Dye/Food Coloring

[Nnystyxx]

So I got to thinking about soda, like I often do, because it's a surprising vector for hilarity. Somebody suggested the idea of dyes for said soda, and I got to thinking about those instead.

A big part of modern chemistry, and natural artistry, is dye: substances made out of natural crushed up stuff, or made from spooky chemicals. What I propose, then, is that we add a variety of mostly-harmless dyes. Dyes would essentially act as a combination of paint and an inert chemical. 

How would they be made? Well, there's a few interpretations one could take:

1. Add them to botany. I don't like this one much because it'd either add way too many new plants, or fuck up existing plants by adding a bunch of reagents to them. This could maybe be solved with another machine specifically for extracting dyes, but you'd have to add cases for all the different plants.
   
2. Make them their own, discrete chem recipes. Could work, but is a lot of overhead, might lead to people stealing the acetone even more, and would likely take a lot of annoying research to be realistic and would clog up potential future recipes.
   
3. Add some sort of 'dye-ifier' chemical that, combined with other chemicals, removes their properties, purifies their color, and turns them into inert dyes. I like this one the most, because if you really want them to, rare dyes could come from rareish chems, and the idea of Nanotrasen discovering a chemical that sucks the chemical-ness out of things and makes pure color-liquids is hilarious to me. (NO SECRET CHEMS OR I WILL FART ON YOU IN EVERY GAME AFTERWARDS)
   

PROPOSED COLORS AND HOW THEY MIGHT BE MADE

• Syndicate Red: Blood or tomato juice.
  
• Solarium Orange: Uhh. Uhhhhh? Pizza?
  
• Triplepiss Yellow: Piss. Lemon juice.
  
• Mutagen Green: Unstable mutagen. Lime juice.
  
• "Water" Blue: Water/holy water.
  
• Cryostylane Puddle Indigo: Cryostylane/cryoxadone. Blueberry juice or something.
  
• Void Violet: What the hell is even purple? EDIT: PLASMA I'M DUMB THANKS CIRRIAL
  
• Pinke: Teporone? I dunno. Probably not teporone.
  
• Theoretically White: Sugar.
  
• Space Black: Welding fuel.
  
• Forbidden Brown: Compost.
  
• And maybe even more!!!
  

MECHANICAL CHANGES
- Add dyes. Dyes:
    - Color items and mobs when applied; higher splashed doses are needed to color a spaceman. This prevents someone immediately fucking everything up with colorful hellfoam. Do not color turfs except in prohibitively high doses if at all.
    - Are removed by water. Take a shower, dip your stuff in a puddle, wash it off in a sink, etc. and you're good.
    - May be mildly flammable, increasing your burn time if you are currently covered in the stuff.
    - Probably do not mix their colors because it would look nasty and disastrous.

- Possibly add an alternate Colorful Reagent recipe made from combining all the colors. For when there is just no cryoxadone anywhere.

MAP CHANGES
Add a box of a few food colorings to the kitchen, so the chef can make Fiery Red Hell Omelettes.

DESIGN RATIONALES

• Dyeing a burger makes it better. Pretty Patties, my dudes.
  
• Paint is fun, but also annoying as hell. What about paint that is less bad?
  
• Make your white jumpsuit more distinct with some dye. Steal the surgical scrubs and start a gang.
  
• Dye your white gloves yellow and leave them lying around to annoy people.
  
• Mixing dye into your custom sodas lets you color them how you want, not just how the deadly neurotoxin inside is colored.
  
• Fill a bathtub with Discount Dan's Discount Dyes. Get in. Turn green. Get hives because you bathed in industrial runoff marketed as food coloring.
  
• Dye smoke grenades allow you to fill the air with hideous colored smoke and make people think they've been attacked with hellchems when they actually just turned green. then come the hives
  
• Fill water balloons with dye! Mark who got hit in your water balloon war and who hit them based on the color they've turned. Bathrooms are respawn points.
  
