Spoiler Post
Week 157 will be an off week. This means suite log, fresh mean, and the CR meme. Also, this will be a heavy plotting week and the last week before the year end event, so be prepared to do that CR and tie up loose ends.
Week 158 will be the three year anniversary event. First off, thank you to all of the writers that have made this game possible and have kept us going through the years. We couldn’t do it without all of you! A special thank you to the members of the crew that have been with us from the beginning, when we only had text posts, just one floor, professional observations, and everyone thought they were going to go home in the end.
There will be a whole lot of info coming out this week, including multiple writeups that we'll be posting, but this will get everyone started. It's going to be a massive amount of information, but the mods are here to answer any questions and talk everyone through everything.
As most everyone knows due to IC plotting, there will be an attempt at escape with some assistance from Val. What the characters don’t know yet is that it’s eventually going to work. Yes, the rats are going to take over the station and this time they’re going to hold it. They’re throwing the Consortium out.
In week 158, the subjects will be getting loose and taking control of the station. The plotting is being taken care of ICly, but basically there will be multiple teams scattering to secure the station and keep it for themselves. They have to move fast, or the Consortium will kill them all in order to prevent them from gaining their freedom. By the end of the week, they will have removed the option for the Consortium to destroy the station, leaving Val in charge and leaving them the station.
So what does this mean?
1. The rats are no longer confined to Facility 1. They are now free to roam throughout Alpha Omega Station. They can choose to move into the housing that used to belong to the staff, take advantage of the new resources, and in general stretch their wings.
2. The Consortium will no longer have any hold over Val, meaning that she will be free to do as she wishes. Is this a good thing? Depends on how you define good . . .
3. The subjects will have access to new information, new resources, and new options. They have the station, now what? What happens next will be entirely character driven.
4. The game mechanics have changed. All the things that were handwaved or we said ‘the interns did it’? Are now visible and part of the plot. Your characters will be seeing exactly what happened behind the scenes and will have to handle these things for themselves. How free were their deaths really? Why do people fall catatonic with no warning? What happens when there is no one there to clean up their messes?
To answer the questions that are surely burning in everyone’s minds, have an FAQ:
Seriously? They get to keep the station?
Yes, seriously. An entire station.
Does that mean weekly experiments are over?
Are you kidding? Have you met Val? She was brought in because she loves to experiment on her guests and attempt to make them stronger. The tone will change, as Val is no longer following the Consortium’s orders, but there will be no end to the experiments. There will also be other events related to the fact that they are no longer in a controlled facility with a staff of 300 to support it. And you don’t think the Consortium is just going to accept this, do you?
No staff? How is that going to work?
There will be some game mechanics changes. For example, damage will no longer be magically repaired at reset. The characters will be responsible for repairing their own damage. There will be robot staff around, but they’re keeping the station running and won’t be able to drop everything and repair a blown out wall. There are only 108 robots, as opposed to a full staff of 300. They’ll get there when they have the resources. Full write up on the robot staff is coming out this week.
This also means that death will no longer be free, as there is no staff to do the repairs to their bodies.
Wait, where did the biological staff go?
Some evacuated the station, but we expect that anyone on the station will be killed by rampaging subjects.
So what happens if a character dies?
They’re dead. If a character dies, the clock is ticking. They’ve got to be stuck in a stasis pod before brain death kicks in. Robots will move any bodies they find to medical, so it can be automated but it’s a bit dicey, a longer wait before being tossed in stasis will make recovery more difficult as the brain kind of enjoys having oxygen. Once in stasis, the character is on pause and the writers will have to arrange for fixing the character and getting them back. The more mauled the body, the more difficult it will be to plot a recovery. Slit throat? Straight forward, have a healer repair that, use the medical supplies to replace lost blood, and kick start that heart, should only take a couple days in stasis while things are organized plus a couple days of recovery before they’re released from medical. Destroyed heart? That’s getting complicated. Harvesting organs from clones created and stored for that purpose is a possibility once the characters figure out they’re around, but an icky one and probably not popular (requires mod approval as Val will have to approve access to storage). It is up to the writer to plot a recoverable death and to plot how they come back. Writers should expect a two week plot to play it safe. Mod approval is required for complicated deaths/recoveries (replacing organs, extensive spinal damage, etc.).
Yes, Val will let them know that dying is a bad idea.
