Chem dispensers, Synthflesh and the issue with both concepts

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This is a follow up to the thread related to plumbing (Plumbing has been soft-removed. Let's talk about it) since at this point it’s a massive thread that connects to unrelated stuff

After discussing on the Beestation discord about how plumbing was terribly broken and how the nerf was ultimately dubious, we concluded the following: Synthflesh (which from now I will refer as SF) was the real reason behind the nerf.

How are we here?

Well to make it compact, the fact that you just need a monkey, some think thank on how to build your setup and lot of patience, you could build in a rather short amount of time a SF factory, which is one of, if not the most powerful healing chem out there.

People always made synth factories because you can stick on 3 patches of SF at once with no downside to heal most damage and have an infinite supply of them publicly available. Even if it was nerfed with the blood duplication, it didn’t fix the core issue. (Quoting from Pirill)

On top of that, SF spam was abused to actually abuse cloning, since despite the egregious requirement for the machine, you could clone all the crew and over with the former chem plumbing system.

And while it’s true that with the former system you could make Mass healing patches en masse (let it be from either SF or any other mix of your preference, with some loss to practicality) the SF was the most egregious one, since it is almost en-par with the ointments and bandaids in matter of healing.

Potential fixes, and a “return to normality” for the chem factories.

SF needs a tweak, and a big one at that, since there’s no drawback to, as i mentioned, slap 3 patches of SF and get to 100% health immediately, and all of that with some stamina loss that would go away after a minute, or faster if countered with some coffee.

One of the suggestion I like is the one from Pirill and Hardly:

  • Lower unhusk threshold to 50 or even 25, we should be incentivizing unhusking over cloning
  • Lower OD considerably, this will make it much less useful as a free healing patch you can spam (which is the main issue of plumbing factories by the way so it could fix that too)
  • Lower cloning synthflesh requirements (or don’t, but balancing cloning is another discussion)
  • Make synthflesh synthesis return partial output like some of the drugs (ie, you make 100u of ingredients that leads to 10u or 20u of synth)
  • If it’s still abused for healing, add a toxin downside.
  • Obviously for balancing, reduce how much synth you get in the cargo crates to match (You’re still going to afford infinite crates because economy is busted and medical has like 100000 credits to spend if Explorers do their job)

Another suggestion comes from Athena:

  • See synthflesh have its role in “this unhusks husks” solidified
  • Annihilate the synthflesh from the body’s chems when you dehusk with it, so you dont have to deal with the tox if youre specifically using it to dehusk
  • Having a low toxin-giving OD threshold (20-40u?)

Another suggestion i pitched was that:

  • If OD, then there’s cellular damage, due to the overrun cell regeneration

All of this could technically make the chem dispenser no longer a nightmare for medical, making it a redundant department because chemistry did all the heavy lifting.

However, this doesn’t mean that a full “rollback” is possible, one of the potential options is the one suggested by Ruko:

  • Dedicated matter cartridges being required for chem production obtainable exclusively from cargo

the reason for the cartridges being only obtainable via cargo is to shift them off power cells, since it ties to another problem related to power draw and power cells being abused due to their more than shoddy code.

My suggestion follow instead an idea more close to how ChemDispensers operate, which is:

  • Chemical generator require Power cells to be powered, at the cost of a massive powerdraw from them.

Of course, this is kinda troubled, since bluespace power cells would skyrocket in demand, going back to the original point of the discussion.

Chemist SoP change?

Another point that raise from the discussion, was the fact that the Chemist in the regard of the chem factory, has no real SoP regarding the distribution of chemicals, and by going a little more in-depth, I found that the chemist, at least regarding the chem factories, has no real SoP regarding it, which is why many chemist opted to put the patch dispenser available to the public, making (for all intents and purposes) medbay next to useless but for revival/cloning.

To this point, I was thinking to extend the Chemist’s SoP regarding chem dispenser construction and use, but I’m not so sure about it so this is a point that i’d rather see open for discussion.

Conclusions

As it is right now, this whole discussion is a big point, since it makes or breaks Chemistry and Medical quite hard, and to be honest, before proceeding with another Blind PR that would make everyone mad and scream in a thread and on discord for a week straight, I want to get proper feedback regarding this.

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How about buffing it’s stamina damage and adding on the low OD toxin?
Sure, you can use it as a healing patch, but you’ll go down into stamcrit for a while, not very practical

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I wanted to add that there is one more issue brought up with chem factories and that is the spamming of Medbay with the factory itself. Honestly I think the best solution there is to just include more dedicated chem factory areas, even if they aren’t very big, it’s not inherently a plumbing issue by itself.

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Synthflesh shouldn’t really have as many reasons to exist imo.

It had 2 Original uses and 1 tacked on later

-Super efficient brute/burn heal with no OD
-Unhusking at 100u

The latter addition was the requirement for the cloner to use it which was implemented (with hindsight) in the most laughable way:
Yes. The cloner required Synthflesh now. But FAR much less than what was needed to unhusk a corpse. If the cloner was T3 you didn’t even have to bother debraining them first. Just slap it in cloner and use 17u and they pop out full health.

Suggestion:
Cloner is on the cutting room floor anyway…
Just remove 90%-100% of the healing effectiveness and leave it as an anti-husking measure. It does not NEED to heal you. Plenty of other methods.

I worry about the whole matter cart thing… but If I can get like ~4000u (up to 8000u during the round) it probably wont be too much of an issue…

Edit: I would like to point out (and I find it funny) that everything around Synthflesh was nerfed while actual values were not outside of adding 120u OD
Due to Synthflesh the infinite blood method was removed, (which I saw as an interesting reaction,) mostly to stop Synth production I believe
While not the only reason it helped bring notoriety onto factories which were also nerfed before Synth was

No attempt seems to have been made to alter the affects of synth. Only making it harder to make or use

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Frankly, yeah… why does it even need to heal at all when we have three tiers of chems dedicated to healing basic damage types on top of an assortment of more niche ones that do it as well?

