Блоб

Blob is a game mode in Secret where a large green blob infests the station and starts destroying everything its path, including hull, fixtures and creatures. Note that this differs from the blob random event, as this blob is player-controlled. The crew must destroy the blob until it destroys a pre-determined amount of the station. If the crew manage to destroy the blob core, the crew will win. But if the blob manages to spread to a predetermined size, the crew will lose.

Mean Green Mother From Outer Space

In the Blob game mode, the blob is controlled by a player, called The Overmind. A number of players are selected to play the blob. They are technically infected and have to choose a location for the blob's base in a random time limit. As time passes the player will get messages which will indicate when they are about to burst.

OH SHIT I'M A BLOB WHAT DO I DO

So you're infected with Blobitis. Sucks to be you! But you can make it suck less to be you by ensuring the easy survival of your future self.

The best place for a blob to choose a base is in an inaccessible area, decreasing the chance of being spotted and being contained; but be warned, it has to be on the station Z-level and on a floor, otherwise you will instantly lose. Think along the lines of good Xeno hiding spots. It can also be strategic to spawn in places that will cripple the crew once you destroy them, like the SMESes or telecoms (be sure not to do anything stupid, like releasing the singularity.) Make sure you're somewhere safe before you burst!

Before you go all blob on everyone, it is also valid to perform antag actions (within reason) like a normal traitor to increase your chances of winning. If you can, try to remove weapons, sabotage the station or create a distraction for when you burst into a station-eating blob.

Blobmunition

Blobs can attack players who are directly (not diagonally) adjacent to them. The blob can also spend resource tiles to place blob pieces. Blob pieces can expand into almost anything, including r-walls and even space, but note that space is much slower than onto a clear floor tile, which can be useful for slowing down the regeneration of the tiles around the blob core. Blobs can also expand onto crewmates, which is useful for hemming them in and taking them down.

The overmind can also decide to place special blob pieces which have special functions and abilities. The overmind must have resource points to replace the normal blob pieces with special versions and to expand where the overmind desires. The blob core will produce resource points at a normal rate but to get more the overmind will have to place resource blobs next to it's core or a node, which acts like a core and gradually expands normal blob pieces outwards.

This is a list of all the blob types that the overmind can spend resource points on to buy and replace normal blob pieces with. There are limits on how close you can put the same special blob to each other, for example the resource blob cannot be near another resource blob.

Core Blob is the most important part of you, it is the brain of the blob and the heart. You cannot have more than one core so you must protect it at all costs, or you will die. It will regenerate health on its own, and you can keep track of it's life from your HUD.

Normal Blob will expand your reach and allow you to upgrade into special blobs that perform certain functions.

Strong Blob is a strong and expensive blob which can take more damage. It is fireproof and can block air, use this to protect yourself from station fires.

Resource Blob is a blob which will collect more resources for you, try to build these earlier to get a strong income. It will benefit from being near your core or multiple nodes, by having an increased resource rate; put it alone and it won't create resources at all. Defending your resource nodes is important. Always replace them if they are taken down and invest in shield blobs to protect them. The more resource blobs you have, the harder it will be for the crew to reach your core.

Node Blob is a blob which will grow, like the core. Unlike the core it won't give you a small income but it can power resource and factory blobs to increase their rate.

Factory Blob is a blob which will spawn blob spores which will attack nearby food. Putting this nearby nodes and your core will increase the spawn rate; put it alone and it will not spawn any spores.

Hotkeys

CTRL+Click: Expand Blob
ALT+Click: Create Shield Blob
Middle Mouse Click: Rally Spores

KILL DAT FUKKEN BLOB

The Emergency Shuttle will not come during blob mode. Nor will the blob spare you or your precious station from a horrible death. Guess you better take it down fast, then.

Tools of the Trade

Most of your weapons are useless against blobs. The blob doesn't give a fuck about brute damage, nor is it able to be stunned. Generally speaking, what you will want is to do burn damage. (NOTE: This does NOT mean setting fire to everything!) Here are some tools at your disposal:

Welding tools: Cheap, readily available from YouTool machines (hack them for two more Upgraded Welding Tools) or the autolathe. Grab one and start burning away. Make a path towards a resource node and take it out. One guy with a welder isn't going to be able to breach the core, so don't try. Make sure to attack on the diagonals as much as possible as the blob can't attack things it doesn't have a blob square directly adjacent to on a cardinal direction. Don't let yourself get surrounded. It's a good idea to grab some Fuel Tanks to keep nearby so you can refuel quickly, but make sure your welder is OFF before refueling, and be sure the blob doesn't get close enough to absorb them.

