The Chef's Dispenser, & interdepartmental collaboration

[Lord_earthfire]

However, I don't think doing things like making the chef dispenser or botanical mister orderable from Cargo would accomplish that. The chef dispenser being orderable from Cargo falls under the same low-value interdepartmental interaction that asking Botany for these chems would be-- the only difference is that instead of weighing the cost to Botany's time and space against the potential benefit, you're weighing the cost to Engineering's time and budget. Sure, you don't know how Cargo's doing, maybe they can afford your order, maybe they can't...

It's litterally cargo's job to get your dispenser, if you want it, though. Most often doing a requisition for them does the job plenty of time.

I think the problems are twofold, though.

Firstly, we don't got a culture which promotes doing your job. On other servers, you run into the risk of being jelled at by your respectable head, get demoted or heck, even get into problems with the admins.

Secondly, and i think this is more important, the departments working with each other is very often one-directional.
* Botanists don't need anything from the chef and bartender AND they got enough chems for everything except the min-maxxing.
* Chemists don't need anything from medbay or engineering
* Engineering got enough materials at rounnd start to not bother with anyones gimmicks

Let's look at examples that have two-sided interactions:
* Selling artifacts to cargo grants artsci more artifacts to research
* Cargo doing requisitions enables them to split profits

And now let's look at interactions that work because a head exists:
* The CE can very much walk into cargo and mining to supply engineering (or do it themselves)

But it's no big deal either way, because of what I mentioned in the original post about mechanical incentives. As it is, the chef dispenser is not that mechanically impactful-- that's why it's in QoL and not something like balance. Chems in catering almost always affect... Like, the color of the food, or the flavor, which is a SINGLE WORD in the chatlog. Is that really worth draining thousands from the cargo budget? Heck no.

Well, firstly, it could be debated why these "flavor chems" exist in the first place... i still don't see why we have chocolate milk with both milk and chocolate existing. But that would go off-topic.

Secondly, you may have forgot that the kitchen dispenser got stuff like salt (wraiths?). Access to chems has always mechanical implications, even if they are small.