Dear @mc_meiler and the powers that bee,
Today I went to automate some medicines as a chemist, when I found out a pull request had gone through causing all chemical synthesizers to require manual refueling using compressed matter cartridges.
I went and had a look at the PR and had the following thoughts:
Regarding the “Why it’s good for the game” in the PR
Free tiny size instant heal patches bad.
They aren’t free, it requires time, effort, mechanical understanding, tools and a LOT of iron to set up. By that same notion surgery is “free”.
Plumbing in its current state can single-handedly replace the entirety of Medbay because one chemist decided to make a factory in 15 minutes that creates infinite amounts of tiny size, instant healing patches constantly for free.
I’m sorry, but this is clearly hyperbolic.
The medbay has more to it than “slap patch on injured person”.
You need to defib the dead, choose the right meds for different races, paras need to recover the dead and injured, doctors perform surgeries including removing xeno chestbursters, and much, much more.
That is not overwritten by a handy-dandy patch dispenser.
This entire line of reasoning is shonky now I think about it. Doctors are NEVER responsible for meds getting made. What it sounds like you have a problem with is the output being public-accessible.
What, are you going to remove the round start patch kits next?
Additionally: it usually takes WAY more than 15 minutes to make a full-size everything-patch fac. you’re acting like every single round we have a old-hand chemist that nails the chemfac that covers everything in no time at all. the median build time for large facs like that is closer to an hour. Chem facs are not easy to set up. this change is punishing the people that worked hard to get really good at something.
This PR requires chemical factories to not only have a resource requirement, but also require maintenance from chemists to keep them operational.
Kind of defeats the object of the automation system that chemfacs are. And even if you want to make this the case, you’ve gone too far. They had a resource requirement already. Time, and the initial investment of iron.
Maintenance sounds like it could be a cool concept, but you didn’t add maintenance. You didn’t add troubleshooting, you added a petty and brutal cost that makes the entire exercise not worth it. see the solutions list below for a more reasonable take on maintenance.
The massive resource cost is intended, as factories should not be running 24/7 at maximum capacity. If you want efficiency, do it yourself you lazy fucks, you already have macros on chem dispensers.
The resource cost is absolutely ridiculous. Factories will never be used at scale again, which is a massive shame. They are one of the most beautiful aspects of SS13 and you’ve killed them.
And as an aside: calling people who took the time to learn how to make factories, raced to build them at roundstart so they could be useful within the first hour, and proceeded to perfect their methodology on a round by round basis “lazy fucks” not only reflects poorly on your character, but also reflects poorly on your understanding of the playstyle.
Solutions
At the risk of being told “WYCI” I do have some ways I feel this could have been implemented in a way that does not remove the usefulness of factories, here are some options of what could be tried instead, in order from best to worst.:
Option 1: add a small chance for synthesizers to fluctuate in the amount of the given chem they are producing. this can cause bottlenecks and supply issues that would slow down and eventually stop the factory without maintenance. You could even do the same to reaction chambers.
Option 2: Add an ore silo linked plumbing construct that can be attached to a fluid duct system, from which the synthesizers can draw from. Perhaps add a minimum material limit that stops the construct drawing out the last of the iron/metal in the ore silo (with a hard minimum to avoid griefing). Perhaps it requires ore silo multitool jiggery-pokery like when you build a new ore silo linked lathe.
Option 3: Make the synthesizers start with matter already in them, equivalent to the iron used to create them, and either let the chemist refill them with iron sheets or make compressed matter cartridges printable from the medical autolathe.
Some of these options will still leave chemfacs as a more niche-use system, but I’m sure it won’t have as detrimental an effect on the chemist’s job.
Please reconsider what you have done here.
Thank you for reading.