Implanter draw rework

[SlamBamActionman]

About the PR

This PR changes how the implanter works when it comes to drawing/extracting subdermal implants for an entity. The purpose of this PR is to remove the need for metashield rules around implants, and instead use mechanics to achieve the desired effects.

This is in line with the changes proposed in the design doc PR "Reduced Metagaming Mechanics" under "The Implant Problem": space-wizards/docs#214

The PR does the following:

• Implanters in Draw mode must now have a specific type of implant set.
  • The implant is chosen from a dropdown list of all available implants the implanter can draw.
• When an implant is used, it will only attempt to draw out the implant it is set for.
• If the implant exists, it gets deposited into the implanter as it works currently (or the draw fails, as is the case with acidifiers/mindshields). There is no change to this process.
• If the implant doesn't exist, the implanter experiences a catastrophical failure and chunts genetic material into the user's hand (the hand of the person performing the implant check, not the person being checked). This deals major damage to the user.
  • This damage is set to 50 Cellular, 10 Heat in this PR.
• Implant draw time is reduced from 60 seconds to 25 seconds.

After this PR is merged, implants and implant knowledge should be removed from the metashield.

Why / Balance

Implanters are one of the few "metashield" items that exist in the game, and the cause of this is quite apparent:

• If implanters weren't metashielded, Security could randomly check crew at any point, for no reason.
• Random checks would be very efficient since you get any implant that they have on them.
• It's not that costly to do random checks. It's 60 seconds and once done you've confirmed they have zero implants, or you catch one.

As such, the metashield specifically requires either finding an implanter or seeing undisputable use of an implant before being able to check for it in an individual. This can lead to unnecessary admin work where it's unclear what exactly counts as undisputable, and players can be uncertain of whether they are allowed or not to perform an implant check. Conversely, a player may heavily suspect a character has an implant, but feel they are not allowed to check due to the rules. This PR intends to fix these issues.

1. Requiring specificity means SecOffs can not check randomly and just hoping to fish out an implant. They must at the very least suspect that a specific implant is in play to know to check for it.

2. This specificity is enforced via the damage taken when guessing wrong. SecOffs do not have the resources to perform random checks since it's directly harmful to the Security department and the personal cost to the SecOff performing the implant check discourages this on an individual level. It's simply not viable to randomly check crew due to the damage taken.

   Even if they know someone is a Syndicate agent or a Thief they are still discouraged from checking the player; without concrete knowledge that a specific implant is in play, it is a risk to take major cellular damage, and while guesses can be made the uncertainty means crafty antags can still fool SecOffs into guessing incorrectly, the risk of which is likely to have a chilling effect.

The self-damage is a way to punish Security for being overzealous in their implant checking. Requiring a resource or breaking the implanter would put more strain on Cargo/Medical than it would on Security; losing access to a Security Officer for the time it takes for them to get healed in medbay is much more of a steep price that impacts Security directly.

The choice of Cellular damage is because it's a fairly rare damage type that doesn't see much use anywhere else. It's currently fairly easy to treat, so following this PR will be another that changes OD and metabolism values of Cellular treatment chems to be a slower process without complicating it for medical.

Technical details

Fairly straight-forward. If the implanter is in draw mode, it can open up a UI window where all implants whitelisted to be drawn are available. The chosen implant gets saved and then later gets checked against when drawing - if it doesn't exist, deal damage.

Media

Requirements

• I have read and am following the Pull Request and Changelog Guidelines.
• I have added media to this PR or it does not require an ingame showcase.

Breaking changes

Changelog

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• tweak: Implanters must now specificy which implant they're targeting when extracting, and deals heavy damage to the person performing the extraction if no such implant exists.

[mirrorcult]

this PR given divine approval from the kingdom of heaven

[SoulFN]

New way to kill a person for antags? Just cuff and try to draw implant from people that you need to kill

[Plykiya]

New way to kill a person for antags? Just cuff and try to draw implant from people that you need to kill

the damage is applied to the user, not the target.

can we include a description of what the selected implant does into the window for new players? none of it is metashielded anymore so it's free game to know the exact details

[Aisu9]

sad that from this entire list of implants, only 3 are legal crew implants

[Cojoke-dot]

sad that from this entire list of implants, only 3 are legal crew implants

its 5 but yeah... crew aren't meant to have things sec would spend a lot of work getting away from you, that's kinda the reasoning in my head for why there are so few crew ones.

