[MERGED PR] Chemical production rework

[junori]

im not good at articulating my thoughts but heres my thoughts on the changes so far, after playing a round or two. i think its alright! its refreshing, different, but there are a lot of things that also *arent* fun from your average player that aren't chemnerds.

firstly, I do feel it was made overly complicated for the SAKE of making it take longer, and increasing the time it takes doesn't necessarily increase the engagement that you're looking for. i do not feel engaged while i sit for 5 minutes waiting for my diethylamine to cook. its boring, it will get repetitive soon, and we will run into the same issue again. maybe its just diethylamine that made me feel this way, though, since oil wasn't particularly painful- still just... a bit frustratingly boring

secondly, i hate photophosphide. its not fun to make, its not fun to store, its just not fun. i feel like chemistry would be perfectly fine without it, and it brings nothing of importance to this update or any recipes. i. never want to have to work with it again, after seeing the RD turn on the lights to my photophosphide chamber and have all of it explode into nothing. its just a downright bad addition, no need to sugarcoat it, considering there will ALWAYS be that guy that turns on the lights

gas masks also do not protect you from cyanide clouds. lids prevent this, but you still need to un-lid the cyanide to pour it into things. i think you see the issue with this.

i also agree with Gamebot, that having acetone and phenol have the same reaction is weird. i like how it was done with salicylic/salbutamol, perhaps it could be like that?

chem should start with a condenser so i dont have to wait for miners to get molitz... i haven't used it *yet* but i can see the use for it, and generally i think its a good addition

overall, its okay. im VERY very mixed on this update, as it just makes The Average Space Experience more difficult, and not more fun or engaging like it seems like you were looking for. i would rather just not have the chemicals than have to make them at this rate, which i feel is defeating the purpose. HOWEVER. with tweaks (COUGH) (REMOVING PHOTOPHOSPHIDE) (COUGH) it would be a lot better and a less tedious of a journey.

[Garash]

This point preceedes the rework, but applies more with it.
I'm not a fan of the micromanagement in optimizing Reagent Heater/Coolers by overshooting. The machine /can/ heat stuff to 500 K in the blink of an eye by setting its target to 999. However, by setting the target to 500 it takes forever to get close to it. Would it be possible for the Heaters to be "smart" and overshoot the 500 K target in a way that gets the reagent /to/ 500k at speeds the machine is capable of doing without overshooting?

Another pre-rework point: The recording/stop button is super laggy, I... should look into that.

Thoughts: I wonder how much the byproduct smoke can be gamed with a vacuum

Nice to have: PR page should mention that Cyanide still has a 374 K point

[Splints]

> I'm not a fan of the micromanagement in optimizing Reagent Heater/Coolers by overshooting ...

Same and it isn't realistic with how most heaters work anyway. Real heaters will stay on until they reach the target temperature then toggle on and off to maintain it. It should take the same time to reach 500 K whether your target was 500 K or 1000 K. (At least things like ovens/stoves/irons/furnaces. If hot plates actually work differently my bad)

Edit: Actually, this is probably simulating a hot plate reaching the target temp instantly and the slow heating is due to the chemicals reaching the temperature gradually. So more realistic than I thought.

[Kotlol]

I finally thought of a thing to say about this rework.

And that is...
Chemistry should be both easy and hard.

Basicaly put, there needs to be room for both the "easy outcomes" and the "harder bigger pay off outcomes"
I'd like to put in the botany perspective.

Botany for example... you can grow and mutate easy crops.
But when you want to have maximum effect or certain plants, that's when you start injecting stuff, taking time, possibly splicing things for an interresting effect.
And at any chance... if you do it wrong... your result is SILCH.

With chemistry, this is what I think is also needed.
We all want to be the "Walter White" and make the purist and strongest Meth, but... in the end chemistry is already super complex and making it more complex and having to stand by doesn't help for accesiability.

We just need the easy way AKA "Mix chems and heat it easily" to get a result.
But the harder way by doing exact calculations, mixing, reactions and intense work on the chemistry, with any moment an explosion or something bad could happen.
Could make chemicals be more potent.

Imagine stypic powder that heals more then the average supply. That kinda stuff is what I think chemistry truely needs.
"Easy to learn, hard to master, with bigger pay offs"

[Garash]

Another pre-rework point: The recording/stop button is super laggy, I... should look into that.

Good lord it's so simple... Was gonna go to bed but uh, PR coming up.

edit: wowza https://github.com/goonstation/goonstation/pull/15659

[Lord_earthfire]

In general, from my tests, most recipes that got changes offers interesting mechanics. I especially appreciate the recipes that can be chained together, like steam and charcoal or styptic powder and hydrogen/water. The synthflesh postules are also just awesome. I also like mixing in satchels for the photo-explosive. I even found myself using cryostylane/oxygen to control reactions better, which is just awesome.

In particular, we lost precision and instead gained the ability for better bulk-chemistry of basic chemicals. This was highly sought after

My only gripe with the system, so far, is the acetone/phenol recipe. Oil got a low yield, if you go for acceptable reaction rates (~33% for me), but acetone/phenol are kinda important chems for most chems and the phenol/acetone recipe doesn't increase the rates at all. Especially that, without chemicompiler, you are essentially wasting 50% of your yield.

This makes most advanced chems rather cumbersome commodoties. It's not that this is necessarily bad, i personally don't think it is, but it feels a bit too much to a degree it feels bad to work with.

I feel like changing the recipe to something like:

1u oil + 3 welding + 0.1 chlorine -> 2 acetone + 2 phenol

Would go a long way to keep the high welding fuel-upkeep of the reaction while not slowing down chemistry far too much.

