Robotic limb degradation

[TDHooligan]

About The Pull Request

Introduces 'limb integrity' as a mechanic among all robotic limbs. 1 point of 'Integrity loss' represents 1 HP's worth of damage that won't heal under most (if not all) circumstances.

Limbs also have an 'integrity threshold', ignoring some accumulated integrity damage. So that robots can actually heal to full health from light damage a couple of times.

A new surgery to 'Replace Structure' can be performed on robotic limbs, to fix all integrity, alongside all the damage that was accumulated as a result of it.

'Repair Machinery' requires a second individual to do it now, so that you can heal robots without causing integrity loss.

A new item, 'Replacement structural rods', can be crafted with rods, cable and titanium. This grants 2 uses, and allows IPCs to repair themselves without assistance.

Nitty gritty balance implications:

• All robotic parts have an integrity threshold of 15 > 20.
• Welding and cable repairs cost 7.5 > 5 integrity.
• So you can repair each parts twice -> four times (60 HP) with no ill effects.
• Every subsequent repair accumulates 7.5 > 5 permanent damage.
• To reset a limb's integrity, surgery needs to be performed.

After 8 repairs, a limb will have 20 unremovable damage. But in return, you'd have healed 120 HP.

---

Since damage will be spread across the body, this gives IPCs a good pool of cheap health, but will need to either replace their limbs, or have a mechanic repair their limbs.

Why It's Good For The Game

Prevents IPCs and augmented humans from ignoring doctors in favour of a stack of coil and an empty welding tool.

Changelog

🆑
add: Robotic body parts now have integrity, 1 'integrity loss' represents 1 HP of damage that cannot be healed/repaired.
add: New 'Replace Structure' surgery that allows a roboticist to restore limb integrity.
add: New 'Structure Repair Kit' craft that restores limb integrity.
balance: Robotic limbs start wearing out after multiple repairs, limiting their repair potential.
balance: Repair machinery is no longer self-operable.
/:cl:

[Orchidthederg]

Seems interesting, but the hard limit on the health pool for IPCs without major interference from other crew members could be a big issue on smaller crews.

[Apogee-dev]

Seems interesting, but the hard limit on the health pool for IPCs without major interference from other crew members could be a big issue on smaller crews.

To be fair, organic crew can only do so much without someone else’s intervention either (and organic self-healing takes a far longer time, more preparation, and/or more valuable resources than welding an IPC), especially if and when one of the various proposals incorporating forms of damage that organics cannot heal without surgery goes through. That’s as much of an issue for small crews as it’s ever been. With this PR IPCs remain far easier to heal than anyone else, they just aren’t capable of infinite speedy repairs. Merely a lot of them.

[TDHooligan]

pretty much as apogee said. human repair can be easier in abundance of materials. but IPCs get access to an effective +30 EHP per limb, for super cheap. then fixing it is 1 crewmate, 2 rods and a toolbox. arguably even this PR might not fix how abundantly strong IPCs can be in PvE.

[Sun-Soaked]

pretty much as apogee said. human repair can be easier in abundance of materials. but IPCs get access to an effective +30 EHP per limb, for super cheap. then fixing it is 1 crewmate, 2 rods and a toolbox. arguably even this PR might not fix how abundantly strong IPCs can be in PvE.

we need ways to make this mechanic better communicated to ipc players
A cheap one would be an screen alert that fires if one or more of your bodyparts is at low integrity
A more expensive one would be some kind of overlay on the healthdoll, like with breaks

[github-actions]

This pull request has conflicts, please resolve those before we can evaluate the pull request.

[thgvr]

After some observations during test merge, i've some feedback.

• The permanent damage should add up much slower
• You should be able to do maintenance on yourself
• This will need some form of feedback, as sunsoaked said a screen alert or health doll overlay similar to disabled limbs will be the solution here

[Zevotech]

This causes aheal to no longer heal robotic limbs.

[Erikafox]

didn't really enjoy it. felt like bone breaking (also sucks ass)

[Jedi-Toothpaste]

I like the idea at concept, but the surgery takes a while to do; which is fine, but how often it needs to be done is a bit grating opening every limb slowly.
What may be better is making it similar to the fix machinery surgery, where you apply metal rods continously until structural damage is fixed; it can still take the same amount of time per apply.
Otherwise a better change would be to let me do surgery on multiple limbs at once, but this may break other things.

EDIT: Also the feedback is a bit poor, an IPC last round only had minor permanent damage across all their limbs, I assumed they were fine so I went to fix them via surgery with a welder and it continously cycled with no feedback I was unable to fix it because it was permanent damage
What might be better is a big red pop-up saying, "You can't fix this damage with just a welder, you'll need some rods!" when doing the surgery so it doesn't infinitely cycle with no feedback other than, "You succeed to fix the positronic person's wounds"

[Slim-Pickems]

I feel many of the problems previously stated are still an issue. My biggest two are the problem that there is little feedback to those doing any welder or wire repair, sticking one into a continuous loop. The other is the fact that self machine repair is not an option. It really screws over anyone that may not have anyone with them but needs full repairs. This will force them to find another ship to help them. One would assume that this would mean med ships would get more patients, but most medical ships, from personal experience, do not know IPC surgery well enough or at all, even with the wiki. It leads to very, very long wait times that can span well past a vote block or two. Not to mention, the fact it costs two rods per limb can have serious issues of such medships not having enough metal on hand.

Edit: This seems to be only worsened for species with already weak limbs (FBP Kepori). A single hit already knocks limbs to black most of the time.

