Swarmer beacon loot

[christ110]

So, let's turn some ok-ish loot into something fun!
Current loot: a fuckton of bluespace crystals
Proposed loot: an anchor-able machine, that acts like a mini swarmer beacon.
*Can be un-anchored and dragged around.
*First person to "use" (click on it whilst anchored) it gets a biometric scan, and becomes the "owner" (swarmer flag added to factions)
*The owner can configure it to tell the nearby swarmers to attack other carbons or not, and to allow changing of other settings.
*The owner (or other carbons, if allowed) can insert metal and it will produce swarmers.
*Can be upgraded with stock parts to increase swarmers to metal conversation rate. (1/50 swarmers per metal at t1, 1/10 SPM at t4)
*Owner (or other carbons, if allowed) can tell it to produce any one of the 4 swarmer types (laser, melee, mining/building, or for traitors: the player controlled ones, possibly set a config or var to enable/disable that so admins can turn off that feature)
*Owner (or other carbons, if allowed) can set the mining/building drones behavior to a few different modes: mine everything and build over lava+chasms, mining and build +bring materials back, or mine, build, and ore return +insert it into the swarmer beacon for more swarmers. (Maybe add the ability for owner to set the beacon to produce 1 laser or melee swarmer for every... 5, 10, [configurable amount] of mining/building swarmers.)
Whaddya think?

[D&B]

It shouldn't be activated at all, or allowed to spawn.

It was shit to deal with because you had to rush it as soon she game started and even when you got rid of the swarmers it didn't present any challenge or fun dodge session to justify mega loot.

[Anonmare]

I'd say it should be useful to be able to "automate" mining by letting a bunch of NPC swarmers do the mining and bring materials to the beacon. A lazy miner could just turn swarmer manufacturing off, so no mats get used to make new swarmers, and let the mats accumulate and take what they produce for themselves.

As well as an option to configure whether or not its swarmers ought to mine things like walls, electronics, machines etc.

[christ110]

The whole idea behind this was to allow miners to automate mining if they so choose, or automate killing fauna... maybe we should set a config option for the owner if the swarmers should try to kill fauna/megafauna.
to prevent ghost roles from being fucked over, and prevent the swarmers from eating the mining base (thus cucking the miner who set it), they shouldn't do that at all.

[D&B]

Automating the department needed to unlock high end stuff sounds like bad design.

[christ110]

Automating the department needed to unlock high end stuff sounds like bad design.

if we keep swarmers as weak as they are, you will need t4 parts, and like 1000 or more of metal to make enough swarmers to have even a chance at killing a drake.
besides, this isn't round-start, nor is it guarenteed to spawn every round. its a megafauna drop.

[Jacough]

What'd be cool would be if the machine sort of turned mining into Factorio. Instead of producing combat oriented drones it could make player controlled construction/mining oriented unarmed drones (or, eh it could even just be a device you can use) that as said in OP can mine and build bridges over lava but also have the ability to basically shit out walls, floors, conveyor belts, and transportation tubes at little or no cost, allowing them to potentially go full autism with conveyor systems that feed all the way back to the mining base, outposts with transportation tubes allowing quick travel to and from the mining base, maybe automatic drills that travel in one direction for a while, scooping up ore as they go before heading back to their initial starting points to deposit it.