funky station

It's awfully quiet in here so I'll start a thread.

I would love to see the librarian role get more love. Something Id really like to see is a use for books, rather than just as clutter.

Imagine if certain recipes for craftsble items were "locked" behind knowledge, and you had to read a book to unlock crafting recipes. For example, a book on "offensive origami" that gives you a recipe to fold airplanes from paper that stuck like darts/thrown weapons. Or a book on medieval combat that lets you craft scrap amour or rudimentary swords and weapons.

You could put a lot of what's generally considered tider loot and other interesting recipes behind this kind of gated learning. I know there's a lot of items that don't get ported from other forks/ss13 because having totally open access to them kind of unbalances the flow of a round.

So my pitch is something like, librarians start with a set of books generated from a pool of all the interesting ones, when someone checks a book out, they have to scan it with a checkout computer or something like the appraisal tool and the ID card of whomever checked it out. If the book is checked back in (ID card and book scanned again) the library computer gets some cash or scrip or points or whatever to purchase new titles from a list. If a book isn't returned within a set timeframe, the library is penalized (like priority mail penalities). There could be some very dangerous books for a lot of points (maybe allowing the librarian to secretly turn themselves into a heretic or cult antag) or syndicate/antag related recipes hidden in seemingly innocuous books.

I think this would give players a reason to go to the library, give the librarian more concrete goals (like hunting down people for late fees) and overall add more colour and diversity to an often overlooked department. (What's that, sec is banning books now??)

I've been thinking about this off and on for a few months but I don't think it's fleshed out enough to contribute as a design doc, so I guess that's the general idea of this post. Share your half-baked ideas and maybe we can brainstorm on something enough to get a proposal together.

Mentorhelp

let me ask all my questions to smarter people damn it!!!

Ive always found it pretty odd that with enough resources you can kind of craft anything? Even as a greytider? So the idea of making the library's books more mechanically useful this way sounds really neat!

Would definitely take some tweaking, I can imagine some people finding it annoying but... It would encourage more social encounters, which is in the spirit of funky.

I think chefs could use a bit of tweaking too but Librarian is definitely left in the dust the most, for sure.

I really like the idea of exclusive recipes being locked behind a 'paper trail' so to speak. I can imagine security talking with the librarian for info on who checked out certain books.

We need the twerking animation. You know the gif I'm talking about. I want to see 10 assistants in a line throwing it back in unison, I want it to be the equivalent of thumping tails or flapping wings - This is how we revitalise the human in the species economy, because not a single other species has the cheeks to back it up

A paper overhaul.

• Make paper more universal (text rendered in a similar manner across OSs, UI scales, etc)
• Add an Office Printer for HoP/Librarian (Allows for batch printing forms).
• Make document labels editable via a textbox (instead of only being able to label papers with a label maker/adding # Label Text before printing a paper).
• Allow printing colored papers (Similar to how you can print paper with a label via # Label Text ).
• Add [mono], book pages, and other formatting quirks to the "Writing" guidebook section.