Its never used. I have played maybe 100 games of ss14, and not once has it ever been used. I think it should be on every station but it has to be set up with all the supplies to make it around it. It feels pointless to add something to the game and have it never used.
Edit - Had no idea they caused this kind of issue before, can it at least me somewhat easier to obtain though? I hardly see salv ever pull it in
And just like cloning, many things are not used in any round and when they are vaguely used the station is in chaos dying from nukies, space dragons or any kind of threat
Cloning used to be a more common thing, and it was removed(from everything but salvage) for a very good reason.
It effectively made death pointless, and the work loop of medical was null. Doctors didn’t even use chemicals on you, they just stuck you in the cloning pod because it was faster and easier.
Not to mention that if science didn’t research it every round, they were rioted against, and security also threatened to kill them for it. Being dogged on for not researching tech is kind of… meh. And probably drove science players away.
It could be brought back, but it requires a very good idea of what to do with it for that. Adding it back now and just saying “you need supplies” is not going to be hard to do. Engineers and the like will just rush to medical shift-start and assemble it then, because it’s that broken of a mechanic. No thanks.
Cloning was the core medical gameplay loop for a long time. It was removed/massively reduced because it isn’t very interesting.
It was bad enough that people found it easier to just kill patients and then clone them, rather than deal with any sort of virology stuff that might be going on with them. Which says a lot about both the cloning and virology.
we don’t really need “kill and clone” to be a thing again.
The 20 meat golems I made for 0.5-1u cogni each in my chemlab:
cloning sucked in ss14 as it had in ss13 as they were largely similar, they presented the same gameplay loop issues. Humans are optimizers and it was quite common for antagonists to try and permakill any assassination targets or collateral victims if they had the means and opportunity to do so because if that person gets cloned, the risk of them being ratted on is too high (even if it would normally be against the rules the possibility was still there).
this tends to push any antagonist kills into the permakill territory since it is the most effective way to not get caught, since sabotaging cloning itself is generally way more of a risk. Cloning as a gameplay tool was also relatively uninteresting in how it was implemented as it made it too easy to fix people if you can just print them a new body. Any mildly complex ailment that required more than two pills and you’d be killed and cloned instead.
Some changes years ago tried to help fix this: cloning needing “biomass” as a resource that had to be managed helped, but since you could recycle any old bodies to get nearly 100% of the biomass back, so really it just added an extra step. Rotting of corpses was also introduced but most of the time bodies got recovered pretty fast before they rotted to unclonability, so this didn’t do much for it either.
I think personally the game is better without cloning. It makes dying more meaningful, people won’t throw their lives away for the funny if they can’t easily be brought back as much. It also makes it less of a necessity to permakill individuals if revival isn’t as easily accessible.
We have a chem that removes rotting, Opporozidone. It requires cognizine to make, and this encourages salvage to bring back carps so chem can make it. Unfortunately it is not considered a core chem and many players don’t even know about it. But player death should be meaningful. Med should be focused on preventing players from dying. If death can be cured in an accessible way, it reduces the value of all of the tools they have to prevent death.
Cloning would be nice but ONLY on zombie rounds. Make the machine only detect zombie bodies. I’d love to actually see zombie rounds last longer and not immediately evac at the first zombie sighting bc people get round removed from just playing the gamemode.