Dye/Food Coloring

[Mordent]

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

Good news, you can! Paint just that item (click it, not you). If you're wearing it at the time you probably need to unequip then re-equip it to see the effect.

...other stuff...

My issue with the implementation as distinct dye/pigment/whatever chems is that this could easily add a dozen or two new yet incredibly niche chems (black, dark grey, grey, light grey, white, dark red, red, light red, dark orange, orange, light orange, dark yellow, yellow, light yellow, dark green, green, light green, dark cyan, cyan, light cyan, dark blue, blue, light blue, dark purple, purple, light purple, dark indigo, indigo, light indigo). That list is 29 distinct colors. Yes, we could strip a few of them out, but hopefully you get my point.

The idea of deriving the color based on other chems in the paint/dye you're using and limiting it to the base three colors + some sort of whitener does keep the chem bloat down, but this sounds like a decent amount of complexity. It means when you splash some on someone, we'd need to check what else you're splashing them with in order to derive the resultant color. I'm not sure that's feasible in our current implementation. Is there any other chem anyone can think of that does that?

I am typically strongly against adding an alternative way to color something (in addition to paint), rather than making paint fit your need instead.

Paint in its current implementation is not suitable as a chem because, let's be honest, the amount of people who would foam/smoke it would be bananas; my understanding is having access to paint at all was the reason the paint dispenser was "broken" by default, let alone letting it be able to be applied as an area-of-effect.

My counter-proposal:

• Make "pigment" a chem.
  
• Make its paint effect only apply if at least a certain amount is used (5? 10?) in order to stop you using a single can and diluting it indefinitely.
  
• Make acetone have a touch reaction to reset someone's color var (however they got it).
  
• Make space cleaner have a touch reaction that has a chance of resetting someone's color var (means the janitor's life isn't living hell... more than it currently is, anyway).
  
• Make mixing colors of pigment able to be achieved in the expected way (so each pool of pigment reagent would have a pigment_color var associated with it that determines what color things painted with it become and what happens when you mix it with another load of pigment - weighted by amount, of course).
  
• Change paint cans to effectively be reskinned beakers with a few tweaks (different flavor text on "splashing" something, only behavior is to apply 10u rather than the whole can) that come loaded with an amount of the right-colored pigment.
  
• Have some special behavior for brewing and/or extracting the above herbs to get the CMY pigments. I'm a little unsure as to how to lighten/darken it, will come back to this after lunch.