Rust germ

[Sasza22]

I was thinking about the rust biome and how it doesn`t have any interesting twist about it. All other biomes have something you need to worry about when entering. Like unwanted gasses, slimelung, heat, melting ice or agressive critters. Rust has nothing. It`s cold and chlorine gets mostly absorbed by wild saltvines.

So my idea is a new germ type that likes cold and metal. The rust germ unlike other germs doesn`t affect dupes but they can be covered in it. What it affects is machines. Whenever a dupe interacts with a machine (delivers resources, operates, tunes up) the building might get "infected". Buildings covered in germs take "rust damage" and need to be repaired. Disinfecting the building removes the effect. Only happens above a certain amount of germs.

Rust germs should spawn (as the name indicates) in rust. They multiply in rust and refined metals. Survive in ores, get inhibited by solids, killed by organics gasses and liqids and disinfected by bleachstone and chlorine.

It wouldn`t be crazy annoying as you could set up sinks to get rid of the germs and some ore scrubbers to clean the ore. Disinfecting will get more important as well. The rust deoxydizer produces chlorine so it will disinfect itself on it`s own. Then it would only be a matter of not spreading the germs to other machines.

[metallichydra]

germs that you cant just ignore is always welcome

[Coolthulhu]

Sounds like pure annoyance.

[goboking]

Cleansing via disinfecting is too easy.  A maintenance oil produced at a workbench would put it on par with other diseases.  Otherwise, I like the idea.

[bobucles]

A machine germ would be very cool. However it is very easy to clean germs off the machine. How about this:

- The germ infects most ordinary materials like ores and sand.

- It does nothing against dupes

- If germy material gets processed by a machine, the machine takes "rust germ" damage as though it processed a wrong material.

It creates a very strong case for using the ore scrubber, which right now is almost entirely useless. It's also a strong case for solving problems with critters such as smooth hatches and gas filtering pufts, since they are not machines and won't break from a rust germ.

As a side note the germ overlay could have more creative shapes for germs. This type of germ could be a brownish hue that looks like broken gears and such, making it very easy to identify. Ooh, time to start another thread.

[Sasza22]

12 hours ago, bobucles said:

The germ infects most ordinary materials like ores and sand.

- It does nothing against dupes

- If germy material gets processed by a machine, the machine takes "rust germ" damage as though it processed a wrong material.

Well i imagined it like this except when processing the germs would transfer to the machine and it would start taking damage from being covered with it. I even thought it could have a status "rusting" that would trigger dupes to disinfect it as a tidy task. If it would take damage directly it would be super annoying to manage a rust deoxydizer. The germs would host in rust and transfer to nearby ore and rock tiles so it wuld still be present in a lot of solid material not to mention stuff dupes infect by carrying and interacting with.

[bobucles]

The problem with having germs on the outside is that outside germs are incredibly easy to clean. Dupe washes hands, walks up, sprays the machine, problem solved. Either very little damage gets done if a dupe fixes it right away, or the machine melts into slag because another dupe half way across the map needs to marathon all the way to fix it. I don't think you'll get a happy amount of damage, there will be a huge variance in outcomes.

 If the germs have to be processed inside the machine, they're much more tricky but at the same time damage is much more consistent. Consider for example biting down on a nice spoonful of cereal except there's a lego in it. CRUNCH.  Only a working machine gets injured, and a simple mistake such as one dupe smearing germs all across the base doesn't create an avalanche of failures. There is only one suffering machine, and it has to be shut down until the contaminated ore supply can be fixed.