Medical Doctor

Role type: Medical. Access: Medbay, Cloning, Morgue, Surgery , Difficulty: Medium.

Medical Doctor - Overview

Medics are arguably the most vital role to a thriving station, except for Security and Command. Their job is to heal injured people, bring back dead crew members, and provide the kitchen with dead bodies when other food sources run out.

While it's not a required part of the role, it should be noted that non-antagonist Medical Doctors are generally expected to do no harm unless your own life or the life of an innocent is at stake; Your purpose is to preserve human life above all else. This doesn't mean you can't make people harm themselves or make other people do the harm for you, but it means that your most efficient tool to fight is running away. Screaming is a close second.

Don't worry, ribs grow back!

Let's get into the art of treatment and diagnosis. So the first thing you need to know is that all characters have 100 health, but health can go negative down to -100. While a character is above 0 health, they are conscious and functioning. Once they go below 0, they are in critical condition, only able to crawl around very slowly and talk quietly. At -100 they suffer a heart attack and die.

So how do you heal hurt people? Well, Medics have access to first aid kits and burn treatment kits, which come with everything you need to treat all surface injuries. The first must-have-at-all-times is the health scanner. It's a tool that when used on a patient, tells you all accumulated damage broken down by type and by body part, allowing you to assess how to proceed with treatment.

Damage types

• Brute damage is the most commonly seen type. It is from physical trauma, I.E. bullets to the chest and toolboxes to the head, as well as damage from low or high pressure environments, such as the vacuum of space. Brute damage is treated with bruise packs. These are found in first aid kits, the medical vending machine, as well as medibelts. You will typically run through quite a few of these, so refills will probably be necessary from time to time. Bruise packs heal 40 brute damage per use, but only will heal damage on the selected body part you apply it to.

• The second main source of damage is Burn damage. This is mostly caused from fires and energy weapons, such as E-guns, flamethrowers, and E-swords. It shows up, but not as frequently as brute damage. Burn damage is primarily treated with ointment. Each ointment use heals 40 burn damage.

• Toxin damage is another somewhat commonly encountered type. Toxin damage is gained through consuming toxins and poison, breathing in plasma gas, and by a few rare weapons, such as the energy crossbow. It is also accumulated from radiation poisoning. Toxin damage is slowly treated by the liver, so check to make sure your patient has one. It also can be treated with charcoal pills, so ask the chemist to craft some if needed.

• OxyLoss; The last commonly encountered damage type is oxygen loss, which is more of a symptom of other damage than it is its own damage type. It behaves exactly like any other damage, but is a result of the body not getting supplied with sufficient oxygen. This is both frequently caused by external factors or by internal health problems. If it's caused by a depressurization and atmospherics tampering, simply moving the patient to an environment with sufficient oxygen will do the trick. CPR can help improve the odds of their recover. However, you may encounter situations where crewmembers are suffering from OxyLoss with no immediate outside cause. This often implies organ damage either to the lungs or the heart. This may get improved over time, but it is possible for people to get locked into death spirals where their heart and lungs cannot sufficiently supply oxygen to the body which causes the organs to begin shutting down, eventually leading to cardiac arrest. To prevent this, surgical intervention will be required.

• Cellular damage; the first of the uncommon damage types that will be seen under specific circumstances. Cellular damage is currently only encountered when a person is cloned. Cellular damage has one treatment method, and that is proper nutrition and time.

• Organ damage; similar to OxyLoss, organ damage is not a traditional type of damage. Each organ has it's own health pool. The amount of health an organ has dictates how efficient the organ is, so an organ at 0 health is not functioning at all, while an organ at 75 health is functioning at 75% capacity. Organs in a particular body part take small amounts of damage whenever that body part takes damage and organs also take damage if they are not supplied oxygen by the circulatory system. When the heart is at 0 health, the body suffers a heart attack. When the brain is at 0 health, the body is brain dead.

