Game Modes

Current Game Modes

Secret

Generally the default mode. The game will randomly choose from the available game modes to keep you on your toes! The usual selection is Traitor, Changeling, Nuclear Emergency, Wizard, Gang, Revolution, Blob, Spy Theft, Vampire, Arcfiend, Mixed (Action), and Mixed (Mild).

Intrigue

A special version of Secret exclusive to the RP servers, Goonstation Roleplay 3: Morty and Goonstation Roleplay 4: Sylvester, tailored to facilitate roleplaying opportunities. Includes the Traitor, Changeling, Conspiracy, Spy Theft, Vampire, Arcfiend, Mixed (Mild), Gang, and Extended game modes.

Nuclear Emergency

Generally known as nuclear, nuke, or nukies. A team of operatives, whose number is based on the server population, are spawned on a small shuttle with a nuclear bomb inside of it. Their objective is to get the bomb onto the station and activate it in a specific area, then defend it until the countdown reaches zero.

Default antagonists: Nuclear Operative

Game-ending conditions:

• All operatives are dead (and the nuclear bomb isn't armed).
• The bomb is destroyed.
• The bomb obliterates the station.

Traitor

A number of random crew members, based on current server population, will defect from Nanotrasen and become traitors with varying objectives! They each get access to a bunch of cool and deadly gear.

Default antagonists:

• Starting: Traitor, occasionally Wraiths
• Late-joining: Traitor
• Random event: Random Event Antag & Sleeper Agent

Changeling

A horrible organism (that is most certainly not a copy of The Thing) has escaped from some private research facility and is preying on the crew members! Prepare for acid-spitting, DNA-sucking creatures who can disguise themselves as any crew member they have stolen the DNA from! Trust no one!

Default antagonists:

• Starting: Changeling
• Late-joining: Changeling
• Random event: Random Event Antag & Sleeper Agent

Wizard

Hark! A technophobe wizard with a mighty beard hath appeared on the station, and he's out for blood! Beware his fireballs, golems, missiles and horrible cluwne curses!

Default antagonists:

• Starting: Wizard
• Late-joining: Changeling, Vampire
• Random event: Random Event Antag & Sleeper Agent

Blob

The blob is a jelly-like organism that rapidly spreads across the station, destroying obstacles such as walls, windows, and crew members. At the start of the round, one or several player-controlled blobs will deploy somewhere on the station and immediately begin spreading outwards from that point. It has a strong vulnerability to fire - welders, flamethrowers and actual fire will damage and destroy the blob, a tile at a time. The AI must help the crew in fighting the blob.

Default antagonists: Blob

Game-ending conditions:

• All blobs complete their objectives.
• All blobs are destroyed.

Mixed (Action)

In this mode, instead of there being one or two fixed antagonist types, there is a mix of various types all at once. Grinches are disabled on the Roleplay servers, though since the default mode for the RP servers, Intrigue, can't run this mode, this is more an extra pre-caution.

Default antagonists:

• Starting: Traitor, Changeling, Wizard, Vampire, Wraith, Blob, Grinch (disabled on RP), Spy Thief (always at least two if they spawn), Werewolf, Wrestler, Arcfiend
• Late-joining: Traitor, Changeling, Vampire, Grinch (disabled on RP), Arcfiend
• Random event: Random Event Antag & Sleeper Agent

Mixed (Mild)

Same as Mixed (Action), but Blob has been removed from the list of possible antagonists to encourage less wanton and/or silent murder and more crew-antag interaction. On the Roleplay servers, Grinch has also been removed from the list.

Default antagonists:

• Starting: Traitor, Changeling, Vampire, Grinch (disabled on RP), Spy Thief, Wrestler, Arcfiend, Werewolf, Wizard, Wraith
• Late-joining: Traitor, Changeling, Vampire, Grinch (disabled on RP), Arcfiend, Wizard, Werewolf
• Random event: Random Event Antag & Sleeper Agent

Conspiracy

A dark conspiracy is afoot. The conspirators: your fellow crew members. You may not know who is and who isn't part of the conspiracy, but they sure do. Each conspirator knows the names of other conspirators and their designated meeting place and has access to a secret Conspirator-only radio channel. Together, they must work towards a unique, commonly-shared mode-exclusive objective. Largely exclusive to the Goonstation Roleplay server.

