Chemistry nerfs

[Frank_Stein]

I think chemicals shouldn't be so portable - carrying around a full beaker of FS acid in your pocket in real life would be fatal. Beakers maybe should splash some contents over you and the floor if you slip or sprint? Even if in your bag/pocket. I'd suggest all acids should slowly corrode the beaker (not as flavour text but if you make FS/HCL acid then you have maybe 2-3 mins before the beaker is gone and the entire contents is dumped over you applying touch).

Maybe some little tube sized containers that can safely be capped. Make mixing on site more of a requirement

[TDHooligan]

After some discussion about Chem groups recently I sat down and tried something a little different a while ago.  Instead of entering a lit of chems for the machine to output, instead your hit the record button.  It will then keep track of all the reagents and amounts that are dispensed, which can then be saved as a chem group.  This removes the copy/paste aspect while allowing more flexibility with the order of reagents being added as this could allow for duplicates.  This mostly removes the copy/pasta aspect as you must manually enter it at least once before saving it.

Following Cal's suggestion a number of Chem Groups could come loaded on the dispenser at round start.

Demo:
https://streamable.com/t3dwf2

i personally prefer the idea of keeping copy pastable groups - This recording will add like a two minute step that will actually make the problem even worse, as players can now just write down a list and make even more advanced copy paste mixes that aren't held back by reaction order.

The ultimate issue with chemgroups is that a lot of very powerful chems match the following criteria:
a. They do not require anything outside of the dispenser, or maybe need a couple units of welding fuel once
b. They do not require any heating
c. There are few reactions that actually get in the way of very complicated, huge mixes.

even with chemgroups, at this point i can make a phlog deathmix almost instantly - but if i want thermite, i actually have to spend time & effort.

My personal suggestion is to make murder chems require a larger amount of effort. namely, add heating steps to more recipes. touching chemgroups won't fix the issue as a lot of these can still just be fine.

all these other suggestions of messing up chemistry won't fix the problem, they'll just make it so every person who isn't nerdy enough to invest in chemgroups now has to suffer the anti-chemgroup chemistry changes without the benefit of chemgroups.

[amylizzle]

I like it. I kinda hate that the optimal way to do chemistry is to have Egg's list open and just copy/paste things when needed.

One minor request while we're here: Make the recipes portable. I'd love to be able to save them onto a disk and copy them to another dispenser, so my fellow chemnerds can make meth real fast too.

[Lord_earthfire]

Since this thread got necroed

i personally prefer the idea of keeping copy pastable groups - This recording will add like a two minute step that will actually make the problem even worse, as players can now just write down a list and make even more advanced copy paste mixes that aren't held back by reaction order.

The ultimate issue with chemgroups is that a lot of very powerful chems match the following criteria:
a. They do not require anything outside of the dispenser, or maybe need a couple units of welding fuel once
b. They do not require any heating
c. There are few reactions that actually get in the way of very complicated, huge mixes.

even with chemgroups, at this point i can make a phlog deathmix almost instantly - but if i want thermite, i actually have to spend time & effort.

My personal suggestion is to make murder chems require a larger amount of effort. namely, add heating steps to more recipes. touching chemgroups won't fix the issue as a lot of these can still just be fine.

all these other suggestions of messing up chemistry won't fix the problem, they'll just make it so every person who isn't nerdy enough to invest in chemgroups now has to suffer the anti-chemgroup chemistry changes without the benefit of chemgroups.

Overall agree with this assessment. We need more things to take care of with chem mixes besides the recipe and the sourcing of the chems.

In particular, i think the reaction temperature needs to be much more important.
I'm thinking about exothermic/endothermic reactions and side reactions that can destroy your chems if you overheat them (eg. Through the reaction itself).

Maybe even a system which utilizes other chems as well. Like stabilizer got a kinda poor role to just make some reactions not explode immediately.

[mralexs]

Maybe add some chems require the usage of a centrifuge or mixer to be mixed? Also some chems should require an electric current running through them to work as well

[LeahTheTech]

One minor request while we're here: Make the recipes portable. I'd love to be able to save them onto a disk and copy them to another dispenser, so my fellow chemnerds can make meth real fast too.

This kind of already exists since you can save chemgroups to IDs.

