Chemistry rework thoughts/feedback

[TDHooligan]

Chemistry rework's been in for close to a month now? I'm curious what people's thoughts are overall on it. As a chemnerd for at least 6~7 years now I'm going to throw my thoughts into the mix. 

I'd like to hear peoples goods/mehs/bads and see if I'm clued in, or just an old fart getting dinosaured. 

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I've really enjoyed some things about it:

• The condenser is an *incredible* piece of equipment for both new and old recipes. It is the star of this rework. It creates so many ideas for greatness, but we need more catalysts and chems that are barely used up as part of a reaction!
  
• A few new avenues of quirky chemistry grenades weapons, like sulfuric heating and duplicating. Cyanide + acid, Sealed beakers shattering into spills. I'd love more of this and some bugfixes to explosions + puddles (this stuff is actually what i'd thought would improve chem ages ago, and it has)
  
• Bunsen burners are cool. They pair really well with condensers. I can see them being really fun down the line as this rework gets refined.
  
• It's so easy to make thousands of units of things now. Arguably even easier than making a beakerful sometimes. It *feels* like I should be making enough chems to give to other players, rather than just hoarding 30u of everything to myself.
  

I've had middling feelings about:

• Heat retention on reaction, it just makes hot reactions need less heating? I can automate heating now. I can't automate cooling reliably. Gimme a way to cool stuff. And don't go telling me to put cryo in beaker #4! I'm already bouncing back and forth on 3 other condensers!
  
• Niche ore requirements - Oh. there are no miners. Or they aren't working. What am I gonna do, *their job*? At least the main consumers of fancy ore (robotics) can actually go mining when they want stuff. I don't mind putting in extra chemistry effort to work around this requirement! 
  
• Weird gimmicks for Sulfazine/Styptic - I dont get it. OK, the consensus was to stop making it instantly at the dispenser. Why not just make it a standard slow reaction? Sulfazine's is just weird, and it makes pouring the reaction mix act oddly. Styptics' is cool but who's making small batches of styptic? These are boring chems that can have boring syntheses, surely?
  

I've had negative experiences with these:

• The raw tedium for intermediate chemicals:
  
• Basically every precursor requires a lot more time/effort/attention/setup, and they are used in lots of boring chemicals. It's hard to justify putting the effort into anything but the most powerful chemicals now. Would you rather make Epinephrine or Meth?
  
• Unreliable output volumes for things like oil. I don't see why the reduced output is even necessary. It's not stopping me making MORE oil - I can easily pour in hundreds of units of fuel. All it does is make balancing reactions annoying/unreliable. So, now I have to eyeball everything I make... Or, ignore condensers and wait for all my oil to be made, then measure out everything manually. So it's the same as before but with a boring step.
  
• Split reactions for Acetone/phenol, it's an interesting idea. However, all it really means is that I have to cram a beaker in a chemmaster every time i make it. I can't use any of the new tools to automate it! And it's made with Boring Oil I Need To Manually Measure!
  
• No way to balance uneven reaction chains - if 1 reaction makes 3u/tick, and something down the line makes 1u/tick, there is no way to build a chain of equipment that stops a condenser overflowing. I can at best, make 3 seperate reaction vessels.
  

Overall:
I think this change has some really strong positives and is a great framework. The tools it introduces are really fun and open up new ideas that are worth expanding upon.

However, It also introduces some really demanding, unrewarding processes.
I don't mind planning everything, setting it up & waiting for my reaction to complete after - I do mind having to repeatedly futz with all 3 of my condensers at the same time as manually handling certain reactions, where at the end I get something as unexciting as 'your spaceman dies less in crit for 2 minutes'

My personal experience for newer chemists also looks worse - I do see the chemical locker used more, lots of complaints about oil. Once the chemical locker is empty, people often just walk out. The skill floor for a job that was already hit and miss has been kicked up much higher. 


