Kavrick's In depth Guide to Doctor and Medic

[Kavrick]

INTRODUCTION I firmly believe that to a good medic or doctor, it's important to be good at both. This guide assumes you at least know the Sulaco and LV624 (The default map) and will be split into three parts, doctor, medic and then tips that add to both. I'd recommend reading the tips even if you're familiar with the basics of medical, and if you have anything I've missed that's helpful, I'd be happy to hear
DOCTOR Now your job as a doctor covers treating patients that arrive at the medbay during your shift, a small amount of this will be treating basic injuries that MT's receive through accidents or treating both MP's and their prey after "justice" is received. The majority of this will be treating marines that medevac from the ground to have their major injuries that medics cant mend fixed, these tend to be broken bones, facehugger infection, organ damage, death, and marines in crit. If there are major marine medic casualties, expect a lot of marines coming up for more basic treatment.

SETTING UP

So you've just spawned as a doctor, what do you do? Well there are a couple of things you should do as soon as you are on board, and after that there are things you can do to keep busy until the rush of wounded arrive.

The first thing you want to do is get kitted out, if you go to the medical supply room at the top of the medbay you can fetch yourself a labcoat and medical hud, the labcoat can be used for suit storage and also has 2 storage inside. After this, go to the supply room to the right side of the medbay, at the top of the supply room on the table there is a pile of lifesaver bags, get yourself one of those (They're far superior to the other medical belts you get in the other storage, can hold more than double), also above the lifesaver bags are two boxes, one has gloves, the other has medical masks, both of these items reduce the chance of causing infections through surgery. Last thing to do regarding gear is to go to a vendor and grab a stasis bag and emergency defib, then remove everything from the lifesaver bag except the advanced brute and burn kits, splints, (Maybe bandages, your choice) and quick clots, then go to any vendore and get one of each of the bottles except soporific along with a syringe, these bottles will be your main way of stabilizing and treating non surgery required injuries (Unless you get better chems from chemistry). The last things you need to do is turn on the cooler for cryo and attach O- bags to the drips. The last thing that might happen during this time is medics coming in and asking for peri pill bottles and hyposprays, both which can be found in your vendors, i'd recommend giving these to your medics as you wont need all of the hyposprays and you wont need any of the pills.

After the initial set up it might be a long wait until things start happening, my personal recommendation is go to chemistry and cook up some useful meds, i'll expand upon this in the chemistry section.

TRIAGE

I'll keep this short and simple, triage is the act of deciding the order of what patients your treat, this is incredibly important when medbay becomes busy and crowded, triage is incredibly important to stop people from dying. The general order i'd recommend goes like this: INFECTED>CRITICAL(Red or flashing health)>DEAD>BROKEN BONES>OTHER
Critical and dead may switch depending on situations, if there are medics in your medbay, treating patients while they are full on health, throw them in disposals ask them to leave, medics should be groundside, where they're needed most, all they do is clutter up medbay and cause complications for triage.
when it comes to the whole CRITICAL>DEAD this means you want to just stabilize them, and stop them from dying, this is incredibly important if you do have dead marines that can be defibbed, as defibbing them is a race against time.


SURGERY

To start off, all surgery instructions can be found here (Surgery).

Surgery is where you'll be doing the majority of your work, if the medics are doing their job and taking care of simple wounds. Surgery goes in these steps: Scan to find the problem > give some sort of anesthetics (Either oxy pills or using the tank and mask that's in the anesthetics closet, be doubly sure to actually turn it on) > Do surgery unique procedure > take patient off anesthetics > let patient leave > wash hands.
Washing hands again decreases infection chance from having bloody hands, infecting wounds just causes more work and is important to avoid. When doing surgery there is a preferred method for maximum speed, if you drop all the tools on the floor next to the table, you can simply use the ALT menu to select the tool you need and drop the old one, this is a lot quicker for two reasons, dropping is a lot faster than placing on a table, and having everything in one spot means you dont have to move to the other tables.

If the medical staff is full, consider ordering a surgical crate to put in the hanger, this is useful for emergency surgeries like facehugger infections.

If you are in a hurry, you can skip clamping bleeders with hemostat, this will be quicker but will cause your patient to bleed, at max speed surgeries shouldn't make them bleed more than 5% this way.

