Beginner's Guide to Bio-Engineering
By Jexx Obo / Field Scientist of the Imperial Guard
Part I: Introduction to BE / DNA Sampling and Clone Enginering skills
I. Introduction
So you want to play god do you, genetically manipulating the dna you obtain from creatures found in the wild and creating new and improved creatures from them? If this sounds appealing to you then perhaps you were born to practice the science of Bio-Engineering, a profession that combines a hybrid of skills from the scout and medic classes. It is my opinion that the Bio-Engineering profession is a natural counterpart to Creature Handling, afterall, what could be better than taming the creatures you make and having them fight by your side in the field! Fortunately there are ample skill points available to you so that you may pursue both professions.
II. Pre-requisites
Before you are able to visit the npc Bio-Engineering trainer in your area you must first complete the 4 blocks of Hunting from the scout profession and the 4 blocks of Organic Chemisty from the medic profession. Once you have completed these skill blocks don't throw your tools away yet, for you still have a bunch of Medical Crafting experience (10k at last check) to work on to have the completed pre-requisite experience to train Novice Bio-Engineer. You will probably have several packs filled with your stimpacks and medicines, these should sell well to medics and doctors or will provide useful to you if you engage in combat with your creations at your side as creature handler pets.
III. DNA Sampling
So you have trained Bio-Engineer and now you are unsure of what to do. At the time of this writing the profession is a bit buggy, the main command that allows you to carry out your field research does not automatically show up in your command panel (ctrl-a) so you must create a macro to use it, or you can simply type the command out. The command is 'sampledna' and you use it on a living creature that you have targetted and that is relatively close (about 15m). Sampling dna can have several outcomes, depending on your skill in the DNA Sampling skill subtree.
1) Failed dna sample and the creature attacks
2) Failed dna sample and the creature remains peaceful
3) Successful dna sample but the creature attacks
4) Successful dna sample but the creature dies
5) Successful dna sample and the creature lives (or seem to mind)
Your skill level in DNA Sampling determines the chance of your getting the best possible results, before training even the first block expect most creatures to either die after a successful sample or attack you whether you succeed or fail. At DNA Sampling 4 it is common to be able to sample 3 or 4 times from the same creature.
A successful sample will net you some DNA Sampling experience and as you sample more and more dna you will advance up this skill tree, it doesn't take all that long to reach DNA Sampling 4. A successful dna sampling session will also result in a new item placed in your inventory, 1 unit of dna from the creature. This dna sample, like all resources in SWG, has an overal quality, which is dependent on your skill level. At Novice BE expect most samples you take to be of Low Quality or Below Average, while at DNA Sampling 4 your samples will range from Above Average to High Quality.
A unit of DNA is comprised of 10 numerical qualities in addition to the overal quality of the sample, these qualities range from 0 - 1000 and are broken up as follows:
A) Physical Condition
1. Hardiness
2. Fortitude
B) Prowess
3. Dexterity
4. Endurance
C) Mental
5. Intellect
6. Cleverness
D) Psychological
7. Dependability
8. Courage
E) Aggression
9. Fierceness
10. Power
Creatures you encounter in the wild will have differing strengths and weaknesses, some may be in better physical condition but not make very good pets due to their psychological weaknesses, others may be very intelligent and dependable but physically weak. Low Quality samples will have the quality numbers reflect which traits are stronger for which characters but the numbers in general will be lower than a sample with a High Quality. It is typical to see High Quality intellect and cleverness valus for a creature that is naturally smart reach into the mid 900s.
So , what do all these numbers mean and how do I make use of them?
IV. Creature Cloning 101
Creature cloning is the process of taking the dna you sampled in the field and using it in a DNA Template to create a schematic for a genetically mixed creature. When you train Novice Bio-Engineer you are given 3 beginning templates that you can use, these are: Bearded Jax, Eopie, Kaadu .
You will need to have sampled at least 5 units of dna before you can start the cloning process and if you don't have one already have an artisan create a Food and Chemical crafting tool for you. Two of the very basic creature templates can be used with the Generic Crafting Tool, but everything after that requires the Food and Chem specialty crafting tool, and after your first block of Creature Cloning you will also need access to a public Food and Chemical crafting station for the newer templates you gain access to (from the Dewback template on requires a public Food and Chem station).
In your crafting tool open the tab for the Genetics Category, at novice level you will see entries for the Bearded Jax and Eopia, and if you are using the specialty tool you will also see the Kaadu. In the schematic you will see 5 slots, each slot requiring 1 unit of dna. The labels on these slots should seem familiar to you now, they correspond to the various qualities discussed above (Physical, Prowess, Mental, Psychological, Aggression). Your job is to examine the samples you have and choose the best samples for a specific quality and use those in the dna template. At novice levels it doesn't matter all that much which samples you use, to be honest the creatures you create will be inadequate and you will be cloning (creature crafting) merely to gain experience so that you can advance in the skill trees.
Using a base DNA Template and creating a new template is only the first step of a two step process for creating a new creature. Check your inventory after your tool has reported completion and you will see a new template there, labelled according to the base template you used (Bearded Jax, Eopie, etc). The next step involves taking this template and creating the creature.
Start your crafting tool again and this time open the tab for Bio-Engineering. You will now see a list of all of the creatures you can create; the list directly corresponds to the names in the dna templates (Bearded Jax, Eopia, Kaadu, etc).Choose the creature that matches the name of the template you just finished creating and move on to the next screen. You will now see a list of all available resources on the left side, this includes meats, flora and dna templates (those that match the same creature). All creatures that are clonable will be created from these resources so now would be a good time to setup a Flora Farm and start collecting tons of flora food as well as hunting out in the field to collect some meat. It is unclear to me at this time how much the various qualities of the meat and flora affect the outcome of creature cloning, though the schematic clearly shows that Overall Quality is of 50% importance.
Once the crafting tool has finished you will see a miniature image of the creature you created in your inventory. If you have basic creature handler skills one of the options that you can perform with this creature is to Tame it. It is my opinion that taming the creatures made at the novice levels is a waste of resources as you can Tame better from the wild. On the contrary, one of the other options available to you is the familiar Sample DNA. This is exactly what you want to do and you will see why as soon as you have succeeded. The experience netted from sampling dna from one of your creations is 10 times that of sampling in the wild. This is a particularly great perk of the Bio-Engineering class as nothing goes to waste and you'll find yourself advancing nicely with repeated dna sampling, creature cloning and subsequent resampling.
V. Conclusion
This guide is meant as an introduction to the Bio-Engineering profession and is by no means considered complete, by the time of your reading this it may not even be entirely accurate. Left for further discussion is the skill subtree of Creature Engineering Techniques, which provides experimentation bonuses, and Tissue cloning, which at the time of this writing is a skill who's purpose is unknown.
-Jexx Obo
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