Final thoughts:
Chemistry can be engaging without directly requiring intervention so regularly! I love watching my oil reaction tick over slowly, drip-feeding through several systems until it turns into meth.
Acetone using 0.1 chlorine is a cool idea that I want to see more of, topping off 50 units of chlorine every 10 minutes is SO much better than having to pour 90 units of fuel into my heated oil reactor every 40 seconds.
I *really* hate that acetone is not usable in a condenser unless your recipe also requires Phenol. Let us build cool infini-drug machines! It was already easy enough before to make more drugs than you could ever use. Why not make it easier to make barrels of drugs for EVERYONE, rather than just 300u to last your whole 90 minute rampage?

[Frolicsome Flufficorn]

Bunsen burner my beloved. 100% one of the best things they ever added to chemistry. but yeah I would also like more catalysts for condensers to be used in .

[Kotlol]

As someone who has tried chemistry old a few times and chemistry new ONCE.

I do like the multiplue possiblities... but... OH MY LORD ITS SO COMPLEX!
We need a way to "ease in" new chemists, cause right now... it's really really difficult.

This is why I recommend looking at Botany that's "easy to learn, hard to master."

A standard botanist will grow crops fine, a decent one will know how to get mutant traces, the master botanist is always splicing mutations/adding chemicals/making the best dank weed possible.

This is what I would rather see with chemistry. With if you want to make meth.. yea it's not that hard.. but to be the HEISENBERG of your lab. You gotta mix , cook and burn all manually to get the purist of meth with a strong potency.

Also it will make chemistry more fun if you can make healing chems be more potent then the standard refills, gives the pharmacy more reason to be used too.

Though this idea might constitute another rework and... LETS NOT! But i think thats the idea route for chemistry (and most departments that can develop things)

[Flaborized]

It really has been about a month ahah, time really happens Non-specific to anything in this thread, I'd like to say that I still intend to go in and expand the rework more and branch it out to other interesting chems (there's lots of ideas Leah and I didn't end up using for these that would still be really cool) but also I've been taking a bit of a tolerance break from it since I worked on it heavily for a few months. But it's still a thing I want to work on and I see lots of room to expand on it. Anyways, my some of my thoughts on the critiques here:

Heat retention on reaction, it just makes hot reactions need less heating? I can automate heating now. I can't automate cooling reliably. Gimme a way to cool stuff. And don't go telling me to put cryo in beaker #4! I'm already bouncing back and forth on 3 other condensers!

This is a good idea I think, though I wouldn't want it to work exactly the same way adding heat does if we add a machine (ie: I don't want to add a bunsen 'cooler'), something more distinct and specific would be **cool**.

Niche ore requirements - Oh. there are no miners. Or they aren't working. What am I gonna do, *their job*? At least the main consumers of fancy ore (robotics) can actually go mining when they want stuff. I don't mind putting in extra chemistry effort to work around this requirement! 

I don't see this as much of an issue personally, part of the dynamic of getting real, tangible benefits from another department is that you don't get those benefits if the department doesn't give them to you. And condensers/barrels/bunsen burners aren't strictly *necessary* to do anything at the moment, just helpful in organizational ways.

Weird gimmicks for Sulfazine/Styptic - I dont get it. OK, the consensus was to stop making it instantly at the dispenser. Why not just make it a standard slow reaction? Sulfazine's is just weird, and it makes pouring the reaction mix act oddly. Styptics' is cool but who's making small batches of styptic? These are boring chems that can have boring syntheses, surely?

The instantaneous of the reactions weren't really the issue I wanted to tackle, it was more that I didn't like that the reactions were just like, pressing a bunch of buttons over and over to get theoretically infinite amounts. I wanted the reactions to instead be easy to make the regular old way, but also allow you to do more complicated stuff that takes less clicks to make lots and lots of product (in a barrel). These are particularly bulk-y chems to produce, and they have a stronger variant, so I tried to give them a recipe that's *kinda* complicated, but isn't *that* hard and not really dangerous in any way. Meanwhile the changes to the higher "tier" meds (pent and synthflesh) are both more involved and specific and have some way to be dangerous to the mixer. I also just personally like the weird reaction types they have, even if sulfadiazine's in particular doesn't make much sense

Basically every precursor requires a lot more time/effort/attention/setup, and they are used in lots of boring chemicals. It's hard to justify putting the effort into anything but the most powerful chemicals now. Would you rather make Epinephrine or Meth?