Tricks of the Trade

CPR is done by clicking on the patient with an empty hand on help intent while they are adjacent to you. CPR takes 5 seconds to be performed, and while you are doing it, the patient stops taking OxyLoss. Once you have completed a round of CPR, the patient heals a small amount of OxyLoss. CPR is never a good solution to save someone's life. It only keeps them alive while you take them to the medbay to apply more advanced treatment. This is where help from other medical personnel or even passers-by can be indispensable. Having someone else performing CPR while you diagnose and treat will greatly increase the odds of survival for the patient, especially if there are multiple patients in critical condition.

Surgery is initiate by having the patient lay down, taking the first surgical tool you need in hand, and then alt + click your patient on help intent.

Imitation Meat

So let's say you've applied what you know as a professional medical practitioner and your patient still died. Or maybe someone just found a cold stiffy shoved in a locker in maintenance. What do you do then?

Well, you clone them, of course. Cloning is the ultimate mulligan. It can be done over and over as long as you've got a body to clone. When a character dies, take them to the cloning room and put them in the DNA scanner. This can be done by click-and-dragging their body into the DNA scanner while they are adjacent to it. once they are in and the scanner is shut, go to the cloning console and hit the scan button to create a DNA record. Once you've got their record, navigate to it and hit clone. So long as the player has not left the game, disabled cloning, and their body still has a brain in it, then it will start cloning their body. Cloning is really fast, only taking 10~15 seconds. Once they are cloned, make sure to pull their old body out of the scanner so they can re-equip their gear.

When it comes to the intersection between cloning and role-playing; it is generally assumed that a clone does not know how exactly they died, or, if they were murdered, who did it. Their memory will be foggy and unclear, and they may have some confusion when it comes to understanding that they are a clone. Treat the circumstance of their death with a polite sensitivity.

Note that the one critical flaw of the cloning process is that it requires a corpse in the first place; one that has not been too chewed up, as well. If the body is lost in space, lacks a brain, gibbed by explosions, butchered by the chef, or taken extensive enough fire damage as to be turned into a husk, then they cannot be scanned in the DNA scanner. One preventative measure that can be taken against this outcome is to scan high-risk people (or really any takers) in the DNA scanner in advance.

The other problem is the aforementioned cellular damage inflicted by the cloning process. A fresh clone will be weak and need time to recover from the cloning process. Because of the cumulative effects, it is not a good idea to clone a person multiple times in quick succession. They will come out weaker and weaker until they cannot move and might die on the spot.

Medical Modus Operandi

Not sure what to do? Here's a handy set of operations that you can follow:

1) Heal critically injured crew members that are around medbay. They are the top priority. Dead people waiting to be cloned can wait a little longer. There is no heavy risk in doing this activity since people often have other priorities over killing you when they haven't died yet.

2) Clone dead people that were brought to you by the paramedics or another crew member. NEVER go find bodies on your own, as you might accidentally end up reviving a filthy antagonist that puts you into a box and throws you out an airlock. It also might not be a bad idea to ask Security if any dead to-be-clones that you get have any outstanding criminal charges.

3) Check on the prisoners in the brig and the security officers themselves. Security tends to be a hotspot for injuries, and its also an opportunity to flex on shitcurity for human rights abuse, maybe even inspiring them to change their ways. Lawyers will love you for this.

4) Open up the cloning bay for everyone to come get preemptively scanned just in case. Brings a whole new meaning to life insurance.

5) Typically, you will find that first aid kits are over-provisioned with burn ointment, and you should replace a stack with bruise packs or gauze. Burn treatment kits are also a thing, but they are mega overkill for most situations except mass-casualty burn incidents like station-wide plasma fires.

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Surgery

Surgery, the best way to look at people's insides. It is very useful for augmenting other players, or yourself. Or creating monstrosities.

So how does it work?