[Dandiiion]

Old man here asking people to please stop nerfing all the things I love. The thing being Chem Groups this time. Also adding 20 steps to basic chemical making operations is very lame.

[LeahTheTech]

Personally I'm somewhat against this, as it really doesn't do much to address the problem of being able to make so many powerful mixes straight from a chem dispenser other than making it take 2 minutes of busywork rather than 10 seconds of copy paste.
Nerds are still going to make the same awful pitcher bombs and anyone who just wants to make pentetic acid as a busy medic is going to suffer.

[tamakona]

some people have already made excellent points with more direct relevancy to the experience of chemistry itself, so i won't give my own two cents on that. but i would like to take this discussion as an opportunity to put my own thoughts on how changes as a whole are handled on goon.

i've recently had this feeling that an increasing amount of gameplay changes are not quite made with the idea of "fun" in mind. in this particular change, for example, i do not see how the extra layer of tedium really helps generate fun for anybody. sure it takes a bit more thinking and time to mass produce chems, but the extra 2 minutes to set up the group isn't gonna stop the mad scientist from mass producing whatever death chem they had in mind. and it certainly won't do much to get in the way of the odds that some innocent spessman is gonna die to it. it's just....more work for the scientist. if anything youre just putting more work on chemistry in general, and having to wait longer as a non-scientist needing a few extra beakers of whatever substances for your job is gonna be less appealing now. the way i see it, it's an overall net loss of fun for everyone involved.

i'm not gonna get into detail with other examples cause i know some people are tired of me talking about them, but i believe my point is clear. i dont think "slapping mindless extra steps onto the op thing" is a wise gameplay design solution for a sandbox game. especially when it doesn't fix the specific problem, it just makes the whole department slowly but surely a more unfun thing to do. now i don't think this particular change is gonna break chemistry or make it unplayable or anything, i just want to point out that i feel like the change was not made with the right mindset, and if changes like these keep being made, slowly but surely, goon ss13 will become a very boring game with over half the game mechanics inaccessible in a 90 minute shift.

[Nerkson]

Azrun - a good PR change, but perhaps I'm not fully sure on a few details.

I'm going to make two core assumptions here:

1. This PR is designed to slow down the rate of making chemicals and stop copy-paste sheets, and
2. This PR is mostly done to help affect Classic Servers, though it will inevitably trickle-affect the RP servers.

Regarding point 1: Science is in a bit of a weird place now. I made a comment elsewhere that Medical, Engineering, Quartermasters, and Security play a massive role in keeping the station running even when there are no antags. People get hurt on the job so they go to medical. Quartermasters make money and can order nearly anything with it, and people want things. Engineers fix the station, add quality of life items like teleporters, and largely repairing it during accidents. Security acts as a sort of mediator on events and to mete out justice when rules are broken.

Science, by and large, doesn't do anything meaningful to the station by default. If every other role *but* science was picked, nothing would change. Even science things, like the teleporter consoles, are freely open to every job role. It's a wonder that people start out science wanting to do good and be a helping hand, and then just devolve into making more horrifically potent death mixes and overdosing on meth/cyanide before blowing the department up from a watercooler filled with black powder that was carelessly left next to a heater after the previous breach.

Chemistry is the department where you mix chemicals and create things no one has ever seen before, and yet Medical has their own science area called the Pharmacy that does everything science does (even the bar has a chemical mixer!), and even botany can make fruits and veggies that create a frankly absurd level of chemicals themselves.

The Chemicompiler, unique to science, is another "copy paste" machine that is a joke. There are probably only a handful of people here who are capable of creating Brainfuck code without the aid of third party sites or copy paste lists, and it is arguably the most powerful machine in science's toolkit. And no one uses it.

This change doesn't aim to fix those issues and wasn't intended to fix those issues, I agree. It won't be the hay needle that breaks the camels back either. It just feels a tad excessive in light of everything else with the department.

Want to balance it out? I have a few ideas.

1. Give the Science chem dispensers unique chemicals that the bar and medical bay don't have access to. Welding fuel, Oil, maybe some possibility for new chemicals down the road- something that lets science have a specific niche that would actually make people want to go there for specific chems.

