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A glance at Space Station 13 (game)

By meteora August 7, 2010 5 Comments

A few days ago, I talked to a guy I knew who was from the United Kingdom. He introduced me to Space Station 13, a F2P roleplaying game which he has obsessively playing lately. I decided to give the game a go because the idea he put out sounded like cool concepts, and proceeded to download the BYOND client which the game is played on. I picked a server and began downloading the mandatory stuff (probably the map's geometry or something) and hopped right in. Boy was I in a treat... Let me explain to you what the game is all about. The middle part is not a mandatory read, so don't be turned off by the length.

Welcome to Space Station 13 (mandatory read, duh)

Sample of the chatbox; admittedly not the best of RPing but hey it works

Space Station 13, otherwise SS13, is a roleplaying game where you run around as a member of the SS13. The game is basically a sandbox of sorts, with you running around SS13 as a crew member. While in game the player can interact with their surrounding environment and converse with other players from a first person perspective, aka in-character (IC). If that sounds complicated to you, don't worry it's not. You basically converse with other players just as you converse in real life, except with more one liners. Its really not all that hard to grasp the idea.

As a crew of the station, you have a job, each with their own unique designated roles and responsibilities. Love to cook? You're in luck, be a chef. Love gardening and fielding a army of killer tomatoes? Botanist would be perfect for you. Like to fix things after a huge explosion? Be a Engineer. Want to annoy people to death and throw turd around? Join up as a clown. Want to deal with just about every griefing bastard on SS13? Sign up for security. Want to become a HAL 9000-clone? Be the AI and fuck all. There is probably roughly 20 different jobs, each with limited slots. A few are more RP-oriented, such as the chef or lawyer. Depending on the job you take, you will have certain access to specific rooms and locations on the station (i.e. a engineer will have access to the maintenance shafts and engine room).

Being a nub chef is hard work

While the game is essentially a sandbox, there are different modes that warrant merits and demerits. Some include fighting off aliens which we like to call "facehuggers", who are more or less essentially the same as aliens in Aliens vs Predators franchise. There's also one that involves fighting a blob infestation or dealing with a pesky wizard and his magic. Then there's nuclear, where a few guys have to attempt to arm a bomb on the space station by infiltrating the place. Others are a little bit more common like traitor, which involves one or more who has a set of objectives to kill someone or steal certain objects. There's enough variety to keep things interesting, on atop which I think happens to be a pretty crazy sandbox game. Each "round" lasts for a certain duration, usually between half an hour to a hour before someone calls the evacuation shuttle because things got FUBAR on SS13. After that you get kicked back out into the lobby (assuming you don't disconnect, anyways).

This guy was unbolting every window here, screwing everyone without a oxygen tank who tries to escape. Pretty hilarious.

A few things that you can do on the station is your job, do some space exploration (if you have permission), build a bunch of walls or vandalize them, interact with other players, release the plasma from the toxins lab or blow up shit and cause mayhem (this last one here happens quite often in most games). There's a fair amount of shit that you can do and I haven't even listed down or hasn't popped up in my head as I type this. I haven't seen anyone build a entirely new room before, but its entirely possible if you do it discretely enough, have the resources available and the round goes on for a long time.

Don't be like us and learn to survive, kid

Though it is a sandbox, you have one primary objective in each and every round: try to survive. The interesting thing about SS13 is that there are people who want to RP normally and those who might clobber you in the head with something. You sometimes cannot tell the difference and their intentions. A number of them are idiots griefing, but there are a few which are genuine (traitor needs to kill a certain person). This kind of attitude has brought in a feeling of extreme paranoia, from just about everyone. The amount of distrust to each other is legitimate for IC and OOC (out of character) and is a interesting twist to the game. Of course, killing is illegal on the station in every form, so hopefully the captain, AI and security follow the laws and crack down on the offender and imprison them. If you're dead and lucky, a geneticist or a roboticist can revive you with a clone or a robot body, respectively (beware of the geneticists; they can make you a monkey if you're not careful. Happened to me before when I was alive).