Yeah this is true and fair and an issue with the rework atm, the scope of it was somewhat limited (since you have to work on big projects like this in smaller chunks so you actually get things done) but as a byproduct of that reagents that take precursors that weren't changed aren't necessarily balanced to how useful they are. The solution imo is going through them and redesigning them to work with the rework, epi and meth in particular are easy candidates for more complexity but I think more obscure chems that don't *need* huge code blocks in on_reaction() but also need oil/diethlyamine/whatever could probably just have ratios adjusted to be a bit less demanding in this way.

Unreliable output volumes for things like oil. I don't see why the reduced output is even necessary. It's not stopping me making MORE oil - I can easily pour in hundreds of units of fuel. All it does is make balancing reactions annoying/unreliable. So, now I have to eyeball everything I make... Or, ignore condensers and wait for all my oil to be made, then measure out everything manually. So it's the same as before but with a boring step.

Oil is something that I envisioned people making independently of what they actually needed oil for at the time. What I mean is, before you even *want* to use oil in the chemlab, you start making oil and putting it into storage somewhere just so you have it when you need it. I like what I've seen from the recipe a lot actually, since I've seen people building weird unique setups with condensers and barrels and whatnot. (Even people scraping oil stains from the Oshan arrivals subs which I think is Good) I don't think there'd be a lot of reasons to make unique setups otherwise, though perhaps it'd be good if it could be signaled to players "this is something you should probably be mixing even if you don't need it right this second" and encourage that kind of thinking ahead stuff.

Split reactions for Acetone/phenol, it's an interesting idea. However, all it really means is that I have to cram a beaker in a chemmaster every time i make it. I can't use any of the new tools to automate it! And it's made with Boring Oil I Need To Manually Measure!

Some kinda way to separate them could be neat, idk. Maybe a filter or a centrifuge or something for this, not exactly sure a good way to do it but I like the idea of a recipe that's unwieldy without tools (though still very much possible) but then you use your specialized nerd chemical equipment and have an easier time with it. And then when there's reactions that use *both* you wouldn't even need the tool if you thought ahead and realized that... which would again be neat.

No way to balance uneven reaction chains - if 1 reaction makes 3u/tick, and something down the line makes 1u/tick, there is no way to build a chain of equipment that stops a condenser overflowing. I can at best, make 3 seperate reaction vessels.

Yep this is pretty much how it's supposed to be, There's some *degree* of automation with condensers, but you're still very much meant to be actively present and manually interacting with the vessels. It could be cool maybe though to let you output condensers into multiple containers and then split the product evenly between connected ones (maybe with a cap of like 3 or something) so you could still manipulate ratios in this way...

As someone who has tried chemistry old a few times and chemistry new ONCE.

I do like the multiplue possiblities... but... OH MY LORD ITS SO COMPLEX!
We need a way to "ease in" new chemists, cause right now... it's really really difficult.

This is why I recommend looking at Botany that's "easy to learn, hard to master."

A standard botanist will grow crops fine, a decent one will know how to get mutant traces, the master botanist is always splicing mutations/adding chemicals/making the best dank weed possible.

This is what I would rather see with chemistry. With if you want to make meth.. yea it's not that hard.. but to be the HEISENBERG of your lab. You gotta mix , cook and burn all manually to get the purist of meth with a strong potency.

Also it will make chemistry more fun if you can make healing chems be more potent then the standard refills, gives the pharmacy more reason to be used too.

Though this idea might constitute another rework and... LETS NOT! But i think thats the idea route for chemistry (and most departments that can develop things)

We avoided adding a purity system on purpose since there's not *actually* really a need for it when producing medical chems and it adds a lot of complexity to displaying chemicals to people and figuring out how different quality chems mix together and stuff like that. Like, but "not really a need for it" I mean that something like styptic powder is so good at healing brute damage that 'styptic powder +1' isn't really necessary. I'd rather have additional harder to make chems (ie: synthflesh) instead, more interesting to me.

I'm also *alright* with chemistry being a bit more difficult to get into than it was, since it's just more difficult in general and that comes with that. I'd rather there be better in-game documentation or help than make the system simpler for the sake of making it easier to get into. Though yeah it could probably be a little bit easier to ease yourself into potentially... but the new recipes aren't actually *that* complicated when you get down to it I feel, though I also designed lots of them so idk that might just be my perspective as well.

