Goonhub
12-18-2022, 06:40 PM
Hey all! I typically play botanist, and I've familiarized myself a good deal with the Reagent Extractor. It's a very handy tool indeed, and I'm glad that botany has it in-house (rather than having to, say, truck all the way over to the Science Department to extract anything).
That said, I think the "Isolate" and "Purge" functions are a little strange. Sure, they work as intended - they let you get rid of or purify certain chemicals with ease. But often times it's a very wasteful process. If I extract a plant with several useful chems in it and I want only one for, say, a patch or a chemical bottle, you have to get rid of all of the other chems in the container. This gets even worse if you make a useful spliced plant with a bunch of chems for the sake of tray economy, since there could be many unique chemical per piece of produce, but if you want to isolate a single chemical out of several useful chems, you'll have to get rid of all the others. It kinda feels...unnecessary, I don't know.
What I'd propose is that you could use the ability to select the other chem reservoirs in the Reagent Extractor to redirect the chems that you're getting rid of by either isolating or purging, instead of sending them to the ethereal plane. That way, you don't have to waste them if you don't want to.
I'll explain with an example: let's say you have Black Venne in the Reagent Extractor, and your have two empty holding tanks and an empty beaker inserted. You select the beaker and extract both atropine and charcoal into it. You want the atropine because it's a great crit medication, but the charcoal is useful, too, and you don't feel like throwing it away. So you then select the first holding tank as your target and click "purge" on the charcoal that's in your inserted beaker. Instead of vanishing, the charcoal in the beaker gets sent to the holding tank, and the beaker is left with pure atropine. You could also do this the other way around by selecting "Isolate" on the atropine in the beaker, which would eject the charcoal into the holding tank of your choosing. If you had Lifeweed instead, isolating the omnizine would send both the CBD and THC to the selected holding tank. If you did want to get rid of something, you could keep the container you're purging/isolating from selected, and the operations would work as they do now, getting rid of one or all but one of the chemicals in the container respectively.
This could be especially useful for situations where you accidentally extract something valuable into a pool of another also-valuable chemical, like extracting lifeweed into your holding tank of 300u of Space Fungus, or extracting more than one drug at a time out of your Omega Weed leaves. It'd also allow for easier use of the Reagent extractor for mixing chemicals, which I'd imagine would be the only reason why this change wouldn't be implemented (in case you're really hell-bent on keeping droppers relevant).
Even with that acknowledged, I don't think this change would be terribly game-breaking, moreso a small QoL thing. As a botanist, you can generally extract more of your desired chemicals just by growing more plants, which takes some time and effort but otherwise isn't too difficult, and equipment for mixing drugs is not hard to come by. (Sometimes, you can even find mechanical droppers in botany.) But being able to save some of the other chemicals that are present in your plants (looking at you, Dawning Venne!) would prevent a lot of waste and save some time. It's admittedly a niche change, but I'd welcome it.
But who knows, maybe there's another good reason not to add this that I haven't thought of. That or there's some other way to save the chemicals you extract that I'm not aware of. Tell me what you think!
That said, I think the "Isolate" and "Purge" functions are a little strange. Sure, they work as intended - they let you get rid of or purify certain chemicals with ease. But often times it's a very wasteful process. If I extract a plant with several useful chems in it and I want only one for, say, a patch or a chemical bottle, you have to get rid of all of the other chems in the container. This gets even worse if you make a useful spliced plant with a bunch of chems for the sake of tray economy, since there could be many unique chemical per piece of produce, but if you want to isolate a single chemical out of several useful chems, you'll have to get rid of all the others. It kinda feels...unnecessary, I don't know.
What I'd propose is that you could use the ability to select the other chem reservoirs in the Reagent Extractor to redirect the chems that you're getting rid of by either isolating or purging, instead of sending them to the ethereal plane. That way, you don't have to waste them if you don't want to.
I'll explain with an example: let's say you have Black Venne in the Reagent Extractor, and your have two empty holding tanks and an empty beaker inserted. You select the beaker and extract both atropine and charcoal into it. You want the atropine because it's a great crit medication, but the charcoal is useful, too, and you don't feel like throwing it away. So you then select the first holding tank as your target and click "purge" on the charcoal that's in your inserted beaker. Instead of vanishing, the charcoal in the beaker gets sent to the holding tank, and the beaker is left with pure atropine. You could also do this the other way around by selecting "Isolate" on the atropine in the beaker, which would eject the charcoal into the holding tank of your choosing. If you had Lifeweed instead, isolating the omnizine would send both the CBD and THC to the selected holding tank. If you did want to get rid of something, you could keep the container you're purging/isolating from selected, and the operations would work as they do now, getting rid of one or all but one of the chemicals in the container respectively.
This could be especially useful for situations where you accidentally extract something valuable into a pool of another also-valuable chemical, like extracting lifeweed into your holding tank of 300u of Space Fungus, or extracting more than one drug at a time out of your Omega Weed leaves. It'd also allow for easier use of the Reagent extractor for mixing chemicals, which I'd imagine would be the only reason why this change wouldn't be implemented (in case you're really hell-bent on keeping droppers relevant).
Even with that acknowledged, I don't think this change would be terribly game-breaking, moreso a small QoL thing. As a botanist, you can generally extract more of your desired chemicals just by growing more plants, which takes some time and effort but otherwise isn't too difficult, and equipment for mixing drugs is not hard to come by. (Sometimes, you can even find mechanical droppers in botany.) But being able to save some of the other chemicals that are present in your plants (looking at you, Dawning Venne!) would prevent a lot of waste and save some time. It's admittedly a niche change, but I'd welcome it.
But who knows, maybe there's another good reason not to add this that I haven't thought of. That or there's some other way to save the chemicals you extract that I'm not aware of. Tell me what you think!