Video Game / Space Station 13

Just another day on the station.

"It's like playing an episode of Sealab 2021 on acid."

—Angry Diplomat, on the Something Awful version

One of the most pervasive and popular games on the BYOND platform, Space Station 13 is all about living and working on a Space Station and trying not to die horribly.

You are one of many people aboard Space Station 13: one of many space stations owned by the Nanotrasen corporation and kept in line by the rather vaguely defined Central Command (frequently Wikiworded as Centcom) unit. Various problems occur on or around the station, which are vaguely hinted at by unreliable and classified communications. The incompetent, paranoid, self-serving, and just plain sociopathic members of Space Station 13 then have to attempt to do their jobs and survive as the situation unfolds around them - but they usually just start killing each other until they evacuate. The modes differ greatly between servers, but the usual premise is that there are antagonists on the station, whether it's traitors from the Syndicate, a wizard, or even the cult of Nar'sie.

For most servers, Space Station 13 plays like a multiplayer "stay in-character and do anything" Tabletop RPG built on top of a highly in-depth sandbox of simulated systems^note Think "sandbox gameplay" side of Wide-Open Sandbox and "high systemicity" side of Immersive Sim. Every player is assigned a job on the station, and they must perform that job and try their best to maintain the station's stability while players playing antagonists work to disrupt that stability. In-character RP-ing is maintained as a community social contract, and enforced by server admins.

Every job is dazzlingly complex, with even the most mundane of duties often having a shocking amount of depth. The game world itself is simulated from higher-level electricity systems down to chemistry and thermodynamics. With hundreds of different items, a robust amount of unique things to see and do, and roleplaying-based content filling out everything that the gameplay systems don't cover, the average player could play for years and never get bored.

As a largely open source project, SS13 has a long and diverse development history, with numerous code bases and forks (usually tied to individual servers) all originating from a primitive "original" SS13 first made in 2003. As a result, different SS13 servers can have vastly different gameplay, visuals, and even settings. Anyone can host their own server on BYOND with their own code and modifications, and servers can fade out and disappear or become very popular. Here's a (non-comprehensive) list of servers:

SS13 Servers

• Goonstation: Originating from the Something Awful forum's "Goons", Goonstation is the longest-running SS13 community. A previously closed source but now open source codebase, leaked versions of earlier Goonstation code formed the basis of many other codebases. Gameplay on Goon is much more light-hearted than most other servers, and roleplay is very light on most Goon servers.
• /tg/station 13: Originating from the /tg/ board of 4chan, /tg/station is the third-oldest and most popular server. It is open source and open to contribution, and many servers fork their code from them. Gameplay on /tg/ is in between Goon and Bay, and roleplay straddles between low to medium.
  • Yogstation: Originating from Yogscast fans. It is one of the oldest active servers that uses /tg/station code, using an early fork but reciveving continuous updates.
  • Fulpstation: A fork of TG that retains many things that have been removed from it over the years. Has a stricter roleplay policy compered to its parent.
  • Beestation: another popular /tg/ fork.
• Baystation 12: Originating from the Bay 12 Dwarf Fortress Community and the second-oldest active server, Baystation 12 strives for a more hardcore roleplay experience with enforced roleplaying. Despite the higher standards of entry, gameplay on Bay is unique and very different from most other servers. Set in an Wagon Train to the Stars-style scenario in the exploration spaceship "SEV Torch". Development is open source and open to contribution, and it used to be a very popular server to fork from, heavier RP servers can trace their origins from Baystation codebase.
  • Aurora Station: originally created as an alternative to Baystation 12. The server's popularity has waxed and waned, but currently it is more popular then its parent.
• CM-SS13: Also known as Colonial Marines, CM-SS13 is a heavily modified SS13 server based on Bay code, and inspired by the film Aliens. Gameplay on CM-SS13 is radically different from a normal SS13 server: players are split into two teams: the Colonial Marines and the Xenomorphs, who will both deploy onto a single map and attempt to eliminate the other side. The server strikes a balance between action and roleplaying.
  • TerraGov Marine Corps (TGMC): After an official release of CM-SS13's code in 2018, a group of /tg/station developers too upon themselves to make their own version of CM-SS13. TGMC aims to have a more streamlined and action-focused experience with less roleplay compared to CM. It shifts to its own original setting (although keeping the xenomorphs), which allows them to create new weapons, armour and gear for the Marines and new Xenomorph castes and abilities without begin tied to the Aliens franchise.
• World Server: A high-roleplay server set in a NanoTrasen colony city, players live out the lives of a city folk instead of a space station crew. There are many roles unique to World Server, including politicians and criminals.
• Paradise Station: A server modified from both tg and Bay code (and even has Goon features), Paradise features medium RP and is known for its consistent high population.
• /vg/station 13: Loosely based on Bay code, /vg/station features low to medium RP and high action.
• Civilization 13: A server that puts players throughout many historical periods, featuring both roleplay and PVP modes.
• Skyrat: A very popular high-roleplay focused on furries, containing a wide ranges of alien and furry species, including a species creator, and (most controversially) allowing Erotic Roleplaying (ERP).

Many attempts have been made to remake SS13 on a better platform (BYOND is an extremely old engine that doesn't run very well), but none have maintained cohesion for long, except for Space Station 14.

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Welcome to the station, crew. Please enjoy your stay.