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What if medical was revamped so that some injuries were surface level and some were internal. And synthflesh could only heal the former?

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TG somewhat has this as part of their wound system, I don’t know the stats of it… but either synthflesh or miners salve helps remove the burn wound condition AFAIK

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personally i feel like the chem factories true power should lie in mass-producing complex pills and reacting reagents you manually put in to form more annoying intermediates or catalyzed reactions such as ephedrine, epi, dexalin, or cath. along with making service’s life easier because universal enzyme is a bitch to use

if you wanted to nerf them further I might suggest reworking the chemmaster to not be aids to work with, as the current “number of pills” system we use is really obnoxious and requires a lot of math and clicks to get the correct ratio of ingredients.

this is where a pill press, reaction chamber, inputs, and a few chemical tanks really shine, letting you just tell the reaction chamber to grab 2u perflurodec and 4u antitoxin and pass it to the pill press which is set to 6u, and then manually feed it the antitoxin and perflurodec

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To each their own I guess… It would be nice to choose unit values of pills and have it cycle out the buffer until there is less than Xu left in it

Its not the most complicated arithmetic but it can certainly trip some people up…

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Cloner is with one step in the grave as it is currently, if I recall right however, someone suggested (possibly Ruko but don’t put my two cents here) to rework cloner to actually create a whole new body with a new mind (meaning that there’s no character continuity, as it is a whole other identity with no brain scanning behind), picking by extraction whoever wants to be cloned to be back in the action, and this would also synergize with the DNA vault.

However so far it seems that almost everyone who commented here so far wants the Synthflesh to be totally reworked to the point of not being a one stop insta heal patch, while also update the chem factory by removing many of the current limitations, which seems both interesting and nice (oh and also the ChemMaster overhaul, i’m not a fan aswell of “make x pills and divide equally the amount by how much content there’s in the buffer”)

Edit:

Possibly in the very very very long run, but it’s there.

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I genuinely am of the opinion that tg’s chems are overall better balanced than what we have, even if it caused outrage back when they got introduced.

Synthflesh is a major example of this. It still heals massive damage with no OD, but converts a large portion of it into toxin damage, which, even with the best toxin curing chems, still takes longer to remove than the current stam damage system we have, and is nowhere near as spammable, to the point that synthflesh patches are seen as a last ditch chem & not as a must have.

direct quote from their wiki : “Instantly heals 1.25 brute and burn damage per unit of the chemical applied, but also instantly deals toxin damage equal to 50 to 75% (based off purity) of brute and burn damage healed.”

I like plumbing. I genuinely enjoy building massive factories in the giant spaces designed for it in /tg/'s maps or on fland. It’s a shame it got axed like it did, but until our chems are entirely reworked, it’s the only way to have a semblance of balance IMO, and it was a good change.

Insta heal/very strong mixes of chems should be very limited in amount, or infinitely produced an hour into the round with like 1 pill every minute or so, and with a lot of research/experimenting necessary to best know yourself what you think is great.
My love of chemistry is trying to min max the best doses for any practical purposes and experimenting like hell on tg, but on bee, it’s useless as even the very basic chems cover 90% of your need, and anything else is genuinely overkill.

Once again, ruko’s med rework is the one thing i await more than anything, and that rework should imo revert the plumbing axing pr whenever it comes out. (and also include really big spaces in each map dedicated to making factories)

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Actually, i’ll be even more straight up and forward. Port over the ENTIRETY of tg’s chem system without any modification. it’s just better balanced, better made, with the pH & purity level allowing to nerf things overall while allowing experimentation and practice to bring things to a better level.

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make synthflesh make sheets/slabs of material

allow surgeons to use sheets in tend wounds but better
synth can still be a bullshit heal but now a bullshit heal you need an actual doctor for

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I can’t read all of this. I will say that in my experience synthflesh is not a big deal. No chem is a big deal actually. Healing damage is not the issue when a person is alive. The issue is healing them when they are dead. That is why all the talk about wounds and traumas. So that there is a distinction between alive and barely alive.

I also find all this talk pointless because from what I understand a medical overhaul is coming in the near future.

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… what ?

you grab 7 synthflesh patches and stuff them in a box, and at the cost of a normal sized item, you have basically near infinite sustainability for the rest of the round with very little time trade off. It obviously doesn’t make you immune, but on the long run, you will win any battle of attrition.

How is it not a problem?

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petition to replace chemistry with a bag full of bombs and stetchkins

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As far as i know, Ruko’s part one of that is indeed a reagents and status overhaul, where it essentially changes how most chemicals works.

Fermichem is… really complex to port, however if there’s a thing i do like is the following standardization:

which makes medical chems more easy to distinguish really (I’m looking at you Corazone, you’re supposed to fix the Heart, not the Liver)

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Oh you are talking about combat. I taught we where talking about medbay. I have never seen that though. It would be semi situational when you have a fight where you have time to heal.

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a synthflesh patch timewise and resource wise is more cost efficient and overall better than a ling’s fleshmend, and by FAR. The 2-3 seconds required to apply the patch are really not impossible to find/acquire. Especially since it works over hardsuits, meaning any combat in space boils down to hit and run, apply synthflesh, hit and run, …

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That’s a ramification of synthflesh aswell, but that can also apply to any other chem the fact that somehow, a patch can pass trough a layer of armor (especially considering how currently synthflesh works, which is to prioritize the healing of the limb you applied the patch, heal the rest later); meaning that’s also an issue related on how patches works.