Isolation

If you or another crew member is infected, do not spread the infection further. Seek the isolation bay of the medical wing, or head to a room no one will enter but yourself and other infected.

Sterilization

Cleaning blood spills from the ground will prevent contact contamination, make sure blood is cleaned from the floor at all time. Any blood splatter out there could hold a dreaded space infection. Contact a janitor if you see blood on the floor, do not interact with the blood if you suspect possible infection chance. Any object or floor that has infected blood on it can infect anyone who handles or touches it.

Methods of Infection

The following are the various ways a disease can spread, keep this in mind at all times:

Airborne - The most dangerous and quick spreading, if you are anywhere within the breathing area of the infected crew member, you have a chance to be infected unless you use internals.

Touch - Requires you to touch, have been touched, or be extremely close to the source of the infection. Hugging someone or switching places with someone has a chance to spread the infection. The infection will be spread by the skin and bodily fluids of an infected person, but will not survive long in the air.

Fluid - Lets you infect someone by splashing them with the virus culture or using smoke. Works even if they have internals on. Does not work through hardsuits.

Blood - The infection will only be spread by ingesting infected blood.

Special - The disease is not normally contagious and the affected crewman has been infected by a non-human vector source. You can work with the infected without risk yourself unless they expose you to the same vector source that infected them.

Any higher level infection method can infect using any lower level methods. For example, an airborne virus can spread to people with internals on by hugging them.

Curing an infection

Every infection is vulnerable to one substance (or combination of two). To find it, you can put an infected blood sample in the PanD.E.M.I.C 2200 machine or use a health analyzer on an infected patient. Administering the substance to the patient (may require multiple injections) should cure him. Alternatively, if you have produced a vaccine, a simple injection should cure the patient.

PanD.E.M.I.C 2200

This machine creates vaccines from the blood of people who have been cured.

How to create a vaccine

Take a blood sample from an already cured person, with a syringe.

Inject that blood sample into a beaker or bottle.

Load the beaker into the machine.

Select the vaccine you wish to produce.

Take vaccine bottle it produces.

Go to chemistry or the holodeck medical emergency program (for the Chemmaster 3000) to distribute the vaccine however you like. Pills need to be at least 0.4u to work.

Additional uses:

Reveals the cure to any infected blood sample, even if the virus is stealthy and don't show up on medical huds.

Simple Diseases

Thankfully, humanity has managed to cure and eliminate almost all of the diseases that plagued its infancy. However, the vast reaches of space have been found to harbor new illnesses that can affect the unprepared staff on Nanotrasen research stations.

A rare infection, which lies dormant in the victim. If the victim dies before it is cured, it will rise as an aggressive zombie, who will then transfer the infection to anyone it manages to scratch. The infection consists in a tumor located inside the head.

One of the most feared diseases in the galaxy, this is a disease carried by primates. A single bite or scratch is enough to fully infect a human. The result is spontaneous genetic reversion, and the affected individual will also become a monkey.

An infection of magnetic bacteria that build up in the body. As the disease progresses any metallic items not bolted down near the infected person will be pulled toward them, even objects as large as canisters. Ingested iron will draw the bacteria to it and allow them to be excreted normally.

Consuming the flesh of a Gondola comes at a terrible price. Produces Pax within the victims body resulting in pacifism, lessened motor control of the arms, and eventually turning the victim into a Gondola.

Advanced Diseases

You are able to create your own advanced disease with different symptoms, which can have buffs, debuffs and other effects. You can only be infected with one advanced disease at a time, but you can also have several simple diseases at the same time as an advanced.

You will start out with two advanced diseases, the cold and the flu. The cold will have the sneeze symptom and the flu will have the cough symptom. They have almost no effect if they infect people, but you need them to acquire more symptoms.

The Pandemic can create culture bottles (basically copies) of existing viruses, so you won't run out while experimenting.

Modifying Symptoms

To obtain a new symptom you need to mutate an existing virus. This involves adding a chemical to the virus, which will generate a new symptom. Rarer and harder to acquire chemicals will yield more potent symptoms. You will start with enough chemicals to create a powerful disease, as long as you use them carefully. You can also insert an isolated symptom into your main virus, by moving 1 unit of the isolated culture to the main mix with a dropper. It will not work every time and may need to be repeated a few times.

Basic chemicals

These are the basic chemicals for virus mutation. You can either add them directly to a virus to obtain a random level symptom, or mix them with other ingredients to get advanced chemicals, that will give you a specific level symptom.

Virus Food: You can make virus food with Water and Milk. Virology lab has its own Virus Food Dispenser. Mixing this with a disease will give that disease a symptom of level 1 to 2.

Unstable Mutagen: You can use mutagen to mutate your disease and give it a symptom of level 2 to 4. Virology starts with a 30u bottle of mutagen.

