rework materials from the ground up

[Noah Buttes]

I'm just gonna say: We tried the "every chem does something to materials".
It doesn't work. There's to many chems. It's impossible to keep all of that stuff updated and even more impossible to give all chems different effects when applied to materials.

Was the main difficulty in actually coding the effects or in coming up with them?

There's far more chems than theres attributes on materials. There's only so many things you can do.
That aside, it became a massive pain to keep all the different effects on the chems updated and balanced.

Yikes, that does sound horrible.

Maybe the chemical effects could be limited to only the reagents that actually make metallurgical sense, i.e. acids, iron, carbon, oxygen, etc.

A few silly chems could be thrown in there too, I guess.