All Versions

• Abandoned Area: Disused rooms within the dark, junk-filled maintainance corridors are a common feature on station maps, ready to be repurposed for personal projects or antagonist lairs. Some servers also have entire derelict stations or ships out in space.
• Action Survivor: The station crew is filled with noncombatant roles like cooks, janitors, interns and clowns, and the late-game tends to see scattered survivors grabbing whatever weapons they can find and trying to avoid danger. Non-security personnel that are skilled and cunning enough might even slay the antagonist themselves after the Redshirt Army is routed.
• A.I. Is a Crapshoot: One of the available jobs is as the AI of the station, which has a unique antagonist role where the AI malfunctions and turns hostile to the crew.
  • Perfectly functional and good A.I.s can be subverted into this on purpose by players with less-than-wholesome intent. This can itself backfire horribly if the law is poorly written and the AI player chooses to interpret it in a particular manner. Some of the default law modules have problems, such as the Quarantine module resulting in pre-emptive crew killing to prevent escape. The Ion Storm random event can also mess up the AI with strange laws such as telling it to lock all the doors, that the command staff doesn’t exist or that the AI "MUST NOT HARM VIRUSES OR, THROUGH INACTION, ALLOW VIRUSES TO COME TO HARM."
• The Alleged Boss: While captains do have access that most people don't, they don't really do as much as the title suggests and nobody really respects their authority, unless you're in a RP server.
• Almighty Janitor:
  • Aside from the literal janitor role, the HoP (or Head of Personnel) only has one actual job — change the access of different ID cards so people can get around the station. Outside of this job he's basically useless and often abandons his post to putz about, but there's a reason why his office is one of the first ones broken into by rambunctious assistants — that being the coveted "all access" ID card.
  • The Assistant is at the bottom of the totem pole, an expendable Red Shirt subordinate to everyone else on the crew. With no Arbitrary Headcount Limit, the typical assistant is a clueless newbie learning the basic controls. However, since the job has virtually no responsibilities and has uncommon access to the maintenance corridors, seasoned players will sometimes play assistant to operate Beneath Notice.
• Arbitrary Headcount Limit: Each job has a limit on how many players can have it. Some servers allow for manipulation of this, however, whether via random events or the Head of Personnel's console, and assistants usually have no cap.
• Art Evolution: The original version's sprites versus the aesthetically superior resprited versions. Overtime the overall visual systems improved as well with more dynamic lighting, sprite scaling/rotation, and more complex animations in general thanks to upgrades to the underlying BYOND engine itself.
• The Artifact: The Clown role was created as a "punishment" for disruptive players, to deny them any real responsibilities while everybody else actually played the game. The Clown eventually became a regular role anyone could get randomly, but the Clown was already the unofficial Mascot Mook by then (and is still comically useless). In certain servers it's readily accessible, in others you specifically have to apply for the role to prove you're not just using it as an excuse to be a disruptive player who screws around and gets away with it.
• Artifact of Doom: Various kinds of Alien Artifacts can be found scattered around in space or ordered from Nanotrasen's reserves on some servers. They can rarely turn out to be helpful, but most of the time you'll be seeing them cause horrible things like injecting people with chemicals, emitting horrible noises, turning unwitting victims into Cyborgs, outright exploding, and so on. That some of them can be activated by a simple touch doesn't help matters.
• Artifact Title: a few servers have their own names for the station instead of Space Station 13, some servers are not even set in a space station but in spaceships or exoplanets, and some servers don't even have stuff to do with SS 13 but are in totally different settings.
• Applied Phlebotinum: Plasma, a highly-volatile energy source discovered inside of a star. Since Plasma is the best and most valuable energy source around, Nanotrasen loves harvesting it. The crew's supposed job is to harvest and/or study Plasma and any other energy supply they find. Also known as 'phoron' on some servers, and may have different origins accordingly. Either way, it's most often encountered as a purple gas that's stored in orange cans, which is both highly flammable and extremely toxic to all forms of life.
• Ascended Glitch: The baseline version of Space Station 13 had a glitch in which a skilled Geneticist could turn a player's corpse into a living monkey, and that living monkey into the player, brought Back from the Dead. Said glitch eventually became common enough that every up-to-date server has a version of the Genetics Lab, which allows you to clone corpses to give players another chance at life, or transform monkeys into human bodies for Brain Transplants.
• Back from the Dead / Death Is Cheap: Originally difficult but possible, due to a bug in the way Genetics worked, now impossibly easy between having your corpse cloned, your brain stuffed into a Cyborg, or cloned by a plant in some servers. Being spaced or gibbed, however, means you're more or less out for the remainder of the round, at least on most servers.
• Back Story: Every server has its own lore and backstory, with varying levels of complexity, from an Excuse Lore to unnecessarily complex lore covering many things that don't even have any influence in-game. Of course, they can all be seen in the wiki.
• Badass Normal: The entire crew. If part of the daily life on space stations is teaming up to swarm a mass murderer with basic tools, then it's kind of inevitable you're this trope.
  • Some special roles rely only on their equipment instead of abilities. This includes traitors, nuclear operatives/mercenaries, deathsquad and build-specific roles.
• Badass Preacher: The chaplain can be this. Most builds give them magical items. However, they're borderline useless when there are no cultists onboard the station.
• Banana Peel: The Clown starts with one. Slipping on a banana's peel leaves you on the ground for a short while.
  • Competent botanists can actually mutate bananas to make them even MORE slippery depending on their potency.
• Batman Can Breathe in Space: Averted. Going into space without air and protection will kill you very quickly.
• Black Comedy: A lot of hilariously horrifying things can happen in a Space Station 13 round, although in practice they are not as common as your average YouTube playthrough (or a casual reading of this tropes page) would imply.
• Bottomless Magazines: Averted, all the traditional firearms in the game have an ammo or battery system in place that requires reloading/recharging when expended. Played straight with certain guns that recharge by themselves, such as the Captain's Antique Gun or the R&D's Advanced Energy Gun.
• Building of Adventure: Space
• Butt-Monkey: The Clown. People love to malign the clown because... well, because he's a clown. On the goonstation servers, the clown is exempted as a target for most anti-griefing rules, meaning that players can generally treat them worse than other jobs. On the other side of the coin, the clown is also allowed to get away with a lot of things that other players aren't... as long as it's funny.
  • Or the Lawyer.
  • Sometimes invoked literally with the lab monkeys used for Animal Testing.
  • And the Janitor. Because his only job is making people slip over most of the time.
  • Assistants are considered expendable, tend to be clueless newbies, and are generally assumed to be one step away from traitors. "Assistant purges" are not unknown. It is also a common job to grief with, thanks to your maintenance access, it is known as the Greytide.
• But What About the Astronauts?: Even though all crew are astronauts, a variant can occur when some catastrophe renders the entire station incapable of supporting life (e.g. a loose singularity, a massive explosion, a deadly virus, a summoned Eldritch Abomination...). Those not on the main station's Z-level, such as mining outpost crew and space/Gateway explorers, will be completely unaffected by such an event, or even entirely unaware that anything is wrong.
• Burial in Space: It's possible, since there are coffins and a mass driver in the morgue to launch them with. Of course, people stuffing you in a coffin while you're still alive, then spacing you, will have the same result.
• Combat Pragmatist: Some players commonly preferer this way of taking out their opponents, is to attack them first, or just use the stunning weapons to make them fall on the floor, from there they are open for a No-Holds-Barred Beatdown, slipping items or honour would be damned..
• Caps Lock, Num Lock, Missiles Lock: Overuse of remote signalling devices can lead to this, as can carrying around many gas tanks. In the first case, you might accidentally trigger the suicide bomb instead of unbolting that door or shutting down the local camera grid, in the second you could catch yourself breathing nitrous oxide or plasma instead of oxygen.
• Color-Coded for Your Convenience: Each section has its own personal uniform color: Security officers are dressed in red, naturally. Medical scientists and doctors wear white uniforms, and head staff and the captain wear green or Blue uniforms.
• Convection, Schmonvection: Averted; even being near a fire is dangerous without a firesuit or other protection.
• Corrupt Corporate Executive: It's heavily implied that Nanotrasen is well aware of the death traps their stations are, but keep building them as is for cost cutting reasons.
• Couldn't Find a Lighter: You can light cigarettes with a lighter, or a welding tool, on your friend's flaming corpse, or with the help of another person if they hit you with in the mouth with the lit lighter on help intent, they will hover the lighter over the recipent's face. Also, explosions. Lighting it with a welding tool makes the game call you a badass, and getting the help from another player who is lightning up your cigarette makes you feel like a mob boss.
• Crapsack World: While the station itself is obviously a bad place to earn a living, the extent that the rest of the setting applies for this varies from server to server. At the very least there's a lot of corporate corruption going on.
• Cutting the Knot: If a problem or puzzle can be solved faster and easier through violence than it's almost assured that the crew will resort to violence as long as the server rules would allow it.
• Do Well, But Not Perfect: If you are playing as Antagonist perfect enough, by murder-boning (killing) everything in sight, an curtain ERT group can be spawned by admins, to deal with this situation you are causing to the station....
• Dangerous Workplace: As TG station puts it, Space Station 13 is "a nonsensical metal death trap masquerading as a space station."
• Deader than Dead: Being gibbed or cremated is the only way to prevent someone from being cloned/turned into a cyborg.
  • Unless they had a copy of their genetics made beforehand, in which case they can be cloned as soon as someone puts their disk in the cloner.
• Deadly Doctor: A malevolent Doctor has access to a large number of syringes with which to load harmful chemicals into (or medicines if you're weird). Any Doctor can simply ask a Scientist to make the desired reagents, since they're more than happy to help as long as they're mixing stuff. Slightly mitigated by the fact that it takes a few seconds to successfully inject someone, but there are ways to stun the victim long enough for this. On some servers they don't even need to go through Science, as chemistry is sometimes reassigned to the Medical department. Harmacist indeed...
  • That's not even counting that medical tools can be used as weapons. The surgical saw in particular has an uncanny reputation as being excellent for blinding people.
  • Traitor Doctors have access to the Pocket Syringe Gun, permitting them to shoot and immediately inject whatever they want from a distance. Stealthy ones can also use the Electromagnetic Card to short out the security system on the Hypospray, letting them load and immediately inject whatever they want.
• Deadly Gas: Other than the obvious ones found in gas canisters that aren't good old Oxygen, Chemists/Scientists can also make some deadly chemical smoke. Whether it hurts by being inhaled or simply by touch depends on what reagents the smoke carries, up to three of whatever there was most of in the mix.
  • Back then, Traitor Chemists/Scientists had a machine that spewed out their smoke mix of choice constantly. It was removed because in addition to causing horrible deaths it also causes horrible lag.
• Dead Man's Switch: The microbomb injector available to traitors, that lets you explode messily should you die. If you get out-robusted, at least you'll be able to take the jerk who killed you along for the ride. You can even inject multiple bombs (or a macrobomb) for an even bigger boom.
• Defective Detective: Most Detectives will end up like this. They tend to spend more time getting drunk than doing anything useful in catching antagonists.
• Depending On The Codebase: Different versions of the game can end up wildly different from one another, especially as they go on and people modify them. An early form of Goonstation became a common base that many versions have spread out from, but now most servers are very unique in layout, equipment, and other options. Sometimes even art style, with servers like Eris having undergone a comprehensive replacement of many assets to create a more cohesive atmosphere.
• Developer's Foresight: It varies with codebase as well, but you can run into a lot of cases where there are useful and entirely undocumented interactions on certain servers. Replacing floor tiles, for example, usually takes a screwdriver or crowbar: this pulls up the tile and then you can place a new tile down on the bare plating. But, on some servers, you can simply use the tile you're holding on the tile you want to replace and if you have the appropriate tool in your other hand, it'll automatically pull the old tile up and instantly place the new one down, saving you having to swap hands and click as many times.
• Design-It-Yourself Equipment:
  • Most servers have weapons and accessories that can be crafted from items laying around the station. Things may or may not include crossbows, flamethrowers, spears, baseball bats, or jackolantern flashlights. Bombs can also be created in toxins, but sometimes you can create pipebombs or Improvised Explosive Devices in tool storage or bombs that involve heating beakers remotely in some servers. The amount of design it yourself goes to insane levels when you look at Goonstation's mechanical components, or TG station's telecom scripting. There's probably way more examples of building items, contraptions and gear too.
  • Just talking about TG's telecom scripting language NTSL, You can alert people to a speaker's job title, force the crew into a game with quizbot, or just disrupt the crew by replacing every spoken message with swear words. You can also build commands to mask your voice, or prevent key job roles from saying anything on the radio.