Default antagonists:

• Starting: Conspirator + a single Traitor or Changeling or Vampire or Arcfiend
• Late-joining: Traitor

Gang

The station is caught in the middle of a war between groups of people with silly names! Will TUNNEL SNAKES be victorious over BADMIN BUSTAS? Play as a gang leader, a gang member, or some random guy who is not in a gang! Formerly an admin-intervention-only mode, now in regular game mode rotation by popular demand!

Default antagonists: Gang

Revolution

Three crew members are revolutionaries who want to kill all the heads of staff, can order unique rev gear to aid in the cause, and can recruit any non-security member to their side with flashes. The shuttle can be called but won't arrive in this game mode, meaning it can only end if one side or the other is successful. Formerly removed due to being prone to massive, bloody stalemates, brought back by popular demand in 2017!

Default Antagonist: Revolutionary

Game-ending conditions:

• If all of the command staff that spawned on roundstart (but not ones the join later) die and/or leave the station Z-level, the revolution wins.
• If all the leaders of the revolution die, are brigged, and/or leave the station, the crew wins.
• If the round reaches 55-65 minutes without meeting either of the above outcomes, CentComm wins.
• Leaving the station z-level, not being logged in, and being brigged all count as "abandoned the station / abandoned the cause", in which they are treated as dead.

Spy Theft

Spies among our midst, men! A number of crew members are secret agents, who have many different objectives and compete to complete bounties for certain items/objects to obtain random Syndicate gear.

Default antagonists:

• Starting: Spy Thief
• Late-joining: Traitor
• Random event: Random Event Antag & Sleeper Agent

Vampire

Some crew want to suck your blood! Capable of outright resisting stuns and, at higher levels, vanishing away as a bat, summoning protective spirits, and siccing undead minions on those who dare defy them, these bloodsuckers are fiendishly difficult to pin down and become only more elusive with every drop of blood they drink. True to popular imagination, vampires are weak to the light of stars in Space and holy objects, but death is only a minor setback for them and their coffin-regeneration powers.

• Starting: Vampire, Wraith
• Late-joining: Vampire

Arcfiend

Danger, high voltage. Sometimes known as "energy vampires", arcfiends might look like normal crew, but they feed on electricity, are immune to certain forms of it, and wield a wide of variety of electromagnetic powers, like hurling lightning, traveling through power cables, emitting EM waves that disable radio communication, and even stopping people's hearts with a massive jolt of electricity.

• Default antagonist: Arcfiend
• Late-joining: Arcfiend

Other Game Modes

Extended

Extended is a round where there are no antagonists selected, giving players the ability to experiment with station systems for as long as they want. On the Classic servers, extended is occasionally used for gimmick rounds where the admins intend to manually create traitors or organize an event. Way back when there was only Roleplay server, and it went by LLJK1, it used to be the only game mode on the Roleplay servers until it was changed to intrigue. (This change came before LLJK1 was christened Goon RP #1, before again being named to Goonstation Roleplay, then Goonstation Classic 1: Heisenbee.)

Default antagonists: None

Action

Cross your fingers, hold your toes, and say your /prayers, because an Admin has taken the director's chair and is craving some ACTION!. Much like Intrigue, this mode is a hand-picked selection of a number of other game modes, starring "louder", flashier antagonists, all scored and occasionally directed by the Admin in the background. This is like Secret in that it actually consists of a set of modes, Wizard, Blob, and Nuclear Emergency, but it's not unheard of for antags from other modes to make a surprise appearance due to admin meddling.

Disaster

Someone made a terrible mistake, and now the station is in ruins. The floors are visibly deteriorated, and corpses litter the halls. Space has been replaced with...something else, and quantum portals frequently spawn, bringing horrific monsters that you may have encountered before. Your job, as members of a salvage expedition, is figure out why, or, at the very least, live to tell about the what. Eventually, after some increasingly garbled announcements, the shuttle is called, and it is your top priority to escape on it--preferably alive.

This gamemode is player-triggered, but it might be a good idea to ask the crew before committing to this!

