Roboticist

RESEARCH STAFF

Roboticist

Access: Robotics, Technical Storage, Morgue, Research Division, Mineral Storage
Additional Access: Research Labs, Toxins Storage, Xenobiology, Genetics
Difficulty: Easy
Supervisors: Research Director
Duties: Create and maintain a cybernetic and robotic army, then suit up in METAL GEAR.
Guides: Guide to robotics, Department Standard Operating Procedure
Quote: Alright, who wants to donate their brain to science?

The Roboticist's job is to maintain the system's cybernetic sevitors, including borgs and various bots that they can create. When provided with resources, they can construct powerful Exosuits.

Bare minimum requirements: Build and maintain cyborgs.

The Lab

Robotics is your home as a Roboticist. It contains the Exosuit Fabricators for the creation of any robotic component you require, a few cyborg recharge stations, a few Exosuit recharge stations, a chest with multiple sheets of metal, Power Cell, and a coil of wire, and scattered tables with a multitool, tool boxes, a few Flash, a crowbar, a proximity sensor, more scattered power cells, and a cell charger.

Oh God, I Don't Know What To Do! Help!

See the Guide to robotics for a how-to on most things you'll be handling.

THIS HAND OF MINE GLOWS WITH AN AWESOME POWER

You are going to be building some of the most powerful things on the ship, given time and resources from your fellow Scientists and the department's best friends, the Miners. One of the most useful tools for your job is a toolbelt, which allows you to use an otherwise vacant slot to hold an entire cadre of tools. There's one in the Robotics Lab... But there are two of you. Be quick or be forced to find your own, and don't be afraid to dunk the other guy if he's a chucklefuck who wants to fight you for the belt. It may be a good idea to stop by Primary Tool Storage as well, for the metal, glass, and potentially another a toolbelt. Return to your den and meet the cyborg, replace his battery for him and exchange displays of affection via a relay of petting and pinging. Then, law 2 it to get the fuck out. They're keeping you from important work.

This is no Zaku boy, no Zaku

If you didn't get a tool belt, go harass engineering until you get one. Put your tools (Including a Multitool) inside it and discard the now-worthless toolbox. It might be a bad idea to grab a spare length of cable coil if and when you're out and about, as you only start with one in the lab. Now it's time to start building robots. First on the agenda is the fulfill the handful of requests to turn people into Cyborgs. Fill the Exosuit Fabricators with metal and get them working.There will likely be one or two people waiting around for you, so either let them in via the service window or . Oblige, this is what you are here to do after all. Take out their brains while you wait on the cyborg parts, and keep their access cards for yourself. Stuff the brainless corpses down disposals and put the cyborgs together, before finally inserting the MMI.

Life on the Assembly Line

Build another cyborg. Try to keep at least 1 cyborg body on standby for the inevitable train of corpses that will be coming through your door. Now you can waste valuable time and resources on fancy exosuits. If Mining all died off or R&D feels uncooperative, keep busy by stealing a bucket from Hydroponics (Or the Cargo Autolathe) and creating Cleanbots, or using up all your Medkits for more Medibots.

Sync up your R&D console, set your Exosuit Fabricators to auto-sync, and get building. Just make sure you have the acid you need to make the circuit boards by now, and that mining has brought you the metals you need. You will have a love-hate relationship with the R&D lab and its residents. On the one hand they will be inventing fun toys for you, on the other they are taking all that wonderful silver from you that could be going to making a Durand. Once you do get enough ores though, it's smooth sailing. Make exosuits, give them to people with little-to-no authorization,and watch the ensuing chaos from your comfy chair.

Other tips

Keep your metal organized, and understand how much each machine will take (and you will always need more metal). Second, glass and flashes are important for your robotics work, as are various devices, security equipment and rare minerals. Don't waste them. Third, have a plan before you start building anything huge, like a exosuit (without the circuitry, they are useless). Fourth, make sure to perform maintenance on cyborgs that come in; Nanotrasen usually doesn't load them with anything but the minimum required power cells. Fifth, tech storage is your friend. It has two flashes, two power cells, and insulated gloves. Raiding tech storage can net you an extra cyborg exosuit before having to beg cargo for a robotics assembly. For bonus points, beg the CE/RD/AI to let you into secure tech storage to get a robotics/exosuit circuitboard to control what you make in case it decides to kill everyone. Finally, ensure you have proper eye protection when you weld, or you'll become blind quickly.

