Mail Courier

CIVILIAN DEPARTMENT
Mail Courier
Mail Courier	Difficulty: Easy Requirements: None Access Level: Cargo Bay, Bridge, Medbay, Research Sector, Tech Storage, wherever there are mail chutes thanks to your mail courier suit Additional Roleplay Access Level: None Supervisors: Captain, Head of Personnel Subordinates: None Responsibilities: Deliver things to the crew Guides: This is the guide.

Neither storm nor shower nor fire nor vacuum of space shall sway the Mail Courier, also known as the Mail Bringer or Head of Deliverying (despite not being one of the Heads of Staff), from delivering mail and other goods to the crew. With relatively few responsibilities, low expectations, and a surprisingly generous amount of gear and access, it's suitable for both newbies and old-timers. The mail system is relatively simple while still being engaging, but you can also safely ignore it if you'd rather do your own thing.

Courier Accoutrements

The most important part of being a courier is, of course, the clothes! Besides the iconic satchel and postmaster's hat, you also get a special mail suit (which is technically a Syndicate item) that allows you to ride mail chutes in a similar manner to disposal chutes. Unless you are also assigned Traitor, you can't get any more, so keep it safe.

If you lose your suit and don't care about being able to travel through mail chutes, it's also possible to obtain standard-issue postmaster's jumpsuits (which, again, do not let you travel through mail chutes). You can find these in Cargo Bay; every Quartermaster's locker has a "Postmaster's equipment" box, and that contains an extra postmaster's jumpsuit and hat. You can open these lockers since you have Cargo Bay access. Depending on the map, there may also be standard postmaster clothes hidden somewhere; either both will be in Routing Depot, or one piece will be in Routing Depot and the other in Disposals.

Besides your uniform, you also start with wrapping paper and scissors for those extra special gift deliveries. In addition, you also spawn with a rubber stamp and a paper bin, in case you'd like to get your inner bureaucrat on.

As for access, you have access to the Cargo Bay, so you can process the mail and, potentially, deliver any crates the Quartermasters order. However, you do not get access to the consoles, so you can't order anything yourself. Besides this, you can also enter the Bridge, Medbay, and Research Sector, though you're restricted to the general department lobby areas and, barring mail chute travel, usually cannot enter the job-specific areas within (so no Captain's Quarters, Robotics, Artifact Lab, etc.) Notably, you also do not get maintenance access.

United Space Postal Service

The most important part of being a Mail Courier is, of course, delivering the mail! Mail arrives inside "mail box" crates shipped to the Cargo Bay. The first shipment arrives within a few minutes of roundstart, and there are additional shipments every 15 minutes or so afterwards. (They are specifically coded to arrive every other market shift, and market shifts occur at 7.5 minute intervals). The amount of mail in each shipment totals out to about 50% of the number of people alive (it's normally 37.5%, or 3/8ths, but they ship extra mail when there's a dedicated mail worker onboard, i.e. you.) You never have to deliver mail sent from the crew, so you really only have to worry about incoming mail.

Your job is, of course, to make sure each piece of mail is delivered to their intended recipient. Distributing so much mail might seem daunting, but since this is the future, you're outfitted with a handful of nifty gadgets to make your job easier.

• You start with a mail bag, and each mail shipment comes with an extra. Each mail bag can fit a whopping 50 pieces of mail, so you can carry whole shipments of mail with just one or two inventory slots. This functions like an item satchel, so you get to enjoy all sorts of quality-of-life shortcuts. Two of note: you can shove a whole pile of mail by click-dragging one piece onto the mail bag's sprite, and clicking on a mail bag while on Grab intent lets you pull out one piece of mail of your choice.
• You also get a mail pinpointer. Click on this with a piece of mail, and it'll point you in the direction of its recipient. The item's sprite shows a blinking arrow pointed in their general direction; its color changes depending on distance, but due to art limitations, it can only show the cardinal directions. However, if you hold it in your hand (i.e. not in your pockets or satchel), you'll see a much bigger green arrow that points to their precise location.

You can also lighten the load by working smarter, not harder. Group together mail from people within the same department. For example, the Rancher(s) and Botanist(s) often work close by each other. If you're delivering mail for Raw Hide the Rancher, why not also stop by Hydroponics and hand off mail for Botanists Poison Ivy and Seymour Krelborn? Also, don't forget: you can throw mail (Hotkey: hold Spacebar if you're on Goon WASD, R on /tg/style WASD, then click on the person), and people will automatically catch it.

Rewards

What's in it for you? For one, cold hard cash. Each shipment of mail comes with a stack of cash based on the amount of mail successfully delivered so far. The first piece of mail that makes it to its intended recipient grants 100 credits; every successful delivery after that grants an additional 10 credits, so the second grants 110 credits, the third 120, etc. to a max of 1000. This is per package, so even if you deliver just 5 pieces of mail, the post office will send over 600 credits (100 + 110 + 120 + 130 + 140). These are mostly intended for the Quartermaster(s), but they will probably be fine with giving you a cut.

Also, you can earn the gratitude and satisfaction of the crew. Really. Each piece of mail contains a small gift; often, it's just a toy or costume item, but depending on the job, the recipient may get something genuinely useful. For example, a Botanist could unwrap a Happy Plant Mixture, while a Roboticist may receive a cyborg frame or auto-mender. It's never anything harmful or detrimental, so you basically get to deliver presents to people, like Santa Claus but blue.

