I really like chemistry, it’s been one of my favorite roles since I started playing. But I always have this terrible habit of just disappearing into the back room and ignoring requests. Every time I play I tell myself I’ll try to be helpful, but usually I just get distracted and fuck off. I’ll start making chems I haven’t done before, start messing around with drugs, and pretty much do nothing for the station.
I also just have bad habits in general with playing. It’s to the point where I don’t really play as often because I feel like I don’t really made anyone else’s experience better. I don’t know why I can’t just stop fucking off for the entire round and being an ass, but when I try to actually help I eventually just get bored and mess with people.
Legitimately, if anyone can give some advice or ideas on how I can try to change how I play I would love to hear it. I know I’m probably just annoying others when I play and I really don’t want to be that way. I wanna start enjoying this game again and I’m the only reason I don’t.
If you are ignoring assigned requests you are technically breaking one of the only job expectations for chemist.
If you are wanting an easy way to help the station more, make some helpful drugs and leave them in the lobby. The roundstart sutures and mesh in medbay lobby go quickly, so replace them with some homemade brute/burn meds and they will most definitely get used.
Ask medbay if they want anything made. Go to botony and see if they need saltpetre or dieth etc. You can fit a small factory in their backroom to mass produce it if you want to go that route too.
There’s nothing wrong with staying in the chem factory room and working on projects or experimenting, but if you’re wanting to help others more, try to man the front counter in pharmacy more and I’m certain people will come up and ask you to make things
This.
Basically figure out some basic high demand meds like synthflesh and such and get them automated first and then go off experimenting.
After that just pay attention to if there is a virus and sick “zombies” scratching at the pharmacy door for their cure.
One thing you can do is fuck off in chemistry to make something dumb but then give it to the right people. Sec officers with meth, morphine (non sleepy amounts) and strong regen are pretty scary. And that’s basic shit. One time on a nukie round I make a self contained, self-replicating metal foam fortress to hold the captain and disc when shit when south. Eventually it lagged out the game (you end up with hundreds of foam walls stacked on the same tile, for every tile of your fortress wall) and had to be admin removed, but it was a cool proof of concept.
TLDR plan a big fuck-off project that you can actually use to help people
Did that once before fentanyl was nerfed. I tried to give sec a shitton of fentanyl grenades during a cult round, those things could make someone pass out in less then a minute and they’de be braindead before they woke up.
Focusing on your plumbing isn’t always a bad option for being helpful tbh. You can do ALOT with it.
Using the stacking method we can make plumbing very space efficient.
Depending on the map you can just flat out put a factory outside a department in like, 6 tiles. Diethylamine/Saltpetre is a good one for this outside botany.
The bluespace dispenser thing is necessary for more convenient distribution.
*Synthmeat for chefs (put the dispenser on a table) is extremely helpful.
*Protein from a synthmeat factory into a grinder can help cytology if anyone does that (and can also fuel infinite axolotl generator).
*Space cleaner outside the janitor’s closet or other areas that need frequent cleaning.
*Pax to security
*Diverting some med flow to the mining base and security brigbay can be worthwhile
*Previously mentioned diethylamine/saltpetre in botany
*General and specific meds in medbay (accessible to the public if need be) and just your Synth/Seiver close by central medical for doctor convenience.
*Forma is semi automatable if you put in a bit of silver into the factory.
*Foam and the anti-fire chem for engineering if you really feel like it.
*Antihol in the bar
There is ALOT you can do with plumbing that’s only limited by how fast you can type and wait for the 59 action limited notifications to go away.
The only thing that really takes me away from it are virus cures (which I sometimes just end up plumbing anyway since I already have all the chems) or specific orders that nobody is doing (rare).
PS, your chem factories will make every chem, making a factory per chem is space and time wastage unless it’s an exterior sub-factory.
PPS, always remember to filter with a REACTION CHAMBER before moving onto however you handle outputs unless you want to make medbay into an ent-ice-cly localised ice age (copious amounts of snowmen included)
PPPS, roundstart shower pipes will get in the way of your distribution, reroute them or use a different pipe layer. (the default is 3)