Roundstart Equipment Documents #524
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iaada
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My hero |
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More docs for the maintainer meeting!!! |
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Thanks for taking the time to write this, like Roomba said, this is a heroic effort ❤️ |
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| ```admonish question | ||
| What items should be available in trinkets? |
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Loose thought: we currently have trinkets that serve some semi-practical purpose (e.g lighter, clipboard, technically towels) as well as trinkets that are purely cosmetic/fun (lizard plush, headphones, LGBT pins). Might be worthwhile to split trinkets into two categories, one for "useful" items and one for "useless but fun" items? Though I'm not sure if that's off-topic from this general roundstart-item design-doc.
We do also have job trinkets now, and one minor problem I've bumped into is that (due to being a separate loadout group) these are counted towards a different maximum limit than "generic" trinkets. Though depending on what actually gets counted as a "job trinket" that might not be a problem per se, I'm more just remarking that this makes the item limits a bit more of a headache (e.g if we want players to have a hard cap of 3 "pointless" items)
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| ## Requirements | ||
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| Job lockers for a department's standard crew should spawn with all job-essential equipment for that department. A player should want most items found in their locker, or have a clear picture of why they would want them. Cosmetic items and optional/situational tools should only occasionally appear in lockers, and should be clearly separated from standard items in code. Expendable items and powerful upgrades should not available to discourage raiding the lockers for loot. |
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What is "job-essential equipment?" A t-ray scanner is nice to have, but might not technically "job-essential" because you could pry up the tiles/know the station layout well. I'm afraid not defining it will lead to ambiguity in what would be acceptable or not.
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I'm not sure that it is necessary to split this among multiple different documents. I'm concerned that doing so would just make things harder to find, compare/contrast the purposes of different sources of round start equipment, and encourage writing too much fluff in each of the respective documents.
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Thanks for taking time to start this doc. I feel that it is not necessary to split it into so many different parts at this time, because it seems like that would just make information needlessly difficult to find. If you want a summary, maybe include a table at the top with links to specific guidelines to anchored headings below. |
| ## Requirements | ||
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| A deparment vendor should have enough stock to supply two naked players with the neccesary gear to work the job. An untouched pair of vending machines should have two complete sets of spare tools and uniforms. | ||
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| ### Equipment Vendor | ||
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| Equipment vendors contain expendable equipment, spare tools, and optional tools. Gear they provide should be regularly useful and sought by players. They should not have gear that is easily available (such as in an autolathe), even if those items would be useful to the job. Nor should they have gear in excess for the purpose of distributing it to non-department players (such as an Engi-Vend with 8 crowbars). |
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It is unclear to me how much these vending machines can/should duplicate what is available in job lockers.
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Overall, I feel that the document doesn't sufficiently explain the decision making process to determine whether or not a specific item should be included in a particular starting location. The purpose of the design doc is so that anyone reading the doc can with relative confidence determine if a change would be accepted or not. If I were reading the doc, I don't think I could make a call on whether or not adding a T-ray scanner to some of the listed locations would be accepted or not. |
ArtisticRoomba
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ArtisticRoomba
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Thanks for taking the time to write this document. I've left my thoughts on some items below.
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| ## Requirements | ||
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| Items available to be printed round start from lathes might be tools or expendables. In both cases the options available should be the basic, minimum gear to do the job. Specialized equipment should be acquired later in-round either through purchases at cargo or as a result of science research. |
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| Items available to be printed round start from lathes might be tools or expendables. In both cases the options available should be the basic, minimum gear to do the job. Specialized equipment should be acquired later in-round either through purchases at cargo or as a result of science research. | |
| Items available to be printed round start from lathes might be tools or expendables. | |
| In both cases the options available should be the basic, minimum gear to do the job. | |
| Specialized equipment that is generally considered an upgrade over baseline gameplay should be acquired later in-round, either through purchases at cargo or as a result of science research. |
| ```admonish failure "Bad:" | ||
| - RCD | ||
| - Grenade | ||
| - Grappling gun | ||
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This may conflict in the future as these items could be brought into the latheset or lockers. I believe the following list is more representative of what we want:
| ```admonish failure "Bad:" | |
| - RCD | |
| - Grenade | |
| - Grappling gun | |
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| ```admonish failure "Bad:" | |
| - Rapid Construction Device (RCD) | |
| - Upgraded ammo that is not usually available at the start of the round like Incendiary or Uranium rounds | |
| - Research-gated equipment that is not usually available at the start of the round |
| ```admonish question | ||
| Should gloves in loadouts be removed / replaced with fingerless versions? Gloves are widely available in-round, and starting with real gloves removes intentionality from antags trying to hide their prints. | ||
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Gloves shouldn't be available in the loadout. Gloves instead should be in other places like a vend or a wardrobe. People should need to go to wardrobes/maints/vends in order to "build their fit" as its fun and allows you to show off something you spent time on.