What about drops and hiatuses?
If a character goes on hiatus and the writer doesn’t want to leave godmode rights to anyone, the character goes ‘catatonic’. This means that the character has collapsed, a robot found them, and dumped them in a stasis pod in the medical level. Why did they collapse? The bots and Val will both say ‘clone sickness’. Why did you think characters would randomly disappear sometimes? While in stasis the bots will dump a chemical known to reverse the damage (which occurs at the genetic level) into the pod and hopefully the character will pull through. There’s nothing anyone can do but wait. Yes, they are visible in the pods, so friends can peek through the window and locate someone that’s gone quiet. When the hiatus ends, the character will wake up in the medical level lying on a table, wearing a medical gown, with their clothes waiting in a drawer with their room number on it.
For a drop, a writer has the option to write up a death, or they can just drop. For that the character collapses with clone sickness, gets dumped into a stasis pod, but the body is not able to recover. The character dies and is tossed in the incinerator.
That’s heavy, man.
Totally.
So how do canon updates work?
Canon updates as we know them will not happen. No 48 hour disappearance with them coming back with memories. It’s just not possible without staff and the whole isolation factor.
But something cool happened!
If you want a character updated, they’re going to need to die. As in completely dead, toss them in the incinerator. Val will just bring in a new copy with the next shipment of new guests. Maybe a lot of guests made heart felt pleas? Maybe she just thinks they’re fascinating? Maybe too many guests seemed relieved that they were gone? For whatever reason, she’s not done with your character. They’ll still have their facility memories, but they’ll be up to date in their canon both physically and mentally. For game mechanics, the writer will need to plot up a death before or on the 22nd of the month so that the character can be included in the shipment that will arrive on the 25th. The canon update post goes up this week, and that is REQUIRED to be filled out before or on the 22nd. How they die is up to the writer, it can be plotted or clone sickness.
This is how canon updates have been going on in the background all this time. It’s why they get new version numbers after a canon update.
Where do new characters come from?
Val does not want to stop her experiments just because her guests’ bodies are failing. There will be monthly shipments from an automated storage facility that Val has hacked. She won’t be offering any explanations to the guests for why new people are still showing up, because that’s how she rolls.
New arrivals will wake up either butt naked or in a medical gown on the medical level. They will need help getting settled in, since they won’t just wake up in a room anymore.
What about F3?
Facility 3 will be locked off on a day to day basis. No one will have access. Val still retains the ability to freeze all of her guests with the gold flash recorded by Timcampy years ago. This is how reset currently works, a flash of gold light that freezes all guests and makes time seemingly stop. It was installed to control the biological staff, and she’s seen no reason to remove it. It takes a lot, lot, lot of energy, so she won’t do it more than once a week, and often less. It’s for emergencies or really cool experiments only This means that she has the option to stop time and have her staff haul her guests into F3 for a couple weeks when she wants a change of pace. Or if they're getting too rowdy.
And observations?
Observations will be continuing, because Val does not want to disappoint her guests. They will be written by Val and her staff, so you can expect anything from Val’s dry sarcasm to the frantic caps-lock abuse of a cleaning bot that just can’t handle the fact your character refuses to stop bleeding on everything. FOREIGN CONTAMINENT.
So where do we learn more about this station?
Alpha Omega writeup goes up this week, including maps and information on what's on different levels. There will be apartment style housing available for the guests to take over or 7 houses that belonged to the original doctors.
So what can we do in the station?
Just about anything you want, keeping in mind that collars are still silver. Also keep in mind that there are now ramifications. Blowing up the greenhouse will result in there being a lack of oxygen and fresh food, so don’t do it. Any character being destructive to mission critical systems will find themselves dealing with Val’s security team. Also, no mission critical systems can be messed with without mod approval.
Characters can pick out somewhere to live, help out with food or gardening, experiment in the engineering area, whatever they would like. Some areas, such as horticulture, medical, and engineering will fare much better if some humans step in. The bots are, for the most part, filling in and aren’t really programmed to do this. There are a lot of roles for people to step in and help run the station. The mods would love to see teams forming up to manage the day to day decisions and maintenance.
I want one of the doctors’ houses!
Don’t we all! We’ll be holding a raffle for those characters that would make a bid for the houses and assigning them at random to keep it fair, keep an eye out for that post.