Roboticist

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Roboticist

Alternative Titles: Augmentation Theorist, Cyborg Maintainer, Robotics Intern, Biomechanical Engineer, Mechatronic Engineer, Machinist, Chrome Shaman, Ripperdoc Access: Robotics, Technical Storage, Morgue, Research Division, Mineral Storage Additional Access: Research Labs, Toxins Storage, Xenobiology, Genetics, R&D Console Difficulty: Easy Supervisors: Research Director Duties: Create and maintain a cybernetic and robotic army, then suit up in METAL GEAR. Guides: Guide to robotics Minimum Age: 22 Quote: Bold of you to assume we have the materials for it.

The Roboticist's job is to maintain the system's cybernetic sevitors, including borgs and various bots that they can create. When provided with resources, they can construct powerful Exosuits.

Robotics and Mech Bay

Bare minimum requirements: Build and maintain cyborgs.

The Lab

Robotics is your home as a Roboticist. It contains the Exosuit Fabricators for the creation of any robotic component you require, a couple cyborg recharge stations, a couple Exosuit recharge stations, tables with multiple sheets of glass, metal, Power Cell, and a coil of wire, and scattered tables with a multitool, tool boxes, a few Flash, a crowbar, a proximity sensor, more scattered power cells, and a cell charger. Additionally, there are components to make three medbots right off the bat, minus the cyborg arms (make 'em).

Currently, robotics has its very own R&D console! That means you can research your mech n' cyborg technology all by yourself, thanks to Tech-Webs. Of course, be mindful and do not hamper the scientist's work or someone will show up for a beating.

Oh God, I Don't Know What To Do! Help!

See the Guide to robotics for a how-to on most things you'll be handling.

THIS HAND OF MINE GLOWS WITH AN AWESOME POWER

You are going to be building some of the most powerful things on the station, given time and resources from your fellow Scientists and the department's best friends, the Shaft Miners. One of the most useful tools for your job is a toolbelt, which allows you to use an otherwise vacant slot to hold an entire cadre of tools. Luckily, every roboticist starts it's shift with one of such, fully stacked so you don't waste your time fetching for supplies. It may be a good idea to stop by Auxiliary Tool Storage as well, for the metal, glass, and potentially another a toolbelt. Return to your den and meet the cyborg that will surely arrive, replace his battery for him and exchange displays of affection via a relay of petting and pinging. Then, law 2 it to get the fuck out. They're keeping you from important work.

What is my purpose? You mostly augment limbs. Oh my god.

Ideally you would have a stream of people to turn into cyborgs, but that is rarely the case. If you are visited at all you'll be asked for your extra toolbelts or to put cyborg arms on the armless Mime. On the off chance that you actually have people that want to be borged, you can remove their brain and insert it into an MMI to then insert into a cyborg shell.

So have you ever seen Evangelion?

Roboticists play an important role in that they pull bored souls from the void to give life to new cyborgs via Positronic Brains. Just as you should have a steady queue of cyborg shells, you should have a few brains on the table for them to pop into. It gives dead or late players a chance to play as a cyborg instead of ominously hovering in the Robotics Lab waiting for the Roboticist to finish printing their Ripley.

Life on the Assembly Line

Once you have your stream of cyborg shells, Positronic Brains at the ready, and you have made all your bots, you can now waste valuable time and resources on fancy Exosuits. If all of the Shaft Miners died fighting megafauna or R&D is wasting their points researching space pods instead of upgrades, you can use your R&D Console to sneakily wrestle a few Exosuit techs out of them before the Research Director yells at you over the radio.

Once some Exosuits are researched, sync your fabricator and get building. Just make sure that mining has brought you the metals you need. You will have a love-hate relationship with the R&D lab and its residents. On the one hand they will be inventing fun toys for you, on the other hand, they are taking all that wonderful silver from you that could have made a Durand. Once you do get enough ores though, it's smooth sailing. Make Exosuits, give them to people with little-to-no authorization, and watch the ensuing chaos from your comfy chair. (No, this is bad, angers the gods and your boss).

Other tips

1. Your exosuit fabricators start synced to the Ore Silo. This will pretty much solve any material management you might have had to do before, just make sure that you have enough materials to build what you want before you start.
2. Glass and flashes are important for your robotics work, as are various devices, security equipment and rare minerals. Don't be a fool and print all the cyborg pieces and then realize you forgot the flashes. Add them to your queue too.
3. Have a plan before you start building anything huge, like an Exosuit (without the circuitry and stock parts, they are useless).
4. Make sure to perform maintenance on cyborgs that come in; Nanotrasen usually doesn't load them with anything but the minimum required power cells and no radio encryption keys.
5. Tech storage is your friend. It has two flashes, two power cells, and insulated gloves. Raiding tech storage can net you a LOT of boards to make all the machines on the station (make an autholate and hack it).
6. Ensure you have proper eye protection when you weld, or you'll become blind quickly.
7. You can "hack" borgs by exposing their wires with a screwdriver (after removing their battery). Any roboticist that pulls his weight can reset a borg's module.

