Budgetstation

[Qbopper]

Thanks to christ110 for the idea

Between the Syndicate, eldritch horrors, and plain ol' employees causing property damage, Nanotrasen has had to cut costs wherever they can, and it's starting to show. Budgetstation is a layout that's going to make you work for your quality of life - cryo is a cold shower with some cryoxadone, botany is some heaps of soil on the ground, and the bar is a keg with some drinking glasses. Resources are relatively scarce and you don't have the same level of tools to work with.

Spoiler:

Q: Is this a joke?
A: No, I thought it was a cool idea and wanted to make it

Q: Do you expect this to be merged?
A: No, if it gets shot down in the PR I won't be surprised

Q: If this gets merged do you expect people to like this?
A: No, probably not

Q: If you don't expect it to be merged or even liked why bother?
A: Because I like making maps, I won't be extremely torn up if it doesn't get in/stay, it's fun to make and think up shitty budget replacements for stuff, and who knows, there's a snowball's chance in hell people will like it

Q: What does this add to the game?
A: The appeal (to me) in a station like this is that it makes the crew work towards something - in this case, building towards the tools they're used to having. It's a common complaint that non-antags just kill time until an antag spices up the round, so having a situation like this at least provides a moderately interesting way to kill time until someone griffs you. Granted, this is all just theorycrafting at this point, and it's likely people won't agree with me, but there's only one way to find out

TL;DR: it gives non-antags a goal that they have a vested interest in working towards

Current todo list:

SEC:
- shotguns with beanbags (sorry, I'm not making it lethals only)
- shitty armory

MEDBAY:
- no sleepers or medkits, syringes/IV drips with chemicals
- no cryo, showers with cryodaxone beakers (make sure to include a wrench and paper explaining to wrench them to cold)
- shitty ghetto surgery

ENGINEERING:
- no engine - solars and PACMAN generators
- maybe a shitty power setup?
- simple atmos(?)

SCIENCE:
- one big slime pen

CARGO:
- shitty mining (I'm considering just not adding a lavaland shuttle and putting a bunch of asteroids for miners to get minerals from but I fear for my life on this one, and I don't know if you can even make a shuttle to lavaland)
- shitty cargo bay, potentially exposed to space? could have the shuttle dock outside and there's a single EVA suit? dunno yet

SERVICE:
- shitty bar with a keg and shotgun
- shitty botany with piles of dirt and limited seeds
- shitty kitchen - meat locker replaced with a box of monkey cubes
- no disposals, use trash bins (janitor has a trash cart and crusher)
- no space cleaner or grenades for the janitor (god help me)

MISC:

- dorms are a communal barracks type deal
- no/few head offices, important shit goes on the bridge(?)
- maybe have some dim lighting

If you have any other ideas or comments let me know

EDIT: there was catastrophic mission failure and the entire map is fucked, but there wasn't too too much done anyways so it's not a big deal I guess

[Wyzack]

Give the bartender some beakers and a bottle of universal enzyme, as well as maybe a handful of reagents to make small volumes of hooch and moonshine

[Lazengann]

so its a "go AFK until R&D is done" map huh

[pidey]

Ooh! ooh! I have an AMAZING idea for atmos in a budget station.

Store all of the gasses in one tank.

And have the tank be indoors.

[Armhulen]

Ooh! ooh! I have an AMAZING idea for atmos in a budget station.

Store all of the gasses in one tank.

And have the tank be indoors.

Fucking awesome

[XDTM]

stunprods instead of batons for sec?

[Wyzack]

Know what would be really fucking cool (but probably way too ambitious for the scope of this project)?

Instead of a shuttle to lavaland, have the shuttle instead go to a custom Z level that just has the derelict on it, but fill it with salvagable stock parts and useful things like minerals. Then fill it with lavaland creeps. Salvage station

[Gun Hog]

Crummy idea:
NanoTrasen did not want to spend money to allocate space for an auxiliary mining base, so instead they built all of Science into one! Sadly, the construction console was also too expensive and was omitted entirely. You nerds want minerals so badly? GO GET THEM YOURSELF! I am sure this will generate plenty of rage and delicious salt when all-access honkscum breaks in and sends all of Science to the wasteland where they are eventually eaten by a roaming drake.

[Qbopper]

Give the bartender some beakers and a bottle of universal enzyme, as well as maybe a handful of reagents to make small volumes of hooch and moonshine

maybe

so its a "go AFK until R&D is done" map huh

thanks for your contribution

Ooh! ooh! I have an AMAZING idea for atmos in a budget station.

Store all of the gasses in one tank.