Tools required for the Job

So far the surgery tools in the game are the Scalpel, Circular Saw, Cautery, Surgical Drill, Retractor, Gauze, and the Hemostat. However currently the Circular Saw and the Hemostat don't do anything in surgery. These tools can be found in the surgery part of medical, robotics, or in a emergency surgery kit.

Step by step Surgery

To begin any surgery you'll need to make sure your target whether you or someone else is laying down, whether on operating table, bed, or even the ground doesn't matter.

To start the surgery you want to alt-click on your target with a surgery tool (I recommend the scalpel if you are starting it.) A menu should open up giving you the options, there should be two major options, picking a body part or the attach procedure. If you select a body part a menu should open for it, things like the torso and head can be cut open to access organs inside it, otherwise the only option will be to heal or remove it.

Attaching/Implanting

This could be attaching a robotic limb, giving yourself a tail, implanting a cybernetic, or whatever zany thing you might wanna do. Start by selecting "Attach Procedure" or "Implant item in..." then you will need to use these tools in order: '''Scalpel > Hemostat > Retractor''' then you can click on yourself and implant or attach whatever it is you are trying to (NOTE only things that make sense can actually be implanted or attached, things like body parts or organs etc.).

Cut Open

To cut a part open for example something like your head you will first want to select it in the menu then use these tools in order: '''Scalpel > Retractor > Hemostat'''. After doing that when you alt-click on your target again it should show whatever is inside that part. (For example in the head would be the brain, eyes, tongue, etc.)

Remove

To remove a body part or organ first select the "Remove..." option in the surgery menu. Then use these tools in order: '''Scalpel > Hemostat > Scalpel'''. (WARNING: You might start bleeding afterwards, make sure to have some gauze handy to prevent blood loss and making a mess.)

Closing a body part

After you're done messing around inside a body part like your torso you'll want to close it up for next time. Start by selecting "Close..." then simply use the '''Cautery''' and it should seal back up.

Important things to note

Currently you are unable to continue or cancel mid-surgery so make sure you have all of the tools needed and have something you can actually implant or you won't be able to continue.

If you come across a surgical procedure and unsure what tools to use you can usually brute force it by just trying all the tools until the next step advances.

Surgery is still somewhat work-in-progress so while most things work perfectly fine some things might be a bit wonky or not yet implemented fully.

Why you might want to do surgery

Luckily since this is just a game it won't hurt at all (physically at least). While you'd think doctors would mostly be concerned with surgery a lot of science is done with the system as well. When you are applying cybernetics for example a Roboticist needs to do surgery to implant cybernetics or give you shiny new robot limbs. These robot limbs and cybernetics can increase your natural abilities like letting you run faster, carry more, or even special abilities like having an automatic reviver! Surgery can also give you a chance to survive a facehugger as if you are quick enough you can remove the embryo from the stomach before the larvae bursts out of you. Cargo might even try to convince you to give up your kidneys so they can sell them for a pretty penny.

While surgery may seem daunting at first it offers a lot of great opportunities and can do a lot to help your fellow crewmate. So goodluck and have fun going out there cutting up your fellow crew and stitching them back together!

Department	Roles
Command	Captain, Head of Personnel
Security	Head of Security, Warden, Security Officer, Detective
Engineering	Chief Engineer, Engineer, Atmospherics Technician
Science	Research Director, Scientist, Geneticist, Roboticist
Medical	Chief Medical Officer, Medical Doctor, Paramedic, Chemist, Virologist,
Cargo	Quartermaster, Cargo Technician, Shaft Miner
Service	Botanist, Bartender, Cook, Janitor, Clown, Mime, Curator, Lawyer, Chaplain, Assistant, Psychologist
Synthetic	Station AI
Ghost Roles	Ancient Engineer, Ash Walker, Fugitive
Antagonist	Revolutionary, Nuclear operative, Traitor, Blob, Wizard,
Centcom	Centcom Officer, Death Squad, Emergency Response Team, Redshield Officer