in rocket launcher and cup holder or whatever.

Maybe have tiers of bionics? It would make sense that your average prosthetic arm doesn’t have wiring and systems that can handle military-grade chain lightning CBMs after all.

But I’m just rambling here. Looking forward to changes in the bionics systems, they certainly need them IMO.

11

I like the idea of power CBMs taking up space and with the inclusion of WEARABLE CBM’s the whole “More Power!” problem could be solved via:

An External Power-Pack - Basically it’s a heavy backpack-like power supply for cyborgs. Heavy and takes the space of a vital backpack but holds allot of power.

Full body cyborgs should have to consume special ‘cyborg food’ like robocop, section 9 and a host of other fictional characters that are mostly machine. They’d still have to eat far less often though. (Think of it like hunting for inhalers as an asthmatic)

EMPs become lethal at some point into replacing one’s body with hardware…

You probably shouldn’t be light enough to swim if you install too many elective prosthetic limbs…

Artifacts shouldn’t do much for you once you shed your fleshy coil…

12

I’m… surprisingly alright with this.

13

I also like the idea of tiered CBMs. I can’t see why there wouldn’t be a cruddy no-name brand/president’s choice knock off of top of the line commodities like these. The best stuff would have to be carved out of bio-operators

As for instillation/repair, how about having bodyshops spawn with low regularity in towns? I’m always seeing flyers but no CBM clinics. They’d contain a Mr. Stemcell-esque robodoc that you can either pay or attempt to hack–either of which makes you VERY VULNERABLE to attack during the necessary procedure, so no running in with a horde hot on your trail.

Attempting to steal from the store or attacking the doc triggers some good ol’ fashioned fifth-amendment freedom as turrets deploy from the ceiling.

14

Why it sounds so easy an alien bodysnatching hive-conciousness from another dimension could figure it out!

15

[quote=“Silfurdreki, post:10, topic:8715”]Good ideas in here, I’d say.

For prosthetics you could also consider making various qualities of them. From low-income insurance prosthetics that only barely retains non-prosthetic limb functions all the way to secret military stuff with built in rocket launcher and cup holder or whatever.

Maybe have tiers of bionics? It would make sense that your average prosthetic arm doesn’t have wiring and systems that can handle military-grade chain lightning CBMs after all.[/quote]
I think a cheap prosthetic could handle a CBM with some survivor modifications far better than a human arm could. I doubt if I’ll add tiers of prosthetics by quality, but I will eventually add different kinds. I don’t want to make the player have to find upgrade after upgrade if a modular system would suffice.

[quote=“Logrin, post:11, topic:8715”]I like the idea of power CBMs taking up space and with the inclusion of WEARABLE CBM’s the whole “More Power!” problem could be solved via:

An External Power-Pack - Basically it’s a heavy backpack-like power supply for cyborgs. Heavy and takes the space of a vital backpack but holds allot of power.

Full body cyborgs should have to consume special ‘cyborg food’ like robocop, section 9 and a host of other fictional characters that are mostly machine. They’d still have to eat far less often though. (Think of it like hunting for inhalers as an asthmatic)

EMPs become lethal at some point into replacing one’s body with hardware…

You probably shouldn’t be light enough to swim if you install too many elective prosthetic limbs…

Artifacts shouldn’t do much for you once you shed your fleshy coil…[/quote]

[quote=“Logrin, post:13, topic:8715”]I also like the idea of tiered CBMs. I can’t see why there wouldn’t be a cruddy no-name brand/president’s choice knock off of top of the line commodities like these. The best stuff would have to be carved out of bio-operators

As for instillation/repair, how about having bodyshops spawn with low regularity in towns? I’m always seeing flyers but no CBM clinics. They’d contain a Mr. Stemcell-esque robodoc that you can either pay or attempt to hack–either of which makes you VERY VULNERABLE to attack during the necessary procedure, so no running in with a horde hot on your trail.

Attempting to steal from the store or attacking the doc triggers some good ol’ fashioned fifth-amendment freedom as turrets deploy from the ceiling.[/quote]

EMPs hadn’t crossed my mind. I’ll see what I can do about that. Battery backpack is sort of like something I was just thinking of. Maybe the backpack could be a giant wearable UPS and make it possible to draw bionic power from UPS systems? Good point about swimming too. As for food I’m not sure. It might be more hastle than its worth to have to find/craft a specific thing that you can only feed off of. I was thinking that a brainbot character could just extract energy from any food source in some kind of artificial stomache. Maybe it could have trouble with certain foods, like a less-restrictive version of carnivore/herbivore mutations. I like that CBM clinic idea.

16

If you are only a brain you would far less nutrients and all. But you would have to “eat” either some kind of nutrient paste without stomach, or could eat like a normal person with a stomach but far less often. I think a torso part would already include a basic version of a stomach or some way to turn “normal” food in the food needed. Ofc intolerances won’t affect you anymore as those components are already filtered out (only the needed stuff is kept).

17

I am liking that this makes the whole CBM adventure less of a solution to difficulties ingame (need toolkit? no problem, arm is toolkit) and more of NEW PLAYSTYLE: ROBOT.

And even if I can’t find anything better than no-name brand prosthetic legs, I’d be happy to have an option besides splints/stemcell shenanigans to fix ruined legs after landmine hopping.

18

If it was only your brain left then you’ll only need a small amount of stomach to absorb the nutrients.
So then why would keep the extra stomach? it’s taking up space you could use for Bionics.

While i like the idea of limiting the number of CBMs you install per body part, lets work from a high base number so parts have a range of sizes.

And on the topic of size, lets not forget about mutations and there penalty’s for large sizes, copied there a good penalty’s for installing to many bionics.

19

Actually this very neatly solves the mutation interaction problem, to have advanced amounts of bionics, you have to have prosthetoc limbs, which cancels out any limb-based mutations.
However you should still be able to be some manner of cy-bear.

20

Having prosthetic legs and suddenly getting HUGE mutations should be a problem…

Also what’s the thought on powered armor? Would it even work with a robo-dood inside of it?