Infections

There are many diseases that can affect you in space! The following will come in handy for virologists, traitors, or any unfortunate soul who's come down with a case of brain rot.

## Virology 101

 File:Virology.png
The first, and most important way to prevent 99% of infections, is proper hazard wear, and knowing how to keep the infection from spreading.

### The Clothes

The following will protect you, from the dangerous infections of space, each giving more and more (till total) protection against infection:

* Level-3 Bio Hood
* Level-3 Bio Suit
* Jumpsuit (virologist, CMO, geneticist, chemist, doctor, nurse suit, scrubs, Research Director)
* Latex Gloves
* Sterile mask
* Shoes (White shoes and Galoshes are the best)
* Private (clean) Internals

### Isolation

If you or another crew member is infected, do not spread the infection further. Seek the isolation bay of the medical wing, or head to a room no one will enter but yourself and other infected.

### Sterilization

Cleaning blood spills from the ground will prevent contact contamination, make sure blood is cleaned from the floor at all time. Any blood splatter out there could hold a dreaded space infection. Contact a janitor if you see blood on the floor, do not interact with the blood if you suspect possible infection chance. Any object or floor that has infected blood on it can infect anyone who handles or touches it.

### Methods of Infection

The following are the various ways a disease can spread, keep this in mind at all times:

* Airborne - The most dangerous and quick spreading, if you are anywhere within the breathing area of the infected crew member, you have a chance to be infected.
* Direct Contact - Requires you to touch, been touched, or be extremely close to the source of the infection. The infection will be spread by the skin and bodily fluids of an infected person, but will not survive long in the air.
* Blood - The infection will be spread by the bodily fluids of the infected person.
* Special - The disease is not normally contagious and the affected crewman has been infected by a non-human vector source. You can work with the infected without risk yourself unless they expose you to the same vector source that infected them.

### Curing an infection

Every infection is vulnerable to one substance (or combination of two). To find it, you can put an infected blood sample in the PanD.E.M.I.C 2200 machine or use a health analyzer on an infected patient. Administering the substance to the patient (may require multiple injections) should cure him. Alternatively, if you have produced a vaccine, a simple injection should cure the patient.

### File:Pandm.gifPanD.E.M.I.C 2200

This machine creates vaccines from the blood of people who have been cured.

Use:

1. Take a blood sample with a syringe.
2. Place sample into a beaker or bottle.
3. Load beaker into machine.
4. Select vaccine you wish to have.
5. Take vaccine bottle it produces.

Additional uses:

* Reveals the cure to any infected blood sample without needing to inject a living creature.

## Infection Listings

Thankfully, humanity has managed to cure and eliminate almost all of the diseases that plagued its infancy. However, the vast reaches of space have been found to harbor new illnesses that can affect the unprepared staff on Nanotrasen research stations.

# Advanced Diseases

You are able to create your own advance disease with different symptoms, which will have buffs, debuffs and bonuses!

You will start out with two advance diseases, the cold and the flu. The cold will have the sneeze symptom and the flu will have the cough symptom.
They have almost no effect if they infect people, but you need them to acquire more symptoms.

The Pandemic can create culture bottles (basically copies) of existing viruses, so you won't run out while experimenting.

## Modifying Symptoms

To obtain a new symptom you need to mutate an existing virus. This involves adding a chemical to the virus, which will generate a new symptom. Rarer and harder to acquire chemicals will yield more potent symptoms. You will start with enough chemicals to create a powerful disease, as long as you use them carefully.

#### Basic chemicals

These are the basic chemicals for virus mutation. You can either add them directly to a virus to obtain a random level symptom, or mix them with other ingredients to get advanced chemicals, that will give you a specific level symptom.

