Difference between revisions of "Human Play"

Revision as of 07:55, 14 January 2014

Here's various tips & tricks for Human Play, detailing old-and-tried practices and advice on how to survive in the merciless depths of space.

Goals

• Survive.
• Maintain the ship.
• Eliminate the Mush menace.
• Research the Retro-Fungal Serum.
• Repair the PILGRED Reactor.
• Pilot the Daedalus to her destination.
  • Return to Sol.
  • Create a New Eden.

General Advice

First and foremost, communicate.

Mush is a social strategy game. If you let your teammates know what you are doing and try to work with them, you will do better and so will your ship as a whole, guaranteed. You'll probably also have a lot more fun. :)

Tooltips are not useful for telling you what your ship needs.

The tooltips tell you some possible actions that you can do. However, they are usually quite far off from what you should do, and in some cases, can be very counterproductive. Since AP is precious, ask your crewmates what you should be doing if you don't know.

Do not cook a bunch of rations.

This is bad or worse, depending on your ship's NERON settings. By default, NERON is set to automatically destroy cooked food at the end of the day. So any cooked rations sitting around at the end of cycle 8 will be destroyed with this NERON setting. If it's changed to preserve cooked food, any cooked food sitting around at the end of cycle 8 will spoil. Spoiled food is still safe to eat after one day, but after another day comes around it will have a chance to make any human who eats it sick. Either way, it's just not something that's good to do.

Do not eat every time you can.

While there are other ways to get food, the rations your ship starts with will be the bulk of your ship's food supply over the first 10 or so days. After 24 cycles without eating, a player gets the hungry status and loses 1 HP per cycle until they eat. If even a few people are eating every time they can, your ship will run out of food and starve. For most characters, it's best to only eat when you know you will be hungry soon, or when there is something important to take care of, like killing mush or putting out fires. If you're not sure, ask your shipmates whether or not something is worth eating to get done quickly. There are exceptions to this, like some ships will want Paola or Finola to eat daily during the beginning of the ship to get more done, but this should probably be agreed upon by the ship.

Do not work on a NERON project that hasn't been agreed upon by the crew.

In the NEXUS, there will be 3 NERON projects available to be worked on at a time. Once one of the three is completed, the other two are no longer available to your ship. Period. Therefore, someone should always list which NERON projects are available and what they do, then attempt to come to some sort of consensus on which is most useful to your ship. Some NERON projects are vital for a long lasting ship, so completing others when those are available is sabotage.

Make sure cameras are set up early.

Mush can infect humans with a spore without being detected in any room which does not have a camera. Doesn't matter if there are witnesses, if there isn't a camera, they can spore you all they like. For this reason, setting up cameras in key locations where people go offline should be a #1 priority for people without a specific job. Check storage rooms to find cameras, they will be on the walls or shelves there. The locations where you want to move them to are both dormitories and the bridge. The fourth camera can go in either the medlab or the engine room, although if your research team is doing their job, the engine room is probably a better location for a camera, since anyone idling in the medlab can easily check themselves for spores if the mycoscanner gets completed. It costs 1 AP to remove a camera and 2 AP to install it. Both these actions can make you dirty.

Do not hang out in a room without a camera.

As mentioned previously, mush can infect you with spores if you're in a room without a camera. Once cameras are set up, plan your trips so that you will have enough AP/MP to make it back to a camera and be protected. If everyone does this, it will be a lot more difficult for mush to turn anyone. The exceptions to this are whoever is using the medlab bed (usually Finola) and Chun, since she cannot be spored. To protect the medlab, the mycoscanner or mycoalarm research will need to be prioritized early on.

Figure out what your character's role is and do it.

There's a lot to do in the game, to be certain. However, while tempting, one should not explore the entire ship clicking all the things, as that is quite a bit of AP and MP that is not going towards your character's role aboard the ship. If you're unsure of your role, ask.

Do not stay dirty for extended periods of time.

There are many things which will make you dirty as a human. However, mush become dirty when they make spores and take damage when they take showers, so they very much have a built in incentive to stay dirty. Watching who is dirty, how often and for how long can help to identify mush. For this reason, if you stay dirty, you may very well be suspected of mush, and possibly killed.

If your health or morale are getting low, do something about it.

When you reach half health, it's a good idea to try to get healing. Anyone can heal 3 HP for you at the medlab for 2 AP, or you can heal yourself for 3 AP. This can also be done with the medkit in any room for the same cost. If your ship still has mush on it and you are low on health, it's best to PM people you trust to ask for healing, since it's not to your advantage for mush to know you'd be easy to finish off. Losing all your morale will kill you as surely as losing all your health, so you should also take action regarding this before it becomes critical. Lying in a bed in the same room as a shrink (typically Janice) will restore 1 morale per cycle, and you can also ask your shrink to use AP to restore 2 morale for you.

Do not end a cycle in the same room as Raluca.

Raluca loses one morale every cycle she ends in the same room as someone else, so she can very quickly reach 0 morale and suicide if people don't give her space. The exception to this is that if Raluca is on a bed in a dorm and Janice with the shrink skill is there, she is safe, because the morale gained will offset the morale lost. This can be risky for Raluca though, as Janice will need to make sure she stays in the room during cycle changeovers.

Do not use the Microwave or the Mad Kube.

The microwave can disrupt the ship's connection to Sol, costing your ship potentially quite a bit more than the 1 AP it would have taken you to cook that ration without it in the AP cost of reestablishing connection. The Mad Kube is a useless item. It has a very low chance of being successfully solved. Each person aboard the ship earns 3 glory the first time they solve it. Using it is generally regarded as a selfish AP waste, unless your ship is about to end.