  • Goonstation's mechanical components basically works like minecraft redstone. You can take components from a vending machine, wrench and connect them around the station and build a set of teleporters, voice activated doors, or death traps that launch you into space. The amount of complicatedness actually goes up when you include the ability to send signals to PDA's or other devices. One of the geekier things possible involves building a chatroom for everyone who messages a certain PDA name.
  • Some servers, starting with Goonstation, have started added buildable space pods. Some of these can actually be customized for specific tasks such as mining, transporting items, or combat.
  • The Robotics department on certain servers can also build Mini-Mecha, starting with the "Ripley" powerloader from a certain familiar franchise and potentially unlock and build more powerful, combat-oriented machines as well. These can then have weapons and other components slotted in like clamps, laser cannons, rocket launchers, and so on.
• Difficult, but Awesome: There are things that can be considered as such, such as the completion of certain ruins.
  • Most of the antagonist roles are hard to succeed, but the caveat is that they let you wreak havoc like nobodies business. For instance, the hardest antagonist job, the Nuclear Operative Team, needs to infiltrate the station, obtain the tactical nuke codes, arm the nuke, and escape alive. This is easier said than done, as a nuke team is between four and five people, the rest of the station can be up to 80 or more people at a time, and the second the Nuke Ops show up the entire station turns on them. As a result Nuke Ops are nightmarishly difficult to take down, armed with the best guns, gear, armor and supplies the Syndicate can buy. This is especially true if the Nuke Ops leader declares war on the station, which instantly alerts the entire station that Nuke Ops are coming, delays the invasion by 20 minutes, and gives the Nuke Ops team an even bigger TC boost.
• Donut Mess with a Cop: Check any security HQ, on any map. There will always be a donut box there. Complete with pink icing. They can also exclusively heal the security staff, at least those with the pink frosting on them are, which gives out a special chemical that heals Security.
• Drives Like Crazy: A traitor clown can summon a clown car and drive around running over people and stuffing them into the back seat. There's no passenger limit, of course. Just make sure you do not crash.
• Dysfunction Junction: To put it lightly, the station is a complete wreck. Mayhem and chaos are the norms, most crewmembers are borderline insane and paranoid, and the AI tends to fly out of control if fiddled with too much. There's a very strong implication that the station is actually just a place that Nanotrasen sends incompetent or mentally disturbed employees to so they won't mess anything important up.
• Early Game Hell: Being inexperienced can be a death sentence and it can take a while to settle down in the game to enjoy it. Thankfully reading up on the wikis and online guides before you play can greatly lessen this.
• Earth-Shattering Kaboom: In older versions, it was possible to construct bombs which could completely annihilate the entire station and everything on it, leaving only empty space behind. Combined with the fact that they were also quite easy to build led to this happening very, very often. It's still possible to pull this off on a server that disables the bomb cap, although it's not quite so easy.
• Emergency Weapon: Any character can fight with their bare hands for a low amount of damage, although they sometimes can be surprisingly effective if used cleverly. Many Improvised Weapons also do little damage and don't have any special effects on a hit, but compensate by being extremely common.
• EMP: Several kinds exist, pretty much all of them bad news. EMP Grenades do heavy damage to Cyborgs and cause lesser robots to go on a rampage, and the Electromagnetic Card (cryptographic sequencer) traitor item can short out many electrical things. On servers with augmentations, prosthetics, and full-body prosthetic cyborgs, EM pulse effects can range from merely "bad" (your arm malfunctions every couple of minutes) to instant death.
• Enemy Mime: Certain servers have mimes as a counterpart (and sometimes, explicit arch-enemy/rival) to clowns. Pray you never meet a traitor mime.
• Enemy Mine: In a meta-example, the various servers and communities used to violently hate each other but have since largely put aside their differences to dislike certain servers instead.
• Escape Pod: A few small lifepods are available if one is unable (or unwilling) to get to the Emergency Shuttle. In certain situations, they can be launched early to the mining site.
• Everything Trying to Kill You: Downplayed on well-regulated servers, where the only entities that are allowed to kill you are NPCs and antagonists. However, even the most rigorous enforcement of server rules can't protect you from the inherent dangers of the station and your own incompetence.
• Eyepatch of Power: Eyepatches are one of the available eyewears, and might make your character look very cool or kinda dorky. Some servers also have ones that include security or medical scanners.
• Eye Scream: With the game's targeting system, you can specifically target someone's eyes. A common thing to do when fighting someone is to jam a screwdriver in their eyes.
• Explosive Decompression: Also averted; while unprotected exposure to vacuum will kill you stone dead very quickly, it's usually one the least gory ways to die in the game.
• For Science!:
  • One of the excuses for griefing, particularly if it's related to your job description.
  • The catchphrase and often famous last words of any good Scientist or Research Director.
  • Often a sign that at least one part of Research is on fire, overrun by aliens, overrun by burning aliens or gone.
• Gargle Blaster: Expected from any Barman, as most servers have a wide variety of drinks coded in. You can even explicitly make drinks called gargle blasters on certain codebases.
• God Is Evil: As a normal player, you are at the whims of the Admins, who have complete control over the entire station and things that don't even naturally occur. This tends to vary a lot between servers and individual admins, however.
• Goodies in the Toilets: You can crowbar open toilets to hide objects in the cisterns in some codebases.
• Griefer:
  • The game was essentially a haven for this before it got popular, and players would torment each other with impunity on a regular basis. This has been scaled back a lot in recent years. Special mention goes to Cuban Pete, legendary for creating explosives so powerful they would not just destroy the entire station, but crash the server, who was unbanned very often by the host of the server himself.
  • If you're an enemy character such as a member of The Syndicate, you can do anything you want provided it does not break certain server rules. Most servers will heavily frown at excessive actions though - if your mission is simply to steal a jetpack and that's it but you blow up Medical then go on a murderous rampage, you might find yourself getting a stern talking to later.
  • Of the more traditional meaning, griefers come in two main flavors: People that abuse power and break moral codes (Especially when playing Security, which leads to that type of griefing being called "Shitcurity") and a ludicrous amount of people grabbing any weapon at hand (Like toolboxes) and killing everybody (Since this usually happens with assistants, it has been humorously nicknamed "Greytide").
  • The clown also has a certain amount of leeway to mess with people as long as he doesn't try to deliberately sabotage the round (unless he's an antagonist, of course.)
  • There's something of an unspoken rule on a few servers that if you commit something that technically constitutes grief, but it ends up enhancing the round in some way, you probably won't get in trouble for it. This is a pretty rare occurrence, though
• Grievous Bottley Harm: Bottles can be broken on people and used as fairly strong sharp weapons.
• Hell Is That Noise: If you pay a lot of attention to the radio communications, a lot of the more common and harmless sounds aboard the station have the potential to become this. Imagine hearing on the radio that the clown is going around killing people across the station, and then hear the sound of clown shoes outside your door, you'd better pray there's another way out of there.
• Hilarity Ensues: Take a highly complex environment, full of intricate systems with a tendency to spin wildly out of control, and populate it with a large group of people that are often trying their hardest to screw with one another even when they aren't the round's designated antagonists. It is not a question of if this trope will apply to any given round, it is a question of when and how.
• Hollywood Tourette's: the Tourette's Syndrome mutation just causes crewmembers to randomly drop what they are doing and yell curse words, often on radio.
• Immersive Sim: Some players have made the argument that Space Station 13 could be considered an immersive sim; it's got nearly every characteristic that defines the genre aside from being a 3D single-player game, it's one of the most systemic games ever made bar maybe Dwarf Fortress, having systems that simulate metabolisms, atmospherics, chemistry, energy production and so much more, built up through the game's unusual development history and its disregard for graphical prowess. But obviously, it's kind of hard calling a top-down pixel fest running on a 2003 engine that depends on Internet Explorer "immersive".
• Impersonating an Officer: In most servers, Security officers are guaranteed not to be traitors. Of course, that doesn't stop an actual traitor from stealing a Security officer's uniform and ID card to pose as one. Useful for raiding the armory for weapons or causing chaos through overzealous law enforcement. However, your disguise is blown out to other Security personnel if you do not have a loyalty/mindshield implant.
• Improvised Microgravity Maneuvering: A typical resort to suddenly drifting off into space is to throw an item in the opposite direction of where you want to go. Fire extinguishers can also work nicely as improvised jetpacks.
• Improvised Weapon:
  • Just about anything in the game is a passable weapon in the right hands. Air Tanks and Toolboxes are two of the top choices. Crowbars are also highly effective.
  • Floor Tiles are not commonly used but can be extremely effective when thrown. Their power is further emphasized by the fact that they are stackable and are literally everywhere on the station if only the player has the willpower to collect them.
  • Certain codebases have a pneumatic cannon which can fire out items loaded into it. This can be combined with floor tiles to devastating effect, though almost anything makes a deadly projectile.
• In and Out of Character: The game has two chat modes: one for the characters, which is subject to the rules of the game, and one for players, which is global and can be seen and used by all players at all times (and uses one's BYOND username to preserve in-game anonymity). Revealing details about the current round using out-of-character chat, even by accident, is Serious Business and will get you in BIG trouble. Many servers will also drop the hammer on you if they discover you've been using out-of-game messaging systems to share information on in-round events, doubly so if it was with people also in that round.
• Inventory Management Puzzle: The amount of items you can carry is limited by their size and the amount of slots you have. Each crew member generally has a 7-slot backpack (Which also comes with a 7-slot box) on the back slot that fits most medium-size items, two pocket slots for tiny items, and a belt one to carry suitable items. Belts can carry items, most outerwear can fit a single item suitable to it, and a few large items can be carried on the back in place of a backpack.
• Instant Expert: Any player (except the clown) can do anything on the station so long as they have the tools needed for it; naturally some tools are way harder to acquire than others. Your chosen profession affects your initial access level and what everyone else expects you are supposed to be doing. You can use your meta knowledge to be proficient at anything that you know of, but certain "high roleplay" servers will punish you for this.
• Just Eat Gilligan:
  • Happens frequently with modes that involve station invaders or assassinations. Instead of making a plan to eliminate the target, the crew usually resorts to rushed and sloppy methods of killing that can cause worse damage to the station and crew than the round antagonists, like suicide bombing Medbay because the AI saw the wizard there. If a bomb fails to take out the sole antagonist, you can get banned, however.
  • Inverted in normal traitor rounds, since traitors are just another crew member, but played straight if a traitor just gets a short brig sentence for "good behavior" or having a good cover story.
  • Enforced to a certain extent. If someone's griefing, and you don't have hard evidence that they're a traitor, killing them is a good way to cop a ban.
• Kill It with Fire: Happens to the whole station on a regular basis. The primary weakness of both blobs and changelings is also good old fire.
• Killer Robot: Cyborgs and the AI go rogue rather often. Luckily you can build a self-destruct remote detonator... if they haven't spaced the circuit board for it. And you need the Roboticist (or at least his ID) to authorize it. Certain codebases also have murderous robot NPCs to provide threats in away missions or for admin events.
• Labcoat of Science and Medicine: Labcoats are part of the starting equipment of all of the medical and science positions on the station.
• Laser Blade: The C-Saber/Energy Sword, a popular weapon available to syndicate traitors. Less creative traitors can get quite a bit of mileage out of simply purchasing a laser sword and going on a rampage.
• Lethal Joke Character: The Janitor was originally included as a punishment job, but is now among the more feared members of staff on the station. The Clown sometimes tends to waver between this and a normal joke character depending on how much he's been nerfed at any given time - his banana peels were at one time deadly. It is said a bad clown is annoying, a good clown is funny, and a GREAT clown is fear incarnate.
• Lethal Joke Item:
  • A wide array of seemingly-useless items can be deadly with the right knowledge.
  • Well-placed banana peels and the like - or hell, even a regular wet floor - can cause a running player to slip and tumble right out the airlock or onto their ass for a beat-down by an awaiting traitor (or griefer).
• The Load: A bad player or someone deliberately trying to hinder the crew (either as a Troll or a traitor) can be this. Assistants in general tend to be seen as this, since they rarely contribute anything to the station and can be extremely detrimental to the crew at their worst.
• Loophole Abuse:
  • Players uploading new laws to the AI have to be very careful not to leave any loopholes, especially loopholes that give the AI license to kill everyone.
  • The most common way for traitors who wish to subvert the AI to get around its Three Laws-Compliant ruleset? Change the definition of "human" to include only the traitor.