[Lord_earthfire]

In total, i am a huge fan of the chemistry rework. It promotes me multiutasking differnt things rather than just pressing buttons and getting the products i want. Especially figuring out macros with these new recipes is really interesting.

I think it is in the nature of the rework that some stuff that was easier ealier are now kinda more difficult. But what this rework brought was so much more design space. We could think about making the recipes of certain chems more easy, but more involved. That way, it is much easier to get into the system, because you don't need to remember that many recipes, but also have a higher skill ceiling, since optimisation isn't just getting the chemgroups right anymore.

This means we could take a look at more advanced recipes and think on how to do these better to make, since the difficulty moved towards their precursors.

[TDHooligan]

Ta for the in-depth reply, it took a while to write this up and everything you've said is reasonable. I've been pondering improvements for a while now so figured perhaps these might be good ideas to bounce off of:

precursors...

could probably just have ratios adjusted to be a bit less demanding in this way.

Pretty much my thoughts on the topic. As I said, I really, really like how it feels to make acetone/phenol - disregarding the split output.

Honestly, I think you could get away with making the advanced reagent ratios MUCH smaller for your standard medchems. like 0.1u, doubling down on the effort/reward for stronger chems.

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oil is unreliable in its output volume

I don't think there'd be a lot of reasons to make unique setups otherwise, though perhaps it'd be good if it could be signaled to players "this is something you should probably be mixing even if you don't need it right this second" and encourage that kind of thinking ahead stuff.

I think you're looking at it the wrong way - In fact, if I were to say there was something people grumble right now, it's oil. I don't think it's super engaging to create oil ahead of time, as it makes you dip your toes in new chemistry purely so you can return to old chemistry (after a new-chemistry tedium step). If I need oil NOW. I just make a fuckton of hot oil. it's fast enough. 

Making a bottle of 50u phenol that i'll occasionally have to pour 10u into a condenser? That's an easier sell.

Hear me out:

Make oil's ratio always 1-1. Make the reaction rate possibly scale up even further. Now, if it's in a condenser, it's functionally an analog 'speed dial'. If you run your oil hot, all your reactants down-chain start disappearing really quickly and you risk one of your condensers running out of reactants & gumming up the works. 

The knock on effects, just from this would be:
 - Players can have room-temperature oil reactions for slower, lower-effort rounds.
 - When you give strong chemicals the higher ratio of 'complex reactant like acetone', it's going to be harder to keep your condenser chains topped up at high speeds.
 - Players can now determine *exactly* how many reagents of each type are needed. This is something I, and others, like doing (chemgroups)
 - There's cool balance avenues when you can adjust reacton rate. IE, "This reaction only works in the presence of 50+ units of water" gives less leeway for the state of a condenser, when automated.

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split outputs

Some kinda way to separate them could be neat, idk. Maybe a filter or a centrifuge or something for this,

I posited a fractional distillation funnel in the other thread. I still think it's a good idea.

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balancing chains

Yep this is pretty much how it's supposed to be, There's some *degree* of automation with condensers, but you're still very much meant to be actively present and manually interacting with the vessels.

I think making the condensers the thing you manage is a much cooler idea FWIW. Chemists have reverse-engineered every chemistry recipe into their underlying ratios, we saw this with chemgroups...


Get a volumetric burette in here so that you can have custom drip-rates, you'll be seeing real machinations. Newbie chemists slosh everything into a beaker. Intermediate chemists slap it all into some condensers-

Nerds decompose their target chemical into the exact ratios of precursors, and make huge abominations... or hyper-optimized setups where they're managing large branching recipes in only 2 condensers! As for balance, it's easy enough to balance this stuff by making seperate parts of reaction chains react.

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Perhaps it's a difference in vision. I much prefer the part where I'm passively monitoring and maintaining condensers, each making things I *know* I want. Not the part where I'm essentially making more than I need of every chemical *just in case i need it*. because every damn time I do the latter, a whole lot goes to waste, or runs barely short whenever I need it.

Hopefully there's some ideas you think are cool in there 8)

[Lord_earthfire]

Make oil's ratio always 1-1. Make the reaction rate possibly scale up even further.