DEFIBBING

Defibbing is an art that is vital to both medics and doctors, and to be adept at it is crucial to being a good medical player. The first thing to know about defibbing is that you can only defib characters that have a black icon with a yellow line through it next to their health on your medical hud.

To successfully bring someone back to life with defibbs you must simply defib them with less than 200 combined brute and burn damage, now this would be simple, but people who die normally have more than this, so the first thing you want to do is cure this, using advanced brute and burn kits to reduce that amount as much as you can, then after that, administer chems that help with stabilizing them as soon as they come back (To make it clear, do this BEFORE you defib, to save valuable time), because when they're revived, they're normally on the brink of death. Usefull chems to use are Dex (Dex plus is better if you have it) Peri (As they will more than likely have organ damage) and then either Bicardine, Kelotan (Or Dermaline if you have it) or both, this will help get your dead dude back on his feet before he keels other again. You can only defib someone who has all of their chest covering clothes off, as in their armor and jumpsuit, this is very important, the defibbing will completely fail without it.

Note that if their damage is still higher than the limit required, you can still defib them and every time it fails it'll heal them until they're within range, of course this is wasteful so make sure to use your advanced kits first! Once you're finished, redress your undead marine as he's waking up, just to be more useful.

CHEMISTRY

Chem recipes can be found here (Chem Recipes)

Chemistry is the right side of the lower floor of medical, it houses a grinder (For grinding up pills and plasma), a chem dispenser (converts beakers full of chemicals into pills and bottles), beakers (Which is what you use to mix and dispense chemicals (The largest is the bluespace one, try not to lose it!)) a medical vendor (Easily the most useful machine in here, can supply infinite premade medical bottles) and the Chem Dispenser (Put beakers in it to add base chemicals to then make new chemicals)

There are a couple of chemicals that you can create that medical doesn't already stock (Dermaline and Hyperzine), But the main use of chemistry is mixing already available chemicals into multiuse pills, such as peridex (Peri and dex, or dex plus)
or bicaderma (Bicardine and dermaline) and other useful pills and potions, you might not need these readily available, but your medics will LOVE you for it, as it makes their jobs easier.

There's one extra thing that's useful to know whilst doing chemistry and that is flasks, flasks that you can get in the canteen can be put in helmets, which means they have a unique use (Apart from alcohol), and that is putting healing concoctions in them for regular marines to heal themselves, again, a very nice and helpful thing to do to give your marines that extra edge they might need, to note, flasks hold 60 units.

Some "1337" surgeons like to make 20u oxy pills for fast surgeries (Because it lets you skip putting on the tank and mask)

MEDIC

You job as medic is to go groundside and patch up injuries caused by friendly fire big lizards, this involves patching up bleeding, treating burn, brute and toxin damage, splinting broken bones, clearing up infections having your patients dragged away, handing out tramadol like candy where it's needed. When it comes to medevac, the standards marines should do this, although standard marines are unreliable but try and get one to do so if you can, having a medic out of duty from dragging back a marine with broken bones and/or infection is bad for the team, one less medic is a huge blow when squads only have two.

KEY NOTE: You should not be at the front of your squad, you should not be straying away and chasing xenos, you should not be by your self in ANY CIRCUMSTANCE, being a medic is all about helping your team, if you're shooting xenos for anything other than self defence, then you're not healing marines.

SETTING UP

Starting the round as medic goes as standard until you get to prep, first you want to replace your underpants with your medic underclothes which can be vended from the vendor in medic prep, then gear up with the gear you can equip in the locker inside medic prep (Armor, gloves, radio headset, boots and helmet (You can get a specific medic helm from the vendor). Next is vending, a whole lot of vending, once you get used to it, it becomes routine, very easy. So first of all you want to vend a lifesaver bag, this goes on your belt slot, best medical belt in the game, holds three rows of items, an emergency defib (for defibbing, check the defib part of the doctor guide), stasis bag (used for putting marines into stasis, practically solely used for OD's and facehugger infection), 2 emergency medkits and one standard medkit. Next you'll need to start emptying your lifesaver bag, autoinjectors take up a lot of room for single use items, pill bottles are far, far better. You'll want to keep your advanced trauma and burn kits, splints, maybe gauze (I keep them but some medics hate them), your trico injectors and your quick clot injectors, then fill the lifesaver bag with one of each pill bottle, take two tramadol bottles if you can, as you can easily run out in high pop round. lastly make sure you have a analyzer in your pocket, the first thing you do with injured is scan them, then proceed to use the correct treatment.