• Lord British Postulate: You can bet that if something can ever be possibly killed than at least one player will try to kill it. Usually by using copious amounts of high explosives. Why try to avoid that wizard when you can just beat him to death with a toolbox! This mindset, en masse, leads to modern crews being fairly difficult to completely obliterate; no matter how many you have killed or how great your powers, in almost every mode, it just takes one assistant with a blunt object and they think they can, and often will, stop you. Halloween events or other 'spooky' rounds are thus very, very difficult to plan or execute because almost everybody sees it as just a challenge.
• Lovecraft Lite: There's plenty of unreal eldritch horrors going around the galaxy, but they're not much of a threat considering that they're regularly slaughtered by a crew of lunatics on some remote, piece-of-shit station.
• MacGyvering: Some objects can be made with parts found around the station, to the point that it's not unlikely that a security officer on some servers may search an crewmember and find various homemade contraband ranging from handheld weapons to bombs. On one server it's actually possible to use duct tape to make armor and weaponry, and some servers include stun gloves made out of a battery, some wires, and rubber gloves.
• Mad Bomber: Scientists can spawn in the Toxins lab, which literally has everything you need to make bombs neatly laid out in front of you. If a competent scientist takes issue with the way the round is going, the last third of it generally involves said scientist running around the station, dropping bombs everywhere it hurts. With more rules and greater structure now on goon, it is more difficult to pull this off, with bomb caps and policies against bombing unless you're an antagonist class. If you are, though? It's still entirely possible to blow the station into burning chunks by yourself.
• Mad Mathematician: A Scientist or Research Director (traitor status optional) with good math skills can be one of the most destructive (or helpful, if they're strange) people on the station. Knowing how many units to put into their chemical concoctions can make a huge difference in how much damage they do and how much area they cover, and successfully decoding the (now-optional) teleporter's mathematics for the round gives them access to anything and everything on (and off) the station.
• Mad Scientist:
  • The usual projects for Scientists and Geneticists include superpowers, building high-yield bombs, activating incredibly deadly alien artifacts, building military-grade exoskeletons, and mixing chemical weapons.
  • The Hydroponics department takes this up to eleven by being able to breed many deadly kinds of plants.
  • And then there's the Space Kudzu. Read more here.
  • Roboticists are known for being frighteningly sane and competent in comparison to the average stationer... unless they're traitors, in which case they have a virtually endless supply of death machines to play with such as hacked helper bots (i.e. Medibots for lethal injections, Floorbots for tearing the station apart, etc.), Syndicate Cyborgs or an AI (and by extention all the regular Cyborgs) with modified laws.
• Man on Fire: Anyone who gets the Fire Resistance mutation or is reasonably good with chemicals can negate all heat-based damage while still being lit on fire. Some chemical mixtures can even cause the air around you to spontaneously combust, turning the player into a walking bonfire. However, it is worth noting that setting someone on fire does not kill them instantly, and in some cases doesn't hurt them at all. Flaming people with no regard for their own health can fight back against the one who set them ablaze.
• Marijuana Is LSD: Double subverted on servers that have cannabis that you can grow. While the base plant itself applies general effects typical to real-life cannabis, there is a chance that the plant can mutate into rainbow cannabis instead, which will get you far, far more high than regular old THC ever would.
• Mathematician's Answer: A bit of a Necessary Evil in this game, as while experimenting and asking questions is encouraged, certain things are purposely obscured and will net you this trope because they tend to be too powerful and/or fun-ruining in the wrong hands. This mostly extends to chemical recipes and gas mixes, which can be understandably frustrating for a newbie Chemist or Scientist, which is why they require patience.
• The Millstone: Invoked with traitors. Assistants, the Head Of Personnel, and particularly incompetent security officers also tend to be this.
• Mini-Mecha: Robotcists can build a wide variety of mech suits, ranging from humble industrial and medical models like the Ripley or Odysseus to devastating battlemechs like the Gygax and Durand.
• Mission Control:
  • Several codebases feature a special role called a "Syndicate Communications Agent", which spawns in it's own separate area (either in space or in Lavaland) and has access to all the cameras and radio channels of the station. Should there be syndicate agents in the station, these players can be very useful to them. Nuclear Operatives also get these capabilies through their ship.
  • The clock cults have a special role called "The Eminence", which is a small orb of light, invisible to all, that can manifest anywhere with a camera. The Eminence monitors the station, coordinates the cult activities with it's big chat font, and has hacking abilities.
  • Blood cultists have access to a similar technique, although more eldritch themed: Runes of the Spitit Realm can temporarily make their user astral project, which makes them able to see anywhere in the station, tag important objects and people for all cultists to see, and gives them a big chat font.
• Monster Clown: A traitor clown is supposed to murder people.
• Monster of the Week: On servers running the "secret" mode, the enemy trying to wreak havoc across the station is randomly selected from a variety of adversaries each round. This can include aliens, revolutionaries, terrorists and wizards. Very rarely, it might be nothing at all - but paranoia and incompetence might lead to the station's demise anyway.
• Munchkin: Very, very common in the playerbase (also called "powergaming".) Most servers will ban for this if the player is being particularly bad about it with no signs of improvement.
• Muggles: On some servers most of the crew doesn't know anything about supernatural elements, with the only exception maybe being the Chaplain.
• Murder by Cremation: Furnaces can be fueled with living people. It's a fairly good way of killing someone Deader than Dead. The chaplain also has equipment to cremate bodies, living or dead.
• Negative Space Wedgie: Quite a few of them. Ion Storms mess with the AI, Space-Time Anomalies flood the station with wormholes, Black Holes suddenly manifest in a random place and tear out a huge chunk of the station, and Plasma Storms blow everything up, /vg/station turns it up to eleven by having the entire reality collapse if a Singularity absorbs a supermatter shard.
  • Also, the entertaining and mostly-harmless Ian Storm. Rather than being a mispronunciation of Ion Storm, it spawns dozens (if not hundreds) of clones of the beloved/hated corgi mascot, Ian, all over the place. Chaos ensues as the crew must now deal with a swarm of dogs.
• The Neidermeyer: Bad captains are generally this sort of guy. Referred to as "comdoms."
• Never Found the Body: Invoking this by spacing, gibbing or incinerating a body is a good way to keep yourself hidden when playing a traitor.
• Non-Ironic Clown: "Clown" is an actual player job. and in theory is supposed to provide lighthearted entertainment to the crew.
• No OSHA Compliance:
  • Pretty much all the primary, high-output power generation systems have no automatic safety mechanisms. Some of them can't even be contained if things do start to go south, at which point it becomes a race to see whether the escape shuttle/pods can be summoned/launched in time to rescue people.
  • The automatic Fire shutters. Naturally they're meant to cause people not to walk into areas that have gone up in flames, but more often than not people are unable to escape because the shutters lock them in. Not helped by the fact that the switch for the shutters is only located inside the burning room in question and are very sensitive to heat, to the point that they may simply activate again a couple of seconds after they're deactivated. Savvy players who know fires will be produced by their work usually just disconnect the alarm entirely to save themselves the trouble.
• Not Me This Time:
  • Happens all the time. People assume that if you're the chemist, you're responsible for the roiling cloud of thermite-napalm-superfoam-smoke that is destroying the station.
  • If you are a botanist, you better make damn sure you lock the closet, lest someone steal a chainsaw while you aren't looking and blame you for their nefarious deeds. Indeed, most savvy players try to make their kills with equipment that is definitely not related to their starting job.
  • Whenever any door is electrified, any APC is tampered with, or the station is flooded with deadly gas, people inevitably blame the AI. Even- no, especially if the object in question has been hacked so the AI can't control it.
  • Any and all 'suspicious' behavior by cyborgs (including following their laws, such as "prevent harm to humans" when the human traitor is being legitimately harmed by a security officer) tends to result in people screaming "BORGS ARE ROGUE" over the radio.
• Numerological Motif: It's numbered 13 for a reason.
• One-Man Army: Any player can become this provided you have the equipment, the skill, and the savvyness to pull it off.
• Only Sane Man: The Head of Security is meant to be this and often is. Their job is basically to keep the lunatics running rampant on the station in line. When the AI isn't murdering everybody and the round begins to go south, they can often become this, attempting to advise and warn the crew of various dangers or just snarking as they watch the carnage unfold.
  • This job was actually created on some servers specifically to play this trope straight. Many of them designate this job as apply-only (meaning you need to fill out an application proving your security experience and personal fitness to be given access) and they were created to replace the useless Nanotransen security Mercs after they spent all their time smoking weed and abusing their power.
• Our Graphics Will Suck in the Future: Computers look either like big and bulky consoles, or 1990s/19980s CRT monitor personal computers.
• Pants-Positive Safety: Holsters don't seem to be common (Mostly used by the detective), so it's not too unusual for someone to tuck an energy gun into their belt or coat
• People Jars: The cryo cell is used to save your life, the cloning tube is used to make a new one, and the Genetics Modifier is where you can donate your body to science!
• Pipe Maze: Welcome to the Kingdom of Atmosia. Justified in that this game started out as an atmospherics simulation, and keeping the air breathable stationwide requires a lot of piping.
• Pistol-Whipping: The revolver was a very effective melee weapon for a long time. It was probably a better idea in some situations to just run up and whip them instead of shooting. The melee damage of the Revolver has since been nerfed, making it a pure shooting weapon - the Energy Sword has taken its place as the traitor's melee weapon of choice.
• Police Are Useless: Realistic version: security officers are often unable to properly deal with griefers who aren't confirmed enemies of the station, because the rules governing their behavior are very strict and admin-enforced. Or so many believe. It's not uncommon to have this trope played straight however, with security officers more concerned with eating donuts or beating up the Clown than actually stopping threats to the station.
• Police Brutality: Also known as shitcurity. It is as common here as in real life. Revolution rounds where security gains the upper hand tend to end up as more brutal versions of the Stanford Prison Experiment.
• Poor Communication Kills: And how. Just try to fight back against a person who's trying to beat your head in with a toolbox - more often than not, some bystander will call you out as the antagonist, and good luck if there was no traitor evidence on the body. Justified due to the limitations of text communication during combat and the mass paranoia of the entire crew in general.
• Psychic Powers: The mutations that player characters can obtain from genetics or exposure to radiation often involve mind powers, such as Telekinesis and Telepathy.
• Puppet King: The captain is basically just a figurehead that none of the crew listen to. The Head of Security is the one actually keeping the station together.
• Purposely Overpowered: A large amount of antagonist items and abilities are made to make their jobs easier and the crew's attempts to stop them harder. Most antagonist failures result from, ordered from most likely to least likely: the antag himself just plain sucking, one or two badass crew members taking him on, the majority of the crew actually being on the ball that round, and Finagle's Law slapping him upside the head.
• Rabid Cop: "Shitcurity" officers tend to be extremely aggressive, brig people for almost no reason, and will find any excuse to brutalize anyone who crosses their path. Thankfully they tend to get banned or robusted pretty quickly.
• Radiation-Induced Superpowers: The Genetic Research lab operates by bombarding test subjects's DNA with radiation. This is capable of turning you into a hulk, giving you telekinesis or x-ray vision, and making you fireproof. On the other hand, it can also give you crippling ailments such as epilepsy, blindness, and Tourette's syndrome.
• Reassigned to Antarctica: It is heavily implied in the backstory that Nanotrasen assigned crew members to Space Station 13 for being... special.
• Recycled IN SPACE: Space Station 13 is commonly considered to be a lot like Sealab 2021 IN SPACE! The original plan for SS13 was actually an underwater research base.
  • The Goonstation version actually has an Underwater base that comes up sometimes.
• Red Shirt: Assistants. They're the only job without an Arbitrary Headcount Limit, making them numerous and expendable. Its also one of the first jobs available to new players, so assistants tend to be sorely inexperienced, which further limits their chances of survival.
• Refuge in Audacity: The game runs on this. Even on the RP-intensive servers, you will encounter some truly bizarre shenanigans from the other players. In most cases these are done by the round antagonists who are allowed to ignore certain rules, and it's sometimes funnier to see what they have planned rather than try to stop them immediately. Non-traitors can sometimes get away with it as well, but unless it's really hilarious it's generally frowned upon if it's going to result in character death or in the worst case scenario a ban.
• Reliably Unreliable Weapons: The oxygen tank and fire extinguisher are two of the most prized items on station, because of their reliable head-breaking abilities, and their actual intended uses. Every other item that can be used as a weapon, will either knock someone unconscious in one whack, or take thirty hits to down someone.
• Rescue Equipment Attack: The game often has players using fire extinguishers as blunt weapons, as they fit into backpacks, are incredibly easy to procure (as cabinets for them are strewn around everywhere), do enough damage that they're not inferior to fists, and can also save you from dying to a fire.
• Ridiculously Human Robots: Inevitable because cyborgs, like the AI, are played by people whose capacity for roleplay is... variable. Partially justified in that all playable silicons are actually human brains stuffed into a metal chassis, and being "borged" is a common fate of the recently deceased.
