Chemistry as a Skill (Need fleshed-out low level Recipes to make this happen!)

[CosmicKobal]

I’m thinking that Chemistry should be its own skill. There are probably other threads out there that have already discussed this, but I didn’t see them when I did a search; just comments about possible new recipes and things involving the Chemistry set.

Things like Batteries, Painkillers, Water Purification tabs, etc, should Not fall under cooking or electronics… at least not fully.

For all I know, this has already been handled in the unstable releases since Cooper. If so, Let me know and ignore this thread, lol

[kevin.granade]

The main issue is that with the recipes we have now, chemistry would be all the high-level recipes, and cooking would be all the low level recipes, so any cooking practice you did would be waste, and chemistry would be even harder to get to. The cooking thing isn’t the end of the world, but we really need more chemistry recipes to fill out the low and mid range before making it it’s own skill.

[CosmicKobal]

I see what you’re saying, but I see high level cooking involving making meals that have long term mood modifiers or go hand in hand with the chemistry as a secondary skill requirement. Low level chemistry would involve… ‘projects’ I guess you might call them.

Things like making a little lantern out of a potato, 2 copper wires and a pilot light (or whatever it is in in-game flashlights that makes the light :), making a little solar panel out of a hot plate, some scrap copper, and wires and a few other things that escape me atm. It would use chemistry and electronics, so would making batteries.

add styrofoam as an item( that different foods come in… or filling up wooden crates) and combine with gasoline to make ghetto napalm/more effective flamethrower fuel

If people put their heads together, I’m sure we could come up with a bunch of low level chem items… most will likely require a secondary skill though

EDIT: for that matter, it IS possible to make your own gasoline… not in large amounts very easily mind you, but with the right setups, that’s a mid level chem/fab recipe/construction. You basically just purify and purify further the ooze you filter out from a wood gasifier. you end up with several different grades of crude oil and gas that’s usable in a car

[Zireael]

Chemistry as a skill was suggested multiple times, the problem is the lack of low-level chemistry recipes and/or high-level cooking recipes. Let’s drop all our ideas here so that it might get done!

[Bumpkin]

Low level chem recipes ;

Smoke bombs
Pruno-style alcohol
Brewing/distilling regular alcohol
Making vinegar
All rendering-type cooking, tallow, lamp oil, etc.
Distilling acetic acid from vinegar
Cocaine to crack is very easy
Morphine to heroin is too
Meth should be low-to-mid-tier

It might be an idea to remove autolearn from some (all?) chem recipes, or set them to autolearn when you’re around 5 skill levels above them, to simulate learning chemical theory instead of rote recipe-following? Even the simplest of chem synths aren’t doable if you don’t know what they are, and you’re not going to magically learn how to make oxycodone from cooking up a bunch of battery acid.

[Zireael]

Good ideas Bumpkin!

[Bumpkin]

Another idea for bottom-level 0-skill chem ; chemical noisemakers. Vinegar and bicarbonate soda in a loosely capped bottle, shake it, place it and wait for the pressure to blow the cap off with a loudish pop.

Also possible ; tanning hides and most food preservation could go to chem with additional req in cooking/survival. Especially lutefisk.

[CosmicKobal]

***Bleach bombs requiring a bottle, bleach, and scrap metal(to simulate aluminum foil). In RL, you would drop in balls of aluminum foil, cap the bottle and throw it VERY quickly to prevent it going off in your hand. in game, I imagine you would instead keep the scrap metal in your inventory and it would be used up when you activate your bomb. I figure you would only have 3 turns to get rid of your bleach bomb before it went off.

the plus for this item would be that it would be useful against NPC’s, seeing as how it’s somewhat corrosive, caustic, irritating, and poisonous. it would create a short lived toxic cloud that would severely hamper living beings and would be a decent noise maker against Zeds.

***Any kind of Fertilizers

*** Simple gunpowder made from flares/fireworks, etc. would only really be useful for a blunderbuss’s ammo or making tnt sticks.

[Bumpkin]

Aluminum foil’s in the game now, no need to simulate it with scrap metal.

• “High quality” meth could be added as a low/mid tier recipe and low quality meth dropped to a “shake & bake” single container synth
• Very impure desamorphine can be synthesised from codeine at around meth-lab levels of difficulty, and using similar precursors.
• Biodiesel shouldn’t be especially hard to synth

[CosmicKobal]

[quote=“Bumpkin, post:9, topic:9685”]Aluminum foil’s in the game now, no need to simulate it with scrap metal.

• “High quality” meth could be added as a low/mid tier recipe and low quality meth dropped to a “shake & bake” single container synth
• Very impure desamorphine can be synthesised from codeine at around meth-lab levels of difficulty, and using similar precursors.
• Biodiesel shouldn’t be especially hard to synth[/quote]

Didn’t realize aluminum foil was already in; that just makes a bleach bomb all the more simple to add in.

If hygiene is ever implemented, making soaps could be a chemistry recipe.

some kind of item that will mask your scent.

some kind of Musk to attract the larger wildlife( bears, moose, etc) so that you dont have to go looking for them as hard.

[Pthalocy]

Good old bleach and ammonia really ought to make toxic gases as per every warning label ever on cleaning products. I just dropped both onto the same tile in a day-old experimental. Nothin’. I realize that’s not cooking or chemistry, but it’s still a very easy ‘recipe’ if I can anticipate just dropping the stuff to have consequences.