And have the tank be indoors.

it's "budgetstation" not "deathtrapstation" :^)

stunprods instead of batons for sec?

I was already thinking of this, but I'd have to find out how to remove stun batons from officer's default loadouts and I don't know if that's something I can do easily

Know what would be really fucking cool (but probably way too ambitious for the scope of this project)?

Instead of a shuttle to lavaland, have the shuttle instead go to a custom Z level that just has the derelict on it, but fill it with salvagable stock parts and useful things like minerals. Then fill it with lavaland creeps. Salvage station

Yeah this is a bit outside what I was aiming to do

Crummy idea:
NanoTrasen did not want to spend money to allocate space for an auxiliary mining base, so instead they built all of Science into one! Sadly, the construction console was also too expensive and was omitted entirely. You nerds want minerals so badly? GO GET THEM YOURSELF! I am sure this will generate plenty of rage and delicious salt when all-access honkscum breaks in and sends all of Science to the wasteland where they are eventually eaten by a roaming drake.

building rnd on a wasteland filled with monsters seems like it would be more expensive than the normal setup

[Luke Cox]

Quick thought about the kitchen: It should just be a small room with a microwave and maybe a fryer. No gibber, utensils, etc. The atmos idea is a cool one too. All the gasses are in one tank, and you have to use a filter if you want to take a specific gas out.

[Qbopper]

Quick thought about the kitchen: It should just be a small room with a microwave and maybe a fryer. No gibber, utensils, etc. The atmos idea is a cool one too. All the gasses are in one tank, and you have to use a filter if you want to take a specific gas out.

Sure, I can do that for the kitchen, but I'm not very well versed in atmos so it would help if someone could mock that up in DM for me

[lumipharon]

afaik you can just make 1 tile of XYZ pressure of a single gas, so wehn the map loads they just spread around and mix. Also all gases together should be perfectly safe (at room temp).

Edit:
Bopper, an interesting/fluffy theme for the station would be repurposing an existing structure/station to make it function as whatever the hell NT needs it for.
That happens in real life all the time with big expensive shit like FPSO's and the like, which are typically ageing, shitty old oil tankers that are 50 years old and are basically piles of rust, that get a refit and another 15 years or so of life. But hey, when it saves you hundreds of millions of dollars, that's ok, because if there's anything better than making something new cheaply, it's repurposing old shit even cheaper!

This way, you could have great fun with making some old mining station/monkey storage plant or whatever, and then figure out how you could practically (and affordably) use the space for the new purpose, by changing or adding as little as possible!

[Anonmare]

You could have the mixed gas tank have a pipe leading out and circle back into itself with filters along it, with two filtering out nitrogen and oxygen leading into a gas mixer to provide the air supply.

[Luke Cox]

Quick thought about the kitchen: It should just be a small room with a microwave and maybe a fryer. No gibber, utensils, etc. The atmos idea is a cool one too. All the gasses are in one tank, and you have to use a filter if you want to take a specific gas out.

Sure, I can do that for the kitchen, but I'm not very well versed in atmos so it would help if someone could mock that up in DM for me

Okay, so you know how atmos has a bunch of tanks (those little rooms with pipes coming out) of different gasses at roundstart? Instead of that, it's one big room with a bunch of different gasses coming out. There's a single output pipe, and you have to use pipe filters to remove the gasses you want from the mixed output.

[Qbopper]

Quick thought about the kitchen: It should just be a small room with a microwave and maybe a fryer. No gibber, utensils, etc. The atmos idea is a cool one too. All the gasses are in one tank, and you have to use a filter if you want to take a specific gas out.

Sure, I can do that for the kitchen, but I'm not very well versed in atmos so it would help if someone could mock that up in DM for me

Okay, so you know how atmos has a bunch of tanks (those little rooms with pipes coming out) of different gasses at roundstart? Instead of that, it's one big room with a bunch of different gasses coming out. There's a single output pipe, and you have to use pipe filters to remove the gasses you want from the mixed output.

Yeah, I understand the theory, I just don't know how to (nicely) set up the various gases in one tank. I could put various tanks into one (slightly) bigger room, I guess

[Nabski]

Quick thought about the kitchen: It should just be a small room with a microwave and maybe a fryer. No gibber, utensils, etc. The atmos idea is a cool one too. All the gasses are in one tank, and you have to use a filter if you want to take a specific gas out.

Sure, I can do that for the kitchen, but I'm not very well versed in atmos so it would help if someone could mock that up in DM for me

Okay, so you know how atmos has a bunch of tanks (those little rooms with pipes coming out) of different gasses at roundstart? Instead of that, it's one big room with a bunch of different gasses coming out. There's a single output pipe, and you have to use pipe filters to remove the gasses you want from the mixed output.