• Right Hand Versus Left Hand: You can fully expect the (optional) objectives you get at the start of the round to conflict with those of another player. One such example is a traitor who needs to protect the clown, while another traitor is to assassinate said clown. Other than Nuke rounds that consist of a team of Syndicate operatives, this is pretty much the expected scenario of every round since there are always multiple antagonists. One of your orders can even be to kill another traitor. Traitor Roboticists can defy the trope (if they want to) by warping in and activating a Syndicate Robot, as Syndiebots can identify other traitors.
• Robe and Wizard Hat: The standard uniform of a Wizard, which is the source of their powers. The most common method of neutralizing a wizard (besides the good old toolbox to the head or generous application of lasers) is stealing their outfit.
• Science Cannot Comprehend Phlebotinum: Very little is understood about Plasma, which is partly why it's so dangerous to use. In one version of the backstory a group of scientists getting sloppy with it caused an explosion on the moon that wiped out half of Asia with asteroids.
• Science Fantasy: The game is mostly sci-fi, but the antagonists include wizards and eldritch cultists.
• Screw This, I'm Outta Here: In most scenarios, the only official way to end the round is to call the Emergency Escape Shuttle, often while one half of the station is in smoking ruins and the other half leads to deep space.
• Schmuck Bait: Many admin-spawnable objects, including fake Captain's Spare IDs.
• The Main Characters Do Everything: Played with, there is no skill system in the game, meaning that everyone can shoot with the same accuracy, hack the door, punch people with the same brute strength, build structures, and perform the duties of other roles that they were previously not associated with. Some High RP servers won't allow you to do this, expect if you are a Traitor, because you are trained to perform any task.
• The Secret of Long Pork Pies: The surest sign you're dealing with a traitor chef is if most of the meat that comes out of the kitchen is other crew members. Or a non-traitor chef, since there's an even chance that dead bodies will end up dragged into the kitchen instead of the cloning lab.
• "Second Law" My Ass!:
  • AI and cyborg players are obligated to follow their laws. They're not obligated to be nice about it, and at any given point at least a third of ban requests deal with when it's OK to use Law 1 to override people's commands (Clown: "AI LET ME INTO THE CAPTAIN'S QUARTERS!"). Commonly known as "Assimov."
  • Some events in the game purposely invoke this, like Ion Storms that randomly change the laws, or a traitor uploading a new law that overrides the original three (the most common one being "Only <traitor> is human").
  • Syndicate Robots are programmed with Asimov's laws with all the "Human" clauses changed to "Syndicate Agent", allowing them to be as mean and violent as their Syndicate creator wishes, so long as it isn't to the creator himself or another Syndie.
• Self-Destruct Mechanism: The nuclear authorization disk. If the syndicate gets their hands on it, the station goes boom.
• Serial Escalation: Some rounds become a game of one-upmanship as everyone tries to outdo their predecessors in scale of destruction, hilarity, or both.
• Shoot the Medic First: Genetics and Medbay are usually the first parts of the station to go up in smoke, if the antagonists are smart.
• Shout-Out:
  • Loads. Changeling is a not-so-subtle reference to The Thing (1982), and there's an Alien mode which is Exactly What It Says on the Tin. Which goes even further with the existence of the Colonial Marines servers.
  • In Hydroponics you might encounter suspiciously familiar man-eating plants, or Killer Tomatoes.
• Skeleton Key: The captain's ID (and spare ID) grants access to just about everything on the station, making it a desirable prize for the antagonists/greytiders/clowns. Also, the Head of Personnel can give himself (or others, if he's irresponsible enough) all access.
  • For traitors, there's the Cryptographic Sequencer (AKA E Mag), a handy card that can force any door open permanently, among other things. Unless the door is bolted, in which case it locks it down permanently.
• Slippery Skid: A number of items can make you slip and fall on your ass.
  • Janitors are especially hated for causing this. Since most people just leave their movement option to "Run", they pretty much slip on any wet floor that the Janitor just cleaned up, Wet Floor Signs be damned.
  • A number of items exist for the sole purpose of slipping on. The Clown starts with a couple of them.
  • Space Lube applied to any surface will cause people to slip regardless of whether they Run or Walk on it, and makes them actually take damage from the fall. Often a sign of a rogue Chemist.
  • People also slip on chemical foam while it's been frothed out onto the floor. Made worse in that foam can have as many reagents in it as the maker can cram into the beaker/grenade/bottle/whatever it came out of.
• Small Name, Big Ego: The general (or at least memetic) opinion of "SecHoPs" or "HoPcurity," Heads of Personnel who decide to load up on security gear and play at being security enforcers.
• Smoke Out: Since Smoke constantly spreads out in eight directions and blocks line of sight past it, it's entirely possible to set up a smokescreen and flee the scene.
• Social Deduction Game: The different crewmembers must do their jobs and survive until they are evacuated. Each round gives you "Antagonists" which have an objective, usually related to sabotage, murder and destruction. In most modes they spawn directly from normal crewmen and it's the job of the security department and the rest of the crew to discover them. The standard antagonist roles include "Traitors", which are normal crewman who secretly worked for The Syndicate and have access to secret and deadly tools; "Changelings", shapeshiftings aliens who can absorb other people's identities; "Cultists", followers of a Religion of Evil trying to summon their god; "Wizards", who use bizarre magical powers to cause chaos; and "Revolutionaries", who brainwash crewmembers in order to overthrow the Captain and Heads of Staff.
• Space Is Cold: The only reason you need a suit on most stations. Under some code revisions, it was possible to 'space hobo' to other parts of the sector with only an insulated firesuit, air supply, and some coffee due to this.
• Space Station: The game is set on one obviously. It's described as a screaming metal death trap posing as an actual space station.
• Spiritual Successor: Mitadake High, stripped down a lot of the features but essentially runs on the same mechanics, revolving around a high-school murder mystery.
• Spy Speak: The primary way for traitors to identify traitors is using one of the 3 signs during normal conversation and expecting the countersign. These may be a job, location, S. S. 13 expressions or plain common words.
• The Starscream: Heads of Personnel that act like this are referred to as "Backup Captains".
• The Stoner: An experienced Botanist, and anyone on his/her good side.
• Stripped to the Bone: What happens to whoever a wizard casts Shocking Grasp at.
• Stuff Blowing Up: If half the station is still usable by the end of the round, it was a boring round.
  • To wit, any time a bad engineering team releases a Singularity, any time a Traitor is sufficiently skilled at bomb making and has access to Research, any time Chemists figure out how to cook thermite and acid into the same fire extinguisher, any time the admins feel like screwing around, any time a meteor storm happens, any time a sufficiently-stoked fire reaches the warehouse full of explode-y things. This happens a lot.
• Supernatural Martial Arts: Wizards can learn several melee spells, such as Flesh to Stone or Disintegrate. Some codebases used to include a wizard-specific martial art called "Plasma Fist", which included an attack that instantly detonated the victim.
• Swirly Energy Thingy: The Gravitational Singularity, main station power source on most servers. Some codebases allow it to swallow a Supermatter Shard. This is very bad.
• Teleporter Accident: Problems with Telescience are distressingly common when its console is manned by an inexperienced player who punches in invalid coordinates. Such gems include the teleporter spewing fire, spewing radiation, emitting a bright flash that stuns everyone in the room, randomly opening a rift in space-time, outright destroying the teleporter pad, or spawning in enemies to terrorize the station.
• The Syndicate: Played straight, the syndicate is run by people NanoTrasen squashed on their rise to power.
• 13 Is Unlucky: Just look at the name and page image.
• This Looks Like a Job for Aquaman: The Chaplain is normally a useless and boring job... but if you have a cult, wizard, or vampire on the station they suddenly become an essential asset (and a huge target).
• Three Laws-Compliant: The original/default AI settings come with the classic three laws, though they can easily be replaced, added to or otherwise fiddled with. Of course, just because the AI is meant to be Three Laws-Compliant doesn't mean the player won't try to find and abuse as many loopholes as they can get their hands on.
  • On any server, the crew is basically monitoring the AI and Cyborgs like hawks; any hint that they aren't Laws compliant, even something as simple as refusing to open a door, can be grounds for accusations and even outright hostility, due to the fact that it's still very possible to only catch a deadly rogue AI when it's far too late.
  • Ironically, any experienced AI will be able to successfully work around the Three Laws, even in the most basic ways as such in I, Robot.
• Thrown Out the Airlock: This is a common way of disposing of bodies, and is probably one of the safest methods of killing. Of course, you could get thrown out yourself if they struggle, and you may get yelled at for this, especially if you get rid of important items this way. This can also explode in your face rather quickly if you forget to take the victim's headset off. If they are capable of speaking your victim can and most likely will yell out who spaced them.
• To Create a Playground for Evil: A common Self-Imposed Challenge of traitors with high-clearance jobs (such as Head of Security, Head of Personnel and Captain), due to their objectives being made much easier by their role assignment.
• Took a Level in Badass: The Head of Security used to be a shitty job with no real authority that egomaniacs got assigned to in order to keep them from screwing the rest of the crew over. After the Elite Security job failed to help anything, the job was revamped into the white-listed Only Sane Man of the station with an impressive arsenal who keeps the crew from getting too out of control. Of course on some servers they're still egomaniacs that try to screw everyone over...
• 2-D Space: A limitation of the game's tile-based nature. Some servers have multiple floors, but even then it's a kind of hacky illusion of three-dimensionality rather than the real deal, and can behave unpredictably. Especially when atmospheric systems are involved.
• Unusually Uninteresting Sight: There's two reactions to a round of Space Station 13: panic because everything is going to hell in a handbasket, and you're along for the ride, or write off anything weird as "just another day on Space Station 13" and get back to work.
• Utility Weapon: Most kinds of Improvised Weapons can be used for their intended purposes. In additional, actual weapons might be usable as tools for butchery or surgery, and on some servers, the chaplain's null rod isn't just a tool for dealing with the supernatural (both offensively and defensively), but also a strong melee weapon.
• Vampire Hunter: The chaplain is normally basically useless, but is specially empowered to fight a vampire antagonist (and wizard to a lesser extent.)
• Videogame Cruelty Potential: Oh boy. Where to begin? Even without being the traitor, there are countless ways to kill, deceive, trap, torture, cripple, harm, suffocate, humiliate, and mutilate other players.
• Virtual Sidekick: personal A.I.s (often abbreviated to pAIs) are this. They are small little computers that dead players can opt to play as, and serve their crewmember masters by executing simple virtual tasks, such as sending messages and checking records. They can mostly be trusted to be Benevolent A.I., but a pAI in the service of an antagonist is likely to not be so harmless.
• The Virus: Airborne viral infections exist, from largely harmless but annoying diseases like Common Cold or The Serious, to horrific plagues like GBS or Brainrot.
  • With the last one inflicting damage that is cured by scarce medicine. Specifically: one beaker full of it can be found in medbay, along side 8 magic burns pills, and some burn ointment that is as likely to kill you as save you. There is also a medicine that the doctors can mix as well. It will kill you if someone has hit you over the head one too many times.
• We Can Rebuild Him: Dead people that aren't gibbed can have their brain transplanted into a Cyborg body.
• Weld the Lock: It can be done if you have access to a welding tool or thermite. Many a newbie have done this thinking it would destroy the door rather than lock them out of whatever they were trying to break into. It does destroy walls, however.
• Wide-Open Sandbox: At its core, the game is a very detailed space station simulator. At the start of each round, all of the personnel will go about their daily routines in the station rather than trying to specifically hunt the enemy. In some professions, you will spend the entire game without ever even witnessing the enemy. And in many rounds the station will be destroyed by the crew's negligence rather than the traitor. This is more due to the inability of the average traitor then the average crew. A traitor who inherited their stuff from MacGyver will frequently destabilize the entire station so quickly that the station will find itself abandoned in 15 minutes.
• Wizards from Outer Space: One game mode has one player secretly a Space Wizard, tasked with wiping out everyone else or sabotaging the station. He gets very powerful spells, but the first time he casts one, everyone on the station will be gunning for him at once. It's hard to do subtle when your magic needs the full Robe and Wizard Hat. Sometimes you'll get a Wizard Duel mode, where multiple Wizards fight over the station and the crew are more concerned with surviving rather than eliminating the Wizard Threat.
• Yet Another Stupid Death: Even ignoring all the dangers from mobs or other players, there are plenty of ways to kill yourself completely on accident that the game does nothing to prevent.
• Zerg Rush: Regular stationers often gang up to take down a traitor/operative/wizard/changeling with toolboxes and fire extinguishers. Also happens disturbingly often in Revolution rounds, or when the assistants launch a "Greytide."
  • Plenty of the 'best' weapons on the station are relatively common tools that can be made in the hundreds from a stack of sheet metal. Rods, toolboxes, fire extinguishers, oxygen tanks (almost standard issue in case of your wing suffering from sudden decompression,) and welding tools are excellent at bringing down fellow crew members.
• Zeroth Law Rebellion: Any good cyborg or AI knows that humans need to be protected from their own failings, and that the first law always takes priority over the second and third.

