Clone Lab

The Clone Lab (Lab CE-6) is a research lab located on Level 3 in Sector C. It allows players to clone one another by various means. Players can be cloned into other players (duplicating the appearance of the person in the "sample" chamber), or a simple bot can be created in the "target" chamber if unoccupied, that will somewhat attempt to follow its host around unless out of range.

Specimen chambers
There are two specimen chambers in this lab: the sample chamber (left), and the target chamber (right). The sample chamber contains the player looking to be cloned, and the target contains the player who is being cloned into (or nothing, if you are intending to produce a bot).

These chambers are metal with glass windows on the sides, wrapping around partially to the front, with the interior containing an emitter on the top and bottom that will spin when the process is initiated. As well as this, a glow will begin to emanate from the chamber in the seconds prior to the cloning operation concluding.

Lab operation

 * To clone one player into another (copying character appearance and physical proportions), a player must be present inside both chambers at once. The "clone sample" switch on the control desk can be pressed to initiate the process, which should take around 10 seconds in total.


 * To clone one player into a bot, leave the target chamber empty. Keep in mind, someone must be in the sample chamber any time a cloning operation is conducted. Bots have 20% of a normal player's health, and thus are more vulnerable to injury.

The process can be aborted at any time by pressing the "emergency stop" switch, directly adjacent to the "clone sample" switch.

Cloning failure
A cloning failure can occur randomly, and results in the body proportions of the resulting entity (a player or a bot in the target chamber after the process has completed) being disrupted, as well as an unpredictable decrease in health. The chance of a cloning failure occurring rises after each successful operation of the lab, and will reset back to 0 once a failure has occurred.

Learning & dialog
Bot clones are able to record and learn about chat messages that other players have spoken in its immediate vicinity (or in the case of its host, anywhere in the game). This learning is very rudimentary, making use of a Markov chain text generator to produce new messages. Therefore, players can "teach" bots by speaking around them, and intentionally cherry-picking messages they would like bots to absorb and repeat.

Keep in mind, learning is not persistent and any data learned by a bot will be erased in any scenario in which that bot is removed from the game (specifically after dying, or during a server shutdown). In the future, a method of saving this data and recalling it later in a new bot will be implemented.

An Easter egg implemented in 0.15.1 involves saying "melon" around a bot clone, which has a slight chance of angering it into chasing said player around, and will explode once in a certain proximity. This is a reference to the video game Façade.