Ass Jam

This page is about discontinued content. The following information is not current. It is kept for historical purposes.

Ass Jam is a Goonstation-exclusive holiday that occurs on the 13th of every month on the Goonstation Overflow server/Goon #4 (and only there), where all sorts of wacky and zany features are enabled and admins, mentors, and players alike can enjoy 24 hours of chaos, anarchy, and shenanigans. It started in April 2020, as a rebranding of `Ass Day that focused less on rampant Grief and more on the beautifully strange and strangely beautiful quirkiness that makes Goonstation, and arguably SS13 in general, so compelling.

Suffice to say, it's somewhat more difficult to learn the game than normal on this day. If you're thinking of trying Goonstation or SS13 on this day, do it if you want, but realize you do so at your own peril and recognize this is not normal gameplay.

Ass Jam Rules

Default UICHUI

If you see when you join and can pull it up via the Ass Day Rules command, that means it's Ass Jam!

If you see when you join and can pull it up via the Ass Day Rules command, that means it's Ass Jam!

The rules may be relaxed, but that doesn't mean it's "no rules all crime is legal" like The Purge. There's still some rules in place, the Ass Jam Rules, listed below:

1. DO NOT GRIEF OR OTHERWISE SELF-ANTAG. PLAY AS NORMAL
2. No intentionally crashing the server or causing lag.
3. No bigotry.
4. No sexual stuff.
5. No creepy shit.
6. No impersonating the admins.
7. No walling off or obliterating arrivals.
8. No giving out secret recipes and the like.
9. If an admin tells you to quit doing something, quit it.
10. No you do not get an antag token.

Ass Jam Rules 1-9 are basically condensed versions of Rules 1, 2, 4, 5, 8, 9, 10, & 11, which are better explained on that page. Rules 3 & 6 (the metagaming ones) are still in effect, but relaxed; more on that later.

10 says that if you spawn as an Antagonist, have your round ruined by Admin shenanigans (far more likely than on any other day), and request an antag token, you're not going to get one. The reasoning is that by playing on Ass Jam, you understand and accept that the Admins are allowed to absolutely wreck your round up and forfeit any right to be compensated for said round-up-wreckening. Besides, you don't really need to ask for tokens; getting an Antagonist role Ass Jam doesn't affect your chances of getting Antagonist on other days.

Where and when do they apply?

General rule is, if you can pull up the Ass Jam Rules via the Ass Day Rules command, it's Ass Jam, and those rules apply.

Ass Jam begins at the 13th of midnight EST (UTC-05) / EDT(UTC-04). It occurs only on the Goonstation Overflow server. The other servers, Goonstation Roleplay, Goonstation RP Overflow, and plain Goonstation, don't have Ass Jam, so they don't have Ass Jam Rules.

Furthermore, strictly speaking, the special Ass Jam rules apply only to rounds that begin on Ass Jam. For example, if a round begins on 11:50 PM on the 12th and continues past midnight, it's still a normal round, and Ass Jam Rules don't apply. Similarly, if a round that begins on Ass Jam continues into the 14th, it's still an Ass Jam round, and Ass Jam rules do still apply.

In addition, though it's somewhat rare, admins can decide to end it early.

Ass Jam Exclusive Content

This is where the magic happens. The real meat of Ass Jam is all the experimental maps, game modes, weapons, and other features that may be too powerful, buggy, laggy, unbalanced, or otherwise too crazy for normal days are enabled. There's content from the coder team and regular community members alike, and it includes things like:

Maps, New & Old

• Donut Station 2 and Mushroom Station return as Map Vote options! These have barely/not at all been updated, so choose them at your own peril!
• Trunkmap/Devstation/Ovary Station makes a triumphant return, renovated for the modern farty spaceperson!
• You can vote for 1pamgoC, a reversed version of Cogmap1, directly from the Map Vote, instead of having to pour reversium on the Map Vote button.
• Some community-made maps enter rotation. This time around:
  • Density: A ridiculously tiny map that's shaped like a bad idea. Must have 30 people or less on the server at time of Map Vote to be available.
  • Fleet/Bellerophon: A series of tiny ships each with their own department, loosely linked by pipes.
  • Icarus: Triangular ship with a singularity too close to the crew.
  • Wrestlemap: An ring-shaped station with many different wrestling/boxing arenas, and "fake" wrestling belts that give you harmless versions of the Wrestler abilities.

