/tg/Station 13

Ignore the top section (3 reaction chambers that were making extra chems). FYI those were mannitol, SGS, and ephedrine (discontinued since I forgot it made people disarm).

This setup provides atropine, salbu, sacid, oxand, and pacid and sends it to a filter and into an output(pacid)/pillpress(others). Yes, these are the chems that have no downside and 2 of them scale if you're damaged.

Takes <15 minutes to make and that's not attempting to speed through it (IE counting the number of synths needed then making them so I can pre-build next round). Heck the bottleneck is having to navigate reaction chamber UI (FYI should allow for import where you can copypaste reactions a la old macros).

I guess i'm not sure if I should hit the chemicals or if I should be upset at plumbing for allowing me to casually make beautifully clean 5u/chem pills for the rest of the round while I casually AFK.

FYI the only sabotage i've seen to my system is it indirectly being blown up by someone going on a bombing spree and a mouse biting the wire leading to chem. Not like you can sabotage it to great lengths other than pipe disconnection anyways without editing the main area.

I will say my tanks sometimes clogged but that's because I don't care enough to find the common denominator in each so they are made at same unit ratio.

Chem factories are the problems presented by chem dispensers but cranked up to 11. They suffer fewer of the issues that chem dispensers do and produce a literal endless supply of any healing chem you want but without even interacting with anything after setup.

I just don't see the point. I literally would prefer to do botany if I wanted to mass produce chems because at least botany has some fun rewards along side that.

Chem will be kneecapped by the removal of the synthesisers at some point and that will make the factories more reasonable.

oranges wrote:Chem will be kneecapped by the removal of the synthesisers at some point and that will make the factories more reasonable.

just make it so you have to buy them from cargo and have a few roundstart ones available.

Yeah if I had to put everything in a vat first this would be a hot mess lol. It only works because it's an extremely clean process.

While we're on the subject there was a discussion about mapping plumbing labs and how they're generally kind of an eyesore due to their size

It's sort of inevitable but even while I was mapping the one on delta I asked repeatedly and nobody could give me a straight or even vague answer on what the appropriate size for a plumbing room should be

depends on what you want people to make (as in the amount of setups you want supported, not so much easy/difficult chems).

For this setup above it requires at least 4 rows: 2 for pipes, 1 for synths, and one for RCs with ability to loop back with enough columns to support piping in the necessary synths. Chems like Pacid requires at least 5 since there's the added heating step.

Not the above image is definitely not optimized for space since there's plenty.

make it slower

Mickyan wrote:While we're on the subject there was a discussion about mapping plumbing labs and how they're generally kind of an eyesore due to their size

It's sort of inevitable but even while I was mapping the one on delta I asked repeatedly and nobody could give me a straight or even vague answer on what the appropriate size for a plumbing room should be

I'd call the meta one the bare minimum size (mostly just because chemists were bitching that it was too small at first).

oranges wrote:Chem will be kneecapped by the removal of the synthesisers at some point and that will make the factories more reasonable.

Seems like the opposite should happen though? Dispensers should get the axe, giving pharmacists limited ability to mix medicine(with the super old method of roundstart beakers), thus giving more incentive for chemists to sign up and use the factories.

the dispenser is a chem synthesizer

Thought you were referring to synthesizers in reference to plumbing.

both preferably

Yes both

So if factories will also be running on a limited supply, that feels like it's just going to kill factories entirely. At the very least, there'd be no incentive to use them over the pharmacy. Are there any plans or ideas in place to make the chemfactory more appealing in this regard?

What a surprise there is an optimal way of doing things in the video game
This will never not be the case you will just be able to reduce what perfection will look like

deedubya wrote:So if factories will also be running on a limited supply, that feels like it's just going to kill factories entirely. At the very least, there'd be no incentive to use them over the pharmacy. Are there any plans or ideas in place to make the chemfactory more appealing in this regard?

if the pharmacy has no way to make most chems, why would they prefer the pharmacy over the factory.

