heretic sacrifice tweak: Soul Fragments

[Kandiyaki]

About the PR

Instead of dropping organs, sacrificing someone as Heretic will spawn 7 "Soul Fragments" - each of which corresponds to a type of organ, and is usable as such in rituals.

Why / Balance

This makes it a bit easier for a Heretic to carry around ritual ingredients, as well as making it so every species has the same amount of reward for sacrificing (e.g. slime people only dropping brains and lungs) and making it so heretics don't have to spend time puzzling over which Gray organ is the stomach.

Technical details

Mostly YML and FTL - changed out a few lines in

Media

8mb.video-oqA-MqIbe6bq.mp4

Requirements

• I have read and am following the Impstation Design Principles and Coding Standards.
• I have added media to this PR or it does not require an in-game showcase.

Licensing

• I give permission for any changes to the repository made in this PR to be relicensed under MIT.

Changelog

🆑

• add: Added 7 soul fragments, each corresponding to an organ and usable in Heretic rituals.
• tweak: Instead of spawning the organs of victims, Heretic sacrifices will spawn 7 soul fragments.

[github-actions]

RSI Diff Bot; head commit 7e86bd0 merging into 06190de
This PR makes changes to 1 or more RSIs. Here is a summary of all changes:

Resources/Textures/_Impstation/Heretic/soul_fragments.rsi

State	Old	New	Status
dreams			Added
hunger			Added
rhythm			Added
shield			Added
sight			Added
speech			Added
sword			Added

Edit: diff updated after 7e86bd0

[lobsterpaw]

what are The Doe, The Warden, The Note, The Archivist, etc

[Kandiyaki]

what are The Doe, The Warden, The Note, The Archivist, etc

They're some of the heretic gods - Doe, Warden, and Fugitive are all mentioned in flavor text for the paths, and the rest are in the "thought-things" in-game book. Couldn't think of anything to put there that would be helpful gameplay-wise, so I just went for something fun writing-wise.

[lobsterpaw]

They're some of the heretic gods - Doe, Warden, and Fugitive are all mentioned in flavor text for the paths, and the rest are in the "thought-things" in-game book. Couldn't think of anything to put there that would be helpful gameplay-wise, so I just went for something fun writing-wise.

ohh okay ty

[mousesweater]

quick note, the souls may need more distinguishing features. being colorblind and trying to pick out which soul you're wanting to use might be worse than trying to figure out what a gray digests with.

[Kandiyaki]

Fair point - added some unique little icons to each one.

[mqole]

im a bit hesitant on this conceptually just because it has some implications for how other aspects of gameplay interact with heretic things which i'd like to see discussed more.

• previously, transmutation circles only dropped organs. as there are lots of ways to get organs this gives heretics some plausible deniability. since there is only one way to get these new soul fragments that plausible deniability is lost, and heretics may find it harder to hide their shit.
• would a better solution to solving people puzzling over which organ is which to be allowing heretics to see that examine text on organs? (also it should be predicted :p)

since heretic's main gameplay identity is being able to hoard a bunch of weird items that might be useless individually but can be combined in rituals to create new items, im of the mind that pivoting to this solution where there are these bespoke crafting ingredients kind of takes away from some of the flavour of it, and overcomplicates the ingredient pool just a bit.

if storage is an issue, maybe a crafting recipe for an organ bag or something?

i would love to find a way to use these sprites for something though, theyre very cute!!

[honeyed-lemons]

I believe the point is to make it harder for heretics to hide their stuff. Currently it is very hard to actually pin a heretic to a murder. Organs don’t contain dna (I believe?). Unless the pr to make heretics permadeath was merged, this will at least help to say “someone’s soul was ripped out here and that’s illegal as fuck”

[Kandiyaki]

The main thing I was hoping to do with this was make it so species without all organs weren't less valuable to sacrifice. Organs do still work in rituals, but they’re just harder to come by now.

Maybe as a middle ground, the Heretic could get a mixture of soul parts and organs from a sacrifice?

[mqole]

The main thing I was hoping to do with this was make it so species without all organs weren't less valuable to sacrifice.

ahhh i see! in that case, i understand the need for it 100%- but i do think it could be worth some additional future-proofing with nubody on the horizon. since you can never guarantee that a roundstart species will have organs viable for all the necessary rituals, it might be nice to have some more robust safeguards for that. not sure what those would look like and this is a perfectly fine stopgap, but i think its something that should be investigated more in the future. (also i just love the organ flavouring a bit too much lol.)

i am NOT going to ask you to write integration tests ensuring that urists of all playable species drop the requisite ingredients for x y z rituals but it is definitely something we should do. the goob integration tests have always seemed a little stinky. add it to the list for the refactor tbh

[mqole]

oh i literally forgot to say the main thing i wanted to respond to was that yes a mix would be good.

[Kandiyaki]

if things are going to need rewriting for nubody anyway, id rather just go with soul-parts-only for now and mix some organs in there once nubody's ready

will work on getting prediction for the tooltips done