Do's and Don'ts

Do:

• Make cyborg bodies and install MMI's in them.

• Keep Positronic Brains available for ghosts.

• Try to borg antagonists instead of the death penalty. They still fail, but are no longer a danger.

• Cut LawSync and reset cyborg laws when the AI is rogue.

• Make useful bots and leave them around the station.

• Make drone shells so players can steal all your metal and glass and rejoin the round.

• Put beacons in all Exosuits, lest they get stolen.

• Recognize that the QM might be more inclined to get you some minerals and toys if you personally go and upgrade his machines alongside building new ones.

Don't:

• Put an MMI in a cyborg shell without making sure it isn't braindead (they can speak, you know).

• Blow all the cyborgs because one was emagged.

• Do not immediately blow up all the cyborgs when the AI is malfunctioning. Instead, take apart your Robotics Control console and relocate it somewhere off-camera so you can lock the cyborgs and reset them to become a powerful ally against the AI.

• Try to avoid making an Exosuit you don't have the materials for. Nothing is more useless than a pile of Durand limbs while you beg for metal and silver.

• Go on Exosuit rocket launcher rampages 'because you can'.

• Build an Exosuit for anyone who just comes by and asks for one (And won't accept a Tracking Beacon)

• Build cyborgs just to destroy them 2 seconds later.

• Build a combat Exosuit without saying a word to RD or Captain and Security.

Tips

• When dealing with subverted borgs on the station. It's a good optimal strategy to put paper hats on borgs that you have unsynced from AI so security and crew can easily tell who's safe to be around.
• Putting better parts in your robotics fabricator reduces the materials required to build stuff and the time equivalent to increasing the efficiency via materials science, so upgrading at the start helps a lot to get the most out of your starting metal. It stacks with materials science. In particular; the micro laser and manipulators as well as high materials research will lower the amount of materials used.
• Losing a mech to an explosion will eject you completely unharmed (probably a good idea to be in space gear though).
• Medibots are a bit more robust than people often seem to account for.
  • Anywhere between adding the robotic arm and the sensor module, you can write on the assembly with a pen to rename the resulting robot, much like cyborgs. This is useful for keeping track of medical robots, as otherwise they're all just named "Medibot".
  • Additionally, you can make medical bots out of any of the different colors of first aid kit available on the station, and the resulting medical bot will keep that color.
  • Medibot assemblies can be crafted to the last step, and then stored in your backpack. Proximity sensors are tiny items, and can fit in your pockets and your internals box - so it's entirely viable to carry and deploy a small army of medical robots, simply by combining the proximity sensors with them in your backpack. They'll spawn on the ground there and then, ready to work.
  • If you have medical access, a good tweak to do to medical bots is to reduce their healing threshold. Use your PDA/ID to unlock their interface, and reduce it to 5 - they will heal people who are at 95% health or less now, great for topping people up. Remember to lock it after you are done.
  • Again if you have medical access, you can stop an already-deployed Medibot from running away after the nearest hurt person as you drag them towards where they're needed the most simply by temporarily turning them off. You don't even need to unlock them to do this, and turning them on again is simple.
  • Though I've not tested it, logic dictates (see next point) that increasing the injection amount probably isn't going to help too much, since a lower threshold means a Medibot can keep injecting you until you're healthy without overdosing you (which, like with all healing chemicals in the game, has no negative effects other than redundancy).
  • Medical robots all use the same chemicals as standard, so it won't stack if they inject a lot of it into you at once or if multiple medical robots inject you. The chemical will, however, linger in your body at high concentrations - I've been brought out of crit several times because I had two medical robots healing me a few minutes before.
  • The Derelict has all the materials needed to create a medical bot. Start your search at the broken Medbay near the chapel.
  • Offering a tetrality of appropriately named and colored medical robots at the chapel to the Spess Machine God Mechatron will grant you his favor.
• Mechs are space worthy as long as you enable the air inside your cabin. This can be useful if you don't have a space suit and you need to cross dangerous breaches. Also, any Mechs with a projectile base attachment can safely push themselves using momentum forces while being stuck in space.
• The Odysseus can scan a stupidly robust assortment of chemicals with its syringe gun, from the laughable to the freakishly deadly. One such chemical is Plasma. Unlimited liquid plasma can be generated.
• Mech drills can bust open lockers to get the goodies inside.
• RIPLEYs are a Roboticist's BEST FRIEND.
  • They are Relatively Cheap
  • They Have Storage Capability
  • Their Internal Airtank, when activated, negates the effects of both hot and cold environments and holds enough air to last the entire round. Literally hours.
  • Their drill can cut through almost anything, including most items, walls, even blast doors. If upgraded to diamond, the drill can even cut through reinforced walls. It is a fairly robust weapon and can gib bodies.
  • If caught in a singularity the mech will be destroyed first giving you the chance to flee.
  • It has fairly robust armor and can resist continuous laser fire from multiple sources for several seconds.
  • It blocks line of sight.
  • When it is destroyed turrets cannot target anyone standing on the same square as it IE the person who was inside when it went boom.
  • A good roboticist should have one on hand at all times.
  • As a side note: An intelligent roboticist in a RIPLEY can rob the vault in 3-5 minutes.* The Odysseus is a force to be reckoned with. It can scan any chemicals, this includes drinks. The Odysseus' internal generator makes infinite amounts of any chemical and syringes fired with the syringe gun can be recovered, meaning you can fire infinite amounts of liquid to use as reagents.
  • You can mix five different chemicals in any syringe (which still only holds 15u, meaning 5 chems equals 3 of each). This can be used to create an amazing healing concoction or an extremely powerful killer syringe. For instance:
  • Healing mixture: Omnizine.
  • Harming mixture: Lexorin, Unstable mutagen, Beepsky Smash.
• Clicking a box with syringes while in an Odysseus with syringe gun raised will load every syringe from the box in the Odysseus.
• Constructing a Ripley Chassis at Materials 1 costs 30,000 metal; at Materials 5, it costs 24,000; at Materials 7, 21,600.
  • At Materials 1, fully upgrading the Exosuit Fabricator (Good luck doing that) makes it cost 27,600 metal (down from 30,000)
  • At Materials 7, fully upgrading the Exosuit Fabricator changes the cost 19,200 metal (down from 21,600 metal)
  • To build a Durand at Materials 7 on a default ExoFab requires:
    • Metal: 329400 (87.84 sheets); Glass: 32400 (8.64 sheets); Silver: 27000 (7.2 sheets); Uranium: 10800 (2.88 sheets)
  • On a fully-upgraded ExoFab, the numbers drop to:
    • Metal: 292800 (78.08 sheets); Glass: 28800 (7.68 sheets); Silver: 23600 (6.293333 sheets); Uranium: 9600 (2.56 sheets)
  • Gygax, Default ExoFab:
    • Metal: 297000 (79.2 sheets); Glass: 32400 (8.64 sheets); Diamond: 10800 (2.88 sheets)
  • Gygax, Pimped ExoFab:
    • Metal: 264000 (70.4 sheets); Glass: 28800 (7.68 sheets); Diamond: 9600 (2.56 sheets)
  • tl;dr -- Combat Mechs mostly cost exorbitant amounts of metal - a stack and a half at least in most cases - but not actually that much of anything else.
• Small robot assemblies can be carried in your backpack. Leaving the final piece out of a robot assembly and slamming it together in your backpack at the site of an issue makes for an effective response.