* **Virus Food**: You can make virus food with Water, Milk and Oxygen. Virology lab has its own Virus Food Dispenser. Mixing this with a disease will give that disease a symptom up to level 2.
* **Unstable Mutagen**: You can use mutagen to mutate your disease and give it a symptom up to level 4. Virology starts with a 30u bottle of mutagen.
* **Liquid Plasma**: Plasma can be used to mutate your disease to give it a symptom up to level 6. Plasma in liquid form is generally in very limited supply, unless mining and chemistry cooperates with you. Virology starts with a 30u bottle of liquid plasma, and in some station layouts with extra plasma bars.

#### Advanced Chemicals

Using these will allow you to both save time and resources when trying to acquire the symptoms you want.

* **Virus rations**: Virus rations can be used to mutate your disease and give it a level 1 symptom. It is made by depleting Virus food with Synaptizine.
* **Mutagenic Agar**: Mutagenic agar can be used to mutate your disease to give it a level 3 symptom. It is made by mixing Unstable mutagen and virus food together.
* **Sucrose Agar**: Sucrose agar can be used to mutate your disease to give it a level 4 symptom. It is made by mixing Sugar or Saline Glucose Solution and Mutagenic agar together.
* **Virus Plasma**: Virus plasma can be used to mutate your disease and give it a level 6 symptom. It is made by mixing liquid plasma with virus food.
* **Weakened Virus Plasma**: Weakened virus plasma can be used to mutate your disease and give it a level 5 symptom. It is made by weakening virus plasma using Synaptizine.

#### Synaptizine

Synaptizine, aside from being a base chemical, will remove one random symptom to any virus it comes in contact with. It's important if you intend to isolate a specific symptom. For example, if you mutate your Cold virus and it acquires the Toxic Filter symptom, you can try and add synaptizine to it to create a virus which only has the Toxic Filter symptom.

## Tips and Techniques

### Dropper

When you're adding a chemical to a virus, you only need to add a single unit of it to the virus. This means you can use a dropper to add a single unit at a time, instead of using a syringe and wasting 5 chemicals at a time. Since Liquid Plasma and Mutagen are in limited supply, it is a smart move to conserve your chemicals.
Remember, you have to use the dropper in your hand once to set it's transfer value to 1 unit.

### Mixing in Beakers

While your first instict may be to create a new culture bottle, adding a chemical to it and scrapping the whole bottle if it's not the symptom you want, it is a slow process due to the Pandemic's cooldown. A better way is to instead keep a culture bottle, an empty beaker, and a bottle of your desired chemical; add one unit of culture to the beaker and then mutate it with the chemical, and check the result. Then repeat until you have to replicate the culture bottle: this allows for 20 uninterrupted tries before having to make a copy.

### Isolating Symptoms

When you get the symptom you want, you should isolate it, by making a new culture bottle with the symptom's name on and storing it in your fridge. Doing this will make it much easier to build different viruses with the symptoms you have, instead of being locked in a single combination. Even better is if you use synaptizine to remove the base symptom, so you have the pure symptom ready to use. A few symptoms are however too stealthy to be detectable by themselves.

### Multiple symptoms

A virus can have up to six symptoms. There's a downside to having too many symptoms: they are less resistant and less likely to spread.
Not only that, but if you add a symptom when you already have four, there's a chance it will overwrite a symptom (33% for a fifth, 66% for a sixth). This is why it's important to organize your symptoms so that you can try and try again until you get the disease you want.

### Virus Stacking

There can be a maximum of three different viruses on a person. Making three separate viruses will allow you to stack the same symptom multiple times, or simply add many more symptoms than a single virus would allow. In addition to that, having three viruses will make you immune to further viruses!
To distribute a triple virus, you should infect a monkey (or yourself) with all the viruses, and then use the blood as an infection vector, since culture bottles will ruin the virus when mixed.