Yeah, I understand the theory, I just don't know how to (nicely) set up the various gases in one tank. I could put various tanks into one (slightly) bigger room, I guess

On the re-purposing the station from something else vein, yeah just make it one bigger room. Make it look like they re-purposed an old unused staff office or something. After all, it's cheaper to just wall up that old kitchen freezer and store stuff at room temperature than bring in the triple re-enforced plasteel space containers. Oh shit we forgot to take the old fridges now everything smells like shrimp.

[Qbopper]

On the re-purposing the station from something else vein, yeah just make it one bigger room. Make it look like they re-purposed an old unused staff office or something. After all, it's cheaper to just wall up that old kitchen freezer and store stuff at room temperature than bring in the triple re-enforced plasteel space containers. Oh shit we forgot to take the old fridges now everything smells like shrimp.

shit, that's funny, good idea

[Professor Hangar]

Quick thought about the kitchen: It should just be a small room with a microwave and maybe a fryer. No gibber, utensils, etc. The atmos idea is a cool one too. All the gasses are in one tank, and you have to use a filter if you want to take a specific gas out.

Sure, I can do that for the kitchen, but I'm not very well versed in atmos so it would help if someone could mock that up in DM for me

Okay, so you know how atmos has a bunch of tanks (those little rooms with pipes coming out) of different gasses at roundstart? Instead of that, it's one big room with a bunch of different gasses coming out. There's a single output pipe, and you have to use pipe filters to remove the gasses you want from the mixed output.

Yeah, I understand the theory, I just don't know how to (nicely) set up the various gases in one tank. I could put various tanks into one (slightly) bigger room, I guess

On the re-purposing the station from something else vein, yeah just make it one bigger room. Make it look like they re-purposed an old unused staff office or something. After all, it's cheaper to just wall up that old kitchen freezer and store stuff at room temperature than bring in the triple re-enforced plasteel space containers. Oh shit we forgot to take the old fridges now everything smells like shrimp.

That could also be funny if you have to open up walls to find abandoned shit that actually works (after you have the Janitor spray it out) and repurpose for yourself. If possible, maybe there could be a random aspect to that? The budget station was repurposed from god knows what abandoned facility, so you never know what you're going to find. (Office supplies? Old science experiments? Walled up skeletons? Syndicate gear?)

Having contributed a lot of ideas to the, well, Ideas thread, the idea of gating Lavaland access is mainly because compared to the bare-bones Budgetstation, the existing Lavaland map would be a well-stocked heaven, and kinda breaks the theme/would have people wanting to dismantle it every round to bring stuff back home. Having a nearby asteroid or two towed in or an abandoned ship full of monsters could be a good stop-gap, with somewhere inside the ultimate goal is to recover the parts for a proper Mining Shuttle Console to call the damn thing from the Lavaland we know and love.

In general, leave open and empty space for expansion and customisation; construction should be encouraged, and by the end of most rounds Budgetstation should never look the same twice.

[Qbopper]

I'd have to start messing with code to get random elements and that's more work than I'd like for a map that I don't think people will even want in the long term, but

In general, leave open and empty space for expansion and customisation; construction should be encouraged, and by the end of most rounds Budgetstation should never look the same twice.

is a great idea

[The Clowns Pocket]

You'll never beat Cerestation in the catagory of best map. Good effort though.

[Qbopper]

just wanted to clarify that this isn't dead, but I have exams next week so my time is limited

[Nabski]

Is this dead yet?

[Qbopper]

no

-real life shit gets in the way of me even logging in to admin
-fucking byond wont work and load the map file aaa
-oh there's a free alternative tool for byond mapping lets get that
-ok finally free oh nvm my rift came in the mail haha
-alright that's fun but ill work on the map in between games and shit
-oh my psu fried itself

It's still on my githib and I still want to make it but a combination of doing other shit and literal incapability to work on it has brought progress to a halt

I'll probably work on it in bits every so often but I don't have access to a computer right now, sorry

[oranges]

so it's dead

[Qbopper]

psu came in and my computer didn't get fried

therefore it's alive

just for you i'll put an orange next to a blender in the kitchen

[oranges]

dead

[Qbopper]

yeah you are

[Qbopper]

I got fastdmm to stop crashing

turns out I had copied the medbay so I could easily grab objects/etc. and the fucking morgue had a piece of paper in it that was deprecated and replaced with a new one with a different filename, and fastdmm doesn't have an exception handler like regular dream maker does for when a map has an object that no longer exists, so it crashes