Assuming we get the balancing right, factories will be automated, so you just dump your inputs in the hoppers and get stuff out, but the downside is you have to build the appropriate production chains.

oranges wrote:

deedubya wrote:So if factories will also be running on a limited supply, that feels like it's just going to kill factories entirely. At the very least, there'd be no incentive to use them over the pharmacy. Are there any plans or ideas in place to make the chemfactory more appealing in this regard?

if the pharmacy has no way to make most chems, why would they prefer the pharmacy over the factory.

Assuming we get the balancing right, factories will be automated, so you just dump your inputs in the hoppers and get stuff out, but the downside is you have to build the appropriate production chains.

You said you were going to make supplies for both factories and pharmacies limited. How is the pharmacy going to be any more limited than the factory?

I think there isn't enough info being given here. Could you explain overall how you're going to change how pharmacies and factories work, and how it'll incentivize people to use the factory over the pharmacy?

you can input into vat for a theoretical 250u pot that can go throughout your entire plumbing chain (cleanly as of now), vs. individual beakers you have to manage within the chem master which can only hold 100 + beaker.

Pharmacy will never be the better option unless you simply don't have enough materials to complete your desired factory setup or you've really optimized your beakers to the point where you should have just made a plumbing setup.

I personally think both systems are way too clean, particularly the chemmaster (pharm) and the react chamber (plumbing). It would be cool if the samples were dirtier and you abused physical properties of chems to filter them out, although that's my dream state.

Botany's version of the chemmaster would go and cleaner samples would have to be sent through chemistry (which they can trade service for with their unique chemicals).

there was https://github.com/tgstation/tgstation/pull/46836 to make chems "dirtier" but in the end it just means you make 2x more reac chambers and a void pipe in the one loop setup you used before
i think we could do a more factorio stylish where with research you unlock different kinds of reagent chambers so like roundstart you are stuck with yuri and libtard but by 30 min you can unlock the plasma gas room which uses plasma sheet to turn em into oxan and sal acid or makes recipes use cheaper/efficient methods if we ever implement expensive chems so plumber job isnt spend 10 min for maximum meth+meds+aids all in one pill and then your job is done to a over time increasing in complexity (table salt -> sodium chlorine -> sea water crystals ) and adding side effects like certain recipes creating gas/ smokes /fires /heat air / cool air etc

when I say dirtier I mean things like chemmaster and filters not being perfect in pulling just the reagent you want out of a solution. I'd like things such as centrifuges, condensers, melting points, etc. to be used as tools to separate chems to purity.

You'd have to add industrialized variants to your setups and perhaps rethink how you setup your factory since it might be beneficial to add your intermediates in various points of the process instead of just add everything in the beginning and let the machines do the work.

oranges wrote:

deedubya wrote:So if factories will also be running on a limited supply, that feels like it's just going to kill factories entirely. At the very least, there'd be no incentive to use them over the pharmacy. Are there any plans or ideas in place to make the chemfactory more appealing in this regard?

if the pharmacy has no way to make most chems, why would they prefer the pharmacy over the factory.

Assuming we get the balancing right, factories will be automated, so you just dump your inputs in the hoppers and get stuff out, but the downside is you have to build the appropriate production chains.

Im not sure i understand. Are you saying that you want to make Chemistry all about setting up these productions chains ala Factorio, and remove the normal Chem Dispensers? That seems like a bad idea. What happens to the departments that require Chemistry stuff? You would expect them to ask Chemists to set up entire production chains so they can get a beaker of Mutagen, or some other reagent? What if someone shows up and needs a specific, niche healing chemical? Sit in the hallway for 10 minutes whilst i go build everything i need to make it?

I must be missing something here, because that sounds utterly crazy.

Yes that is what will happen.

I do not see how that could possibly make the game better, honestly. Powergamers will find the way to min/max a department no matter how many times you revamp it. Making Chemistry into Factorio will not change that. You would just be making it a worse job for everyone else that plays it, along with frustrating anyone trying to get something out of Chemistry for their own projects.