2. Floppy disks - have a drawer with floppy disks that have pre-made groups of chems on it. Let people swap 'em in and out. Trade them like pokemon cards, discover them in the wild. Create their own floppy disks. (Heck, I even had the idea of a series of small encounter rooms that are randomly generated every map start that telescience can access to quickly smash and grab stuff, and disks could be rewards from that, but one thing at a time.)

3. Combine the Chemi-compiler with the science chemistry dispensers. We're already mostly there, could multiple beaker prompts and more buttons for "Do X, then Y, then Z" be added? The recording feature is actually powerful if we can get more prompts added to it.

[DioChasek]

Couple thoughts.

Chemistry can be a pain point for new players, making it more painful with multiple steps to do anything useful is not exactly desirable in my eyes.

Similar point having to learn an entire coding language to use a piece of equipment is also bogus, especially a pain in the ass coding language like brainfuck.

Long story short, hurting new players progress to impede problem players being problem players, is not the solution I would look for.

[TwoBraids]

Long story short, hurting new players progress to impede problem players being problem players, is not the solution I would look for.

Agree with this. When I was new to chemistry I made everything by scratch anyways. But doing anything that was even slightly complicated was unfun for me to do by hand so I started making basic chem groups that I still use today for certain things. The font is small and looking back and forth between the wiki is not fun. Using chems is fun. For most, making them is not when it is a tedious process and punishing everyone because of a few recipes are being misused seems unfair.

Like others have said, why not tweak how some problem recipes work so it requires more steps like real chemistry does? You shouldn't be able to turn the chem heater up to maximum and have most chems just be ok with being 1000C for example. Even adding things like, you need beaker tongs to take hot beakers out of the heater without burning yourself could add little time buffers to make things take longer. Things like that would be more interesting and add small things, not take away.

And even some recipes, if followed wrong, like Egg's meth recipe... well, 90% of the fires in medbay's pharmacy I see are caused by people not doing that recipe correctly. Some players actually think it doesn't work because they are doing one thing wrong out of laziness.

Add more heating and specific mixing requirements if you want to gatekeep certain chems, but please do not make me waste 20 minutes not RPing on a round just staring at a chem screen and pressing buttons. It is not fun and would make my gameplay experience worse.

And in the end, even if a system that makes it worse for everyone comes out, people who do want to speed run death chems will find a way with a new system.

[Kotlol]

We can also just make science a white list only job to hinder bad actors.. or atleast have x amount of rounds.

I actually did science as one of MY LAST JOBS to try out next to mechanics.
As they were the most complex. But it turns out Mechanics isn't as extreme as I thought....

But all of science is ULTRA COMPLEX! The easiest being artifact science...but the interacting with every device at the start is very complex and tedious.
Either via the doodad or the complex and annoying DWAINE.

So if you fear people will just log to get death chems.. just like science behind like 5 shifts? Or more? I mean captain is locked behind 20.

[Washbasin]

The average, very very new player has no goddamn idea how to make styptic and even less idea how to make a chemgroup. Pre loaded chemicals are fine.

I think that freely giving out a button which magically makes styptic lessens the need for players to learn how to actually make styptic on their own, or in that same vein, make their own chemgroups.

On the other hand, I would be totally down for something like a recipe guide which new players can follow to actually use the machine without this.

If we are going to aim for pre-loaded chems in the future, (since that appears the direction you're aiming to take) then it might just be better to have dedicated dispensers similar and lesser to what pod wars has, and remove the basic chem dispensers entirely; Add ones entirely devoted to basic medicines without the capability for chemistry.

There are already some notes in this thread about how science is largely uncontributing to the rest of the station, and setting up a system which puts them into a position to contribute could stem this.

Chemistry would be responsible for advanced chems, and medbay could carry on as normal, but now tied to research.

Additionally, should chemistry fail to come through, we can always have an advanced medicines crate available at cargo for order.

But these are just my initial thoughts. I think some other options around this idea should be fully explored beyond just nerfing or buffing.

[DioChasek]

A thought I had was give qm’s a new flipping category medical chems covering patch, ampule,bottle, pills, and syringe of medical chems. And to really drive home a purpose for chemistry make the base prices on it really juicy.
On a related note is artifacts need to sell for way more than they currently do in cargo.

If we really wanted to nerf chemistry ( I do not like this following idea entirely because Of a litany of reasons) chem dispensers could start having a maximum supply of chemicals they can make before being reloaded.