feat: chaplains can designate their holy items

[little-meow-meow]

(co-authored by @princesspengy!)

Allows chaplains to 'sanctify' an item, making it functionally equivalent to a bible or other holy book. It may be used to heal, to bless water into holy water, and to deal holy damage on melee attack (on top of any existing damage).

If a chaplain's sanctified item is destroyed, they are able to sanctify a new one immediately. However, they may only sanctify a new item of the same archetype (matching entity prototype IDs). This limitation is intended to balance out their ability to replace their holy item immediately.

In light of this rework, existing bibles (including the traitor-exclusive necronomicon) have had their Bible-specific properties removed, and the necronomicon has been removed from the uplink. The steal objective for bibles has also been removed.

Why / Balance

The holy book system was originally just the Bible, but it was eventually found—by both us and upstream—that limiting players to real-world religion is restrictive to character expression and at times a bit of a tonal lurch.

The current system is still limiting for players who'd rather bring their own characters and lore into the job. This change permits players to designate any item they can get their hands on as their holy item (henceforth 'sanctified item'). Limitations exclude anything with MobStateComponent out of an attempt to preempt undiscovered bugs.

Technical details

Created a new entity BaseSanctifiedItem with specific component configurations that become applied to sanctified items upon sanctification. This means that sanctified items will have MeleeWeaponComponent applied to them, but they won't deal any new damage besides the Holy damage sanctification provides.

Implemented healing (henceforth 'blessed healing') as an action to avoid interfering with any existing item interactions. Thus, we took that ability out of the existing holy books and discovered at least one existing bug with bible healing. It technically doesn't fully work as expected currently (mostly success feedback) but should become correct pending upstream fixes (space-wizards/space-station-14#42070). The base failure rate was chopped because we perceived it to be annoying without contribution. Perhaps we've missed some cultural context.

Entities which receive BibleUserComponent simultaneously receive the ActionSanctifyItem action. This action is removed upon sanctifying an item, but re-added when that item is destroyed. This technically allows for some information side-channel exploit by enabling users to tell when a specific entity has been destroyed, but we couldn't devise a practical use case for it.

Known Weirdness

• Blessed Healing will say that the target has no wounds to heal even when they do. This is a result of the abovementioned damage system bug and will be fixed pending upstream changes.

• Entity prototype matching means that visibly equivalent items (e.g. material stacks) may have different prototype ids.

• Because we're adding the melee weapon component, other combat functionality might interfere with this. For example, most guns can't be used as melee weapons.

• Some items are logically destroyed but narratively still exist (e.g. placing material stacks into lathes, stacking/splitting material stacks).

Potential Future Improvements

• Additional templates can be created and applied to items that match certain filters during the sanctification process. For example, sanctified guns could fire holy ammunition instead of being usable in melee, or some items might summon different familiars than Remilia.

• Some values, like sound effects, granted actions, and amount of holy damage, are currently hardcoded into the system. Defining these in YAML would allow for better templating and cleaner system code.

• Relocating the chaplain's abilities to actions allows for the possibility to grant different actions under different conditions.

• The logic behind sanctified archetypes ought to be able to treat things like mapped and printed toolboxes as being the same object.

Media

2025-12-27.00-51-53.mp4

Changelog

🆑

• add: chaplains can now sanctify any item at roundstart to grant it the healing powers and other properties previously limited to bibles! for more details, read the chaplain's new guidebook entry
• remove: bibles no longer have inherent special properties in light of this new system
• tweak: the chaplain's healing no longer has a chance to fail and damage the target instead
• tweak: the sound effect for the chaplain's healing has been changed
• remove: the necronomicon has been removed from the traitor uplink, pending possible reworks
• remove: bibles have been removed from the chaplain's roundstart loadout

[github-actions]

RSI Diff Bot; head commit af597a0 merging into b757f87
This PR makes changes to 1 or more RSIs. Here is a summary of all changes:

Resources/Textures/_starcup/Interface/Actions/actions_chaplain.rsi

State	Old	New	Status
heal			Added
sanctify			Added

Edit: diff updated after af597a0

[princesspengy]

testing has revealed that guns dealing holy damage just doesn't work but that's okay because holy damage isn't relevant yet anyways

[teamstarcup-bot]

This pull request has been mentioned on starcup. There might be relevant details there:

https://forum.starcup.cc/t/101-chaplain-sacred-implement-ideas/379/1