Miscellaneous

• Everyone can *dab! It's not bound to any particular hotkey, so you'll have to enter say "*dab into the text parser near the bottom of the screen or press T and put in *dab if you have WASD mode on. You are still not protected from the more harmful effects of dabbing though.
• OOC is always on. As a reminder, the hotkey for it is O. If all those fail, you should still be able to use the ooc command, either through the Commands tab or the text parser at the bottom of the screen.

Contributing to Ass Jam Features

Want to add a feature for Ass Jam? It's easy. Just take a look at this Google Doc for details on formatting your code for Ass Jam shenanigans or read this this comment snippet for a shorter guide. If you don't know how to code or use Github, but still want to contribute, check out the Goonstation Development Guidelines and this wiki's Coding guide.

We ask that you 1) try to add code, rather than change existing code, 2) leave a comment explaining the Ass Jam code 3) follow the server rules, and mostly importantly 4) make sure your code compiles, both with Ass Jam define off and with it on. Depending on how good your features are, it might even be incorporated into the full game, to be enjoyed all 28/29/30/31 days of the month, not just one.

History

Ye Olde Ass Day

The old Ass Day rules. Notice the lack of griefing rules.

Ass Jam started back in August 2016 under the name of "Ass Day". It was heralded by this forum thread with an ominous countdown and a "Syndicate communique" explaining Ass Day within the game universe as a shutdown of NanoTrasen station surveillance.

People often compared it to The Purge, and though it was originally conceived by admins MagicMountain and Popecrunch and mentor APARTHEID as an chance for players to indulge in their urges to grief, the comparison was never really true. Rather than being totally suspended, the normal Rules were swapped out for a special set of Ass Day Rules, listed below:

1. No intentionally crashing the server or causing lag.
2. No bigotry.
3. No sexual stuff.
4. No creepy shit.
5. No impersonating the admins.
6. No walling off or obliterating arrivals.
7. No giving out secret recipes and the like.
8. If an admin tells you to quit doing something, quit it.
9. No you do not get an antag token.

It's not too different from current Ass Jam rules or even general game rules, but notice the lack of rules against grief. This was the core defining feature of Ass Day. It extended to all roles; Security for example could ignore Space Law and be as brutal as they wished, and AI, Cyborg, and Ghostdrone were free to disobey their laws, with griefy ghostdrones in particular being somewhat of a tradition on Ass Day.

Ass Day Is Dead, Long Live Ass Day

Simply put, Ass Day's lack of grief rules was boring. Similar to The Purge films, most people were not really all that interested in griefing each other, and the ones that were tended to burn through both each other and the people who didn't want to grief pretty quickly, often in ways that prolonged the round or made calling the shuttle or otherwise ending the round difficult. Rather than intense glorious grief fests, people instead got brief one-sided outbreaks of grief followed by dreary doldrums of waiting around as a Ghost watching an empty station and clamoring for someone to end their misery, if they hadn't already left out of boredom. While there were admin shenanigans rounds that significantly lifted the mood, the regular Ass Day rounds between became slogs, and unlike modern Ass Jam, there was no bizarre and creative content to keep things interesting.

The playerbase, naturally, voiced their discontent. By and large, most players still loved Ass Day, especially the wild and chaotic rounds where admins went nuts with their admin buttons and gimmicks, but they could not bear all the crushingly dull rounds in-between where nothing happened and resented their rounds ending early by what they felt were repetitive and unfair tactics, with particular distaste towards griefing ghostdrones. It got to a point where the population of the server(s) celebrating Ass Day regularly dropped by 30% or more, even during weekends when there were supposed be more people playing.

The admins noticed. In March 2020, after a few months of fumbling, they decided to reform Ass Day into the current Ass Jam, forgoing suspending grief rules in favor of enabling strange and wacky mechanics.

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