Liquid Plasma: Plasma can be used to mutate your disease to give it a symptom of level 4 to 6. Plasma in liquid form is generally in very limited supply, unless mining and chemistry cooperates with you. Virology starts with a 30u bottle of liquid plasma, and in some station layouts with extra plasma bars.

Using these will allow you to both save time and resources when trying to acquire the symptoms you want.

Virus rations: Virus rations can be used to mutate your disease and give it a level 1 symptom. It is made by depleting Virus food with Synaptizine.

Mutagenic Agar: Mutagenic agar can be used to mutate your disease to give it a level 3 symptom. It is made by mixing Unstable mutagen and virus food together.

Sucrose Agar: Sucrose agar can be used to mutate your disease to give it a level 4 symptom. It is made by mixing Sugar or Saline Glucose Solution and Mutagenic agar together.

Weakened Virus Plasma: Weakened virus plasma can be used to mutate your disease and give it a level 5 symptom. It is made by weakening virus plasma using Synaptizine.

Virus Plasma: Virus plasma can be used to mutate your disease and give it a level 6 symptom. It is made by mixing liquid plasma with virus food.

Uranium Gels

These chemicals require large quantities of liquid uranium (obtained by grinding uranium bars). You'll require the help of mining to make these.

Decaying Uranium Gel: Decaying Uranium Gel can be used to mutate your disease and give it a level 6 or 7 symptom. Despite its name, it will not decay into nothingness or deplete itself over time (outside of circumstances that would cause normal chemicals to do that). It is made by combining 1 virus food with 1 liquid Uranium.

Unstable Uranium Gel: Unstable Uranium Gel can be used to mutate your disease and give it a level 7 symptom. It is made by combining 1 virus plasma with 5 liquid Uranium.

Stable Uranium Gel: Stable Uranium Gel can be used to mutate your disease and give it a level 8 symptom. It is made by combining 1 plasma with 10 parts liquid Uranium and 10 parts liquid silver or gold.

Synaptizine, aside from being a base chemical, will remove one random symptom to any virus it comes in contact with. It's important if you intend to isolate a specific symptom. For example, if you mutate your Cold virus and it acquires the Toxic Filter symptom, you can try and add synaptizine to it to create a virus which only has the Toxic Filter symptom.

Formaldehyde will neuter one random symptom when mixed with a virus. This disables its effects while keeping the attributes intact. This is useful for meeting threshold values without making the virus deadly.

Tips and Techniques

Dropper

When you're adding a chemical to a virus, you only need to add a single unit of it. This means you can use a dropper to add a single unit at a time, instead of using a syringe and wasting 5 units at a time. Since Liquid Plasma and Mutagen are in limited supply, it is a smart move to conserve your chemicals.
Remember, you have to use the dropper in your hand once to set its transfer value to 1 unit.

Mixing in Beakers

While your first instict may be to create a new culture bottle, adding a chemical to it and scrapping the whole bottle if it's not the symptom you want, it is a slow process due to the Pandemic's cooldown. A better way is to instead keep a culture bottle, an empty beaker, and a bottle of your desired chemical; add one unit of culture to the beaker and then mutate it with the chemical, and check the result. Then repeat until you have to replicate the culture bottle: this allows for 20 uninterrupted tries before having to make a copy.

Isolating Symptoms

When you get the symptom you want, you can choose to isolate it, by making a new culture bottle with the symptom's name on and storing it in your fridge. You can then move 1 unit of the blood containing the isolated symptom into your work mix to add it. Doing this can make it much easier to build different viruses with the symptoms you have, instead of being locked in a single combination. Even better is if you use synaptizine to remove the base symptom, so you have the pure symptom ready to use.

Multiple symptoms

A virus can have up to six symptoms. Having more symptoms can sometimes make the virus less resistant and less likely to spread. The more symptoms you have, the higher chance there is for a new symptom to randomly delete one or more old symptoms when added.

Understanding stats

After you're done mixing your disease, stats from the symptoms are added together to make disease stats. Viruses have a default of 0 in every stat.

Stealth: If stealth is 2 or higher your disease will be hidden from medHUD and scanners. Generally it will also hide the warning signs of symptoms before they activate.

Transmission: Improves the chance each tick to spread the virus, increases the amount of protection you need to prevent infection, determines the infection vector, and is needed to override other viruses.

The infection vector is calculated with (disease's transmission - amount of symptoms). 2 or less is blood, 3 is fluid contact, 4 is skin contact, 5 is airbone. The Sneezing symptom forces sporadic airborne spreads, but does not otherwise affect this.

When infecting someone who already has a virus, if the infecting virus' Transmission is higher than the other virus' Resistance, the latter will be overridden by the former.