Chemists have reverse-engineered every chemistry recipe into their underlying ratios, we saw this with chemgroups...

I think what we saw with chemgroups is very much the reason why we should stop making 1-1 recipes and, in the future, move towards inaccurate and more involved result ratios.

- In fact, if I were to say there was something people grumble right now, it's oil.

Iirc the malding over oil ended at the point where the phenol/aceton recipe was changed to take 4 welding fuel and create more products. People don't do oil anyway. They throw welding + carbon,hydrogen + chlorine in, hit it once with a welding tool and make phenol/acetone directly. The ratios conlme out in a way where you need low values of oil to make high quantities of chemicals.

The thing people were complsining for a very long time after the real merge was diethylamine. A bug existed that made the reaction always leave 0.5 of chemicals. That was fixed.

I think currently, from my observation of the discord, people would like to have a seperation method for phenol/aceton, but that's about it what i see on complaints.

My personal gripe recipe is smelling salts of all things, though. It prevents me from making chemgroups that chain the oil/phenol-reaction and the diethylamine reaction, fueled by pyrosium heating (carbon from oil, ammonia from diethylamine and oxygen from pyrosium). But honestly, that is fine, since side-reactions are good way to throw a wrench into your plans.

[TDHooligan]

I think what we saw with chemgroups is very much the reason why we should stop making 1-1 recipes and, in the future, move towards inaccurate and more involved result ratios.

im not seeing how youre making this link between 'people having fun perfectly balancing recipes' and the reason why chemgroups were removed: 'people copy pasting their entire job with 0 effort'.

people still having fun balancing recipes to this day

[Cleaverwolf]

Haven't explored all the changes to chemistry but I've messed with a few. I agree that the styptic and silver sulfide changes are a little odd, as I have a bad habit of clearing my beaker thinking I did the recipe wrong when really I just have to await awhile for results, mostly a skill issue on my part. Making oil is OK, but I wish the Speed Vs. Using up welding oil margin was more forgiving, particularly because there was a change to make chemistry barrels more responsive to welding torches. Acetone and Phenol is in a good spot but as mentioned by another, would be nice to split them for more usable product.
The only thing that really bothers me right now is salbutamol and salicylic acid because for some reason the moment you mix the precursors together they start to mix into nothing, which makes it frustrating when you want salicylic acid but accidentally make salbutamol.

[Lord_earthfire]

The only thing that really bothers me right now is salbutamol and salicylic acid because for some reason the moment you mix the precursors together they start to mix into nothing, which makes it frustrating when you want salicylic acid but accidentally make salbutamol.

Iirc that happens when neither the temperature is reached for salicylic acid nor it is shaken for salbutamol. If it reacts into noyhing, either heat it or move it around and it should start the corresponding reaction. Could be communicated more properly, though.

[Cleaverwolf]

Iirc that happens when neither the temperature is reached for salicylic acid nor it is shaken for salbutamol. If it reacts into noyhing, either heat it or move it around and it should start the corresponding reaction. Could be communicated more properly, though.

I think a small delay would be nice, but I figured as much-

[colossusqw]

So, I'll preface this with saying that i really like a lot of the changes made, and the amount of attention you have to pay to what you are producing now is really enjoyable when compared to the previous iteration of the system.

It does take up a lot of your time to make any non-trivial amount of chems, though. There are chemicals that basically require you to be watching beakers for 90% of rounds, even on RP, to be made, and many chems that just aren't worth making due to how complex they are as it stands(space glue has got a big bump up, neurodepressant as well, atropine is much harder to produce, sulfonal, teporone, robusticin...).

One thing for me, is having complexity and a need to engage with the chem production systems, but it's another for scientists to need to spend most of their rounds in chemistry if they wish to produce more than 1 or 2 different chems in non-trivial amounts, especially if most of that time is spent looking at barrels and watching the numbers go up. I've taken to separating mixes i make in multiple beakers when those have preset reaction times, and just having 10 different instances of the reaction happen at once, for instance.