## Symptoms Table

### Understanding stats

After you're done mixing your disease, stats from the symptoms are added together to make disease stats. Here's what exactly they do:

* Viruses have a default of 1 in every stat.
* Stealth of 2 or higher will hide your disease from medHUD and scanners. Stealth of 3 or higher will hide it from P.A.N.D.E.M.I.C. machine. Also, if a virus only contains positive symptoms, it won't show up on on the medHUD.
* Transmission is determined as follows: (disease's transmission - amount of symptoms). 1 or less is blood, 2-4 is contact, 5 is airbone. However, sneezing will force it to be airbone.
* Chance of advancing a stage per tick is 2% or stage speed, whichever is higher.
* Cure depends on resistance and amount of symptoms: resistance - (amount of symptoms / 2)

* Chance of it being cured every tick is 15 - resistance, but always between 10 and 20.
* Transmission affects how much protective gear you must have to protect yourself from it.

### General Tips

* Toxic Filter + Toxic Compensation = Regeneration. They are also the only positive symptoms that can stack their effects. Add Self-Respiration and a virus can bring someone back from crit.
* If you happen to run out of plasma, chemistry usually has a few extra bars you can ask for.
* Sugar can be hard to find, but you can use Saline-Glucose from any NanoVend Plus for Sucrine Agar.
* Wearing protective clothing is not necessary during virology research, but you should wear it in event of an outbreak or while experimenting on monkeys.
* If you're dealing with a virus too stealthy to analyze, you can use a virus with the Anti-Bodies Metabolism symptom to cure it.
* Have in mind the disease you want to make before you start searching for symptoms: knowing the level of the symptom you're looking for may save you time and materials.
* While it's possible, you should refrain from using only plasma to get the symptoms you need, as it can run out very quickly, and without it you can only beg mining for more plasma bars.
* The only statistic you want when making a buffing virus is Stage Speed, as it improves a few symptoms. Resistance is useless as nobody'd want to cure it, transmittability is either undesired or taken care of by Sneezing, and Stealth is annoying, as it can make your virus hard to replicate through the Pandemic and to spot with MedHUDs.
* Viruses with only positive symptoms won't show up on the medical HUD. They will still show up on the scanners and on the Pandemic.

### The Black Death

Being a traitor virologist opens you up to a whole variety of cruel and interesting ways to create chaos on the station. Here's some tips to allow you to spread your worst creations.

* Here is where statistics become important: you need Resistance to avoid the cure being salt, you want Transmittability so your virus can spread, Stage Speed so it acts before the victim is cured, and Stealth to avoid it being noticed too quickly. You won't have them all on a single virus, so choose the direction you want to go with.
	+ A high stealth will deny any chance of discovering the cure as long as the resistance is above 0.
	+ A high resistance will make the cure so rare that it won't realistically be available to everyone. Beware of vaccines, though.
	+ A high stage speed will cause your virus to progress at extreme speed, giving targets less warning before acting.
	+ A high transmittability will allow you disease to spread itself without your help; it will also make it so you need more clothing to protect from infection.
* While it might seem a good idea to put many harmful symptoms on a virus, its stats will be lowered to the point it won't act before it is cured. Stick to one or two harmful symptoms, and add neutral ones to buff its statistics.
* All symptoms give out messages to the infected before they reach the stage where they activate. People will be aware of what is hindering/killing them.
* Stacking viruses will not only allow more symptoms, but will make your targets immune to eventual ABM viruses.
* Going around outside of virology with a biosuit will alert people that you don't trust your own virus: you might want to infect yourself with an ABM/cough virus, so people can see that you're infected as well, while you'll be immune. Or simply any three harmless viruses.
* Remember that live and walking infected spread more than corpses. Consider making a disease that hinders many instead of one that kills a few. Although dead people can't work on a cure.
* A syringe gun filled with infected blood is a good way to spread viruses if you can't trick the crew.
* Sabotaging the Pandemic is usually a good idea, as it can create a vaccine for a cured virus which is cheap and easy to distribute, even if the virus is so resistant that gold is the cure.
* Sabotaging chemistry can stop them from making most of the chems that can cure viruses.