Geneticist

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This is the place where dreams come true and abominations in the eyes of God are born in the same day.

This is the place where dreams come true and abominations in the eyes of God are born in the same day.

This is the place where dreams come true and abominations in the eyes of God are born in the same day.

This is the place where dreams come true and abominations in the eyes of God are born in the same day.

This is the place where dreams come true and abominations in the eyes of God are born in the same day.

The Geneticist makes his home in the east end of the medbay. As a geneticist, your primary job is to research genetic defects, mutations and fancy superpowers. When all the medical doctors are dead or incompetent and the roboticists are too busy putting butts on everyone's heads, you may also want to operate the nearby cloning device to revive fallen crew mates through the use of wacky clone science.

The Lab

Genetics has a couple DNA manipulators, which is where geneticists conduct the involved work of unlocking the genetic code, hoping for super-powers. The process is absurdly elaborate, technical, and time-consuming. To get a better understanding on how it all works, see the Guide to Genetics. The guide goes into great detail on the process of genetics, but the general gist/most important things to take away are:

• As high school biology should have taught you, all humans (and monkeys) have DNA. As it should also have taught you, some blocks of DNA are not expressed/activated, known as latent mutations or potential. Some of these are good, some are bad, some are just amusing. You can see what latent mutations a person has through the Potential tab. Initially, all these DNA blocks will show up as Unknown Mutations.
• Your job as Geneticist is to research the precise nature of these DNA blocks and activate the more useful ones in the crew members. The two main ways of doing this are:
  1. Doing the base pair puzzle, by completing the half-filled base pairs, finding the correct base pair for the empty ones (Hint: CG is not the same as GC!), and cracking locked pairs. Once the boxes are correctly filled, you then choose Activate to give them the mutation. Giving mutations this way doesn't have extra perks like activators do, but if you find multiple people with the same latent mutation, you can simply autocomplete the boxes to give them the mutation rather than wait on activator cooldowns.
  2. Simply creating an activator for the latent mutation and use it on somebody who has it in their Potential (obviously you can't activate a person's block if they don't have it.) This does not require filling it those base pair boxes, and you can turn the filled activator into the GeneTek console to either:
     1. Extra Materials to spend on researching more mutations and upgrades.
     2. Chromosomes that, when combined with a DNA block, modify it in some way. See them and combine them with DNA blocks through the Research Menu->Stored Chromosomes tab.
     3. Free unlocks for locked pairs.
  • Both of these methods are perfectly acceptable, and both of them have similar results. The activated DNA block will move from the Potential tab to the Mutations tab. Initially, you can't do much in the Mutations tab, but purchasing certain upgrades will allow you to store the activated DNA blocks.
• You can upgrade the GeneTek console and expand its capabilities by purchasing upgrades with Materials through Research Menu->Available Research. You initially will only have a few upgrades, but as you purchase more upgrades and research more mutations, the amount of upgrades available will expand drastically.

The monkey pen nearby is also home to a number of monkeys and a locker with electropacks. Monkeys, once turned human, can be a great source of interesting/useful mutations to, once you've the relevant upgrades, store and hand out to the crew, as well as test subjects to dump activators for more unfavorable mutations on so you can get those sweet, sweet materials and chromosomes. To turn a monkey into a human, just get a monkey from the monkey pen, restrain it (usually with one of the items from the Animal control lockers), and then, through the Body Type tab, turn it into a human.

Crew Objectives

As a loyal crew member, you can sometimes be assigned some strictly optional objectives to keep yourself busy while you wait for something to happen. As a geneticist, you can expect to see the following:

End the round with at least 5 people scanned
You need to get people into the DNA scanner in medbay. Most rounds, you won't get 5 people in the scanner period, let alone 5 people who won't be cloned, so if you really want to do this you might need to try accosting people in medbay so you can scan them.

Syndicate Geneticist

Though genetics doesn't have exclusive control over the cloner anymore, the enzymatic reclaimer can still be a fantastic way to kill people that walk into your lab (or any volunteers you've recruited) if you have an EMAG and are able to score a flash off the roboticist (or hack his manufacturer yourself). Emag the reclaimer first, then if someone barges in, flash them, take off their headset and shove them into the reclaimer for an almost instant kill - or alternatively, lock them into the DNA manipulator and slowly irradiate them to death. Eccentricity and wandering is also expected from a geneticist. Hunting for superpowers is extremely boring, so many geneticists wander off to do something else. Nobody will question why you're dragging a dead body if you're heading back to medbay. Most people won't even mind if you stash a dead body in the morgue or grind it up for biomass as they'll assume you've already run it through the cloner first.

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