i love surgery: it's easy, though appropriately stressful, and makes med complex.
surgery needs a balance to make chem not fully out of a job, though. this i agree with! many of my friends who used to play chem now either do not play the role or do not play period due to how persistent an issue surgery is.
however, the new mechanic changes are incredibly unbalanced and frustrating. there is no funklog about it, so players not in the discord have no way of understanding what is going on; hell, i am IN the discord and there was no information there either, i had to ask.
sterility is a feature i know folks have talked about for a while, and i think it's definitely worth exploring, but right now it is insanely frustrating to work with. some issues can ONLY be fixed with surgery. rot, limb loss, brain removal, etc. are exclusively surgery's job. the tools getting dirty while working on a patient makes sense, but it happens incredibly fast to the point where you have to clean them during surgery, which means you have to stop and clean them... but the soap doesn't clean in one go, it's gradual and takes a good few minutes, which expedites rot. and now, at least when i saw it, the moment a patient is rotting their heads start popping off and can't be reattached. it means a patient can no longer be cloned, borged, or treated chemically because they cannot be repaired.
there are definitely ways to combat the overpowered-ness of surgery without adding a mechanic that is this unbalanced and frankly frustrating. making it so that surgery doesn't repair almost all forms of physical damage is a start! you could also make it so tissue repair has a "cap": once it's at a point of no longer being unrevivable damage, resuscitation can take place and chems can be applied because surgery will no longer work on it. sort of like an OD limit for chem, but a hard stop limit for surgery to work.
it's also possible to just... make the sterility thing more forgiving. one patient's own body fluid should not become poisonous to them: make it so it has to be cleaned between patients. doctors walking into the room with a surgery mask down and the patient immediately accumulating 200 poison is also absurd, as well as rot making heads pop off before bloat (which was already a great mechanic).
in the discord, the admin implementing the feature admitted this was not fully tested and likely unbalanced. it is. it is causing patients to die en masse because there is no changelog on this feature, which is making it as if no change took place at all; not to mention it was implemented on funky friday, where we have an influx of players for potential events, who likely do not play regularly or may not be in the discord. the change is an issue on its own, but the lack of transparency is a huge red flag.
i'm not much a coder and don't know how my possible fixes could work, but it has made surgery basically impossible because it is now a guaranteed deathtrap. there is a way to make chem relevant without destroying a feature you intend to keep.