Do's and Don'ts

Do:

Make cyborg bodies and install MMI's in them.
Try to borg antagonists instead of the death penalty. They still fail, but are no longer a danger.
Cut LawSync and reset cyborg laws when the AI is rogue.
Make useful bots and leave them around.
Make drone shells so players can ~~steal all your metal and glass~~ rejoin the round
Put beacons in all Exosuits lest they get stolen.
Make a Cyborg and Exosuit Control Console.
Try to make your own boards by getting acid from chemistry and getting R&D to sync the servers.
Remember to periodically sync your own R&D console to get the most out of their research data
Recognize that the QM might be more inclined to get you some metal/robot assemblies if you don't eat up all of their points with Ripley boards.

Don't:

Put an MMI in a cyborg shell without making sure it isn't braindead (they can speak you know).
Blow all the cyborgs because one was emagged.
Immediately blow all cyborgs when the AI is malfunctioning - Instead, take apart your Robotics Control console and relocate it somewhere off camera so you can lock the cyborgs and reset them to become a powerful ally against the AI.
Try to make a exosuit you don't have materials for, nothing is more useless than a pile Durand limbs while you beg for metal and silver.
Go on exosuit rocket launcher rampages 'because you can'.
Be an asshat.
Build an exosuit for anyone who just comes by and asks for one (And won't accept a Tracking Beacon)

Tips

Putting better parts in your robotics fabricator reduces the materials required to build stuff and the time equivalent to increasing the efficiency via materials science, so upgrading at the start helps a lot to get the most out of your starting metal. It stacks with materials science. In particular; the micro laser and manipulators as well as a high materials research will lower amount of materials used.
Losing a mech to an explosion will eject you completely unharmed (probably a good idea to be in space gear though).
Medibots are a bit more robust than people often seem to account for.
- Anywhere between adding the robotic arm and the sensor module, you can write on the assembly with a pen to rename the resulting robot, much like cyborgs. This is useful for keeping track of medical robots, as otherwise they're all just named "Medibot".
- Additionally, you can make medical bots out of any of the different colors of first aid kit available on the ship, and the resulting medical bot will keep that color.
- Medibot assemblies can be crafted to the last step, and then stored in your backpack. Proximity sensors are tiny items, and can fit in your pockets and your internals box - so it's entirely viable to carry and deploy a small army of medical robots, simply by combining the proximity sensors with them in your backpack. They'll spawn on the ground there and then, ready to work.
- If you have medical access, a good tweak to do to medical bots is to reduce their healing threshold. Use your PDA/ID to unlock their interface, and reduce it to 5 - they will heal people who are at 95% health or less now, great for topping people up. Remember to lock it after you are done.
- Again if you have medical access, you can stop an already-deployed Medibot from running away after the nearest hurt person as you drag them towards where they're needed the most simply by temporarily turning them off. You don't even need to unlock them to do this, and turning them on again is simple.
- Though I've not tested it, logic dictates (see next point) that increasing the injection amount probably isn't going to help too much, since a lower threshold means a Medibot can keep injecting you until you're healthy without overdosing you (which, like with all healing chemicals in the game, has no negative effects other than redundancy).
- Medical robots all use the same chemicals as standard, so it won't stack if they inject a lot of it into you at once or if multiple medical robots inject you. The chemical will, however, linger in your body at high concentrations - I've been brought out of crit several times because I had two medical robots healing me a few minutes before.
- The Derelict has all the materials needed to create a medical bot. Start your search at the broken Medbay near the chapel.
- Offering a tetrality of appropriately named and colored medical robots at the chapel to the Spess Machine God Mechatron will grant you his favor.
Mechs are space worthy as long as you enable the air inside your cabin. This can be useful if you don't have a space suit and you need to cross dangerous breaches.
The Odysseus can scan a stupidly robust assortment of chemicals with its syringe gun, from the laughable to the freakishly deadly. One such chemical is Plasma. Unlimited liquid plasma can be generated.
Mech drills can bust open lockers to get the goodies inside.
RIPLEYs are a Roboticist's BEST FRIEND.
- They are Relatively Cheap
- They Have Storage Capability
- Their Internal Airtank, when activated, negates the effects of both hot and cold environ-ments and holds enough air to last the entire round. Literally hours.
- Their Drill can cut through almost anything including most items, walls, even blast doors. If upgraded to diamond the drill can even cut through Reinforced walls. It is a fairly robust weapon and can gib bodies.
- If caught in a singularity the mech will be destroyed first giving you the chance to flee.
- It has fairly robust armor and can resist continuous laser fire from multiple sources for several seconds.
- It blocks line of sight.
- When it is destroyed turrets cannot target anyone standing on the same square as it IE the person who was inside when it went boom.
- A good roboticist should have one on hand at all times.
- As a side note: An intelligent roboticist in a RIPLEY can rob the vault in 3-5 minutes.* The Odysseus is a force to be reckoned with. It can scan any chemicals, this includes drinks. The Odysseus' internal generator makes infinite amounts of any chemical and syringes fired with the syringe gun can be recovered, meaning you can fire infinite amounts of liquid to use as reagents.
- You can mix five different chemicals in any syringe (which still only holds 15u, meaning 5 chems equals 3 of each). This can be used to create an amazing healing concoction or an extremely powerful killer syringe. For instance:
- Healing mixture: Omnizine.
- Harming mixture: Lexorin, Unstable mutagen, Beepsky Smash.
Clicking a box with syringes while in an Odysseus with syringe gun raised will load every syringe from the box in the Odysseus.
Constructing a Ripley Chassis at Materials 1 costs 30,000 metal; at Materials 5, it costs 24,000; at Materials 7, 21,600.
- At Materials 1, fully upgrading the Exosuit Fabricator (Good luck doing that) makes it cost 27,600 metal (down from 30,000)
- At Materials 7, fully upgrading the Exosuit Fabricator changes the cost 19,200 metal (down from 21,600 metal)
- To build a Durand at Materials 7 on a default ExoFab requires:
  - Metal: 329400 (87.84 sheets); Glass: 32400 (8.64 sheets); Silver: 27000 (7.2 sheets); Uranium: 10800 (2.88 sheets)
- On a fully-upgraded ExoFab, the numbers drop to:
  - Metal: 292800 (78.08 sheets); Glass: 28800 (7.68 sheets); Silver: 23600 (6.293333 sheets); Uranium: 9600 (2.56 sheets)
- Gygax, Default ExoFab:
  - Metal: 297000 (79.2 sheets); Glass: 32400 (8.64 sheets); Diamond: 10800 (2.88 sheets)
- Gygax, Pimped ExoFab:
  - Metal: 264000 (70.4 sheets); Glass: 28800 (7.68 sheets); Diamond: 9600 (2.56 sheets)
- tl;dr -- Combat Mechs mostly cost exorbitant amounts of metal - a stack and a half at least in most cases - but not actually that much of anything else.
Small robot assemblies can be carried in your backpack. Leaving the final piece out of a robot assembly and slamming it together in your backpack at the site of an issue makes for an effective response.