Tips for Traitoring

• A Cryptographic Sequencer is your best friend and will be what you use to subvert borgs. Usually, when you don't have roboticist access, you must emag a borg to unlock its panel, then crowbar it open and swipe it to subvert it. This takes time and will force you to flash and disable the borg for a bit. But since you are a roboticist, you can easily trick borgs as they line up for you to give them upgrades and new batteries, opening their panels for you without question.
• When a borg is emagged, their self-destruct function is also upgraded, making it more lethal. If you have a target that you want gone, just tell the borg to buckle them onto their rig, then self-destruct, resulting in a gibbed crew member. Strike fear into every heart.
• If you are worried about higher authorities spotting the massive FNX-99 "Hades" Carbine on your Durand, you can always purchase a Concealed Weapon Bay for 3 TC, which allows you to install one piece of equipment designed for combat mechs and hides it from plain sight even when examined. That is, until you start razing the hallways with it.
• Your objective is to card/kill AI? Well, you have access to the easiest way to get into that box of solitude. Emag a borg and you can watch it abuse complete access to the station to go right through all of the AI defenses. What you do at its core is up to you.
• You can load a Medibot with any chemical mixture. Refer to the mixture in the Traitor Chemist section and they will inject them with said mixture over and over until they die.
• People can't tell who you are when you are inside a mech and have to go by the mechs name... which you can change at any time. Change your mechs name to some other mech and you can walk across the station as a conferred traitor.
• If you do not have a Cryptographic Sequencer handy, you can alter a borg's laws by using a law board on them while their cover is open! However, make sure they are not law synced with any AIs or else their laws will revert back to normal!

Being an Evil Genius

Traitoring as a Roboticist is fun and easy, especially since you spawn with flashes, and an expectation of building very dangerous machines. Your high station access, and access to tech storage will allow you to get pretty much everywhere,considering that you can have gloves off the bat. And, of course, emagging any of your basic creations serves to cause havoc and chaos. The toxins kit's contents poured into a single large beaker of an emagged Medibot can create a very dangerous 'helper'. Emagging the cyborgs equips them with a Syndicate lawset, gives them special new tools, and prevents them from being fucked with on a control console. If you want to make a cyborg despite having no volunteers, it's never a bad idea to simple drag the body of your last murder victim back to the lab for a debraining - Rarely do people question you once the body is already being operated on.