Maybe #31045 would need to be reverted to give sec a better chance with this stuff for some of the implants. You're never going to be able to find storage or uplink implants without directly watching someone use them. Letting sec know what kind of implant is in a person when they find an implanter would make it much less of a hassle for sec when dealing with a DNA scramble implant or such, especially when it could kill you in an attempt to find out.

[SlamBamActionman]

The damage has been updated to 50 Cellular, 10 Heat.

This puts you at or over the slowdown damage threshold, something that is very undesirable for a Security officer. The officer can get back down under it via having some ointment on hand, but that still leaves them at 50 Cellular, making it impossible to do another implant check without dying.

[PaulRuddsAssFuzz]

I get the basic idea of wanting sec to stop checking without cause- But damage to the person performing the extraction? That can't work on it's face, and it would have to IC be the worst, most dangerous design in the world for that.
But assumed functionality aside, it'd actually be more detrimental for the universal implant remover to be destroyed if it can't pick up anything, given how annoying it is to ship things to sec anyway, because above all, this solution is too overkill in the direction of the antags for the following reason;
Even if the damage to the searching officer were just, the distinction being "type of implant" is a bit too hard on sec- Stopping needless searching is fine, but if we know someone is a syndie, it should NOT, from there, be a punishment on us that they used an EMP implant instead of say, a storage one, or a bomb, or an uplink, or any number of other implants that are both right to suspect an antag of, and that ironically all use an identical implant method. There are lots of variations of implant that you can get mixed up between even with probable cause, and punishing the person doing the search (in a way that only makes sense if they are horribly clumsy) over a condition you can get wrong even with probable cause will only cause people to reach for the more extreme alternate hedged bet of just killing the detainee.

[Killerqu00]

Stopping needless searching is fine, but if we know someone is a syndie, it should NOT, from there, be a punishment on us that they used an EMP implant instead of say, a storage one, or a bomb, or an uplink, or any number of other implants that are both right to suspect an antag of, and that ironically all use an identical implant method.

You shouldn't be checking syndicate agents for implants unless you know for sure they have one.

There are lots of variations of implant that you can get mixed up between even with probable cause, and punishing the person doing the search (in a way that only makes sense if they are horribly clumsy) over a condition you can get wrong even with probable cause will only cause people to reach for the more extreme alternate hedged bet of just killing the detainee.

Which implants can be confused between each other?

[thebadman4662]

Which implants can be confused between each other?

Uh, storage and uplink? Both could give syndie "esword out of thin air"

[cohanna]

Even with the phala changes if the meta shield gets removed I would still envision implant checking to become significantly more common for storage implants.
Phala is, as you mentioned, trivial to use and obtain and giving sec a dedicated jug of phala is not difficult at all. Your proposed changes means the officer (likely ward) will have to set aside like 2 extra minutes of non active combat to heal up fully at most which for someone like the ward is basically ensured.
This is especially detrimental to thieves who would be impacted the most. After all it’s fairly reasonable to implant check a kleptomaniac for a storage implant provided the opportunity arises.
While I think the changes overall are beneficial, I would hope some rebalancing around the storage implant itself is done should this get merged. (Maybe reducing the TC cost a tad and/or increasing its storage space for the thief)

[Killerqu00]

Which implants can be confused between each other?

Uh, storage and uplink? Both could give syndie "esword out of thin air"

If you are sure it's specifically an implant, then you must have fully searched that person, then they almost immediately pull out a sword out of nowhere. This is too specific of a case.

[noldevin]

I have to vote no. This would make storage implant pointless as sec would basically always check for it if the suspect is clean. Plus they can just ask chem for some phalanx which isn't that hard to make.
The metashield is necessary and if anything should probably be expanded, since players WILL use Meta knowledge if allowed

[mirrorcult]

with these changes phala healing cellular needs to go, cellular was intended to be a significantly more 'permanent' form of damage and it being easily healable kind of makes this pointless

[OrangeMoronage9622]

I just hope that chemists and the CMO in general will tell security to piss off if they ask for an entire jug of phalaxamine every shift. Especially if it's shift start.

