Bio Engineer Archive

Ok, we've all discussed what things we want within the profession. Top of our lists are enhancements for pets similar to buffs or the ability to manipulate the already tamed pets. But the fact is that the design brief which states we 'enhance and improve over nature' is actually very limited. There's only so much we can enhance and because we're a support profession we expand as the game expands. The bio-engineer needs to have a more broad purpose because as we come into the year when the space expansion is added your going to see all other crafting professions but us getting involved. With vehicles that contain weaponry you'll see weaponsmiths getting involved, with shielded spacecraft and transport you'll see the armorsmiths getting involved and so on and so forth. Now the bio-engineers can be left simply making components for others but there must be some kind of original idea which is needed in the game and hasn't been filled.

So please share your ideas about how to expand our profession beyond pets, beyond petcare and beyond enhancements.

Well think of what a 'bio-engineer' means if you asked someone who knows nothing about SWG.

The first thing that comes to mind would be cloning. We already do that, but with creatures. What about with players? I'm not sure what this could lead to, but I've thought more than a few times that we should be able to clone players as well as creatures.

Next you can think of bio-warfare. If we are truly bio-engineers, along the way wouldn't we have figured out ways to extract those 'plague', 'disease', and 'poison' glands from the creatures we have been sampling? Germ warfare? The possiblity to add germs into weapons, grenades, etc?

Crop enhancement? Creating seeds to be able to plant crops bio-engineered crops? Creating the best quality wheat, corn, oats?

Then there are the things we still can't control in the creatures we make that should be controlable. Size, height, weight, just to name some off the top of my head.

I think part of the problem with BE is we're a third leg. We are an extra "bit" that makes everything else awkward.

We could make cool Bio enhancers, but thats the Doctors forte. We could make Bio weapons, but thats the Combat Medics job. We could do Bio Technology (nanotech item enhancing stuff) but that would probably put us up against the Artisan based classes and Smugglers.In our "main" role, we compete with CH's (supply of pets).

With that in mind (not treading on other classes toes), it'd be great to see someone come up with something.

Ok here's an old idea. This was first proposed by someone else and was expanded on by me around...ohh ... it must be roughly 4 months ago now. The concept is to actually allow bio-engineers to get more involved as a support profession, not just enhancing but providing bio-engineered resources that can benefit any profession.

The concept is that you have a new schematic in your datapad called a 'Resource synthesizer' this works much like our generic template except you have multiple slots which you put a certain number of materials into. What happens next is that you produce a template that merges resources to create a new one. This would help overcome the sometimes complete shortage of certain specificmaterials as you have one bad shift after another.

Put simply lets say your server has no had any decent 'rainbow gemstones' for a while, so the T21s are poor and some people simply aren't making the items that use this valuable resource. Now you'd have3 slots in the Synthesizer template, the first is the TYPE of material, the second two slots are used for merging stats. Now the initial slot doesn't contribute any stats, all you find is that it provides the final outcome. The nice thing about this is that the 2nd and 3rd slots determine the stats for the gemstones. It'd be possible to actually alter the gemstones so they had flavour for example. The final stats for the end material would be a direct 50/50 blend between the materials in slots 2 and 3, this ensure some degree of balance since you need to use 3 resources to make a new one. Very costly indeed plus if you don't have any good resources on hand then you can't produce anything better than what already exists.

The template is then loaded into a food and chem factory (here is more additional costs for the process) and you drop in the stacks of 3 materials needed to make this new hybrid material. So you set it running, come back later and find a fresh stack of a unique resource sitting in your output hopper. If you wanted you could even name it yourself or it could simply have a serial number to show that it's bio-engineered and not naturally occouring.

Lets take an example here to wrap this up completely, lets say we want someeggs but there's nothing good around on any planet. We'll called this Eggs01.

Eggs01 - decay res: 200 / flav: 105 / pot ener: 95 / oq: 331 /

Now clearly this stuff is rubbish, so lets say you decied to engineer a new type of eggs from this. So you'd take two more organic resources which had all the same stat. Lets call this Org01 and Org02.

Org01 - decay res:889 / flav:782 / pot ener:970 / oq:980 /

Org02- decay res:320 / flav:811 / pot ener:891 / oq:899 /

So you'd take a quantity of these resources,sticks the eggs into slot1 and the other two into the remaining slots. Hit assemble andup pops thecompleted new type of eggs. The experiment page lets you further enhance the stats you wantsince the actual result will always be an average, less than one resource but more than the other thus experimentation ensures that you can actually increase certain stats to levels you want. Lets alsosay a novice has to use5 units of each starting materials to produce 1 unit of the final resource. A master gets a nice 1:2 ratio meaning they actually get double the resources out for what goes in.

In this case the final eggs would have the stats as follows:

HybridEggs -decay res:604 / flav:796 / pot ener: 930 / oq:939 /

For the sake of balance lets say experimentation only adds around 10-20 points to any induvidual stat, that means a master can add an additional 200 points if they want which isn't going todrastically tip the scales to create an uber material however it does mean you can give certain stats a much needed kick in the right direction. In this case you might experiment up the flavour a bit.