[IHaveNoOriginality]

Hi. I played a round last night as a synthetic Sarathi, I personally think not being able to do the surgery to reinstate limbs by yourself was just a huge annoyance, just for how often a misalignment can happen (where for minor pressure damage an organic can nibble on a cactus fruit or mushroom leaf, I'd have to repair myself for a dent). It feels awfully tedious both for me, to not have any autonomy, and for whoever I'm asking for how frequent it is. Couldn't it be fair to have it twice as slow, or have a window for failure that would waste the rods and have you repeat the step, if done by yourself, just for convenience of not having to ask the ship's engineer for the eleventh limb restore in a hour.
Along this synthetic limbs felt disabled really easily, compared to organic arms and fracturing, which could at worst make a splint in emergencies (never played a synthetic before yesterday, but it gave me this impression.)
This is all from my personal experience playing this, though, I'm just trying to explain my experience from yesterday.

[TDHooligan]

• Harmless integrity loss no longer shows as damage to the health scan.
• Integrity is no longer lost when total damage (on top of existing integrity loss) is under 15, so light wounds are fixed easily. This is disabled when the limb has 15 or less integrity remaining.

I'm not going to pull the trigger personally on self-repair yet. I don't have a problem with it, but with how cheap metal is, IPCs will just take a stack of rods out with them for their repairs. Then we're back to square one. They can still just swap limbs with other dead positronic NPCs too.

[Sun-Soaked]

• Harmless integrity loss no longer shows as damage to the health scan.
• Integrity is no longer lost when total damage (on top of existing integrity loss) is under 15, so light wounds are fixed easily. This is disabled when the limb has 15 or less integrity remaining.

I'm not going to pull the trigger personally on self-repair yet. I don't have a problem with it, but with how cheap metal is, IPCs will just take a stack of rods out with them for their repairs. Then we're back to square one. They can still just swap limbs with other dead positronic NPCs too.

I don't really want to see full selfrepair, but if someone wants to make something that can gradually deal with small amounts of structural damage I wouldn't be opposed

[Martinpachu]

i think it's OK if there's full selfrepair because other species are able to do that, it should be just slower/less efficient/less accessible

[Madtankdriver]

Ipc's are supposed to be helpful and useful and not a hindrance that needs to be fixed every time you take too much damage, that would get tiring real fast for the engineer! That is one of the perks of being an ipc. You supposed to able to repair yourself fully with tools. Remember Ipc's have other weaknesses but one of the benefits is being able to fully repair yourself. Another thing that would be kind of bad is if you are running solo on a shuttle, you wouldn't be able to fully repair yourself without another crew member to help you. So, you are kind of screwed compared to just being a regular human. Maybe an alternative that is much slower to repair yourself would be good? These are robots we are talking about; they can do self-surgery that removes their arms and legs. Why couldn't they also slowly and less efficiently repair their deep chassis damage as well?

[Martinpachu]

i think it's OK if there's full selfrepair because other species are able to do that, it should be just slower/less efficient/less accessible

to add actually. maybe there should be some things that need help (akin to broken bones on organics that need surgery) though i think it's fine to let them heal some moderate damage on their own.

[thgvr]

• Harmless integrity loss no longer shows as damage to the health scan.

  • Integrity is no longer lost when total damage (on top of existing integrity loss) is under 15, so light wounds are fixed easily. This is disabled when the limb has 15 or less integrity remaining.

I'm not going to pull the trigger personally on self-repair yet. I don't have a problem with it, but with how cheap metal is, IPCs will just take a stack of rods out with them for their repairs. Then we're back to square one. They can still just swap limbs with other dead positronic NPCs too.

Being nearly forced to swap out limbs isn't something I desire here. That should be a last ditch sort of things. Without the ability to fix themselves one way or another, you're almost completely reliant on someone else playing an IPC. This isn't really great.

If you don't want to give them the robotic surgery on themselves, there needs to be an item they can acquire or a method they can do at a lower efficiency to repair themselves. IPC doing maintenance on themselves is perfect vibe

[Martinpachu]

• Harmless integrity loss no longer shows as damage to the health scan.

  • Integrity is no longer lost when total damage (on top of existing integrity loss) is under 15, so light wounds are fixed easily. This is disabled when the limb has 15 or less integrity remaining.

I'm not going to pull the trigger personally on self-repair yet. I don't have a problem with it, but with how cheap metal is, IPCs will just take a stack of rods out with them for their repairs. Then we're back to square one. They can still just swap limbs with other dead positronic NPCs too.

Being nearly forced to swap out limbs isn't something I desire here. That should be a last ditch sort of things. Without the ability to fix themselves one way or another, you're almost completely reliant on someone else playing an IPC. This isn't really great.

If you don't want to give them the robotic surgery on themselves, there needs to be an item they can acquire or a method they can do at a lower efficiency to repair themselves. IPC doing maintenance on themselves is perfect vibe

being able to do maintenance on yourself while chatting with someone would actually be great

[TDHooligan]

i'm open to suggestions on how to, ideally, reutilize existing non-trivial items to allow lone IPCs to repair integrity.

ideally something similar in availability to existing healing items. not just costing metal. humans can't fix limbs without splints (and therefore, cloth), and limb degradation is already significantly more forgiving than limb breaks.

[Anticept]

Very slowly to fix integrity. Very.

Lorewise, fixing a machine would be exceedingly difficult while its running right? But if the ipc lays down that's basically turning off servos etc, so someone else repairing would be very fast.

[github-actions]

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[TDHooligan]

I've coder-sprited a new craftable item to allow self-repair, or repair on the go. It's similar to splints for carbons.

cursorily, it costs 3 rods, 1 titanium and 2 pieces of cable coil, which is salvageable in a pinch. plasteel would also work fine, but I figured truly out-of-luck IPC's could dismantle a wall or something.