Laser weaponry: Available in the Armory, in certain heads of staff's quarters and through R&D or Cargo. Resist the temptation to just charge one gun then fire it off. If you're carrying the whole armory you'll be more effective if you have the ability to fire them all in series. Grab the chargers and wrench them a good distance from the blob so you can recharge, but make sure the blob doesn't eat them. If you're in Cargo, take the time to order as many guns as possible before you run off to fight. This is the one round type people will love you for running gun cargo.

Emitters: Set them up as far away from the blob as you can while still striking the core. If the blob reaches them, they're gone. Three emitters side by side matched against the core is a one sided match.

IEDs: The modest explosion is enough to rip a bit of the blob apart without destroying the floor and ruining atmos for people. Throw them in when you see weakness in the blob's defenses to tear open an attack point.

Flashbangs: Two flashbangs will destroy all weak blobs in a large area, allowing people to rush in and ruin the special blob squares. If you don't warn people you're using these, they might get stunned and eaten by the blob. Give people a chance to clear the area.

Once again: DO NOT USE FLAMETHROWERS OR PLASMA FIRES. They are useless and will only make the rest of the crew die and hate you.

Risky Measures

(Do not use these unless shit has really hit the fan, or else you might be banned. When in doubt, adminhelp to see whether the Cuban Pete inferno you are about to unleash is

Superheated Gas: Hot gases will eat away at a blob, but just setting a plasma tank on fire does more harm than good as it won't burn hot enough to reliably destroy blob pieces, so preheat your shit. If atmos hasn't been ruined yet you're doing more harm than good doing this.

Bombs: Bombs can destroy any piece of the blob except for the core proper, if the round's been dragging on and atmos is ruined, it's not a terrible idea provided you have something to hit the blob with AFTER there's a gaping bomb hole in the ground.

Bags of Holding: If you can get within one or two squares of the blob core, creating a singularity there will almost certainly eat the blob core and win the game. DON'T DO THIS IF YOU CAN'T GET EXTREMELY CLOSE AS THERE'S NO PREDICTING LORD SINGULOTH. If things are going really bad, though, and you can still get reasonably close there's a chance this may be your only hope. Because there's no assurances here you might end up killing everybody. Ahelp before doing this to get the ok.

Non-Action Crewmates

If you do not have access to the above weaponry, you should stay off the front lines unless you want to get killed and slow shit down for everyone. However! There are still things you can (and should) do!

Medbay

Blob mode is one of the few modes where Medbay is actually worth a damn. Here is what to do:

Medical Doctor: You are field medics. Put your HUD glasses on, grab a first-aid kit and heal people so they don't die. The worst thing in blob mode is someone with half the armory in their backpack dying and getting blob-engulfed so no one can retrieve them. Don't let this happen. The most useful first-aid kit is the standard white one; fire first-aid kits are useful if people are inevitably getting caught in lasers or getting hurt by inevitable plasma fire. Don't waste them on someone with like 10 damage in an area; use triage like a real doctor, you drunken ERPing fuck. DON'T FORGET THE INAPROVALINE SYRINGES! Blob produces a lot of critted people, and you don't want them dead before you figure out what to do with them. You can also drag people to cryo and dead people to cloning, but generally you'll be more useful on the field. If you do because no one else is, for God's sake loot their bag so you don't end up removing half the guns and space suits from the field like so much kebab.

Chemist: Mass produce medicine. During Blob, if the crew is competent, you will run out of medikits very quickly, and Cargo is better off ordering other things. Bread and butter is bicaridine (for the damage the blob does), dermaline (for aforementioned lasers and plasma fire), inaprovaline (for critted people), ryetalin (for cloned people.) Don't bother making tricord/DD, it works too slow and you shouldn't need toxin healing anyway. You can either leave them on the counter for people to grab or take them to the battlezone yourself depending on what people are doing.

Geneticist: Clone the people who inevitably die. Always have someone cloning. LOOT THEIR FUCKING BAGS FOR WELDERS AND GUNS if no one else did, to give back out to people who need them; if anyone whines about GENETICS TAKING MAH GUNS they don't deserve to be in the fight. Most of your powers are of limited utility -- Hulk is only good if the blob is in a hard-to-reach place, X-ray is of limited utility, cold resistance can be useful if some chucklefuck has exposed the blob area to space but otherwise useless, and I haven't tested TK to see whether it works on blobs. (If it does, though...)

