User:Cyanobacteria/Sandbox

Disclaimer

The idea of this guide is to give newer players an idea about some of the most game breaking tactics in the game. The only reason that this guide is being made is so that I can improve upon my own tactics by watching others who begin to develop on their own once I spoon feed them these methods. This guide isn't just for traitors, but, also for players who merely wish to get an edge or find a practical solution to a situation. I won't include game breaking tactics that actually cause the server to crash and are banned from all servers. These tactics posted here must be tactics that aren't intuitive for newer players to pick up. I'm choosing to share this knowledge with others and don't want people trying to edit or block my content so that only a few people can have that knowledge, as that defeats the entire purpose of this, therefore I am also making a pastebin series. This is not a guide on how to troll others, but, more so to use effective tactics the common person isn't going to think of. This list will not shrink as methods become more popularized, but, will instead change with updates if applicable.

Any section with (TAT) next to the name means that it's been tried and tested by myself personally.

Introduction

To begin with, each department section in the game and each job should have access to certain features that give them a kind of edge over other departments. This is true for everybody except a few jobs like the chaplain, curator, clown, mime, bartender, chef, janitor, and assistant. Departments generally share a few things with all the subdepartments and as such, sometimes it's true that you don't need to spend telecrystals on being a traitor in order to pull anything impressive off. Traitor weapons are more of a "makes it easier" kind of thing. That being said, this guide won't be covering AI and cyborgs, nor specific forms of antagonist. The stations departments are sections off with security, being a department that never has antagonist by default, cargo, engineering, medical, research, luxury, and the heads department. The heads department can fall into almost any other department and thus isn't that important. The service department which I call the luxury department, basically only has one robust role there, which is hydroponics.

A Few Things to Remember

1. Always hide traitor items in a good place until the moment you need them
2. When being sneaky, only buy high key syndicate items that give you away, when you need them
3. Always take the AI out first before doing certain task such as breaking into the bridge, the vault, the AI upload, communications, and then some.

Add more to this list if I'm missing anything

Medical Department

The medical department gives you immediate access to a few things such as a syringe gun or two, syringes, morphine for putting people to sleep, patches, and maybe if someone isn't in their subdepartment/section, those things too. Each department also has a fabricator which can be used in order to obtain various items of great importance possibly, such as your own private chemistry lab if you're merely a normal medic.

Liching

If you scan yourself early and have a friend use suit sensors with you, they can tell when you died and clone you even if your body is floating out in space. I call this liching. If you get caught by the head of security doing something terrible, and they kill you instead of putting you in the permanent brig, you just come right back. It punishes their stupidity. They have to kill you in the cloner as well and it's something the AI isn't going to be too smart on either. The only catch to this is you need at least one person to help you do that, which I'm against the notion. While this strategy can be used to keep coming back from the dead, cloning isn't without it's faults, thus, setting up your own cloning somewhere secret can generally be a good idea or else security can literally run down to the medical bay and just delete you from the cloning record. If you end up working with someone from research later on, you can make this process much easier by having it send a message that you died to the person cloning through nanites. Obviously the nanites method isn't viable early game.

Stacking

(TAT)This is something done by someone with access to a chemistry lab and beaker. Stacking normally requires a syringe gun and syringer to be used in a game breaking way, but, can also be done through pills. One thing people don't realize about chemistry is that you can actually put infected blood inside of a pill with other chemicals, labeling those chemicals as the positive effecting pills and it convincingly has a positive effect as well. I'v never tried this with patches but I'm sure it would work the same. This would be an example of stacking, but, it's not really the most game breaking way to use stacking. To use stacking most effectively, you have to take the effects of certain chemicals that do a particular type of damage, such as lexorin, and combine them with other chemicals to give the heterogeneous mixture the most effect. I'v discussed this before on a military weapons forum and they found the idea very offensive for some reason. My first stacked mixture I'v ever made was what I like to call "corpse breaker". The idea is someone that gets hit with a full syringe full of corpse breaker, would die and be unable to be revived by the cloner if scanned after they get hit. A tip to stacking is that some chemicals that have similar effects use similar ingredients and have different tiers of the same effect that can also be stacked, such as mannitol and neurine, neurine having mannitol as an ingredient and also having a stackable effect with mannitol that allows for more effective non-surgical based treatment of brain trama. Some brain trama will require surgery.

Corpse Breaker(Lexorin/Anacea/Impedrezene/Heparin/Sulfonal): A full syringe of this stuff would have only three units of every chemical, but, they all metabolize at the same time. There is no defibrillation you, giving you blood, giving you drugs, and even the cloner might not heal the damage fast enough.

A few last notes are that syringes can penetrate the armor of most security officers and lexorin literally only requires you to add 20 hydrogen and 20 oxygen to a beaker filled with 20 units of the solid plasma you started with in order to make four standard syringes worth. Lexorin deals so much damage that if you were put into of a cyrotube to cure it, you would have to be put in the cryotube three times after going into critical state for it to finally be out of your system. Doing this will let you, if you don't miss a syringe shot, kill four security officers.

Engineering

Engineering is obviously a department that should be a force to be reckoned with in many ways, but, it never really is because engineering never takes advantage of all of its assets. Security has access to hardsuits just like engineering. Engineering can set up an engine, create barriers that protect from asteroids, control the atmospherics of the station, control the power distribution, control the gravity on the station, and also maintain the station from being damaged. Engineers get to use game breaking tactics when it comes to the tools they use to do their job, not their job itself. Making an engine isn't going to somehow stop the bad guys on its own, nor is fixing communications. Destroying it isn't going to give you green text either.

