Chemistry component market

[colossusqw]

Chemistry is in a much healthier place right now, but since you can pretty much get infinite amounts of the simpler chemicals, and chemical stacking is always needed to be remembered when balancing things it leads to a lot of the current chemicals, balanced for the state of things years ago, and being only a click away from infinite amounts, to be exceptionally underwhelming, i was trying to think of a more interactive way to balance chemical components and their availability.

With this in mind, i thought of having the chemical requisitions console also work as a chemical market, where chemists can check for what companies need and bulk sell them beakers, bottles or barrels for credits, and thusly use said credits to buy various assorted chems back, from common precursors, to more exotic things.

This would limit the availability of SOME of the chem dispenser precursors, such as radium, mercury, plasma, etc. but have different prices to them, that allow chemists to buy components directly in bottles or jugs, either with the company budget or their own money, as well as more expensive and exotic chems like uranium, morphine, caffeine, histamine, various common compounds like premade acetone, oil, and whatever else.

This would allow for many currently bordering on useless due to ease of abuse otherwise chems to have more interesting effects to them, give chemist an incentive to explore different recipes and interact with their job with the rewards of interesting, otherwise hard to obtain chems, and just overall give the role more to do. It would also help in making the difference between botany and chem be more visible, with chem being able to make still large-ish, but not unlimited amount of stronger chems, while botany gets the basically infinite amounts of less strong chems.

A cool extra that could be nice to have would also be having a premade vending machine at chemistry's door, where spacemen can buy whatever the scientists put on sale, the profits being converted into their budget.

[GARGATHUGANOKSREVENG]

I hated this for a few seconds because making chemistry more monotonous is nightmarish. But then I realized this does the complete opposite.

If chemistry has their own cargo system where they can sell and purchase research-specific things like artifacts, pressure crystals and chemicals you'd make a gameplay loop every department in sci could benefit from. Some guy doing artifact science is helping himself and the guy working in chemistry. You'd get more exotic chemicals in chemistry and that'd probably also help medsci and telesci too since a lot of medical chemicals require annoying precursors.

Then quartermaster would be defunct because it's a gimmick job. Its only purpose is to have access to cargo, sit in one spot for 50 minutes fulfilling requisitions until they get billions of dollars and have nothing to use it on because cargo is so inaccessible to the rest of the jobs that nobody really bothers ordering anything from them because if there's no QM it's off the table.

I'm not even sure if this would impact QM that much. They still get to deal with crap like station infrastructure if important things get blown up. It just cuts the annoying primordial tie they have with science, not having access to eachothers departments but both being hindered by the fact sci needs cargo to sell their goods, and cargo needs chemistry because you occasionally get chemical requisitions that pay enough.

Plus the research budget is useless outside of genetics, they're the only ones who have access to it. Repurpose the research budget into a research cargo.

[Lord_earthfire]

I want this. Chemistry needs some additional goals they csn follow onntheur own except doing pent/synthflesh (zhat noone uses) or making deathmixes to test on monkeys.

They need more reasons to do the different reactions on their own.

[Egregorious]

I am a big fan of resources with some sense of value to them, so I would definitely want to see this tried. I do think there's probably an argument to be made that too much of it in SS13 would detract from the actual roleplaying if people are encouraged to be too focused on gameplay mechanics to actually interact with one another (looking at you, genetics). However I reckon there's more than enough space right now, and I believe in a sweet spot where resource scarcity does encourage people to interact.