• Color the pool with something that won't kill people for once!
  
• Could be used for some other stuff like paintballs later?
  

[Cirrial]

What the hell is even purple

It starts with "p" and ends in "lasma".

[cyberTripping]

This is missing Staff Assistant Grey, maybe made with ash or something.

other than that, yes nnystyxx good idea

[Frank_Stein]

Dump some in a washing machine along with multiple items and run it to mass dye things

[babayetu83]

im dyeing to see this implemented

better yet instead of chems why not just have this tied into botany completely? just mush up vegetables and have them serve as dyes (watermelon could be pink/green, peanuts & wheat for brown, rice for white, apples for green, oranges for, you guessed it, orange, tomatos for red, etc)

[poland spring]

Yeah I'm all in favor of giving cool stuff to a department BESIDES CHEMISTRY. Let Botany have this please

[Sundance]

Yeah I'd be up for making this botany exclusive.

[Nnystyxx]

I have listened to this and actually agree wholeheartedly that it would be a Good Botany Thing. My only concern about Botany: where the fuck are you going to get cyan/blue dyes? & also grey, depending. You could make chilly peppers, but it would increase the scarcity of blue dye considerably.

Red: Tomaties.
Orange: Oranges, onions?
Yellow: Banans, lemons.
Green: Limes, green apples.
Cyan: What???
Blue: WHAT
Purple: Eggplant
Pink: Graaaapes? (Ours are very pink)
White: Rice, Garlic
Grey: ???
Brown: Coconut, Peanut, Coffee
Black: ???

Rainbow Melons should be able to be made into a dye that makes items cycle through the rainbow.

EDIT: You could use the juicer in the Bar backroom as a sprite, but it's pretty blurry

[Frank_Stein]

How about mixing dyes to get different colors?

[Nnystyxx]

How about mixing dyes to get different colors?

That could work. I'm still baffled on where to get magenta or cyan in botany, though.

[Mordent]

Ignoring the fact that I don't think this idea is a good one (it's a whole new system for what amounts to temporary colorful reagent/paint), contusine () for magenta, asomna () for cyan (close enough). Make commol () your yellow and now you have a reason to grow herbs other than weed.

[Frank_Stein]

And bleach makes it white. Bam! You've got laundry dyes

[Vitatroll]

im dyeing

[Sundance]

Ignoring the fact that I don't think this idea is a good one (it's a whole new system for what amounts to temporary colorful reagent/paint), contusine () for magenta, asomna () for cyan (close enough). Make commol () your yellow and now you have a reason to grow herbs other than weed.

I understand your point mordent regarding a whole new system isn't a good idea for something so trivial, which is why this might be better as a specialized chem extractor. Just so i'm clear: A dye vat could work exactly like the distillery. Put in herb/plant -> Get unique chem. I hate using chemistry as a backbone to many things, but in this case it kind of makes the most sense. If you don't want to make it a seperate device, using the distillery isn't so bad, but new things are nice all the same.

There is three problems with coloring stuff in its current iteration:

1) Colorful reagent is completely random. It's great if you want to rainbow stuff, but as far as being actually aesthetically functional, it's pretty useless.
2) Painting cans and hairdyes work off a totally different system. Hairdyes seem a bit legacy code-ish and I'd understand leaving that be, but paint cans would really benefit from being chem based for future use.
3) Paintcans leave a lot to be desired. You receive them randomly when ordered, one paint can covers about 5 tiles, and paint is impossible to get off if you get it on you, essentially targeting you (in a game that's kinda stealthy, this sucks and makes paint an annoyance rather than it's proper function)

I dunno, making paints/dyes work off a system suggested where you produce magenta, yellow and cyan, where 10 units magenta to 10 units yellow makes red, and then tying this up with botany, I think is a solid suggestion.

[poland spring]

also we can't dye individual pieces of clothing in ways that show up on our avatars and that sucks ass