Making chemistry more user friendly

[Retrino]

This conversation was happening a little while ago in rp chat, basically discussing how chem recipes are kind of not user friendly to find when you don't know where to look. Your options are either read the wiki, or read the ingame books, the latter of which is very underused. Going through long lists of text isn't exactly everyone's forte (felt), so having a more interactive means of learning chemical recipes is the overall goal.

My idea was doing this via reagent scanners. This could possibly be as an upgrade to them, or just an inhand toggle on the base scanner. Scanning a beaker that contains a compound would break down the reagents used in the compound to be listed by the scanner while in that mode. So, in this way, bringing science a bottle of whatever medicine you'd like them to make more of would give the ingredients to them to replicate instead of going "I dunno how to make that" or heading to chems wiki.

It'd still have an element of experimentation, since some chemicals still require a heated temp, maybe needing heat could be indicated by the scan in some way? 

Either way, just seemed like a neat way to introduce ingame chem recipes being found outside of just the books.

(Also before the secret chems comments come in, they can just... be blacklisted. ez clap)

[Waffleloffle]

I think this is a fun foundation for sure, much better than having to pull yourself out of the game to look at the wiki

runs into a bit of trouble with regards to both "intermediate" chems (stuff you have to mix as a precursor in making something else, think cryoxadone for colorful reagent) and not working without a sample to work off of, but I can imagine there's probably some clever design solutions for both of those that could preserve in-round engagement

[Retrino]

True, something like colorful reagent could quickly get cluttered. The only suggestion I could think of in that regard would be having the other compounds within the chem lumped together to show it as its own group that would need to be made. Not sure how you would do that with the ui, but medscanners have pretty intricate readouts, so with some time I could probably think of a means to organize them

As a separate but conjoined idea with it, maybe having an option to show recipe of requested chems from the request console could also be helpful?

[babayetu83]

a secondary function for the science goggles could be that upon examining a chem it could tell you the recipe, or maybe list a few recipes in which it is an ingredient of

there's quite a few very obscure food-based chems for example like partially-hydrogenated soybean oil which you would never think to make on your own by combining hydrogen and soybean oil (from botany)

[Kotlol]

I always feel like when you find a chemical in a relic, you should be able to reverse engineer it somehow.

[Scaltra]

A friend of mine brought up an idea at one point for an in-game catalog of sorts (maybe like a chem records computer?) Where you could search for all sorts of chemicals that people ask for from the request thing or on your own time. It tells you what it is, how to make it etc. Stuff like secret chemicals could have redacted descriptions or something about them entirely. Could add all sorts of flavor with the text used in it as well as the descriptions of the chemical. 

Would be pretty nice to have an in-game catalog where a chemist can do what they would have done with Cntrl F on the chemicals page of the wiki. Plus some added NT research team/ NT management in-game flair.

[Glamurio]

A friend of mine brought up an idea at one point for an in-game catalog of sorts (maybe like a chem records computer?) Where you could search for all sorts of chemicals that people ask for from the request thing or on your own time. It tells you what it is, how to make it etc. Stuff like secret chemicals could have redacted descriptions or something about them entirely. Could add all sorts of flavor with the text used in it as well as the descriptions of the chemical. 

Would be pretty nice to have an in-game catalog where a chemist can do what they would have done with Cntrl F on the chemicals page of the wiki. Plus some added NT research team/ NT management in-game flair.

This is generally a good idea. Something like a wikipedia, but in-game instead. I love the wiki, honestly, without it I wouldn't have even felt comfortable getting into SS13, but there's something to be said about remembering the sheer volume of recipes in the game, every once in a while you are met with something that makes you go "hang on, how do I make that again?"

This honestly doubles for cooking as well, as it's pretty much the same principle. What springs to mind immediately is the little chicken chart that ranchers start with that have a diagram of which chickens to make in what way, something similar could surely be made with chemicals, not necessarily all of them, but a large amount. That's an easy visual guide to follow.