How do you intend to make room for all this on the maps? Chemistry makes a lot of stuff. There is nowhere near enough room in any of the lab rooms to make more than a few chains. Traitoring would be obvious, niche chems would be made even less often, Chemists would be punished for not min/maxing their setup as fast as possible to deal with any influx of patients that need healing. Virology diseases would be nigh impossible to cure at high resistance levels due to the amount of work required to set up a chain for a more complicated chemical.

Whats the reason for making such a massive, convoluted change to a core department that is relied on by so many for so much?

Alright, first of apologies for long post. i will summarize my thoughts on this, instead of making a thusand short posts. I will admit I find little prurpose for the factory already; apothecary allows me as a chemist to make all the chems a normal round wil ever need, and the only things I require are a crowbar and a battery, and can easily be done in 15-30 minutes. You rarely need mroe than 30 pills of a type (save maybe oxa/trop, which are the easiest to make) in a round, and when you do medbay is either bombed to death or shuttle is coming. The process of making chemistry is looking at the wiki, write down the formula and do the process as written. Even if you add further secondary steps, in the end it's just grabbing the cooking book and rewriting it, forcing people to relearn new formulas, but inevitably ending in the same result: No matter what you do, save of removing plumbing completely, chemistry will always end as a 15 minute job to anyone who knows the setup. Even if you remove both plumbing and chem disps, and try the most byzantine system possible, the wiki will eventually just give us a valid setup that everyone will copy, and in the end the only question is how much of the new finite resource can be used.

Since you ar einterested on removing Chemistry's supremacy over the station, I'd recommend three things:
- Make Virology more capable of mass producing vaccines, so taht the disease removal falls on Viro, as it should be.
- if you are going to add aditional and seemingly unnecesary middle steps, make sure to not cause unnecesary problems to map makers.
- Allow alternate ways of getting complicated chemical compounds. Cargo and botany come to mind (Seeds with "chemplants" taht have random rare compounds), or chem crates that require CMO or chemistry access to open, and that have bottles of whatever chemicals you input, like the chem synths).

These changes make chemistry non-vital anymore and will allow for more ways to deal with problems, which i feel is what is intended with the reworks we've been having recently.

As a botany player I find it funny that you are moving more and more towards making chemistry a bottling plant for botany.

We can also add a generic precursor chem, simmiliar to plasmium oxide, but much more common, add bluespace tanks/pipes and make the synthesizers require that generic precursor to actually create chemicals. This would cause chemists that want to create a factory spend like 5-10 minutes on lavaland setting up the chemical infrastructure. Hell it would make AUX base actually useful.

EdgeLord_exe wrote:We can also add a generic precursor chem, simmiliar to plasmium oxide, but much more common, add bluespace tanks/pipes and make the synthesizers require that generic precursor to actually create chemicals. This would cause chemists that want to create a factory spend like 5-10 minutes on lavaland setting up the chemical infrastructure. Hell it would make AUX base actually useful.

we dont need more jobs moved outside of station, having synths spend $ to work or cargo, xenobio, botany are enough for interacting

Locking some of the more high-end chems behind Lavaland wouldnt be that bad, but we would need to make Lavaland more accessible, in that case. Would be a good time to add Xenoarchaeology. Replace Toxins with a shuttle leading to a science department attached to the Mining Base. Put Toxins there along with the new Archaeology lab. Scientists can venture out into Lavaland at their own risk to find stuff to research, or geysers for high-end chemistry stuff. This means bomb-makers may actually be inclined to use their bombs on Lavaland for mining, Science department gets a whole new area to explore, plenty of ways to gate whatever coders want. Scientists can organise survey teams with Miner escorts if its a dangerous area, or take up the Miner role if they all went and died.

Pumps can be simplified into bluespace magic that teleports the reagents directly to a connected tank on-station. Higher tier pumps could be faster, or required for higher tier geysers.

it’s already accessible enough since you get free access to lavaland with public shuttle

not sure whether making plumbing even more of a boring fucking chore is a good idea though