MAIL FRAUD

Mail is typically DNA-locked to the recipient, but it is possible to bypass this security measure by cutting the package open with a knife (including a plastic one), analogous to letter openers. Opening mail that doesn't belong to you is considered mail fraud, and mail fraud is a crime. Anyone who does this in view of a security camera is immediately marked for arrest. Fraudulently opening mail also leaves behind a torn package containing fingerprint evidence, which Security can then use to track down whoever dared to violate the sanctity of the postal service.

Since the game finds the idea of mail fraud IN SPACE! deeply hilarious, it has a lot of fun pretending that opening another person's mail is the absolute worst crime ever. Besides having cameras detect mail fraud, the game also makes it so you can (somehow) immediately tell if someone has committed mail fraud, signified by a message in the chat saying:

You suddenly feel hollow. Someone has violated the sanctity of the mail.

If another mail courier has done it (normally, there is only one mail courier slot), the message has a larger font size than normal and instead reads

Your spine goes cold. Another mail courier has violated the sanctity of the mail..!

This and the "You suddenly feel hollow" messages are on a 10 minute "cooldown", so serial mail fraud criminals don't spam your chat with mail fraud notifications. If you commit mail fraud, you're treated to a massive block of text saying:

WHAT HAVE YOU DONE!? WHY WOULD YOU DO THIS?

Again, these are all purely for comedy. Nothing bad actually happens to you if you sense mail fraud or commit it yourself (aside from being flagged for arrest if you do it in front of a security camera), and you're free to ignore the messages if you wish. It's simply flavor text.

A (Not So) Brief History of Blueshirts

This job was previously called Mailman, even though mail workers could also be women or non-binary. This job originally appeared on June 4th, 2010, during the early history of Devstation. Back then, all the station's mail went through chutes going to and from a central hub called the "Mailroom", and the Mailman's job was to sort the mail as it came in and distribute it to the correct destinations. Back then you had to click on the mail chute to open it, since the chute did not automatically open. Besides this extra step, it worked much like today's mail chutes: afterwards you'd click on the chute with the item to be delivered, then click the chute, and hit "Engage". There were a couple hazards with the job: the chutes area was often low on air, but luckily the Mailman often spawned with an air tank, and poo was a game mechanic at this time, so people occasionally sent literal shit through the mail (and sometimes the Mailman sent it too), which would often splatter across the room.

The big issue with the job was that no one would send mail (correctly), and the Mailman would often disappear somewhere. The job was quietly discontinued from normal play months later. It was not missed. Some few years later, on August 27th, 2014, the Mailman was bought back as a job of the day for Wednesdays. In the intervening years, the station's mail system was vastly automated and simplified, so when the job came back, it was sort of a curious relic of the past without much to actually do.

It was the August 29th, 2019 update that gave Mailman their Cargo Bay and Bridge access, chute-compatible suit, and gift-making supplies, shifting the role from a novelty of the past to a legitimate job about delivering the right packages to the right places. Back then, the QM console required the general Cargo Bay access level rather than the specific Quartermaster Supply Console one, which didn't exist back then, so they could also place cargo orders. When the console got its own special access level on September 28th, 2020, Mailman lost this ability since they didn't get said access level after the change. This was less a deliberate attempt to weaken the job and more an unforeseen side-effect.

Mailman was renamed to Mail Courier on January 12, 2024; this update also retired one of their other names, Head of Mailmanning, and replaced it with Mail Bringer.

Fun fact: the day after this job was added, Mr. Muggles was re-added (yes, he was removed before) to the game, ostensibly as this job's assistant. He technically still is, but it's like an Office Space situation where NT stopped paying him years ago but never got around to telling everyone the news.

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. If you complete an objective by the end of the round, you'll get some bonus Spacebux. As a mail courier, you can expect to see the following:

Ensure 30 pieces of mail are opened by their addressees.
Yep, "opened by", not just "delivered to"; the recipient has to actually open the mail you gave them. The "by their addressees" part is also important; if someone forcibly opens mail not addressed to them, it does not count for this objective. In addition, the objective always mandates 30 pieces of mail be opened regardless of population. There could be 10 people or 100 people, but it'll still ask for 30. The 30 pieces of mail requirement is also in total, so if other people deliver the mail, that's fine.

On Classic, rounds generally last 50-60 minutes, while Roleplay, they tend to hover around 100 minutes. This totals out to about 1.66 to 2 minutes per piece of mail on Classic and 3.33 minutes on Roleplay. This is not a lot of time. Your mail pinpointer is very good at locating people, so the main bottleneck is actually getting to them. They may be in a room your ID lacks access to or one without any mail chutes for you to use. Any number of things may thwart your quest to deliver the mail: fires, hull breaches, rogue robots, radioactive blowouts, bloodsucking fiends—anything can happen on Space Station 13!

Still, it is possible. Since this is for mail delivered in total, you can hire some people to deliver mail for you and still satisfy this objective. It's faster to throw mail at people (Hotkey: hold Spacebar if you're on Goon WASD, R on /tg/style WASD, then click on the person) than it is to walk up to them and hand it to them, since people automatically catch mail that's thrown. Combine mail deliveries for people of the same department, e.g. deliver mail for the Geneticist(s), then the Roboticist(s), since both work in Medbay. Mash that sprint (Hotkey: hold Shift for Goon WASD, Spacebar for /tg/style WASD) for a speedy delivery, and run in straight lines, since you get speed boosts from sustained runs (signified by little puffs of dirt).

There is no medal associated with this objective. But think about the journey, not the destination. Considering all the obstacles you've overcome to accomplish this objective, you have proven that neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night will stay you from the swift completion of your appointed rounds.

Gallery

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