MedSci discussion

[Lord_earthfire]

I think chem requests have gone down as there are rarely chemists willing and able to fulfill them.

IMO the chem skill floor is way, way, way too high atm. and the ceiling is dropped down as of the rework.
The only reason most experienced chemists get shit done is because they know exactly what they're making, and they make it.

On the other hand, newbies meandering around with chemistry are tasked with creating some incredibly slow, boring reactions. So they don't do them. So they never learn, which is why we're seeing the same names single handedly making pent/perf A Thing, and why they the chem rework barely impacted them.


If you're too new to know that oil can be heated, fucking up your oil is punishable by waiting for a literal 20 minutes. There's a tedium making everything you do for others even slower (cooling shit down again. waiting for acetone, waiting for diethylamine, waiting for oil, waiting for sulfuric.)
A lot of these recipes require 4 things you wait for. And a lot of these things have noob traps built into them.

Now, you're trying to figure out what cool things go boom (not many) so you're scouring the wiki, making Phlog, whatever. And someone asks you to do a 12-step reaction? It's clear as day why chemists blank medbay. They're likely trying to do the most basic stuff.

You're vastly overestimating the difficulty of the new reactions. In fact, i would say the rework decreased it for some chemicals, most notable pentetic acid.

Most of chem's skill floor comes from remembering multiple indrigients and hiw to make them. This means that once you cut down on indrigients, you cut down on the complexity by a lot.

Or, differently speaking, you need to have the wiki open when playing chemistry. This is the big hurdle beginners fail on. If a reaction takes time or is instant hardly matters.

The problem with people playing chemistry only is the same reason people don't often play rancher. Or geneticist. It is a job where you stay in your department all shift. But in contrast to ranching and genetics, people don't come to you because they got a multitude of ways to make what they need themselves. It's simply unrewarding. Especially with medical chems, where you are only asked for 3 things: synthflesh, perf and pent.

SS13 is a game where people need to learn complex systems. And ot is proven tine to tine afain it works. Heck, /tg chemist is played by people, simply because it, as a job, is mire rewarding.