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.
Bare minimum requirements: Build and maintain cyborgs.
The Lab
Robotics is your home as a Roboticist. It contains Exosuit Fabricators, used for the creation of any robotic component you require, a few cyborg recharging stations, a few Exosuit recharging stations, a chest with multiple sheets of metal, Power Cell, and a coil of wire, and scattered tables with a multitool, tool boxes, a few Flashes, a crowbar, a proximity sensor, more scattered power cells, and a cell charger.
Your Job
First on the agenda is to fulfill any early requests to turn people into Cyborgs. Fill the Exosuit Fabricators with metal and get them churning out some cyborg bits. Place flashes in the cyborg head, and cables and a power cell in the torso, then add all the pieces onto the Exoskeleton.
There will likely be one or two people waiting around for you, so either let them in via the service window or go actually open your door for them. Oblige them. After all, this is what you are here to do. Take out their brains via surgery, and put the brains in MMIs. Then, stuff the brainless corpses down disposals in the Morgue. Finally, insert the MMIs into the cyborg shells. You now have cyborgs!
Life on the Assembly Line
Try to keep at least 1 complete cyborg body on standby for the inevitable train of corpses that will be coming through your door. In the downtime, feel free to devote your precious metal and time to building robots or exosuits. If Mining all died off or R&D is uncooperative, keep busy by stealing a bucket from Hydroponics (Or the Cargo Autolathe) and creating Cleanbots, or using up all your Medkits for more Medibots.
Sync your Exosuit Fabricators for extra miscellaneous parts and cyborg upgrades, and get building. Mechs require acid which can be obtained from the Chemists, and mining should obtain the metals you need. You will have a love-hate relationship with the R&D lab and its residents; on the one hand they are required for you to obtain mech circuits and equipment, but on the other they are taking all that wonderful silver from you that could be going to making 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.
Other tips
Keep your metal organized, and understand how much each machine will take (and you will always need more metal). Glass is important for your robotics work, as are various devices, security equipment and rare minerals. Don't waste them. Third, have a plan before you start building anything huge, like an exosuit (without obtaining the necessary circuitry, they are useless). Fourth, make sure to perform maintenance on cyborgs that come in; Nanotrasen usually doesn't load them with anything but the minimum required power cells. Fifth, tech storage is your friend. It has two flashes, two power cells, and insulated gloves. For bonus points, beg the CE/RD/AI to let you into secure tech storage to get a robotics/exosuit circuitboard to control what you make in case it decides to kill everyone. Finally, ensure you have proper eye protection when you weld, or you'll become blind quickly.
Do's and Don'ts
Do:
- Make cyborg bodies and install MMI's in them.
- Try to borg antagonists instead of having security kill them. They fail their objectives and are no longer a danger, being restricted by their laws.
- 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 glassrejoin the round. - Put beacons in all Exosuits, and DNA lock them, lest they get stolen.
- Make a Cyborg and Exosuit Control Console.
- Try to make your own boards by
raiding R&Dgetting acid from chemistry and getting R&D to unlock the mech technology. - Recognize that the QM might be more inclined to get you some more metals if you don't eat up all of their points with Ripley boards.
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.
- Immediately blow all 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 make a exosuit you don't have materials for, nothing is more useless than a pile Durand limbs while you beg for metal and silver.
- Go on exosuit rocket launcher rampages 'because you can'.
- Be an asshat.
- Build an exosuit for anyone who just comes by and asks for one (and won't accept a Tracking Beacon).
Tips
Robots
- Medibots are a bit more robust than people often seem to account for. They're capable of stabilising multiple people in critical condition, and have infinite basic chemicals.
- 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.
- 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, which is great for topping people up. Remember to lock it after you are done.
- 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, or by setting them to stationary mode.
- 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 - a person can be brought out of crit by having multiple medical robots healing them before a fight.
- The Derelict has all the materials needed to create a medical bot. Start your search at the broken Medbay near the chapel.
- Anywhere between adding the robotic arm and the sensor module, you can write on a robot 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".
- 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.
Mechs
- 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.
- Losing a mech to an explosion will eject you completely unharmed (probably a good idea to be in space gear though).
- Mech drills can bust open lockers to get the goodies inside.
- RIPLEYs are a Roboticist's best friend. Their drill can cut through almost anything including most items, walls, even blast doors. The diamond drill can even cut through Reinforced walls. It is also a fairly robust weapon and can gib corpses.
- It also has fairly robust armor and can resist continuous laser fire from multiple sources for several seconds.
- When it is destroyed turrets cannot target anyone standing on the same square as it (i.e. the person who was inside when it went boom)
- 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 of syringes while in an Odysseus with syringe gun equipped will load every syringe from the box in the Odysseus.
- 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:
Tips for Traitoring
- 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. Changed your mechs name to some other mech and you can walk across the station as a confirmed traitor, so long as you don't speak.
- You can load a Medibot with any chemical mixture. Insert skewium in a medibot and have it wander around injecting people? Sure!
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.
