Glimmer Drainers have too high a construction difficulty

[VMSolidus]

Description

At this current point in time, Glimmer Drainers have a recipe that is nearly impossible to obtain by anyone playing the game normally, even with great effort. They require that SEVERAL psychic creatures be killed, or permanently removing psychic players from the round by killing them, and then destroying their soul crystal. Both of these things are so wildly impractical that they literally never happen. In fact, in several hundred hours of playing on Delta V, I have never witnessed someone even so much as attempt to make a Drainer. There is not a single person I've spoken to has ever witnessed one being made.

With this high of a requirement to make them, they may as well not even exist. This is a significant issue for Epistemics, as it entirely removes the very possibility of making more than one prober. There needs to be an entirely different construction recipe made for the Drainers, or for the method of obtaining Normality crystals be changed entirely. Perhaps Normality crystals should be obtainable from a different department entirely? Maybe have a recipe that involves obtaining them from artifact fragments, or from destroying artifacts. That would put the onus on players to interact with the Salvage department in order to get the fragments needed to build Drainers.

[Hyenh]

Glimmer drainers exist to mitigate the event of high glimmer. The more psychic entities that pop up as a result, the more opportunities to obtain normality crystals. In short, they're designed to only be needed when you actually need it.

[VMSolidus]

So this basically won't happen, because if glimmer gets that high in the first place where revenants start spawning, it's going to keep getting too high until something DRASTIC happens to stop it. Usually the fix that people employ involves an RPG to the prober room, which erases all of Epistemics in the process, and results in an emergency shuttle being called.

[Hyenh]

It will only continue rising if you don't take action. You have tools to handle psychic creatures.

[PHCodes]

This has not been my gameplay experience. In my experience, an entire station completely devoted toward addressing the Glimmer issue still usually isn't enough to complete a single Glimmer Drainer. I've had at least 3 shifts I've played as Captain where we put the highest priority possible on making the drainers... And between the probers and psionic users, things still snowballed so fast and so hard that we still wound up having to explode the Glimmer Probers. It's not tenable, and it does not feel balanced in the least.