Stage speed: Increases the chance of advancing a stage each tick. It will be 2% or stage speed, whichever is higher.

Resistance: Makes the virus harder to cure; determines the required chemical to cure, decreases the chance of it being cured each tick when in contact with the cure, and defines how resistant the virus is to being overridden by other viruses.

Severity: A hidden statistic. The symptom with the highest severity defines the virus' severity; it affects the color of the medHUD icon, ranging from blue for positive viruses, to flashing red for extremely deadly diseases.

The chance of it being cured every tick is 15 - resistance, but always between 10 and 20.

The cure is determined by [resistance - (amount of symptoms / 2)]. One chemical from the tier is randomly picked.

Causes the affected mob to burst into flames periodically, while also giving them small doses of Napalm and Chlorine Trifluoride. If wet when bursting into flames, the victims will also explode. Explosions can happen in stage 4 and stage 5.

The virus mutates the host's metabolism, making it almost unable to gain nutrition from food.

Stealth 4

General Tips

If you happen to run out of plasma, chemistry sometimes has an extra bar you can ask for.

Sugar can be hard to find, but you can use Saline-Glucose from any NanoVend Plus for Sucrine Agar.

Wearing protective clothing is not necessary during virology research, but you should wear it in event of an outbreak or while experimenting on monkeys.

If you're dealing with a virus too stealthy to analyze, you can try making a very infective virus to override it.

Have in mind the disease you want to make before you start searching for symptoms: knowing the level of the symptom you're looking for may save you time and materials.

Generally, you should only use mutagenic chemicals that will give your symptoms from only a single possible tier (in other words, use weakened virus plasma or virus plasma instead of just plasma). The exceptions to this rule are the decaying uranium gel (only if you're rolling for level 7 symptoms) and virus food chemicals, since they are much, much cheaper to make than more exact chemicals of their tiers. It should be noted that one bar of uranium can be mixed with other chemicals to get you 20u of decaying uranium gel, but only 4u of unstable uranium gel.

The Black Death

Being a traitor virologist opens you up to a whole variety of cruel and interesting ways to create chaos on the station. Here's some tips to allow you to spread your worst creations.

Here is where statistics become important: you need Resistance to avoid the cure being salt, you want Transmittability so your virus can spread, Stage Speed so it acts before the victim is cured, and Stealth to avoid it being noticed too quickly. You won't have them all on a single virus, so choose the direction you want to go with.

A high stealth will allow the virus to incubate before the victim notices.

A high resistance will make the cure so rare that it won't realistically be available to everyone. Beware of vaccines, though.

A high stage speed will cause your virus to progress at extreme speed, giving targets less warning before acting.

A high transmittability will allow you disease to spread itself without your help; it will also make it so you need more clothing to protect from infection.

While it might seem a good idea to put many harmful symptoms on a virus, its stats will be lowered to the point it won't act before it is cured. Stick to one or two harmful symptoms, and add neutral ones to buff its statistics.

All symptoms give out messages to the infected before they reach the stage where they activate. People will be aware of what is hindering/killing them. Consider investing in stealth to prevent this.

Going around outside of virology with a biosuit will alert people that you don't trust your own virus: you might want to infect yourself with a harmless resistant virus, so people can see that you're infected as well, while you'll be immune.

Remember that live and walking infected spread more than corpses. Consider making a disease that hinders many instead of one that kills a few. Although dead people can't work on a cure.

A syringe gun filled with infected blood is a good way to spread viruses if you can't trick the crew.

Sabotaging the Pandemic is usually a good idea, as it can create a vaccine for a cured virus which is cheap and easy to distribute, even if the virus is extremely resistant.

Destroying all of your viruses (and the ones in your chem fridge) other than the one that you are going to use before you release your doomvirus by dumping the containers holding them out onto an adjacent tile and then using a spray bottle of space cleaner on the resulting pile of blood can be a good idea, since clever CMOs/players can infect themselves with one of your prototype viruses to overwrite your main doomvirus with a less harmful virus/version of it (provided that the less harmful virus's transmission stat is higher than your doomvirus's resistance stat).

Sabotaging the holodeck computer is also a good idea because its Emergency Medical simulation also contains a Pandemic.

Sabotaging chemistry can stop them from making most of the chems that can cure viruses.

Adding your virus to food the chef has cooked is a good way to spread your virus.

Virology Rework

Virology has been reworked to add threshold bonuses to symptoms. If the specified statistic goes over the threshold, the symptom will gain the relative bonus.

Neutering

You can now neuter symptoms, making them inactive, but still able to affect statistics. Use them to empower positive viruses without killing your patients. Adding formaldehyde (now in the smartfridge) will neuter a random symptom.

Stealth

Stealth no longer hides viruses from the Pandemic, but it will hide many early warning of infection instead.