Interdepartmental and personal trade using Vendomats

Development Feature Requests
1

I am working on expanding Vendomat system fist part is almost ready. There is also docs PR

Why?
Recent introduction of department economy. While great, highlighted some problems this PR seeks to address:

  • Salv is station’s mat producer. But since department now can buy mats on ATS they often buy mats that station already has. Same goes with other stuff, like meds or tools.
  • Tiders are effectively excluded from economy
  • You have possibility to steal spesos as player from dept, but spesos in most cases are useless. (As CMO i can offer botanist spesos for deus. But what they would want it for? Exotic seeds and that’s pretty much it. As antag you can get spesos for bribes, but like why would reporter need 30k spesos?)
  • As dept you don’t really have a good way to earn cash on the side apart from selling all the shit in your dept using dept-locker-chest-thing.

What?

  • Paid vendomats(Not all). With money going to departments that is maintaining them.
  • Custom player created vendomats, with custom prices and ability to make to money stay in vends for ultimate TiderShops.
  • Injecting some money into personal economy using paychecks send by mail system. (Another reason to do mail for cargo, the money will get back to them through economy)
  • More maints spesos, and more valuable maints loot which can be haggled to cargo for spesos.
  • New space law against selling contraband on vendmats.

Again Why?

Phase 1:
Introduction of single new paid vendomat, with sick drip and some rare root that cargo can
restock for profit(suggestions for what are welcomed)
Phase 2:
Add roundstart empty vendomats for some depts (meds, sci, cargo and botany).
Med for example can sell topicals, pills and med tools.
Sci for example can sell tools and all the things they can print on their lathes.
Cargo, can sell MATS, things they buy on the ATS or find in salv.
Botany can sell drugs fruits
Phase 3:
Tweaking prices in normal vends
Introduction pail payday
Tweaking maints loot tables
Other paid machines like slot machines.

2

I want to gamble spesos so much after reading this.

This sets the groundwork for so much potential future content, you have to do this right. Even from just department economies the other week, there have been lots of players suddenly trading spesos, chefs putting price tags on food, bartenders charging for drinks, security handing out fines, and i cant imagine how much more this would increase with your proposal, I am really excited. This would open up things like trader midrounds, exchange rates between currencies aka secret TC method (: , and new antag objectives, and thats just stuff I thought of in the moment.

I really like the idea of getting your paycheck mailed randomly at some point during the round, but i feel like roundstart spesos being dealt with by just starting with them, as suggested in the design doc, is slightly clunky.

What do you think of using an ATM to account for roundstart spesos?
Id imagine you would have a random-ish low speso ammount associated with your ID at roundstart that you can withdraw at any point or deposit to, and like a 5%charge/withdrawal-fee to insentivise HOP or whoever to keep it supplied.
It would give each players ID more value
It would give players a safe-ish way to store spesos
It makes it so every player doesnt just start with their pockets stuffed with money
And most importantly, It would set the groundwork for downstream forks to introduce persistent player bank accounts if they so wished (im guessing goob would drool over this if they dont already have it).

3

We are finally getting payed!