CMO: You are NOT a field medic, let your slaves do that. Basically, your job is what the CMO's job should be but never is: coordinate doctors, be a head of staff, make sure Medbay proper is doing its job, and for God's sake keep your cat away from the blob. Contribute your first-aid kit to the cause, and maybe quit whining about MAH REDTEXTS and consider contributing your hypospray to someone you trust who can actually use it.

Virologist: Kill yourself. (Some of the advanced good symptoms might be minorly useful in blob fighting, but again, if enough time has passed for you to get them the blob is either dead or too far gone to die, and why is cargo wasting points on a virus crate anyway?)

Cargo

Order emitters. Order fucking emitters. Don't assume the ones in Engineering Secure Storage will last, or even that anyone will remember to use them at all. Point seven emitters at a blob and it'll regret everything.

Order guns. Energy guns have their place, and are nice, but the station already has plenty. Combat shotguns may be better if people are good with them and print as many shells as you can in advance. Why? If you print lethal shells between Industrial Welders, combat shotguns don't have the downtime of energy guns. A constant feed of lethal shells makes for the ability to print, shoot while printing, clear shell, take new shell, feed old shell in, repeat. It makes the metal cost pretty much fuckall and does big damage. Besides that, you should already have enough laser guns on the station that unless some dipfuck loses them to the blob, you have barely enough chargers to charge them all at once.

Order some goddamn metal and glass. Don't rely on mining to get back at all or on time. However...

Get those miners a hand teleporter and EVA suits. Calibrate the teleporter to a beacon in R&D. You're going to mass-drive the miners to the asteroid because fuck the quarantine. Laser cannons don't grow on trees. They can give a heads-up when they're sending a crate for the RD to re-test-fire so you don't lose mineral shipments. The primary importance is getting diamond and uranium back unless you hit at least 4 silver deposits, in which case if robotics] is any good the round will end shortly. See Science for details.

SHIT TYRONE HACK THE FUCKING AUTOLATHES. You can make dozens of INDUSTRIAL WELDERS from a single sheet each of metal and glass. They're 70 metal, 60 glass, or something like that, with a single sheet of material providing 3750 of each. An Industrial Welder is the exact same size as a normal welder but holds 40 fuel and comes pre-fueled. They're so cheap to make that they're virtually disposable. In fact, R&D should bump up their materials research with the gold from the vault to make super matter bins, pico-manipulators, etc., so that you can lathe thing stupidly fast at the forward autolathe you fuckers better have made.

No seriously make a fucking extra autolathe near, but not up in the face of, the blob. It's easier to have an assistant constantly print new Industrial Welders than to refuel them and risk the blob popping a fuel tank.

Science

Toxins: Make bombs. Six 3/7/14s. Slap them into package wrappers and LABEL THEM APPROPRIATELY SO THEY DON'T BOOM. Small Package (145.9 -- 30) hits the blob, etc. If things go ass up or you have a lot of weapons and EVA-capable people, a MANLY way to fight the blob is to bomb your way to the core and then just have everyone ready to shoot its core down. Other than that? DON'T USE THEM UNLESS THINGS ARE DESPERATE. Bombs are indiscriminate and breach the hull, so unless cargo ordered an emergency crate you're boned. (Cargo will probably not order an emergency crate.) Also, grab those heat canisters! Get some assholes into firesuits, take all the postburn CO2 you can, and release it behind the blob. As long as you don't breathe it, the suit protects you from arbitrary levels of heat and pressure so you should be just fine.

Roboticist: Once the medics empty their medkits onto belts, can make at least 6 medibots. Cargo can order emergency crates with floorbots and 2 medibots which will be useful when some fucker inevitably makes a hull breach. Cleanbots are useless here, don't waste the metal on that. Mechs aren't worth making UNLESS you somehow magically get a shipment of the 20 silver for a Durand. IF YOU GET A DURAND WITH AN ENERGY RELAY, YOU WIN THE BLOB MODE. PERIOD. LOAD IT OUT WITH A SOLARIS AND THE BLOB LOSES, NO QUESTIONS ASKED.

Xenobiologist: Go do a real job. Slimes take way too long and are way too random to be useful in time, although if you get some metal slimes early it could be mildly helpful.