[Armhulen]

I got fastdmm to stop crashing

turns out I had copied the medbay so I could easily grab objects/etc. and the fucking morgue had a piece of paper in it that was deprecated and replaced with a new one with a different filename, and fastdmm doesn't have an exception handler like regular dream maker does for when a map has an object that no longer exists, so it crashes

budget station, budget mapping

[Qbopper]

you have to live the dream for it to be real

[Qbopper]

made some progress on the medbay + fixed some misc issues (why the fuck were the windows not using window spawners) while I was adminning today, so hey, that's something

[Not-Dorsidarf]

Security shouldn't have lots of neat, differentiated solo perma cells, just a single medium sized room with no windows to space and MORGUE written on a rusty sign on the wall

[Qbopper]

I had something similar in my notes - I'm not sure if I'm going to do a big holding cell or not

I think the best idea is to come up with a variety of designs ranging from the true budget experience to babby mode shit in case people have a REALLY hostile reaction to something like that

[DemonFiren]

Let them cry and git gud.

[Armhulen]

Let them cry and git gud.

okay great but that's why ceres has a revert pr up right now

[Qbopper]

Let them cry and git gud.

okay great but that's why ceres has a revert pr up right now

it's not quite the same because budgetstation's gimmick is having shitty stuff inside what would otherwise be a normal layout

that being said, ^

[Armhulen]

i'm saying risk it but the map should be fun

[Qbopper]

yeah the intent is for the map to create interesting situations, not force people to get by with literally nothing

I'm trying to add alternatives instead of just stripping stuff out and calling it a day

[Luke Cox]

Most systems in the game have "ghetto" alternatives. All we need is to replace the regular items with them.

[Anonmare]

Surgery should have an assortment of tools and a butcher's knife in place of actual surgical equipment

[Qbopper]

Surgery should have an assortment of tools and a butcher's knife in place of actual surgical equipment

"Shitty ghetto surgery" is in the todo list already

[Qbopper]

I asked sybil if they care about 3 tile halls and it was about 2:1 "give us 3 tile halls"

just curious what other people think - 2 tiles might fit thematically with the shitty budget motif but it would also have some gameplay impacts

also I took pity on the bartender and added a booze dispenser (no booze-o-mat though)

EDIT: forgot to say I also added "cryo" and did some more general layout shit so that I don't kill myself later on

[DemonFiren]

did the chef get a microwave?
if so, is it a dirty one?

[Qbopper]

did the chef get a microwave?
if so, is it a dirty one?

yes
no

the idea is that NT had to scrape together a station on a low budget, not "everything is shit and designed to make your life hell", and it makes little sense for the microwave to be dirty on round start

besides one spray of space cleaner = no issues

[DemonFiren]

they obviously couldn't afford cleaning staff between shifts

speaking of which there should be no space cleaner, only soap and mops

[Qbopper]

they obviously couldn't afford cleaning staff between shifts

speaking of which there should be no space cleaner, only soap and mops

way ahead of you

also I had family arrive in a semi-surprise visit and will likely be unable to even log on let alone map for the next few days at least

fug

[bandit]

theater should just be like a chair and a bare bulb

[Tokiko2]

Have you considered not adding "hallways" at all, but rather just have wide maintenance instead where the hallways would be? You'd have cabling, grilles, low light and trash everywhere instead of clean, empty, tiled hallways.

[naltronix]

heres an idea, make the station rooms smaller and ommit really needed stuff so that people get on with their fucking jobs like building
like:
the HoP office
the captains quarters
RCDs
Spare metal, get mining or cargo to order it

[Qbopper]

theater should just be like a chair and a bare bulb

heh, not a terrible idea

Have you considered not adding "hallways" at all, but rather just have wide maintenance instead where the hallways would be? You'd have cabling, grilles, low light and trash everywhere instead of clean, empty, tiled hallways.

not really, I think having hallways vs maint is important to how the game plays - dim lighting isn't a bad idea, but I don't think I want to remove the concept of proper maintenance for that alone

also doesn't make sense IC if you ask me

heres an idea, make the station rooms smaller and ommit really needed stuff so that people get on with their fucking jobs like building
like:
the HoP office
the captains quarters
RCDs
Spare metal, get mining or cargo to order it

the problem is balancing things between "everything is available for you to do it off the bat (even if you need to assemble it)" and "you have fucking nothing go bother miners and science"

I don't know how omitting the cap's quarters or hop's desk will make people do their jobs

EDIT: forgot to say I'm moving to my dorm on the 2nd so work is still on hold :/