Besides that, i like most of the changes done to chemistry. Of course some stuff would play nice like the new glassware having 200u capacity instead of 100u, because there is not too much incentive to use it if you could just start multiple in-beaker reaction against one where you need to babysit your reaction due to low volume. But besides that i just love the changes.

These make chemistry a dangerous enviroment to work in, which i really, really missed.

[LeahTheTech]

Okay I've fixed the first batch of horrible bugs so far and changed the phenol recipe as suggested because the numbers were a little low.
I have an idea about making heaters work faster by fuelling them with toxins gasses but we'll see if that works out.

[colossusqw]

Ok, first of all, i have to say i love this in many levels, the systems are interesting and they provide some extra depth to chemistry past just pressing the buttons and memorizing recipes, and the possible ways in which things can go horribly wrong is fantastic.


With that out of the way, i feel a lot of the non-instant reactions are a bit *too* non-instant, and it makes a lot of chemical production, especially of some reagents that aren't touched much by the update, even harder than they already were. I've tried making half a barrel's worth of neurodepressant for instance, since it involves both large amounts of phenol and sulfuric acid, and found out that most of it is done through simply waiting by the barrels for about 45 minutes(possibly more). These time factors also seem like they would only be compounded by classic's shorter average round times.


As well as the possible balance implications(which i trust will be figured out in following PRs and discussions). I feel particularly worrisome that 10 small beakers will react 10 times as fast a single large beaker, similar to how one can weirdly stack potassium explosions across multiple beakers. I think a good step in keeping things a bit more expedient and consistent would be making the speed of reactions somehow tied to the size of containers(or initial amount of reacting chemicals) in many of the precursor production cases, since it would make sense for a lot of phenol precursors in a barrel to produce more bulk phenol in the same time as a bit of phenol precursors reacting in a beaker.


As for things i feel would be nice to have but aren't as immediate as what I've described:
- It feels a bit silly for chemistry's glassware to be able to store acids, yet be melted by their vapors.
- It would be interesting for there to be a heating pad that you don't have to annoy the artifact pals for.
- Later down the line, it would also be cool to look at different chemicals and their respective balancing, especially if their availability got altered in a big way, either considering changing recipes or general effectiveness.


In general, i like the possible fail cases and hazards it adds, but i fear these changes makes a lot of regular chemicals currently very time consuming to produce.

[Flaborized]

Changed sulfuric acid to not melt items at all, since you can use other acids for it and this makes the smoke generated from producing it much, *much* less annoying. Still burns and disfigures in high enough amounts of course, and not *healthy* to breathe in :eye:

[Ikea]

I think you should be able to feed pustules viscerite (make them like twice as effective as organs) for that good ol interdepartmental cooperation. Besides that all this stuff looks cool.

[Silent Majority]

...my main issue is medical has no access to any of this, some advanced medicines are now impossible for us to make.

Further while I guess I like the whole...idea of waiting in practice I usually want to do stuff. The new implementation has now added sitting around and waiting to part of the chem process, giant weird pulsating organs, and really seemed to just make something more..arcane and slow. Was people spending too little time in chemistry an issue? I don't know. It just..doesn't play well for me, and asking science for stuff is great. If there is any science, and they're in chemistry, and they feel like making it for you. Which is a lot of iffs.

Maybe if all the tools are added to medical but as-is this just, on my end, seems like a slight nerf to medical.

[Lord_earthfire]

...my main issue is medical has no access to any of this, some advanced medicines are now impossible for us to make.

I think that's a positive. This makes chemistry a more pronounced department. Pharmacy or the bar should not have all the possibilities of chemistry. And i saw certain MD's already shelling out tons of pentetic acid already, so it's still possible. It's just more cumbersome for non-chemistry, which is good to see.

In general, i like the possible fail cases and hazards it adds, but i fear these changes makes a lot of regular chemicals currently very time consuming to produce.

I think once this gets merged a few other recipes need a chsnge as well. This opens up the possibility for simpler, but more engaging recipes.

[TDHooligan]

other stuff i'd personally like to see:

Dropper funnel - Holds liquid and drips it into an attached container over time , lets you set its flow rate. Then you can use it to control reaction speeds in larger assemblies
Fractionating condenser? - could output to 1 or more beakers, allowing for isolation of things that have reacted (like Acetone/phenol) without the chemicompiler.

you could get some really interesting reaction setups with this & some math.

quick edit: also the condensers could be a bit smaller? even slightly-complicated concepts are insanely big

[Spoodle]

At first I was hesitant upon seeing a big chemistry change, but overall I really like this PR! My only real feedback is that it appears that pulsates can only be put into beakers and barrels. I’d like it if this were expanded to any container, so I could put a large pulsate into a hand-held fuel tank or water cooler, for instance

P.S. Also maybe make condensers able to be routed to any container?

[colossusqw]

Ok, a few extra things I've felt when playing as of late:

- Cyanide is both a bigger time commitment and more dangerous to make, as well as being more difficult to weaponize in general. It would be good to see either it becoming more easy to produce and manage, or having some of it's effects altered to reflect it's harder to produce state.
- Fuel tanks that look like they'd have lids don't have any, giving them simple screw/unscrew ones would help using them to store chemicals(considering most labs start with some as well, and they are used in flamethrowers).
- Smoke powder dissipates into nothingness when in a closed container, it would be interesting to have it build up pressure depending on temperature above 30c, and pop open lids or break more fragile containers, or at least not instantly disappear when the temperature is reached.