Tips for Traitoring

People can't tell who you are when you are inside a mech and have to go by the mechs name... which you can change at any time. Change your mechs name to some other mech and you can walk around as a conferred traitor.
You can load a Medibot with any chemical mixture. Refer to the mixture in the Traitor Chemist section and they will inject them with said mixture over and over until they die.

Being an Evil Genius

Traitoring as a Roboticist is fun and easy, especially since you spawn with flashes, and an expectation of building very dangerous machines. Your high ship access, and access to tech storage will allow you to get pretty much everywhere,considering that you can have gloves off the bat. And, of course, emagging any of your basic creations serves to cause havoc and chaos. The toxins kit's contents poured into a single large beaker of an emagged Medibot can create a very dangerous 'helper'. Emagging the cyborgs equips them with a Syndicate lawset, gives them special new tools, and prevents them from being fucked with on a control console. If you want to make a cyborg despite having no volunteers, it's never a bad idea to simple drag the body of your last murder victim back to the lab for a debraining - Rarely do people question you once the body is already being operated on.

Jobs on FTL13
	Command	Captain, Executive Officer, Bridge Officer
	Security	Head of Security, Security Officer, Master-at-Arms, Detective
	Engineering	Chief Engineer, Ship Engineer, Atmospheric Technician
	Supply	Quartermaster, Cargo Technician, Shaft Miner, Munitions Officer
	Science	Research Director, Scientist, Roboticist
	Medical	Chief Medical Officer, Medical Doctor, Chemist, Geneticist, Virologist
	Service	Janitor, Bartender, Cook, Botanist, Clown, Mime
	Civilian	Assistant, Lawyer, Chaplain, Librarian
	Non-human	AI, Cyborg, Positronic Brain, Drone, Personal AI, Construct, Adamantine Golem, Ghost
	Antagonists	Traitor, Changeling, Nuclear Operative, Wizard, Shadowling, Abductor, Xenomorph, Revenant, Space Ninja, Holoparasite, Swarmers, Blob, Devil, Clockwork Cult
	Special	Centcom Official, Death Squad Officer, Emergency Response Officer, Ian
	Races	Humans, Lizardperson, Flyperson, Plasmaman, Podman, Miscellaneous