Emergency Equipment Crate and its possible changes

[ManopolisJones]

Something that's never left my mind as I play QM is the emergency equipment crate. I had only ever seen it bought a few times, and every time it was by a medical doctor for the reasons of getting the two medbots inside of it. My understand of the Emergency Equipment Crate is, it's the kind of crate you'd buy during an emergency to just open up, and let it go to work. The medical bots will fan out to whoever's wounded, the people will snag the internals they need, and the floor bots will be dragged out to where ever there's a breach. Of course, nobody does that for one reason or another and it gets me thinking about it's contents and what could be done to perhaps make it a more desirable crate.

Now originally I thought of it more as a resupply to the emergency lockers, which made me want to replace the gas masks with breath masks, but then I thought about adding the larger yellow emergency oxygen tanks to the crate, and the idea came to mind to replace two of the five normal blue emergency tanks with yellow ones, and replace 3 of the gas masks with breath masks, the idea being the yellow tanks to be used with gas masks, the breath masks for the blue tanks. Then I thought about the two hazard vests which I guess the idea is, you put the vest on, then you put your emergency air tank into the vests suit slot, and while that makes sense, I think it would be perhaps a better idea to replace the vests (considering the mechanical maintenance crate gets us our fill of them) with a couple of emergency shelters instead.
I reckon these particular changes adds the duel effect of it's ability to replace missing items in emergency lockers, and fill up any missing emergency shelters, while also being able to be deployed in what you could call a crisis zone.

With all that being said however, here's the real point of discussion for me. Should anything be done about the four robots in the crate? My thoughts could perhaps be likened to creating a problem where there isn't one, however I feel with my experience of them being bought exclusively for their medical bots if something is worth changing, and if so, how? The first thing that came to mind was simply removing the medical bots and placing them in their own entry in the medical tab on the cargo console, the thinking being, instead of the MD buying a crate where 90% of the contents go to waste, they'd just buy their own for whatever a decent set price would be. But then this gets me thinking about roboticists and if this new entry would cause any problems with them having something they'd normally make (able to be purchased at cargo. Which then gets me into this loop of "But this bot is already in the crate anyway", so if there was truly a problem, should they both just be removed anyway? Which then gets me thinking, "But wouldn't removing them go against the core idea of the place this crate down, let the bots go to work?"

Normally I wouldn't have thought twice about putting in the first batch of changes to the emergency crate in a pr, but I want to hear what people think about the robots in the crate, and if these kinds of changes would be a favored idea to those inclined to buy.

[jwhitak]

Already considering balance changes on this myself, and have some commits locally in progress trying to figure out where I want this to be.

The emergency crate is in a really bad spot right now. It's being used as a medibot crate and has no real use otherwise. There's usually enough emergency lockers to not need a resupply, and the contents are situational at best. You want the medibots and that's it 99% of the time. If anything, it should be removed until a better design is figured out. This is the only reason why I didn't PR it this morning. Still trying to process ideas.

Medibots are moving to their own crate, for sure. Sorry, medical nerds. Two free sources of mainline chems for all the damage types is too powerful for 40 credits.

Current working model is
Emergency Crate - 40 Credits
Five (5) blue small tanks
Five (5) gas masks
Two (2) hazard vests
Two (2) emergency toolboxes
Two (2) rad patches
Twenty (20) floor tiles
Twenty (20) metal rods
Two (2) Inflatable Shelters
One (1) Medkit

Medibot Crate - 100 Credits
One (1) Randomly Colored Medibot

Floorbot Crate - Doesn't exist! Floorbot nerf confirmed.

[ManopolisJones]

Glad i'm not the only one thinking about this, i'd say it wouldn't be a crime to have a single floor bot in the crate with some tiles on the side for a quick reload before you send it out. When it comes down to the hazard vests, if you're sticking with full gasmasks and small blue tanks, you may as well add three more hazard vests to stick with the theme of sticking them into your suit slot in case of an atmos emergency. I personally still think adding a few yellows to spice up the crates not too bad an idea.

[Eneocho]

I'd flatout replace all the blue tanks with yellow ones and keep the gas masks, much more useful that way.
Move the hazard vests and radpatches to a separate "hazard crate", since those two tend to be left behind.
Move the medibots for 50c each to their own crate under medical (so you need 100c for 2 medibots).
Finally move the 2 floorbots to the engineering tab for 30c. Floorbots are incredibly underwhelming and slow so having the two for 30 is not really an issue. Alternatively, buff the floorbots. One idea to buff floorbots is to make them ignore firelocks completely so they can patch breaches without ZAS risk. That and increase their speed by a lot god they're way too fucking slow.

[SonixApache]

make it a flatpack
when unpacked it creates at 6x6 shielded safe zone
medibot and floorbot and cleanbot activity from the center for a minute or two
then it all just melts into slag