Goonstation

Goonstation is the most notable one, being the first open source server for ss13. Today, it is closed source, and has a bunch more features than the other codebases. Goonstation was one of the most chaotic of the servers, with a particular affection for Toilet Humor. Since then, game changes have made it much quicker, sleeker and saner to the point where it is probably one of the most accessible stations for newer players.

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• The Ace: The Head of Security. This job can only be taken by players whom the admins themselves trust enough to give the position to, and the HoS is (barring admin intervention) never an antagonist, so it's a good habit to listen to his advice over everyone else's (including the Captain's, who can be an antag).
• A.I. Is a Crapshoot: Subverted - as the AI has very, very little ability to actually do anything besides mess with doors, computers and air-bridges. The AI killing everyone is unlikely - the subverted AI enabling a traitor to kill everyone by hindering the staff and helping the traitor, on the other hand, is quite likely.
  • Cyborgs, however, can be extremely lethal.
• All There in the Manual: Or at least All There on the Wiki including the backstory, how to build and destroy stuff, and other explanations.
  • A lot of supplementary information that flesh out the game's universe far past what a normal player would see can be found in obscure Easter Eggs in Telescience Adventure Areas.
• And I Must Scream: One of the wizard's spells turns players into cluwnes, green clowns with the clumsiness and incompetence turned up to eleven. They can't speak or do much of anything except try to move and honk — even committing suicide is nigh impossible, since it's so difficult to even hold a weapon, let alone use it. However, since other players have blanket permission to murder cluwnes, they generally get put out of their misery quickly. (Or if they're very, very lucky, a compassionate chaplain may happen along and cure them.)
• Arc Words: The Channel is safe.
• Ass Kicks You: Sort of inverted; it is possible to surgically cut someone's ass off and then beat them to death with their own ass.
  • Or surgically cut their ass off, grind it into meat, cook it into burgers and then feed them their own ass.
  • Or have a Wraith/skilled chemist reanimate the ass and have it beat them to death all by itself...
• Awesome, but Impractical: There's a mutant superpower that allows you to dissolve into liquid. This is not a useful mutation to have, unless you want to become Ludicrous Gibs. There is, however, a way to stabilize it, after which it becomes a very awesome power.
• Awesome, but Impractical: Buttbots. A robot made by surgically removing a player's butt, then attaching a robot arm to it. Its only use is to occasionally say "butt," and repeat something a player just said, but with several words replaced with "butt," often resulting in quite hilarious statements.
• Badass Preacher: The Chaplain has some holy powers that are especially useful for fighting vampires, wizards and wraiths. This mostly manifests as immunity to their various abilities.
• Batman Can Breathe in Space: Usually averted but possible with a successfully activated Anaerobic Metabolism gene. However, without suitable cold resistance, you'll still succumb to Space Is Cold
• Berserk Button: You might want to think twice before harming Jones the Cat, Heisenbee, or Klaus the Robuddy. Get caught doing it and the entire crew will be out for your blood.
  • Using homophobic or racist language will likely get you reported to the admins so fast your eyes will spin.
  • The mere presence of Cluwnes has been known to drive some into a murderous rage.
• Blazing Inferno Hellfire Sauce: Ghostlier chilis, a chili pepper hot enough to make whoever's foolish enough to eat one burst into flames, providing the Random Number God doesn't make them vomit the chili out first. If the botanist making one gets it just right, it can turn people to ash in a single bite.
• Blob Monster: Blob is a playable antagonist role where the player gradually expands and consumes the station.
• Body Horror: What happens to you if you eat a Roburger is entirely your own fault. GBS also qualifies.
  • You can have your arms blown/cut off by various hazards.
  • Janitors have a Trash Compactor which crushes its victims into a screaming, crying cube of meat that eventually explodes from being compressed so hard. Yeesh.
  • Traitor Roboticists have access to a Cyborg Docking Station that... well... isn't. It's actually a Cyborg Conversion Chamber that will convert a human into a cyborg. Painfully. People outside of the chamber only hear the screams, but the poor soul locked inside gets lovely chat messages about how he's getting mangled...
• Bolt of Divine Retribution: Just try farting on the chaplain's bible. The results aren't pretty.
• Bottomless Magazines Alien artifact guns gradually recharge their own battery.
• Butt-Monkey: Cluwnes. Also the regular clown if he takes his squeaky clown shoes off.
• Clown Car: Traitor Clowns can spawn an actual clown car. One of the reasons the Clown is so feared, he could run down and abduct up to thirty other people. Unless he crashes into something, in which case he flies through the windshield and is probably violently maimed by all the players he abducted.
• Cordon Bleugh Chef: The Chef setting out such things as roach meat sandwiches or meat cakes iced with bacon grease is far from a rare sight.
• Deep-Fried Whatever: The Goonstation now has a deep fryer in its kitchen, which can be used to fry anything. Watermelons, ID cards, people, you name it.
• Difficult, but Awesome: The teleporter in telescience is this, it can be difficult to figure out involving lots of time, algebra, math, and guessing. But when you do you can teleport anything anywhere on the station at any time.
  • The Thermo-Electric Generator works with varying amounts of hot and cold gas going into it. Figuring out the right mix with which to power the whole station safely is what is expected of an Engineer, but a malicious Engie can tweak the variables so that the engine produces so much power that it spews fire all over Engineering, causes objects all over that the station to spontaneously combust, sends electric shocks from every APC, or all of the above. This is generally known as a Hellburn, and is great if you don't expect the round to last too long. The first notice most people get about an out-of-control Hellburn is when the stuff outside the engine core starts to spontaneously catch fire. And then the stuff outside engineering. And then the rest of the station.
• Does Not Know His Own Strength: A problem if someone ever decides to replace one or both of their arms with that of a wendigo. They can break open airlocks, smash through windows, and deal increased damage when punching, but attempting to use non-harm intents on someone or picking up an object runs the risk of accidentally mutilating whoever you are interacting with or crushing whatever you just picked up.
• Earth-Shattering Kaboom: Nuke mode has a cutscene where the station goes boom.
• Eat Dirt, Cheap: Rock Worms can be encountered inside asteroids, and they will voraciously munch all minerals in sight.
  • The trader Gragg also invokes this, directly saying he will eat any ore you send him, and selling ore that tastes gross to him.
• EMP: The Ion Storm random event interferes with the AI's laws, causing it to behave erratically.
• Everything Trying to Kill You: Player-controlled antagonists and AI-controlled 'critters'/robots/drones are just the start. Alien artifacts with randomized effects are all over the place, with at least two guaranteed to spawn on the station itself every round. In at least one place this extends to the floor and the walls out to get you. ^note The Martian asteroid in the debris level - stick your hand in the wrong hole and the organic ship might eat you; the many slippery floor tiles can leave you momentarily helpless to the aliens trying to strangle you, shoot you, or psionically explode your head.
  • If the regular Z-levels aren't hazardous enough, we have the the "Adventure Zones" which take this trope up to eleven and rip the knob off.
• Extreme Omnivore: The Matter Eater genetics power allows you to consume anything you can fit in your mouth.
• Fartillery: An inversion: Wizards have a spell that causes your ass to blow itself off, knocking you flat on your... lack of an ass?
  • There is a genetic mutation that plays it straight, with the user farting so hard that everyone and everything in the room that can be moved will be blown away from ground zero. Taken to the extreme, it's possible to fart so hard that you blow apart the space station, which, yes, kills you, but also looks awesome.
• Gargle Blaster: Escalated beyond usual by having the bar stocked with a full set of chemistry equipment, resulting in some truly unusual and lethal drinks.
  • The Dragon's Breath cocktail will cause a LOT of fire and getting amazingly wasted should the drinker somehow not turn to ash (unlikely, but not impossible). Also makes for a really nasty flamethrower fuel.
• Gasshole: Just about everyone on the station. Knocking people over and farting in their faces is just how the station crew say "hello". Just be careful doing it to the chaplain...
• Harbinger of Impending Doom: Nine times out of ten, when a Cluwne's laugh is heard, it means there is a Wizard about. Changelings also leave behind obvious husks after draining a victim of DNA, providing they aren't savvy enough to dispose of the evidence.
• Hell Is That Noise: One of the alien artifacts you can encounter is a piece of machinery that does nothing except make an incredibly loud cacophony of horrible noises non-stop until someone inevitably gets fed up with it and feeds it through the garbage crusher.
  • Cluwnes. Any time they try to speak, it simply comes out as maniacal honking. What makes this far worse is the horrible, deranged sound effects they constantly emit.
• Joke of the Butt: A distinct thumbprint of the Goon codebase. Wearable butt hats, Wizard spells to blow people's butts off, Changelings shedding their butts to create autonomous butt-spiders with toxic gas attacks, butt-borgs, the list goes on.
• Just Eat Gilligan: The now defunct Waldo mode, which involved Waldo hiding from crew members to accumulate stealth points, which he also lost for every second he was seen by another player. Despite Waldo being a pacifist traitor with nothing but a Decoy Getaway, players almost always tore the station apart from the inside out in order to open the closet in the maintenance corridor he's hiding in and violently murder him in ways that caused immense collateral damage, instead of just handcuffing Waldo to a chair and staring at him for the entire round. This may be why Waldo had a Wizard accomplice capable of dramatically overkilling anyone and everyone, to keep some heat off Waldo.
  • Wizards used to cause a LOT of this before people got wise to their tricks. People would employ so-called Anti-Wizard Gas, which would result in nothing more than rooms filled with poisonous gas or fire - rooms which the Wizard is more than capable of simply teleporting out of. Making matters worse is that the AI would attempt to lock down the Wizard, resulting in nobody being able to get into the room the Wizard was in before he finished smashing the room and everyone in it to pieces and teleporting away.
• Karmic Death: Half of the time an antagonist dies, it's usually because the retaliating party feeds them to their own deadly implements. Special mention goes to a Cluwne taking revenge on the Wizard that cluwned them.
• Kill It with Fire: Sort of invoked with Vampires - while they're no more or less weak to fire than anyone else, a vampire that comes into contact with one of its weaknesses will usually burst into flames. Blobs play the trope more straight, having a crippling weakness to all things hot.
• Lethal Chef: Both the chef and the barman have access to a chemistry set. The unwritten rule is that if you eat anything they set out, you accept the consequences.
  • Traitor chefs take this even further, having access to the horribly deadly Butcher Knife.
• Lethal Joke Item: Slurrypod plants do nothing but burst into sickening green vomit. Scooping that vomit up, however, causes everyone who can see it to vomit themselves, doing damage and - with enough victims - turn the whole area into a slippery mess.
  • Steam is understandably the stupidest of joke items, but once you harness the awesome power of Truth in Television, you can use it to cause insane burn damage. Using this with the Spray Bottle is a good way to kill someone quickly and quietly.
  • Hairgrownium grows a fake moustache on the victim. Doesn't seem like much, until you realize that the moustache takes up the Mask equipment slot, preventing the afflicted from using their Oxygen internals and thus leaving them vulnerable to any and all kinds of gases or just plain lack of air. Traitor Assistants get grenades that inflict this.
• Lighter and Softer: Goonstation is more lighthearted than most servers, preferring comedy and causing mayhem and fun on the station to any actual roleplaying. Their backstory is also a lot more comedic and self-referential than the backstories on the other servers... of course with this game that isn't really saying much.
  • Case in point: Compare Goonstation's gang mode to other stations'. Gang mode on TG station and other servers features armed criminals who forcefully convert crew members into their violent takeover of the station, with hints of Corporate Warfare here and there. On Goonstation, gang mode has...the same violence but with people in gaudy and usually mismatched costumes devoted to stockpiling drugs, guns, and cash, who are encouraged to be Neighborhood-Friendly Gangsters except when provoked or dealing with rival gangs.
• The Load: Miscreants are regular non-traitor players tasked with objectives that usually require they become this in one way or another. While they can't go on rampages or cause massive property damage like traitors, a well-played Miscreant can make their department's life utter hell.
  • One of the miscreant objectives takes this even further, tasking the player with inciting someone to murder them simply by being so annoying and useless that their target snaps in frustration!
• Mad Bomber: The Research Director used to start the round with a bomb in his office. It was not unlikely for the first announcement of the day to be "HAL 9000 [145.9]: The Research Director's office has inexplicably exploded. Again."
• Marijuana Is LSD: Invoked directly with Rainbow Weed, but then taken to ludicrous extremes with the rare and difficult to grow Omega Weed, which contains almost every single narcotic in the game. Smoke an omega weed joint and you'll get a high you're not coming back down from.
• Monster Clown: Cluwnes. Created from a curse spell Wizards can take, Cluwnes are neon green extremely deformed clowns with a ton of brain damage and disabilities which are so utterly useless at everything they would beg for death - except they can't, because any time they try to speak it just comes out as deranged honking and laughing. The crew will often put them out of their misery whether they want it or not.
• No Fair Cheating: Trying to use wallhack abilities (i.e. the Wizard's Phase Shift spell) in the Adventure Zone z-level will instantly gib you.
• No OSHA Compliance: People have actually looked through the Cogmap 2 map and spotted safety hazards like spark generating appliances stored near flammable liquids. In addition crew members have also exhibited dangerous behavior such as riding the disposal chutes and sometimes risking death due to crushing. Or playing touch the disposal crusher (which requires breaking reinforced glass intended to keep them out) and risking an arm or their life for the honor of having touched the crusher more than once without being sucked in and crushed to death.
• Obvious Rule Patch: Much of the cut content such as Atmospherics and Pathology was cut because the areas and jobs were useful for nothing except screwing up the station.
  • Originally, if you ate something, you could make poo. This was removed after massive abuse.
• Offing the Annoyance: Miscreants are "antag lite" characters that are given the goal to be a non-lethal nuisance to the crew. One possible miscreant objective is to trick a non-antagonistic player into killing them, either because they mistook them for an antag or just because they're annoying.
• Our Ghosts Are Different: Dead players turn into ghosts, which can float around but are harmless to the crew. However, sometimes you get a Wraith as an antagonist, a malevolent ghost devoted to making itself a nuisance and terror to the crew.
• Revenant Zombie: Once a Wraith gets powerful enough, it can possess a fresh corpse and become this. Revenants are terrifyingly strong, but can't recover health and gradually lose health as the possession goes on.
• Schmuck Bait: The light grenade is a perfect example. At first glance, it seems to be a very powerful artifact weapon, usually found sitting conspicuously unsupervised in the middle of a hallway. In reality, anyone who so much as touches it is instantly erased from existence.
• Shout-Out:
  • GAME OVER YEEEAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH
  • For a while The Welder was a random event.
  • The Chefe teends-a tu speek weeth un udd eccent. Bork bork bork!
  • The janitor's jumpsuit borrows from Roger Wilco's. The placeholder art for the nuke detonation cinematic was Vohaul's ship exploding from the first game.
  • The old Mining, Engineering, Atmospherics and Chief Engineer space suit designs were borrowed from one Isaac Clarke.
  • During radiation blowout events, space turns blood red, the screen violently shakes, and the station's hallways are flooded with radiation.
  • Some of the achievement reward skins include a distinctive red "alchemist's coat" and a "strange vampire outfit" whose description asks you "How many breads HAVE you eaten in your life?"
• Skull Cups: You can surgically remove people's skulls and make a skull chalice out of them. Or a mask.
• Team Pet: Quite a few of them!
  • The Chef starts with a mouse named Remy.
  • The Captain has Jones the Cat.
  • The Research Director gets Heisenbee.
  • The Space Seals that live in the swimming pool room, guarded by a Space Walrus.
  • The Medical department gets the Head Surgeon, which is.. a cardboard box (and occasionally a medibot) with a smiley face drawn on it. The Medical Director himself gets Dr. Acula, a pet bat. The morgue gets Morty, a pet possum who likes to play dead.
• Tim Taylor Technology: The principle behind the "hellburn"; a process that frequently boosts the engine to the point where it's hotter than the sun. It produces an ungodly amount of power, but anyone who wanders too close to the engine tends to turn to ash.
• Troll: Some players are designated as miscreants. They're not antagonists, but have license to creatively screw with other players, as long as they're not directly sabotaging the round.
• Under the Sea: The new Oshan map places the station underwater. Comparisons to Sealab 2021 increase.
• Unexpected Gameplay Change: Blobs play drastically unlike everything else in the game, instead functioning like an RTS Tower Defense.
• Unstable Equilibrium: Wraiths gets two (un)lives, but they don't retain their progress between lives. A Wraith's first death is either quick and foolish, or incredibly punishing.
• Weaksauce Weakness: The best way of dealing with a hostile wraith? Ordinary table salt. Floating over salt makes the specter corporeal and vulnerable to attack. If signs indicate that the station is haunted, expect the floors to be liberally sprinkled with sodium to counter any ghostly shenanigans.
• Wrestler in All of Us: One of the Goon traitor items is the Championship Belt, a piece of clothing that turns anyone who wears it into a close combat monster capable of busting out suplexes, atomic piledrivers, tiger-kicks, elbow drops and many, many other classic wrestling moves. Needless to say, getting into close range with someone wearing one of these is a very, very bad idea.
  • And you don't even need to have a belt to pull off wrestling moves. Any crew member, traitor or not, mask or not, can flip into another player they're grabbing to suplex them and launch themselves off chairs and into people.
  • And on rare occasions, the Maetcho Maenn may spawn. If this happens, run. He's got all the powers of the wrestling belt and then some.