[ArtisticRoomba]

with these changes phala healing cellular needs to go, cellular was intended to be a significantly more 'permanent' form of damage and it being easily healable kind of makes this pointless

Could make cellular require a cryochem only to heal. Encourages the use of cryogenics and achieves the desired effect. This way security can't just check every damm implant. Feral slimes dealing cellular damage might have to be offset more into caustic though.

[noldevin]

My problem is even if you make the heals harder, this disproportionately affects the storage implant as it's probably the most common and will have a reasonable success rate of removing if you have a strong suspect. At 8tc it's already pretty expensive. This will make it worthless.

[cohanna]

At 8tc it's already pretty expensive. This will make it worthless.

I wouldn't say worthless but you can def argue that the tc cost should decrease a small amount should this get merged. Not really the end of the world. For the thief I think they could receive an extra column of space in theirs but that's just my opinion.

[ArtisticRoomba]

Of course the most used implant will be disproportionally affected if the security officer wants to play "guess the implant this guy has".

It's the person who's using the implants fault if they get caught using an implant. This will promote syndies using their implant smarter.

[noldevin]

fault

The problem is you probably won't get caught using the storage implant. You'll be a suspect, get searched, they'll find nothing, and they'll do a storage implant check. Every time. It will be useless.

[SlamBamActionman]

My problem is even if you make the heals harder, this disproportionately affects the storage implant as it's probably the most common and will have a reasonable success rate of removing if you have a strong suspect. At 8tc it's already pretty expensive. This will make it worthless.

If Sec has a strong suspicion of there being a storage implant, they should be able to remove it. That's the whole point. You are right that Sec shouldn't be encouraged to check willy-nilly, but that's the whole point of the Cellular damage and the Phalanx changes in #32209. If Sec feels they can still check every time, then rest assured further balance tweaks will be made.

Also consider hiding your stuff in other ways, rather than relying on an implant as a crutch. The storage implant will still be great for stuff like random searches or where Sec suspects several people and can't afford to implant check every single one.

[ArtisticRoomba]

You'll be a suspect, get searched, they'll find nothing, and they'll do a storage implant check. Every time. It will be useless.

You can easily argue that you stashed it somewhere. They can't perform a check if you had obvious time to hide it.

You can also just let them take the item so they don't have to check you and you lose the implant. You don't have to keep the item hidden inside of you right after you're caught and spend 20 minutes losing the implant.

This is my entire point about syndies learning to use their implant in smarter ways.

[noldevin]

I think the needing to select what implant to remove and having a penalty for selecting the wrong one is fun, but imo either the metashield needs to stay or there needs to be clear space law on when checking for an implant is allowed.
I can guarantee there will be plenty of sec that just automatically storage implant check if someone comes up clean, with no other reason to suspect an implant. I think the metashield of requiring DNA on an implanter or seeing obvious blatant use of the implant is the right way to go here.

[Aisu9]

I wouldn't say worthless but you can def argue that the tc cost should decrease a small amount

why would it need ot be reduced when in the current iteration implant are automaticaly removed without "proof" check

[ps3moira]

The better idea is for the implant remover to be removed from the game as I believe it was a temp-solution for when we have proper surgery in-game to remove implants. Instead of this UI design and rework which won't be good for whenever a new implant is added.

[keronshb]

The better idea is for the implant remover to be removed from the game as I believe it was a temp-solution for when we have proper surgery in-game to remove implants. Instead of this UI design and rework which won't be good for whenever a new implant is added.

It sure was. But we can't just remove it without surgery being in place.

[OrangeMoronage9622]

The better idea is for the implant remover to be removed from the game as I believe it was a temp-solution for when we have proper surgery in-game to remove implants. Instead of this UI design and rework which won't be good for whenever a new implant is added.

It sure was. But we can't just remove it without surgery being in place.

We removed the shuttle from the game before we got a salvage rework.

[Pumkin69]

Space law should get a spot about implanters and checking similar to the metashield but in character instead of out of character and just tell people that its an in character issue in the rules or something. Otherwise i think this is a great set of PRs and i agree with the decisions made by slam.

[retequizzle]

is the only thing blocking this from being merged the requested reviews from sloth

[SlamBamActionman]

is the only thing blocking this from being merged the requested reviews from sloth

I addressed Sloth's remaining review via comment a while back; I'll mark them as resolved since there has been no pushback on my reasoning.

[keronshb]

I need to check back on this sometime because I feel failing the check had to have a larger punishment.

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