Say what you want, but this was awesome.

Now, I'll have to be frank with some issues with the game instead of just selling it to you. Griefing is a issue, some people just enjoy killing people. It can sometimes get out of hand, especially if you're too trusting of someone else or venture off into some isolated place. It is sort of part of the game now, so you have to be careful about others. There is some serious lag issues, but fortunately it varies on different servers, so you can simply hop on in a different game. I heard there are terrible admins, but I haven't experienced any issues with this (other than horror stories about unwillingness to ban griefers and mistakenly ban non-griefers). Of course, I've only played less than week and I'm more of a "rather not murder someone" kinda guy in this game.

The HUD is unfortunately fairly dated and clunky. There's some odd mechanics like having to switch to your free hand to pick up shit or say open your oxygen tank. I often ended up beating someone up at least once whenever I try to attempt to wake them up or perform CPR with the wrong hand, heh. But once you get into the game then it doesn't really become too much of a issue. The learning curve is steep if you didn't read the guides or have someone guiding you, though fortunately there's a fair share of people who will teach you things. Sometimes people, security in particular, are incompetent and do not respond to things in a timely order, or do some shitty work on their job. Perhaps the most annoying thing for me is when the captain goes rogue and uses a cloaking device to kill just about everyone. At that point you might as well quit and join another server, because you'll stay dead for a while.

Some crazy & unique moments (optional read)

Contrary to popular belief, we weren't vandalizing shit.

There was one time when I was apart of a exploration team that consisted of four members; myself included. We all geared up and headed out to a derelict space station. Our leader was named Narfy. We ventured out into deep space with our space suits, already losing one man on our way there as he got lost in space (technically we just ditched him unintentionally, he didn't follow us quickly enough, can't remember his name). When we got there we hooked up the power and began looking around the abandoned Russian space station, exploring the unknown with our own eyes. It was exciting to explore the place, I kinda felt as if it was gonna be a secondary base of operations, a sister station to SS13.

Russians in Space!

Apparently we weren't the only ones here though. A robot named "Officer Beepsky" followed us hundreds of miles into outerspace just to try to arrest us. All that was separating us was the glass, as he was from outside. A fellow explorer named Aaron joined to replace our lost comrade. We were pretty puzzled about why the hell the robot followed us ALLLLLLL the way to where we were. It was ridiculous. You should have seen the radio chatter we had with the guys back at SS13. It was pretty crazy...

But things just went even more crazier. There was a clinic and a functional computer, with all the database of our crew on SS13. We were shocked to find medical reports on each and everyone of us. Strangely enough, someone thought it was funny to list "missing head and shoulders" as a major disorder for me. Aaron went off to explore some more while we dicked around in the clinc. He returned and told us to follow him. We did, and found out there were aliens on this space station. Without a moment's notice, a alien popped out of Aaron's stomach, effectively killing him. It turned into a some kinda horror thing, reminded me of Dead Space for some reason. We screamed for our lives and went to find a escape route, up until I blew up into a bunch of pieces. All that was left was Narfy as I just fucking blew up (I still don't know why I just died like that). Narfy was pretty much screwed at that point, though the round ended without him being killed.

In another round, we played aliens and everyone got together. We all went into the cargo bay, armed ourselves with weapons and barricaded the room as the rest of the station got infested. It was a pretty disorganised group, but at least half of us managed to evacuate in time for the shuttle.

This was an alien attack, and this was the second before I blew up, again, this time with a alien out of my stomach

Here we were rigging the disposal pipes to send it out into another area, away from the rest of the station.

Another round I hooked up with a guy named Hunter. We were both engineers and I decided to play along with his plans. We decided it would be a good idea to heat up the engine by releasing a bunch of plasma, so that it would produce more energy. We broke every fuel tank in there. Normally plasma doesn't catch on fire, but this time the whole fucking engine just engulfed in flames. We panicked and got the hell out of there. Decided to do a bit more screwing around and went to claim the cargo bay as our base of operations, establishing a new "nation" on the station.