This would naturally be a little database heavy, but no more than the unquie entries for dna plus the materials would stack. On another note this is also a huge money sink, needing 3 resources to make a single one with only the possibility of only producing double the materials of the smallest stack you put into the factory. In the end it's meaning a loss of 1/3 of the costs it too to gather and harvest the resources even in the best situation. Thats a fantastically huge money sink as you are literally losing materials. However some people know that it might be worth it since slot 1 doesn't contribute stats so you put the poorest material in there. Naturally engineered resources would be costly, at least x3 more costly than the wild ones if people wanted to break even. However it could be a real godsend during the dry seasons when there isn't anything good in the galaxy or on their planet.

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Tal-N wrote:

The bio-engineer needs to have a more broad purpose because as we come into the year when the space expansion is added your going to see all other crafting professions but us getting involved.

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Well, it's probably more Babylon 5ish than SWGish - but there is quite a bit of fictional background for organic components in ships. It's not such a stretch.

Maybe go the artificial intel. route. Possibly adding a dna mix and giving the ship or crafts computer a "brain"

I'm not sure that the space expansion will mean much for the existing professions, I'd imagine they'd bring in new professions. Either that or give us a few more skill points and add an extra line of 4 skills into certain professions. So with that in mind.....

I think we could look at how to improve our existing skills. Bar the bugs, the new crafting system for pets is fun and if they build on this over time we could end up with a truly class system that gives us true control over the pets (Ok this is looking further ahead then 2004 ). I'd love to be able to create true hybrid pets. Imagine mixing a Vur Vir with a Rancor. You could have a hopping Rancor Now implementing such a system would require some serious work and would be a long time coming, but the thing about the big changes is you have to pen them in early, otherwise you'll never get them in.

Coming back to some more realistic ideas I like the Bio-Warfare plan. One thought that springs to mind is we could extract the poison or disease and then gice it to a ranger who could make traps with it. Then there's the obvious grenades for comando and other weapons I can't think of. Maybe we could help create smoke bombs for vehicles that poison as well as affect vision.

Right I think I'm getting silly now and Eclipse has loaded, so I'm orft.

Not sure of there being any mention of organic ships in the SW universe prior to the appearing of the Yuza-Vong

Interesting idea Tal, but I see two issues.

One is the economy. I've seen posts from TH about cycle ofresources (rare to plentiful and back to rare) being one of the "exciting" things about SWG trading/crafting. People can mine/harvest stuff when it's plentiful, store it and then sell it when it hit's the downside of it's cycle for a good profit.

The other issue is Artisans. I doubt they'd like us invading their "turf" and supplying "cream" resources to people.

Not trying to "poo-poo" the idea, just trying to get people think of ways to do it that won't upset other systems in the game.

I like Malgor's idea of Bio-Enhancements for guns (poison, disease,etc.). I also like Tal-N's idea of making Bio-engineered flora in a factory. Combining samples of different flora, experimenting on the impportant attributesto get a great template, and sticking it in a factory would be cool.

Also, I could sure use some decent fish. Combining two types of fish to get one with better stats for Pet Stim Ds would be great. We could put it intoour new Fish-Eggs-Milk-Mollusk Factory. Yeah, that's what we need, a FEMM Factory.

Here's one:

How about letting us create subcutaneous implants for PCs that can semi-permanently increase a player's HAM stats or substats buy a modest amount? Implants could have a built-in decay on use orinjury ala weapons. Scale them such that they are not anywhere as powerful as doctor's buffs(which would still be desirable in this case) and allow these stats to be raised a smaller amount (say 100-150 points each). Adjust the scales so they could be worthwhile but not completely overpowering. For example, such implants could enable someone to wear their armor unbuffed but STILL make doctor's enhancements desirable as they really are not overpowering.

This would take some balance and adjusting but I bet such implants would be in great demand.

I think that the droid changes will all but destroy our cl10 market, I expect they will be more powerful than anything we can craft at cl10, post-exploit. But I'm not entirely convinced we will need a new purpose, and I very much doubt that we'll get one even if we need one. Even if nobody wants a cl10 pet, we'll still already be more useful than a few professions out there (Image Designers, anyone?).

What I would like to see us focus on is tissues, something that didn't even get a mention in our last top 5 list. Not only are there still bugs in it that need to be squashed, the selection that we have is very limited. Expanding our selection should be relatively easy, it would require no art, no new systems to be developed and tested, and there are dozens of skills that could be easily incorporated into it, from defensive to offensive to non-combat. If our tissues options were expanded, then I think between that and CH-pets we could have enough work to make our way through.

If we do need to branch into anythign else, however, it would probably be human cloning. Creating faction-style, stormtrooper-style pets; having some ability to enhance human cloning; etc.

Agreed Scorus... the tissue side of BE is an untapped market..the skills/enhancements that could be possible are vast... but yes, let's fix what's bugged first, then push for more types...

the bio-warfare aspect would be what I'd like to see...but can't imagine us becoming any part of that..and as far as space exploration...I believe new professions or at lease sub/hybrid professions will force people to pursue those avenues...(heck, in addition to the "new" crafting professions that we'll probably see...there might be pilot professions as well....

scorus, I'd bet you're correct in the possibility of us cloning npc-type clones...seems the next "logical" step for us