Default antagonists: Wraith

Revolution Extended

Exactly like standard Revolution, but without the 60-minute time limit and CentComm meddling. This isn't in rotation, but you may see it in the off-chance you get to vote for the next round's game mode.

Default antagonists: Revolutionaries

Battle Royale

A special "treat" from April Fool's Day 2019: a game mode fit for a king, with a premise simple enough for a peasant: everyone must kill each other until they are the last one alive. In the meantime, BATTLE STORMS periodically hit the station, bringing forth waves of intense heat and radiation to those not standing in designated safe zones, and waves of loot crates occasionally dramatically drop onto the station, bringing forth random weapons and gear.

Default antagonists: Battler

Everyone-Is-A-Traitor Mode

Aka, Ass Day Classic, or just Assday. The rules of old Ass Day, now formalized into game mechanics. Everyone could commit grief on Ass Day, and they still can in this mode...because everyone in this mode is an antagonist, even the Head of Security and Security Officers, and so is everyone who joins after the round starts. The AI and borgs start out rogue, sometimes there's a Wraith or two, and everyone else is hard-mode traitor, meaning they're an antagonist, but don't get any special gear or abilities. This mode only appears with admin intervention.

• Default antagonists: Hard-Mode Traitor, Wraith
• Late-join: Hard-Mode Traitor, Wraith, Changeling

Flockmind

A gestalt machine consciousness carried by a radio signal called the "Flockmind" is converting the ship/station into a relay powerful enough to propagate itself across the galaxy, at any cost. It can overhear the station's radio channels (albeit with heavy distortion), wields vast radio-based powers, and must create "flockdrones", strange teal bird-like beings that can beget more of their kind and harvest the ship/station for the resources and infrastructure required for the relay.

Default antagonist: Flockmind

Football

Inspired by American or gridiron football, not association football. Everyone spawns as a footballers in a locker room on a specially-designed map wearing Space American Football gear and is assigned to either a red or blue team. After a short while, the footballers spawn onto the field, where they must take a football to the opponent's endzone, located on the left for red and right for blue. Successfully taking a football to an opponent's endzone (a "touchdown") causes a small explosion and gives the team points. Whoever has the most points after 15 minutes is declared the winner. Players continually respawn every 15 seconds.

Default antagonist: Footballer

Pod Wars

NanoTrasen and the Syndicate are battling for control of an asteroid field! Each side spawns in their own special base, on a special map designed for the mode. NT gets the NSV Pytheas in the northwest, and the Syndicate has the Lobrok in the southeast. Each base has four "Critical Systems" on their main motherships that can be repaired with a welding tool and initially start protected by shields. Both are also equipped with a mineral magnet for mining, a high-tech cloning bay that automatically clones people without needing scanning and takes less than a minute to revive people, several special pod part fabricators, and emergency putt fabricators that can be interacted with to produce weak but cheap putts.

In the first phase of the mode, which lasts 15 minutes, each side must mine for minerals by either using the mineral magnet or gathering ore from nearby asteroids, in order to build pods for the up-coming battle. Both sides can still make contact and fight each other, but there is not much they can do just yet.

After these 15 minutes are over, the shields protecting each base's critical systems go down and the teams can now capture three stations in the map, called capture points: UVB-67 (in the southwest corner), NSV Reliant (in the direct center of the map), and Fortuna (in the northeast corner). To capture a point, the teams must interact with a computer located on the stations. Commanders capture points faster than regular pilots. Capture points allow the team controlling them to warp to the area, periodically spawn loot crates for them, and also take away points from the enemy side.

To win, each side must either destroy the all the other side's Critical Systems, reach 200 points, or reduce the enemy side down to 0 points. Each team starts at 100 points. In addition to capture points reducing the other side's points, dying also makes your team lose points, more if you're its commander.

Discontinued Gamemodes

Most of these game modes are broken or have been removed from the code entirely.

Sandbox

Sandbox is a mode where all players can spawn more or less anything in the game through the sandbox panel. In theory, this is the mode you go to to figure out how stuff works and practice various systems, such as starting the engine or building complex pipe constructs. In practice, this is the mode where everyone spawns cloaks and revolvers and gives themselves all the wizard spells.