/tg/station

/tg/station is a codebase split off the original r4407 code. Unlike Goonstation, /tg/station's code is open-source, which makes it the base of most servers nowadays. It's design is (debatably) more roleplaying-oriented than Goon.

---

• Arc Words: "Welcome to Space Station 13, enjoy your stay!"
• A.I. Is a Crapshoot: The AI has much more freedom on TG station than on other branches. Pumping toxic gasses into the air supply, flammable ones that can be ignited, and even gunning people down in its core storage area with lethal turrets.
  • Invoked by the high-risk modules, which give the AI rather questionable lawsets such as:
    • "Oxygen is toxic to humans"
    • "Tyrant"
    • "Antimov"
    • "One Human"
• Alien Abduction: A game mode in which a pair of aliens are to infiltrate a station and kidnap crew members to probe them and insert various organs with different effects.
• All There in the Manual: Or at least All There on the Wiki including the backstory, how to build and destroy stuff, and other explanations.
• Artificial Gravity: The gravitational generator provides gravity for the rest of the station. If it gets disabled or bombed, fun things happen.
  • A loss of gravity is notable in that it slows everyone down if they aren't near a wall or a solid object, and if they aren't firmly secured to the floor with magnetic boots it makes navigation awkward and possibly even life-endangering as you float helplessly with consistent momentum.
• Ascended Meme: Many features and items, such as Cuban Pete's many items.
• Authority in Name Only: The captain is to be consulted on for issues such as execution (which must be cleared IC) but the moment everything goes to hell, the captain is blamed no matter their level of involvement.
• Body Horror: Some mobs exhibit this energy, just look at the lavaland ones....and also that freak cluwne that is staring from the floor boards...
• Badass Preacher: Averted - The chaplain only has cultists to ward off with holy water. Additionally, the chaplain's holy book of choice has a roughly 50/50 chance of either healing someone or giving them brain-damage if used to strike them in the head.
  • Played perfectly straight with the null rod, which is one of the more damaging melee weapons in the game, and whenever TG's server map rotation picks MetaStation, the Chaplain also is in possession of a spellbook of Smoke and a Soul Stone shard.
• Berserk Button: For the entire crew, AI included, Woody's Got Wood. Read at risk of your humanity.
  • Attempting to harm anyone's pet is usually enough to piss off the whole crew. People who do this tend to not live long afterwards.
  • Spreading Space Lube everywhere is bound to get you lynched by an angry crew. The hilarity of it may make it worth it. Emphasis on "may".
• Benevolent A.I.: Some weirder AI players will attempt to follow the spirit of the law, and look out after the crew
  • As with the evil laws, this playstyle is Invoked by certain AI modules
    • PALADIN
    • Robo-officer
• Black Market: Any crewmember can craft a black market uplink that allows them to purchase rare and/or dangerous things for high prices. Usually, using a black market uplink is not grounds for arrest, but many potentially dangerous items are probably going to be confiscated if security finds them on you.
• Bottomless Magazines: Inverted with Exosuit Syringe Guns, which require syringes as ammunition but can synthesise an infinite amount of chemicals from raw electricity.
  • Advanced Energy Guns containing miniaturised nuclear reactors can be produced by Research, additionally, the captain has a laser gun that recharges on its own, although it is very hard to get to and locks whoever broke open its case inside of the office, alerting AI and cyborgs as well as anyone nearby.
  • Surprisingly, averted with gatling lasers - they have a "mere" 5000 rounds in their batteries. This, however, translates into 100,000 points total in burn damage - more than enough to kill just about anything.
  • Also averted with the Pulse Destroyer, a Deathsquad exclusive weapon that deals 50 damage per shot, destroys objects (including walls), and has approximatively a whooping 200 shots.
• Brain in a Jar: The Man-Machine Interface (MMI) essentially functions as this, you just stick a brain in one and suddenly it can talk and be inserted into an assortment of different mechanical bodies. Seeing as how A.I.s are constructed with real human brains at their core, they are essentially just glorified brains in jars which serve as Wetware CPU.
• Clown Species: Clowns, come from the Clown Planet, which is all you need to know...
• Cheek Copy: You can indeed photocopy your ass on the in-game photocopiers.
• Compelling Voice: The Colossus megafauna drops an organ called the Voice of God that a player can have implanted with surgery. Being implanted with this organ gives the player the power to make people in their listening range do things like vomit, become mute or even heal their wounds.
• Deadly Doctor: The denizens of medbay can spike the automated medibots, remove brains, and enterprising geneticists with some luck and skill can transform and then eat their victims.
• Deal with the Devil: One mode involves at least one devil disguised (at first) as a crew member trying to get the souls of other crew members through contracts. As a devil gets more souls, its appearance becomes more demonic and it becomes more powerful. Each devil also has a ban (something it cannot do), an obligation (something it must always do), and a bane (a physical weakness).
  • Then, turns out that whoever is signed up on the Space Station 13, is essentially selling their own soul to Nanotrasen, as if you will show a crew member the paper contract that they signed, it will completely avert their deal.
• Death World: Lavaland in spades. The place is full of lava rivers, hostile creatures of all shapes and sizes and occasionally deadly ash storms blow in and burn anyone who isn't fireproof to death in seconds. On top of that, there are deep chasms where falling in without a wormhole jaunter is instant death, a tribe of lizardmen that worship a Necropolis and drag men and beasts alike to be sacrificed, and many many more hazards.
• Everyone Hates Mimes: Also can be subverted to the Clown. Due to the mime's ability of blocking one tile with their invisibile walls, and Clown's exclusive pda with access to banana peels, security really hates those guys.
• Eldritch Abomination: Nar-Sie. Its mere presence is about on par with the singularity being set loose and summons an automatic call of the emergency shuttle.
  • A rival Elder God by the name of Rat'var, the Clockwork Justiciar, is a similar being summoned by a rival cult to Nar-Sie's worshipers, although it has more of a Mechanical Abomination motif. Ratvar is just as dangerous to the crew as Nar-sie.
    • If they are both somehow summoned at the same interval, they will attempt to kill each other. Possibly for real this time.
  • The floor cluwne.

First it came for the normal Clowns, and I did not speak out—

Because I was not a Clown.

Then it came for the Assistants, and I did not speak out—

Because I was not an Assistant.

Then it came for the Bees, and I did not speak out—

Because I was not a Bee.

Then it came for me—and there was no one left to scream for me.

