UPDATE: Xenochemistry (Roguelike chems + phrase building based chemistry)

[Frank_Stein]

i hate to be the person who derails the thread instantly but i had a thought:

if this were implemented and people thought it worked well, rebalance whats a "secret chem" and what isnt, and then put those behind the randomised chems somehow. Getting the best chems would require proper experimentation and be a bit of a fun timesink rather than the tedium of complex chemistry mixes, and it also would get rid of the weird power dynamic between turbo chemnerds and other folk. ALSO means that leaks wouldn't result in recipes being shuffled, preventing them from getting any more random and unintuitive.

That's what I had in mind, but figured people should have a chance to ease into it to see if they like it.

That's why I think it's important to have new chems to fiddle with, to increase people trying it out and to not mess with established methods

Chemical property tags is a great idea. What I would love to see with the new chems is them essentially representing an idea, and the things you mix with them modifying that idea

An example could be that there's a "Health" chem, and you could add a "Damage" chem to it to make a poison, but you could also add a "Restore" chem to it to make a health tonic. So you have a base and build off of it when doing mixes

I definitely agree that this is works best as some sort of sci-fi chem stuff without a real world basis