Construction

Let you build your very own space station from scratch. Except for the survey shuttle and a couple of asteroids, the main z-level started out completely empty. Basic supplies and a couple of pods for exploration were provided, and everyone also spawned (among other starting gear) with a space suit, jetpack, full tool belt, special blueprint markers for designing and building new rooms, and a large-capacity RCD. The idea was for the crew to cooperate, mine ore and grow their own produce once hydroponics was operational, and trade those goods for whatever was required to expand the station at the time. The dedicated server attracted a somewhat stable population at the beginning, but couldn't keep them interested in the long term and was subsequently shut down.

Meteor

In this mode, the station was bombarded by wave upon wave of meteors. After about 30 mins or so, the shuttle would be auto called. It was quite a fun mode, but due to the awfulness of BYOND, it became horribly laggy and basically unplayable past the 20-minute mark. The goals of this gamemode are quite simple, escape on the shuttle, and you win the round.

Meteors now appear as a random event.

Legacy Disaster

Basically admin-shenanigans: the gamemode. It is also known as meteor's big brother. the objective for everyone in this mode is simply to survive. This is complicated by the fact that minutes into the round quantum portals will begin to open at random and shit will get unbelievably chaotic. The portals can explode with electrical energy, a burst of stunning light, or just plain explode.

Portals may also summon a variety of unhelpful emagged robots that can stun or injure you. This inevitably leads to the AI being destroyed or corrupted, pretty much every area of the ship being exposed to vacuum and everyone on the station going deaf. After a set amount of time, the shuttle can be called. If you escape on it, congratulations, you survived! This game mode is not in the regular list but admins occasionally bring it up.

Spy

This game mode was designed to overcome the shortcomings of revolution. The game randomly assigned several players as spy masters with the objective to kill all the other spymasters and be the only one to escape. Unlike traitors, spies didn't know the identity of their targets and had to do some sleuthing - that was the intent anyway. In practice, it was little more than team deathmatch, as every spy ring would scramble to load up on laser guns and then order their mindslaves to gun down everything that moves.

Deathmatch

Space Station 13: Black Ops 2. One of the few gamemodes that included every person on the server. Everyone would spawn as a death-commando. Last man standing wins. Removed due to how horrible robust SS13's combat system is.

Monkey

Came in two flavors: Monkey, and Monkey Survival:

• In monkey mode, random player(s) were chosen to carry a virus that turned other players into a monkey when bitten.
• In monkey survival, the crew were pitched against super fast, super robust NPC monkeys. Nowadays, the robust monkey AI is used in a traitor item.

AI Malfunction

Basically, the AI is messed up and the crew has to fix whatever's ailing it. In theory, this is a game mode, but in actuality, this happens every round, so it's more or less redundant.

Restructuring

A horribly drawn-out team deathmatch mode. A player would be randomly chosen every 5 mins. All other players were tasked with killing this player. If he died or survived for 5 mins, another player was chosen. This continued till 1 player was left.

Alien

Aliens was a game mode where player-controlled aliens attempted to turn the station into a hive while infecting or killing the crew. The crew would need to work together to slay the aliens and stop them from breeding. Aliens were split into four different job classes: Queen, engineer, soldier, and larvae with each having their own unique strengths and weaknesses.

This was discontinued because the aliens would get themselves killed within seconds, while the crew would know exactly how to fight them. There is an urban legend that 20th Century Fox, the owners of the Alien franchise, which this mode took cues from, sent a cease & desist letter over this mode, causing it to removed, but that was just a joke started by a coder. This game mode has since been completely removed from the goon-station code. Like a couple other modes, there are bits and pieces of it still lurking around in the code.

Waldo

Wally Waldo, who may or may not be a little bit magical, has a very clearly defined objective to hide while everyone else must find him. Another person plays Odlaw and must assist Waldo in achieving his lifelong dream of not being found.

Intrusion

An eldritch intruder known as the Overmind (name pending) attempted to merge with SS13's plane of reality by taking over the minds of critters and creating weird glowy structures with toggleable levels of visibility. Cut by its coder before it could be fleshed out.

Martian Mode

A force of player-controlled Martians attempted to take over the station and convert the crew into fellow Martians. And possibly other things, if this game mode hadn't abandoned less than a quarter of the way to completion.