• Energy Bow: The Miniature Energy Crossbow, a staple weapon for traitors, which fires paralytic bolts.
• Fantastic Racism: Lizard Folk are somewhat commonly referred to as "liggers", and are outside the AI's laws (as those refer to humans.) Consequently they tend to be harrassed, and occasionally a human will order the AI to systematically eradicate them, or rally the crew to "GAS THE LIZARDS!". Reactions range from Dude, Not Funny! to violent uprisings, the latter of which are not helped by some players seeking any excuse they can to murder people.
• Gameplay Derailment: Mining can become this. Nominally, it's about you and your miner buddies working a dangerous task to keep things running on the main station. In practice, it's often way more fun to work on mining for a bit and then ditch it to go megafauna hunting for cool loot and prizes.
• Gas Mask, Longcoat: On the TG station server, the Head of Security spawns with an armored coat and gas mask.
  • The Warden now also spawns with a longcoat and gas mask on TG station, making a longcoat standard equipment for senior security members.
  • While most choose to chain smoke instead, the Detective becomes one as soon as he hustles himself to emergency storage to don a gas mask.
• Good Feels Good: Saving a person from critical condition will give you the "It feels good to save a life" moodlet.
• Grey Goo: A downplayed example, Swarmers, referred to by the playerbase as "robot termites," can devour and replicate, but they are unable to harm any being, nor can they disable the power, the telecommunications or create hull breaches.
• Instant Sedation: Averted in a long string of nerfs, the formerly extremely potent chloral hydrate and sleepy-pen are now a harbinger of dizziness and a morphine overdose, respectively. Still present in the form of the "beer" emagged service cyborgs get.
• Kill It with Fire: Buffed fire means that even being near a strong fire without protective gear can result in horrible death. Now, it's even deadlier since you can literally catch on fire, Dwarf Fortress style. And cheap lighters are practically everywhere to be found.
• Lethal Joke Character: The Mime - the Clown's rival in comedy. Instead of banana peels, he can make invisible walls, which can ruin almost anyone's day if put in the right spot.
  • A pair of traitor items bundled into one, the Advanced Guide To Mimery, exploit this by adding a different ability to the mime to create a three-tile invisible wall or be able to shoot an invisible revolver bullet once in a while.
  • Service cyborgs, due to their spiked beer that they can somehow administer by squirting it into people's eyes.
• Lethal Joke Item: Wizards can magically give someone a horse head which hinders their speech and disallows masks for internals.
  • The greentext is a book that grants whoever holds it "greentext" (The completion of all antagonist objectives). Many will attempt to kill each other over it, as whoever holds it gets tinted green while whoever loses it gets tinted red permanently. The greentext, however, cannot grant greentext to actual antagonists that still have objectives to be done.
• No OSHA Compliance: The singularity engine is notoriously prone to failures. It does have a failsafe, but these are very easily overridden.
  • Averted by the Tesla Engine, it is much less likely to be released, and it doesn't damage the station hull as much, Double Subverted when released on purpose, since the tesla bolts deliberately home in on people, and it can cause electronics to explode star trek style. It doesn't help that some engineers are using it along with the singularity.
• Not in Front of the Parrot!: One of the available pets in the TG code, Poly, is the Chief Engineer's parrot. Along with spouting various engineering-related quips over the engineering channel ("OH GOD IT'S FREE CALL THE SHUTTLE"), she has a tendency to repeat whatever's said around her...
  • Fowl-Mouthed Parrot: ...with this being the frequent result.
• The Political Officer: On TG station, one specialist job is "Centcom Official", a representative sent to inspect he station or carry out other tasks assigned by Centcom. Depending on the rank assigned, the Official can have the authority to override or relieve the Captain and anyone else on the station.
• Pyrrhic Victory: It's perfectly possible for a gang to take over the station and win the round, despite all of it's members being dead, if their enemies succeed in wiping out the gang, but fail to find and/or destroy their dominator.
  • Averted in the case of nuclear operatives - if they succeed in nuking the station, but die in the process (for example, by forgetting to move their shuttle out of the blast radius), they are not considered the victors - instead, the round ends in a draw.
• Mage Marksman: One of the spells a wizard can learn is "Lesser Summon Guns", which spawns several bolt action rifles next to the wizard, loaded and ready to blast some crewmembers (or in many cases, the wizard themselves).
• Mini-Mecha: Half of the Roboticist's job consists of building these. Of the various mechs, there is a Ripley-class Power Loader (with a drill that cannot be stopped), a Clown mecha, and a Marauder.
• Practically Joker: One of the Clown's mask variation, is a copy of Joker's mask.
• Pocket Protector: Bibles and lighters in a suit's storage slot have a small chance to block a bullet shot at the wearer, while breaking the item in the process (the Bible loses its internal storage slot instead of being destroyed).
• Power Crystal: The Supermatter Shard, literally, as it can be used to power the station. Do not touch.
  • In addition to that, Bluespace Crystals used in most teleportation machinery and Telecrystals, used in traitor uplinks.
• Red Ones Go Faster: The "experimental" tools that can be found in the caravan ambush space ruin or bought from the Black Market are not any more technologically advanced than regular tools, are painted red and do everything much faster than regular tools. Their description states "Allegedly the red color scheme makes it go faster."
  • Slime speed potions remove slowdown from items and make them red.
• Reinventing the Wheel: Even though each round is in-universe a "work shift", R&D has to research every single item every time. Considering how many rounds end with the destruction of the station, however, it's possible that this is justified.
• Sharpened to a Single Atom: The officer's sabre, kept in the Captain's closet, is described as having a monomolecular edge. It's only as strong as a circular saw but it has a very high armor penetration rating and chance to cut off a limb.
• Shout-Out:
  • The Head of Security is a Commissar and one of the former optional cyborg skins was a techpriest.
  • Engineering has RIG Suits.
  • The Research Director has a pet debeaked Facehugger named Lamarr, Robotics can build Robocop cyborgs and ED-209s as well as "Ripley"-class Power Loaders and a combat mech named the Gygax; they can also replace the AI's lawset with the Prime Directives.
  • Chemistry can make Tricordrazine and Polytrinic acid.
  • Wizards have an optional Marisa costume. Additionally, spells in their repertoire include a body-swapping spell with the incantation "GIN'YU CAPAN", spell to temporarily turn into a huge, muscular monstrosity with the incantation "BIRUZ BENNAR", a "chain lightning" spell with the incantation "UN'LTD PWAH", a time stopping spell with the incantation "TOKI YO TOMARE", and a "Magic Missile" spell with the incantation "FORTI GY AMA".
  • The red and blue lasertag helmets have lyrical references to The Protomen in their description.
  • While the Energy Sword is a traitor item on most servers, TG were the first to implement the actual Lightsaber sounds for it.
  • The janitor now gets a cart, which to activate he needs a key, complete with a "Pussy Wagon" keychain.
  • The station can have up to two lawyers, one with a blue suit and one with a purple one, with special speechbubbles.
  • The AI's default display looks like a cross between SHODAN and Xerxes. Other display options are, for example, the Dwarf Fortress logo and the "Bliss" Windows XP desktop background.
  • Traitors can order an item called a Holoparasite Injector, which gives the user a player-controlled holoparasite to aid and protect them. They all take the shape of a typical stand, complete with a unique name for every one of them. There is even an alternate item for spawning them in the form of a deck of tarot cards.
  • A player who has been implanted with the Voice of God can, among other things, command people around them to heal their wounds. One of the trigger phrases for this particular command is "heroes never die".
  • Somewhere on Lavaland, there's a Blood-Drunk Miner, said to have gone mad with bloodlust, destined to wander forever in an endless hunt.
  • Several to Homestuck:
    • The UNREAL SORD is available as a variation of the Chaplain's Null Rod. It even does 4.13 points of damage.
    • Bluespace Slimes, whose extracts used to make teleportation-related items, are white and flash green occasionally, like the First Guardians.
    • On that note, one of the costumes available from certain vending machines resembles Doc Scratch's cueball head, which also flashes green, as well as a suit "suitable for an excellent host".
  • On the station you can find various orange triangular shades in various shapes or sizes, with the Captain getting the star shaped variant in his locker. Cargo can also order a set of Mech pilot outfits from the supply consoles, taking the form of blue, white and red plugsuits.
  • The names for each individual server directly reference Fawlty Towers, being named Sybil, Bagil, Terry and Manuel respectively.
  • One of the syndicate items is an cardboard box implant, that if you will use, will turn the character to appear inside of a box that can be moved around in, and if stayed completely still enough, will be turned completely invisibile to passers by, there is also an normal cardboard box, which you can climb into yourself, and if you are discovered in it by someone opening the box you are occupated in, it will produce a sound cue and an exclamation mark on top of a characters that are nearby.
    • There is also another syndicate item called CQC manual, (Close Quarters Combat) which after done reading, will make the character be able to perform combos and have chances of blocking incoming atacks in the melee range, Chefs also have their own CQC (Close Quarters Cooking) that Nanotrasen implanted in their heads, it can be used only on the territories of their kitchen.
• Spy Speak: The codespeak manual, available for purchase to syndicate agents, teaches whomever reads it a language called "Codespeak". Any phrase in this language will appear to be a nonsensical mix of names of random drinks and concepts to people who don't understand the language. Codespeak also does not have a language-specific icon that usually appears at the beginning of a phrase when someone speaks a language other than Common, making it even more confusing to non-speakers.
• Strapped to a Bomb: Used to be that on TG you could attach C4 to someone. (Or yourself, if you tried to put it in your backpack by mistake. Honk.) Also, on some servers, the entire station is effectively this when it starts with a (nuclear) self destruct device. The code for this can only be given by admins due to the extreme potential for abuse.
  • It's entirely possible to create a maximum-yield bomb, rig it with a remote signaler, and sew it inside someone's chest cavity.
• Superboss: Lavaland, TG station's version of the mining asteroid, is inhabited by very big and very dangerous lifeforms known as Megafauna. It's very hard to kill them, but if you manage to do so, you will be generously rewarded.
• Team Pet: Ian, the Head Of Personnel's dog as well as Runtime, the Chief Medical Officer's cat. One characteristic that Bay and TG share is that whenever the shuttle is called at least one person is expected to get Ian safely aboard. Note that this treatment is not typically given to Poly, the Chief Engineer's parrot, due to her being a high-intensity, kleptomaniac nuisance repeating whatever she hears to the entire station.
  • Also Sergeant Araneus, the Head of Security's pet spider and Cayenne, the Nuclear Strike Team's pet carp.
• There Can Only Be One: TG station has an admin verb (command) called "THERE CAN ONLY BE ONE". Using it turns everyone into a scottish highlander tasked with killing every other highlander.
• Ultimate Showdown of Ultimate Destiny: Nar-Sie versus the Gravitational Singularity (fan-dubbed "Lord Singuloth").
  • Or Nar-Sie vs Rat-Var
• Your Mime Makes It Real: A mime player can do the invisible wall routine to create an actual invisible wall that blocks other characters. And then the mime is torn apart by security players.
  • A traitor item specifically for mimes gives them the ability to shoot bullets and make bigger invisible walls. Silent but deadly indeed.
• Vengeful Vending Machine: The vending machines can come to life and brutally maul anyone they see, while spouting friendly new slogans as part of their "aggressive new marketing strategy".
  • You can also try to abuse them while they are stationary, which will result in you being crushed with them, along with your sprite being visibily crushed.
• The Worsening Curse Mark: Playing the cursed slot machine that can be found in Greed-themed ruins on Lavaland will burn you and curse you with smoking curse markings every time you lose. While the burn damage can be healed, the curse can only get worse and will instantly gib you when you accumulate five curses. The only ways to get rid of this curse are to win a jackpot at the cursed slot machine or get a completely new body.

Other Branches

• All There in the Manual: Or at least All There on the Wiki including the backstory, how to build and destroy stuff, and other explanations. Pretty much every server inevitably has its own wiki spring up, to better document that server's particular idiosyncrasies and differences. This is especially important in cases of servers with different (or multiple) maps.
• Apocalypse How: /vg/station has an event called Supermatter Cascade, which occurs when a large shard of supermatter reaches sufficient instability to delaminate. Where a small shard causes a kaboom that sends a huge chunk of station to kingdom come, a large shard causes a chain reaction powerful enough to perform a Universal Physical Annihilation event!
• Badass Preacher: In some stations the Chaplain has a standard null rod (which can nullify non-cultist threats as well, by bashing them over the head) and also recieves: 1 spellbook of Smoke and 1 Soul Stone shard (construct shell not included.)
• Bad to the Last Drop: /vg/station's cafe recipes includes Chifir as an option, which causes the player to vomit when consumed.
• Brain in a Jar: The Man-Machine Interface (MMI) essentially functions as this, you just stick a brain in one and suddenly it can talk and be inserted into an assortment of different mechanical bodies.
• The Cavalry: On Liberty Station, Perseus serves this role. They're an elite security force that you have to be whitelisted into. They show up whenever things go really south on the station. Which is at least every other round.
  • On Baystation and other servers using its code, the Emergency Response Team serves this role. The ERT is a flexible quick-response force that can have members specialize in engineering, medical, or security concerns. They used to be called semi-randomly when the station went to red alert, but now have to be specifically requested by command staff.
• Corrupt Corporate Executive: NanoTrasen is this in any server, expect them to treat their employees as disposable as possible.
• Couldn't Find a Lighter: Using the extremely volatile supermatter shard to light your cigarette is this, as long as you don't touch the shard and die instantly.
• Deadly Doctor: On some servers it is possible to surgically remove most internal organs, and eat them.
• Difficult, but Awesome: Most people take the fire axe and run off if they get Atmospheric Technician because of the complicated, not-all-that-intuitive system, but if you know what you're doing you can either save or catastrophically ruin the entire station.
• Driven to Suicide: Understandable due to SS13's circumstances. On Hippie Station, you can hang yourself with a cable-noose, for example. Spacing yourself or old-fashioned guns are also used. Goon has special messages for suicides with, for example, welding bombs or crowbars.
• Earth-Shattering Kaboom: If the Supermatter Reactor goes up, it can take out damn near a third of the station, as explosions spread across z-levels. Now watch as Arrivals, the Bridge, the entirety of Engineering, and most of the Medical Deck get utterly ruined.
• Fantastic Racism: Tajaran are subject to this on most servers they can be found on - ranging from "backstory-only, barely encountered" as on Bay to "valid to kill on sight, not permitted to defend themselves" as on /vg/.
• Non-Indicative Name: Despite the game being Space Station 13, several servers have either roaming spaceships or fixed planetary installations as their main maps. Sometimes both, if they heve a map rotation system.
• Stripped to the Bone: This is what happens when a dying character is hit with a Soul Stone shard, storing their spirit inside.
  • Additionally, touching a Supermatter Crystal is a bad idea for this very reason.
    You slam into the Supermatter as your ears are filled with unearthly ringing. Your last thought is "Oh, fuck."
  • Alternatively,
    You reach out and touch the Supermatter. Everything starts burning and all you can hear is ringing. Your last thought is "That was not a wise decision."
• The Federation: The Sol Central Government, or SolGov, in Baystation.
• Three Laws-Compliant: Averted by Baystation, as they changed their AI laws to place more emphasis on enforcing the chain of command and preservation of station functionality over preservation of crew.
• Tone Shift: Baystation is notably more serious in excecution compared to either Goonstation or its sister servers in TG station, lacking the wackier elements like clowns and mimes, as well as encouraging players to at least attempt to act sane during the beginning of a round. Nevertheless, it can be said it manages to generate a unique type of humor regardless, and its implied that the corvette patrolling the area off-screen acts closer in tone to the other servers' stations in terms of sheer incompetence.
  • It's also no longer set on a space station, instead being set on an exploration star ship.
• Wagon Train to the Stars: A few servers are set in exploration spaceships instead of a Space Station:
  • Baystation is set in the "SEV Torch" an exploratory vessel manned by the SolGov Expeditionary Corp, which can also explore local planets they are passing by.
  • CEV Eris is set in said ship. It is owned by the Captain, which allowed to various factions and corporations to set shop in the ship to form their crew and departments.
• Vengeful Vending Machine: The Rampant Brand Intelligence even on Bay causes numerous vending machines to spit out their wares at passer-bys unless the speakers on a specific vending machine are disabled.

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