Lasermancy

(TAT)There is a tactic that is very much cheese because it blind sides the AI completely and gives them no way to defend themselves when the time comes. This method involves the lasers that are used to set up the super matter, and the reflectors. By setting up reflectors in the laser room, you can extremely easily in almost all stations, use purely reflectors to reflect lasers into space from engineering, use lattices and floors to set up maybe two to three reflectors at most in space, and send six lasers flying around the station to any point you desire without needing to drag those heavy lasers around the station. If you're an antagonist, this is great because it lets you focus fire on the artificial intelligence. If you're not an antagonist, this is also great against rogue artificial intelligence and blob. All you have to do is protect the lasers and reflectors, which setting them up doesn't draw as much attention to yourself as actually activating the lasers or moving the final reflector in place to seal the deal. The final reflector should always be the reflector that is closest to the super matter, as to not suddenly stop powering the station for a few minutes and getting people to notice.

Beacon Trap

Most security officers are really bad at the game. One of the things you can do when you're committing crime as an engineer is make a small three by three room out in space with a fake wall that is open. Place a beacon the hand teleporter will lead you to, inside the room. Provoke security without saying a word and make sure you aren't wearing an ID while you cover your face, then teleport and close the fake wall. An airlock with no power that requires a crowbar will get security almost every time, as most people are too ignorant to always keep a crowbar and fire extinguisher on their person at all times. After about three minutes of being stuck in a room if security didn't manage to get out, there should be a suffocated security office. Since they'll be in space if that's where you built the room, they'll be much more difficult to find with their suit sensors on. This trick can also work on assassination attempts from an antagonist that fail, but, likely won't do much.

Security

There isn't many things security actually has that they can use due to the fact that the only trick other then throwing people into a gulag that they have is bringing out lethal ammunition and murdering innocent people in the hall way. Compared to the other departments in terms of potential, security really doesn't have as much to deal with unique situations other than maybe cultist and revolutionaries. Even then, most of the time, the security force is never truly able to hold their own and the reason for that is because the title they hold. It's obvious that a player who wishes to cause grief to others will purposely pick security because of the potential in abusing someone. Security is also only powerful to a certain point, from which that point and beyond, security gets out geared by almost every department. Night vision is probably almost absolutely essential in some game modes. Even chemical implants can be easily removed and the person with them can be easily cloned to get rid of it.

Rule of Two

(TAT)Very similar to that of star wars, having two officers forcing each other to go everywhere together allows for security officers that are more skilled to teach the less skilled security officer some tricks, prevents one from being stunned and unable to report the stunning, and generally increases the odds of taking out a variety of antagonist. This rule of two isn't something that's easily enforced, however, managing to do this rather it involves demoting security officers that end up dying alone or promoting the mime and clown to a tag team security officer force of their own, can prevent changelings from managing to impersonate an officer and keep the mind shield implants secure.

Cargo

There really isn't much to say about cargo that people don't already know. Because of this, most methods involving cargo are well known while cargo itself is popular. There are almost zero methods that nobody ever tries or thinks of that involve cargo. From killing lavaland bosses to setting up a massive rogue base on lavaland powered by golems, everything is tried and common knowledge. You can intentionally get a boss to get on the shuttle to take it to the station for it to kill everybody, but, it's not really much of a trick and would probably get you banned if found to be intentional. Because of that, consider this a place holder for future content to come.

Research and Development

This department is similar to cargo, except vastly superior in its current state. The reason for this is that almost any board for any computer, machine, and any stock parts for the machines can all be created inside of research and development. This means that research can create its own AI upload and manipulate the laws of the station or create their own shuttle console and prevent the shuttle from ever being called. Research and development also decides how useful the fabricators of the other departments are. That being said, nine times out of ten, research related tactics are almost always used because of the amount of flexibility this department has. As for tactics nobody really tries, there isn't really many as all subdepartments of research generally always get things done to the point where even the newer players will end up geared out by the end of the round. Consider this a placement for future research and development related unconventional strategies.

Service

Unlike other departments, this department is very open and generally involves interaction with the entire crew in a manner that is more personal than other departments like engineering. As previously stated, this department has many niche activities that serve almost not real purpose, except for botany, however, almost all of these subdepartments can have some kind of usefulness against various antagonist, such as slaughter demons, devils, and vampires. Like cargo and research, this department also doesn't have much content that other players don't really try very often.

Heads of Staff

This generally is more of a management department than an actual department, but, a department still. At least one person from each department has some place here while the captain generally controls the more important aspects of the heads of the department. As long as each department has a head, there is always an easy way for the captain to extend their power through that department and ensure that proper management of each department is carried out. There isn't much to do in this department and so carrying out anything unique is almost completely unheard of. This doesn't mean that there isn't anything new that can be done, such as giving each of the departments two heads instead of one and forcing them to stay near each other. This still isn't really new entirely.

Ghost Disk

(TAT)Extremely easy and underrated strategy. Basically, you have to manipulate the trash shoot system ensure the disk stays in the chute as it moves around the station. This method can be risky, but, will certainly prevent a lone operative. The idea is that the disk is constantly circulating around the station inside the chute system and so a simple minded idiot would think they're trying to chase somebody. This forces them to blow open the trash chutes if they want to get anything done, but, they have to know that's a good move or have to blow it up on accident. Telecommunications will obviously be something that gets blown and so manipulating the chute away and around that would be a good idea. The captains office gets blown with the briefing room which both have a trash chute inside of them, but, this isn't actually a chute system you should worry about because the disk won't go that way in the chute system. The best and easiest way to pull this off is to remove the conveyor belts in cargo and the recycle room, then extend the pipes to shoot things out in the direction and close enough to the next chute.