Next comes weapons and gear from the outer prep vendors, the general use gun is the pulse rifle, but personally i prefer the shotty, simply because aliens are less likely to jump you if they know you can one shot them, make sure you put a knife in your boot and get a pack of flares in your spare pocket, if you're running pulse rifle, put your ammo in your armor, unless you're using a shotgun, in that case, move a stasis bag to your armor and then put the shells in your bag (do not use slugs or SMG, they are both vastly outclassed by the other guns and buckshot), other general weapon use wont be covered in this guide.

The last thing you can do during set up and stick up the docs in medbay give the docs a visit and request a couple of items. There are two main items you'll want from medbay, the hypospray (Defaultly has trico, but you can empty it into yourself with ODing and request a bottle to fill it with) and peri pills, peri pills fix organ damage.
GENERAL MEDIC GUIDE AND TIPS The following will be an assortment of tips useful for the medic to know:

If a marine is taking oxygen damage and doesn't have low blood, it probably means he has organ damage, give peri.

If a marine has organ damage and they have fractures, that means their chest is broken, splint it to prevent more organ damage, this also works for broken skulls to prevent brain damage.

Sometimes you'll need to ask the marine where the fracture is, you cant find out without an advanced scanner but they may be able to, finding and splinting the part will stop more damage, but the splint WILL ware off, so they still need medevac, splinting is not a replacement for bone surgery.

Take roller beds down to the ground, they can be found in medbay, these are used for moving wounded quickly, to mount someone on a bed, click and drag them onto it.

If someone is wounded, dragging them causes their wounds to worsen, more damage and bleeding can occur, to prevent this, use grab intent on them when moving.

Trico is a good panic chemical but is extremely slow, if you have the time and resources, use bica and kelo, it's a lot quick and will get them back into the fight faster.

Reserve advanced brute and burn kits for majorly damaged areas, dont waste them on 20 or below.

Ointment can be used to clean wounds and remove infections, although advanced infections will need surgery or spaceacillin

Always rip off an alien from allies's faces, people like to powergame and wake them up so they can stab it and remove it themselves but it's extremely risky, it's better to drag them somewhere safe quick, take it off, kill it and then treat the wound, be sure to treat the wound ASAP because ripping it off twice will cause a broken skull.

Your gun is best used for chasing off aliens and defending wounded, not for fighting on the front lines.

Sometimes it's best to save tramadol for those who are about to hit paincrit, although this might be consider lower rp, it depends on your supplies and wounded count.
GENERAL TIPS IMPORTANT TIP THAT EVERY MEDICAL STAFF SHOULD KNOW: A lot of non container medical supplies can be restocked into vendors (Bottles, autoinjectors, defibs, syringes, splints, gauze, ointment, advanced brute and burn kits etc.) to do so, click and drag the item onto the vendor and then revend the item, it'll be refilled and this also instantly charges defibs.

Never ever ever ever use quick clot twice, this will kill people extremely quickly, doing this repeatedly will probably get you jobbanned or even completely banned for griffing.

Multiple medics should not be treating the same person, this is a waste of human resources and will increase the chance that you'll OD the poor lad. The only exception to this is defibbing, one person keeps an eye on their vitals and stabilizes while the other does the defibbing

Using right click > give can best faster than forcefeeding pills, although of course this only works on conscious spacemen.

You can harm intent syringes to instantly inject someone, although this will break the needle and make you lose 5u of whatever you tried to inject.

Throwing injured can move them quickly and wont hurt them unless it hits a wall, although i consider this to be low rp.

Generally as you play you'll find your own preferences to gear, dont stick to this one here, if you find something that is more efficient to you, do it.

Add a macro for the Give command to quickly give pills to marines, to add macros, right click on the top of the byond window - Credit to Nerocavalier

Spaceacillin slows down larvae growth - Credit to Nerocavalier



If i've made any errors, feel free to point them out and i'll do my best to correct them.

[Kavrick]

I'm aware that my formatting might be sub optimal, if you have any criticism, i'd appreciate it.

[Katsukai]

You can harm intent syringes to instantly inject someone, although this will break the needle and make you lose 5u of whatever you tried to inject.

I don't know why, but when people do this sometimes you get hilarious results.

[nerocavalier]

Make a macro for give.

