Zombie Rebalance

[Ahzpy]

What Does This PR Do

This PR introduces a new form of curing zombies alongside the existing chemistry/virology content

The necrotic tumor is an organ placed in the head of zombies at the final stage of infection. It takes 45 seconds to remove, and once removed, it will instantly cure a zombie. This will not provide immunity, and the affected person can be infected again at stage 1

Why It's Good For The Game

Zombies have been untouched for well over a year, and have great potential as a midround. Experimenting with different balancing will get this antagonist in the game sooner.

Making zombies cured by surgery will remove the need for bonfire pits and give everyone the opportunity to cure others through ghetto or legitimate surgery, rather than the cure being entirely dependent on one person, one machine, and several fully functional departments producing reagents. This is a similar formula to white terror spiders and xenomorphs, which seem to work out well by protecting operating rooms.

Images of changes

2842716c-1741-4761-9ada-a103f80b06cb-render.mp4

Testing

See above video, abductor hemostat used to shorten the time

This PR will need to be testmerged and spawned by admins. This is not proposed as a definitive "fix" to zombie balance, but an attempt when one has not been made in a year

Declaration

• I confirm that I either do not require pre-approval for this PR, or I have obtained such approval and have included a screenshot to demonstrate this below.

Changelog

🆑
add: Zombies get tumors on their final stage, curing them on removal
/:cl:

[Pennwick]

I feel this would completely declaw zombies. The reason they make for such a horrifying foe is the difficulty of de-conversion. If reduce it to a simple surgery you lose a lot of the story telling potential. Especially if a zombie outbreak is stalled early.

That said putting zombies on bonfires is an issue. Its a little too safe and doesn't involve much player thought. Maybe a band-aid approach might be better for once. Just have zombies randomly extinguish and break bonfires. Have their rotten juices eat away at the logs. Could be done with a snowflake check on bonfires or perhaps they release acid/water when overdamaged.

[Coolrune206]

Is the zombified person alive or dead as a result of the tumor's removal?

[Ahzpy]

Is the zombified person alive or dead as a result of the tumor's removal?

It depends on how damaged they are when they are cured

[Ahzpy]

I feel this would completely declaw zombies. The reason they make for such a horrifying foe is the difficulty of de-conversion. If reduce it to a simple surgery you lose a lot of the story telling potential. Especially if a zombie outbreak is stalled early.

That said putting zombies on bonfires is an issue. Its a little too safe and doesn't involve much player thought. Maybe a band-aid approach might be better for once. Just have zombies randomly extinguish and break bonfires. Have their rotten juices eat away at the logs. Could be done with a snowflake check on bonfires or perhaps they release acid/water when overdamaged.

Zombies are still difficult to cure as this takes upwards of a minute, applies to one person at a time, and can only be done at the final stage when they are most dangerous. This offers all crew an attempt to cure others, rather than the cure being dependent on one person and one machine.

As for the bonfire, you cannot code out player creativity. Zombies are a threat that are constantly reviving, and when you're not allowed to cremate/gib them and have no way to fix it like this tumor, players will find a way to keep them dead. If they can't use the bonfire, they'll use acid, and so on until you've band-aided every means of killing zombies effectively.

[autocephalophagy]

It should be riskier to do this though, 45 seconds is usually not enough time to revive due to how zombie healing works. My idea is that there is a chance for failure to remove the tumor (lets say 25% chance, but that can be changed), and failure instantly revives and uncuffs the zombie. Its also a common trope in zombie media for a seemingly inactive zombie to suddenly lunge as a jump scare.

[Ahzpy]

It should be riskier to do this though, 45 seconds is usually not enough time to revive due to how zombie healing works. My idea is that there is a chance for failure to remove the tumor (lets say 25% chance, but that can be changed), and failure instantly revives and uncuffs the zombie. Its also a common trope in zombie media for a seemingly inactive zombie to suddenly lunge as a jump scare.

Even if a zombie does revive, which takes an estimated 2 minutes, it also has to unbuckle itself and then uncuff itself, adding an extra ~2 minutes, taking 4 minutes for it to actually become a threat during surgery. People can only stand still so long to cure one single person before someone bumps into them, a zombie attacks surgery, etc. If this PR gets tested the time will be adjusted if it needs to. Right now this is as barebones as can be because I don't know if adding features like failure chance and jumpscares will be beneficial to the antagonist as a whole until this is tested.

[github-actions]

This pull request seems to be stale as there have been no changes in 14 days, please make changes within 7 days or the PR will be closed. If you believe this is a mistake, please inform a development team member on Discord.

[pvur]

Very nice, only slight issue I have is that getting cured isn't blatantly obvious as you keep your claws (I started clawing someone to death while being cured).

[Pennwick]

I'm less against the idea of the change. It does shift Zombie to an antagonist that can be handled. Though it seems pretty clear that even with this option zombies easily snowball. As far as I know in the test round we had 3 starting infected and medbay got completely overrun pretty easily. I'd still want to throw a zombie on a pyre until the surgery was clear for their treatment. There seemed to be a few unintentional issues, hard to tell if they're caused by this PR or general zombie code.

Cured individuals weren't well notified and kept claws
Seemed like cured individuals sometimes couldn't understand common
Sometimes individuals were cured but still were infected (Which is maybe intentional if you're covered in zombie)
Virus advanced way too quickly (I got the impression it was supposed to be roughly 1 minute per stage but saw a person go from 3-6 in 30 seconds)

[Ahzpy]

Cured individuals weren't well notified and kept claws
Seemed like cured individuals sometimes couldn't understand common
Sometimes individuals were cured but still were infected (Which is maybe intentional if you're covered in zombie)
Virus advanced way too quickly (I got the impression it was supposed to be roughly 1 minute per stage but saw a person go from 3-6 in 30 seconds)

A lot of these issues seem to stem from the actual messy zombie code rather than the balance changes I'm introducing. All that's being added is an organ that completely cures the zombie virus on removal, the same way that the chemical cure does. I will, however, definitely look into the claws seeing as my PR makes curing zombies much more commonplace.