IMO this deepens detective gameplay as everyone wearing gloves is quite boring and dilutes the experience.
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| ```admonish question | ||
| Should loadouts contain armor? Should an exception be made for command like HoS and Captain? |
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Loadouts should not contain armor. They are equipment that is essential to the job, and having duplicate armor in the locker allows heads of staff to give out extra armor to other staff which invalidates the point of it being scarce. Antagonists can also steal the armor and have a fairly powerful piece instead of it not mattering because the Captain/HoS can just pick up their spare.
Note that this introduces a bit of an annoying predicament as offering player choice as to style leads to requiring multiple pieces of armor in the lockers which defeats the point of scarcity. However it is better than offering double duplicates - a set of armor in the loadout and a set in the locker.
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| ```admonish question | ||
| What items should be available in trinkets? |
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Trinkets should not be bloated to shit (sorry). A lot of items in the trinkets should instead be obtainable in-round throughout the map or in vends - stuff like the cigarettes/lighters in the trinkets section is pointless when we have dedicated machines for them (smokes vendor). It makes the feeling of scarcity in the later parts of the round nonexistent if you just have the thing you want in the beginning of the shift.
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| ```admonish question | ||
| Should optional / situational tools like t-ray scanners or tutorial books be included in lockers? Where would the line be drawn for optional tools? |
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Optional or situational tools should instead be included in vends, otherwise they will clutter lockers up with items not taken. Stuff like tutorial books should be on the person if they spawn as an assistant.
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| ```admonish question | ||
| Should equipment lockers include items which only have a chance to appear? What kind of items should only appear sometimes? |
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Meme or gag items. Science has a % chance for a red crowbar to appear in a locker, for example.
This can also be extended to items that would be seen as expensive and thus not often supplied - NT is cheap after all, maybe the bomb kit doesn't have a multitool (which is what it currently does). However in the end it should probably just be a joke - truly expensive items should be researched and printed at a lathe.
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| ```admonish question | ||
| Should cargo be able to purchase new job lockers? Should they be actual lockers or a crate with the items inside? |
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Any sort of equipment that is inside of a locker is sometimes intentionally scarce - for example, it would be quite silly if you could print everyone armor. This is why armor is only bought in its own crate and its expensive.
As such, the job lockers themselves shouldn't really be purchasable, rather the items inside the locker should be acquirable in varying levels of difficulty. For example, a lost flashlight can be easily replaceable via your department's vendor, a firearm via the armory (much to the dismay of the warden), and an armor vest via cargo purchasing restricted equipment.
| ## Questions for a full doc | ||
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| ```admonish question | ||
| What spawners should exist? What should they have? |
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Petty stuff like department-specific tool spawners, random material spawners. Not really much more to add here as our spawners for this category are quite okay and map enforcement for stuff like this is okay.
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| Equipment vendors contain expendable equipment, spare tools, and optional tools. Gear they provide should be regularly useful and sought by players. They should not have gear that is easily available (such as in an autolathe), even if those items would be useful to the job. Nor should they have gear in excess for the purpose of distributing it to non-department players (such as an Engi-Vend with 8 crowbars). | ||
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| Items in an equipment vendor should never be clothing. This includes all eyewear and gloves, even if such items are important tools for the job. They should instead be found in the department's respective clothing vendor. There are two exceptions: an item which can be worn but isn't clothing - such as a whistle - and clothing that is not worn by the player themselves - such as a medical gown to give to patients. |
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This introduces inconsistencies with stuff like the Robovend which has a welding mask and robot parts.
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Last week's Maintainer Meeting (27 September 2025) brought up concerns about PRs changing round start gear, and what gear should be available. These docs attempt to translate that meeting and provide a more concrete form to the definitions, and give the decisions a documented place on the repo.
These docs aren't finished and are marked as stubs. I included some questions for how to expand them, particularly for loadouts which have a lot of decisions still hanging. I feel that these can serve as a start for those discussions while having something on the books for turning down micro PRs changing things.