This can definitely be helped by individual chem recipe changes, as it very much should, but i feel another thing that could really help would be a reaction speed scaling based of of the volume of the container or initial volume of the reaction. It would make much more sense for a big reaction happening inside a barrel to happen at a bigger scale(and thus produce more per second) than for it to have the same static reaction time as a beaker, and prevent separating multiple beakers to increase reaction speed being a thing.

[V1M4K]

I am of two minds.

On one hand the more complex nature of it means that it is going to be more rewarding to figure out how to do chemistry and it will feel like more of a full role than just clicking buttons on a console.

I do have more misgivings than praise unfortunately.

I do not know if it is an intended part of the design feature, or just a circumstance, but this does mean that production of chems using machines other than the ones in chemistry becomes much more difficult. I go to the chem labs in med bays to try and get us some chems and we do not have any lab equipment yet, so I am much more likely to end up dosing myself with byproducts, and it is a crap-shoot at best to get chemistry to make med chems unless you are playing on an RP server. The only issue with that is that you do not usually see that many chemists on an RP server from my experience and the ones that I have met are not usually very experienced so they have a hard time making any advanced med chems, or with this update even basic med chems. 

The other half of this is that Antags will have a harder time getting making chems, as it takes more time and knowledge, as well as explicit access to the chemlab to produce the good chems. Perhaps it was the intent to not have people just break into the bar and make their hellchems or meth, but I feel like that closes off avenues for potential antags to do some wacky shenanigans. 

The final part I have concerns over is time, I have not gotten as much time with chems as seemingly some in this thread who have really dug into the extremities of it, but it took me a reaaallly long time to make chems, and it felt like I was not as flexible in being able to do so. In my mind at least part of being a Chemist is that you can be called on to react to some event with a chemical that you know to aid the station, which requires you to know many various chemicals that could be useful and produce them in a somewhat timely manner. If it takes you 15-20 minutes to synthesize a chemical, then you will probably have missed whatever event could have required your aid. But the time constraint might just be me sucking at producing chems which would be fair to the scenario.

[colossusqw]

I've had some more time to think about these changes, and IMO, the main thing i've come to conclude from them is:

- Yes, making chems is a part of the fun, but it's combining them in interesting ways, and showing them off in funny bits and actually using them as a way to INTERACT with people that is the biggest part of chemistry.

- The change in time requirements to actually make fun and interesting drugs or assorted chems you can use to RP/just mess around with is severely limited by how much the work load for the average scientist went up, and to very reduced returns.

- Complex and interesting recipes are NOT the problem here, as previously stated, they are part of the fun, but a chemist that spends the whole round in the chem lab is a chemist that is not interacting with the station at all.
(If examples are needed, compare sulfonal to ether, making one requires minutes of staring at a barrel for oil, then more so for acetone, and finally just adding the final components, another is ether, is much more dangerous to produce, and requires attention, but if done properly can be produced much faster. One requires attention and can go off explosively if messed up, and the other just requires a whole lot of time not really doing anything.)


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THERE IS A LOT OF GOOD: I'm not saying the rework is bad, far from it, i think it opens up a lot of potential interesting interactions, but i do think it at least in part, misunderstands the draw of chem to a lot of players. Lab time should be fun, but it shouldn't be the majority of a player's round. Looking at a lot of new interactions, like sulfuric acid or the new cyanide off-gassing, it has definitely achieved a lot in making the chemlab more dynamic in this goonstation styled, chaotic, fast-ish paced way.

DYNAMIC VS TIME CONSUMING: There is a lot of room for things to go sideways in the lab(explosions, fires, smoke leaks, whatever crazy things we can come up with), and that's good, it makes for an interesting experience, and that feels like the most promissing path to creating a fun and engaging lab game loop without consuming most of a player's round.

INTERACTIVITY: Having to be careful not to mix TOO much of that one chem in the mix else it's gonna melt your face is fun, waiting for 20 minutes for the precursor to finish cooking really isn't. Actually being able to go out in the hallway and set up your little chemist tent to sell turbo-caffeine-meth is great fun and actually engaging to everyone else, a 15 person round feeling like 8 pop because the scientists are all holed up trying to make pent that's probably not gonna be used really isn't.


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I hope this hasn't been TOO negative overall. I really like the core of the rework, thank you for coming to my TedTalk.