Using stasis bags for ODs are a bit excessive seeing that most of the time it won't do much beyond some internal organ damage. Doing it for quickclot has a very good chance of making them not defibbable since it reduces overall health and toxins damage are difficult to reduce with defibbing.

[Kavrick]

Make a macro for give.

Using stasis bags for ODs are a bit excessive seeing that most of the time it won't do much beyond some internal organ damage. Doing it for quickclot has a very good chance of making them not defibbable since it reduces overall health and toxins damage are difficult to reduce with defibbing.

Yeah honestly i was struggling to think of what else they're used for

Never though about a macro for give, that's genius

[nerocavalier]

Yeah honestly i was struggling to think of what else they're used for

Never though about a macro for give, that's genius

Unfortunately, stasis bags have no other use than slowing down larva with spaceacillin. They also stack.

I mean in theory they should keep critical marines stable but marines can die inside and no one opens them until it's too late.

[Kavrick]

Unfortunately, stasis bags have no other use than slowing down larva with spaceacillin. They also stack.

I mean in theory they should keep critical marines stable but marines can die inside and no one opens them until it's too late.

Added spaceacillin affecting larva, cant believe i forgot that

[Katsukai]

There is also an bug, if an infected person dies and gets revived with dehib. He would not burst regardless how much time goes by.

[Kavrick]

There is also an bug, if an infected person dies and gets revived with dehib. He would not burst regardless how much time goes by.

Was never aware of that, never had to defib infected i guess

[Katsukai]

Was never aware of that, never had to defib infected i guess

Usually medics or doctors don't know if they are infected unless they are using the adv scanner, since they also seem to lose infected symptoms when they get revived.

[spicemoron]

The first thing you want to do is get kitted out,

No, the first thing you do is run to the chem lab and you mash those fucking buttons until the dropship leaves, then you worry about the rest of medbay, if something bad happens just grab the medhud and scanner from the vending machine and run to hangar or briefing. If someone else is already there use research's chem machines and push buttons less efficiently.

Also the priority should be BICARD -> KELODERM -> peridex (because you can just give em the bottles from the vendors and make refills for medbay use) -> special requests -> "general use pills" (hyperzine and tricord 30+u pills, preferably renamed with descriptions informing about the dangers of overdose or lack thereof) -> iron/sugar -> cryomix -> utility pills for medbay (leporazine for waking peopel from cryodips and water and potas to clear systems)

Now I feel like writing a doctor guide with a greater emphasis on chemistry, but it'll feel be a copypaste of the other medical guides.


I'll just settle for adding a quick mix guide to the chemistry wiki page... when I feel like it (I'll be a wip since I don't know the most efficient ratios for making oxy and peri yet).

[Kavrick]

No, the first thing you do is run to the chem lab and you mash those fucking buttons until the dropship leaves, then you worry about the rest of medbay, if something bad happens just grab the medhud and scanner from the vending machine and run to hangar or briefing. If someone else is already there use research's chem machines and push buttons less efficiently.

Also the priority should be BICARD -> KELODERM -> peridex (because you can just give em the bottles from the vendors and make refills for medbay use) -> special requests -> "general use pills" (hyperzine and tricord 30+u pills, preferably renamed with descriptions informing about the dangers of overdose or lack thereof) -> iron/sugar -> cryomix -> utility pills for medbay (leporazine for waking peopel from cryodips and water and potas to clear systems)

Now I feel like writing a doctor guide with a greater emphasis on chemistry, but it'll feel be a copypaste of the other medical guides.


I'll just settle for adding a quick mix guide to the chemistry wiki page... when I feel like it (I'll be a wip since I don't know the most efficient ratios for making oxy and peri yet).

Although thats the optimised way of doing things, i dont think its completely necessary, you have plenty of time before briefing and theres only one chemistry station to about 6 players, i dont think its a huge deal

[spicemoron]

Although thats the optimised way of doing things, i dont think its completely necessary, you have plenty of time before briefing and theres only one chemistry station to about 6 players, i dont think its a huge deal

Occasionally you'll get a combination of the rasp leaving early AND medics who actually take your pills so you gotta push buttons fast.

[Kavrick]

Occasionally you'll get a combination of the rasp leaving early AND medics who actually take your pills so you gotta push buttons fast.

I dont completely disagree, but it doesn't even take 5 minutes to get your gear on.