The captain was more than willing to allow it, since I suppose no one was really doing anything with that area anyways. It was a pretty interesting idea, because we started doing some modifications on the station which normally wouldn't be allowed (especially if the AI was occupied by someone, which wasn't the case). Because we screwed up the engine earlier on, the rest of the station began to run out of juice, aside from us, where we relied on a bunch of batteries to keep the room functional while the rest of SS13 got screwed over (we were the only engineers and the engine room was FUBAR and filled with plasma). Pretty sure that was part of his plan. Either way, it was working pretty well for us, up until a major lag spike.

Many other stories to tell, but I think this should give you a good idea on what crazy things can happen.

The Verdict (mandatory read)

Space Station 13 is a addicting game with many surprising elements and possibilities out of such a small game (about what, less than 15 mb?). A game doesn't need to have eye candy graphics to do well. SS13 excels in the department of originality and allows just about allows a wide range of creativity. I probably wouldn't say infinite since I'm unsure if you can add or make new objects/maps, but there's a lot to consume. Its a game for people like me who likes to pretend I'm some avatar dude who's getting royally fucked over by the sheer insanity that can happen on SS13. If you're into sandbox games, RPGs and like to roleplay (don't need to write well) then this game just might be for you. Its a game that doesn't require a supercomputer to run, you could probably run it on Windows 98 if you had decent internet.

Here's a kinda funny summary of what I've just said:

For those who are interested in playing

If you want to join the club and play SS13, just download the Byond client. Making an account for it is unnecessary, but preferable. Go to the RPG section and find Space Station 13. My username is Meteora147, so you can just add me on your friends list. My character is always named as Ramirez in one way or another (it gets hilarious when everyone orders me around to do the impossible, just like the meme). Here's two servers I primarily play on (you have to create a new character for each server, its annoying I know but there's not a whole lot to customize in the fist place, takes a few mere minutes).

Gibbed #4 Goon Station 13 - This is probably the most populous server in the game. I've seen the player count go upwards of 60 and never seen it go below 30 at midnight in Pacific Time. Despite the high player count, it surprisingly doesn't feel especially too crowded, given how we're all in our all special rooms, how big the station is and how maybe a dozen of them will be killed off one or another. Despite the GOON's reputation (which probably isn't too favourable) the RPers here are actually pretty decent. One time I actually had a pretty quiet game where everyone just chilled, never had to do any work as a janitor.
German Station 14 Concos Hut - My favored server so far, its been a mix of things. Population count is roughly 15-30 on average. My British friend says he prefers RPing here. I'm not sure how the quality compares to Gibbed #4. It goes up and down sometimes. Sometimes there's a lot of griefing, other times its fine. The one fatal flaw so far however, is that German Station seems to have a lot of lag. And I mean a lot. The lag spikes sometimes lasts for 5 minutes. Luckily you can pretty much just go on the internet and browse around until the game unfreezes, but its annoying.

I haven't tried Gibbed #3, its the second most populous server.

Also, for those who are starting off, here's a few things you should know. Please start off of as an assistant. You get very few access as an assistant, but you don't have very much responsibility either, which is good since the room to fuck up the rest of the station by mistake is very low. Its good for those who are learning the mechanics, controls and the map layout. Stick with it for a while until you've gotten a good grasp of things. After that, you can try some other lower difficult jobs like janitor, barkeeper, chef. Some of the highest difficult jobs are the AI, captain and Head of Personnel, so don't choose them until you learned your way through the game.

Here's a few useful links:

HUD Explanation
Basic Commands
Tutorial
Roles/Jobs Index (for the curious)
Station Layout (older map, detailed)
Station Layout (newer map, but not nearly as detailed)

Fuck my fingers are tired from all of this typing. I'll try to help any of you if you need it, but I'm pretty new myself. I've gotten most of the basics down though.

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