That other thread about a potential nutritional overhaul might lead to some innovations about higher-end food recipes. That change and this proposed one for chemistry might both help eachother out.

[Muaddib]

From my limited experience, chemistry working off your cooking skill is perfectly realistic. Chemists are good cooks, because they won’t fuck up their spice mixing. And I still remember my first chemistry lesson. Making caramel and boiling eggs. Felt more like a cooking lesson than a chemistry class.

It might feel counter-intuitive, but from a logical perspective it makes perfect sense.

And it keeps the crafting system realistic. Without silly MMO tricks, like making a bomb out of a fart and some dry cement, or cooking a meal worth 1,000,000,000 euros that probably has more nutritional value than a nuclear powerplant.

[CosmicKobal]

[quote=“Muaddib, post:12, topic:9685”]From my limited experience, chemistry working off your cooking skill is perfectly realistic. Chemists are good cooks, because they won’t fuck up their spice mixing. And I still remember my first chemistry lesson. Making caramel and boiling eggs. Felt more like a cooking lesson than a chemistry class.

It might feel counter-intuitive, but from a logical perspective it makes perfect sense.

And it keeps the crafting system realistic. Without silly MMO tricks, like making a bomb out of a fart and some dry cement, or cooking a meal worth 1,000,000,000 euros that probably has more nutritional value than a nuclear powerplant.[/quote]

I agree that chemistry and cooking are sometimes not easily separated, but I feel that there are enough recipes in game to warrant a clear line between cooking and chemistry. of course, making things like tallow for example should require both skills, but requiring a high cooking skill to make anti-biotics or meth just seems kind of ludicrous.

As to cooking a meal worth way more than it should be, the value system in game already doesn’t make sense at times with some truly out-there trade values. IF a high level cooking recipe DID end up being overpriced, I’m sure it could be fixed if the trade system is ever changed.

on that note… I kind of want a mod now that adds a ‘Fart bomb’…

[Miloch]

Cooking and Chemistry have some synergy. People who study cooking a good bit do learn a good bit about the chemistry of food. But I feel more that you should be able to study chemistry without having to bother with food. To me a Chemistry skill is the knowledge and skills to SAFELY mix different chemicals, the knowledge of how different chemical reactions works, and a depth of knowledge about useful chemicals and what they do. Should this stem from cooking? No not really. Do I understand the current opinion of the devs? Yes I do. Honestly I feel chemistry should be made it’s own skill and the skill level requirements for chemistry should be re-balanced. But that involves work. As I am not volunteering to do it I said my piece and will now go back to skulking about the forums.

[Random_dragon]

The more physical types of crafting skills have their own divisions and synergies, in particular quite a few recipes involve both mechanics and fabrication. So I agree that cooking and chemistry should become separate skills with various amounts of synergy.

As for suggestions, there are some basic existing recipes that could be made low-level chemistry recipes. Salt production from boiling off salt water might fall under both cooking and chemistry, to give one example that might be valid that I don’t think has been suggested already. o3o

[Pthalocy]

Distillation for the production of alcohol strikes me as more chemistry than cooking, though it is consumable. I might consider the fermentation booze recipes for chemistry rather than cooking as well.

[Random_dragon]

Maybe. If you needed both skills to various extents to craft either, maybe have the basic fermentation be more cooking-focused, with distillation shifting to a chemistry focus?

[Kadian]

Couldn’t we technically use most school-experiments for low-grade chemical recipes? They’d probably consist of mostly noise-making mixtures or small explosions though, which are probably quite useless.

However, you could combine Chemistry with Fabrication (and Electronics, if necessary) and create some more chemistry-based grenades or explosives? Those grenades could combine an explosion with toxic gasses, or Fire with toxic gas and so on ; Furthermore, a Grenade which HEATS up Acid could be extremely useful if you consider that gaseous acid would still burn you, you could cover a larger area with acidic gasses, which not only burns enemies from the outside, but from the inside as well.

Another possibility could arise if you add some more chemicals into the game - you could potentially add a lot of chemicals to schools, labs and pharmacies, you could even introduce pharmaceutical firms to the game, or new laboratories which would experiment with potential new materials.
You could, with said new chemicals, start mixing your own ammonia, bleach, dyes for carpets or paint, or your own medicine and drugs.

With that in mind - why not add acidic weapons into the fray too? We already have several melee weapons with added Flamethrowers - why not make the same with acidic sprayers? Get some acid, put it in some kind of container with an added sprayer, and with a push of a button you could shoot acid into the face of your enemy. Probably just as effective as burning gasoline.

[Pthalocy]

Are you telling me we have reason for a stinkbomb recipe? Because I like it. Not far off from smokebombs; if I recall, sugar is involved in the recipe.

Applying acid would damage a lot of weapons, so I’d be concerned for realism just a bit - but a sprayer would totally work. It’d have the advantage over a flamethrower in that we can’t craft gasoline, though I don’t know what kind of damage it would deal. Might wind up a less harmful but more controllable and sustainable alternative. Well, less harmful in the sense of raw damage. I fully expect it to wreck items on the ground the same way spitters do. It just wouldn’t spread and consume a whole building and smoke everyone to death.

I’d be curious about whether toxic mixtures might be applicable to items like arrows, for that extra poison pewpew.

Completely different thought: crafting pesticides to keep shit off your crops. Though right now there’s no such threat to farmed goods, so my idea currently has no function.

[Random_dragon]

Ooh, yes. And improvised bug bombs?

I do wonder what the expect gameplay effects on mutant insects would be. o3o