Chemistry: infinite, procedurally-generated compounds.

Starbound has a heavy theme of infinite exploration, infinite worlds, a spaceship to scour the stars, procedural mobs with a massive variety of abilities, appearances and AIs. The game clearly emphasizes exploring the stars, but what if we had another frontier, a small one, for those of us who want to take an occasional break from the constant swashbuckling of adventuring, maybe sit down at a table and do some Science.

In Starboundian chemistry, all you can do is mix two chemicals together and get a new one. To get these chemicals, you can run base materials, dirt, wood, alien meats, through a refiner, and these materials will refine into one of only a few chemicals (a very small number, like 5.)

Once you have refined chemicals of various types, you can get to work, mixing them together and finding interesting results. Your handheld scanner will give you information about what they do, and their effects can be varied, from temporary disorientation, speeding the imbiber up, slowing him/her/it down, damaging, healing, shielding, color changing, strengthening or anything else that modders and the devs can think up or any of a vast number of strange effects can be combined in any way as you mix the chemicals together.

So, you can mix 5 of any chemicals together to get a new one, you have 25 possible combinations. But now, you can mix any of those chemicals (and the previous 5) together and get even more combinations, 30^2 is 900 different combinations, but those numbers get even bigger, 930^2 is 864,900 different combinations. As players explore the chemistry world, they'll find more complex and less bounded chemicals. Most of them will simply be flat-out weird, having effects that make no sense together or are just useless. But sometimes, a player will find a diamond in the rough. A potion that does something unique or has an effect that is really useful for certain playstyles. When these are found, someone will post about it on the forums and it will catch on to the laypeople who don't have the time or inclination to sort through mountains of different chemicals to find the rare particularly-useful one.

Early chemicals will be more standard, they'll be reliably useful, with predictable effects that most anyone can use. Later chemicals, on the other hand, will be less reliable, as said before. They'll have effects like "deal 31.4 damage, heal 27 damage, turn the player purple for 5 minutes and shield the next 10% of damage for 2.1 seconds." They're supposed to be wierd, somewhat entertaining to see. This won't be everyone's cup of tea, but it would be mine on occasion.

For the hardcore chemists, they might use a series of pipes and automation devices to utilize dozens of refineries and chemistry tables to rapidly make lots of chemicals, scratching that itch of what to use robots and that oh-so-awesome wiring system for, when someone wants to make a really, really big machine.




Since chemicals doing things is what this suggestion is all about, here's a whole load of different attributes that the chemicals could have. While many are more common than others, there should be all sorts of fun effects to find.
And any of these effects can be found attached to other ones. Even contradictory effects.

Good Attributes: (Generally considered a Good Trait)

Health Changes
Invisibility
Invincibility
Dodge specific attack type
Damage dealing increase when under liquids
Emit Light All around you
Shockwave Created when Green Bar Depletes, damaging, stunning, burning (ETC.)
Increased Movement Speed
Close to Death Attributes (can be any other attribute.)
Weapons Have higher Knock back
Increased Accuracy
Near Missing An Enemy Causes you to Regain 0.5 Of your health
Damage others when they hit you
Pankakeman was the one who thought up the above suggestions.
High hp attributes (can be any other attribute)
healing based on damage taken in X seconds or % HP missing

Healing can take any form, a HoT (Heal over Time) a shield, or your standard heal

Bad Attributes: (Generally considered a Bad Trait)

Damage yourself
Energy (Green Bar used as Ammo) Recharges to only Half, instead of Full
Forces all items in your hands to drop onto the ground
Can only Crouch (Can still jump)
Explode, not killing you, but destroying things around you within an X block radius (Very Rare, as overpowered)
Unable to jump
Screen blurs
Depth of View decreased
Blinded (Few Seconds max, as overpowered)
Increase specific Damage type
Damage dealing decrease when under liquids
Generic Poison
All hail Pankakeman for the above thoughts!confusion: controls become temporarily skewed (only for a few seconds, if that)
damage based on % HP remaining or damage taken recently

Remember, healing can be any type of healing; direct, HoT, or shields.
Damage can be the same way, direct damage, DoTs, or temporary damage.

Unusual Attributes: (Unusual Attributes can be Good or Bad, and give you something to laugh about, and change how you may play)

Randomly sing an ABC File
Become Giant
Become Tiny
Colour Changes
Creates random Particles around you
Emit Light only Infront of You.
Increased Mob Spawn Count (Specific Mob or Random)
Causes specific Crop/flower/living type to grow with every step you take
Forces Rain
Forces Snow
Forces intense heat
Randomly Turn into any Decoration Item in-game (Rare, funny, I think it would fit Starbound's Humour)
Slime Drips from you, damages all those who step on it, including yourself (Sinks into ground after 2 seconds.)
All weapons change to Fire Weapons
All weapons Change to Frost Weapons
All weapons Change to Poison Weapons
Enemies Seem bigger than they are
Hallucinations
Can no longer Walk up One Block Floors
Causes Earth Tremor
Your "Pain" Sound changes to another Sound of a randomly Generated Monster
High/low HP attributes (an attribute that only occurs above X% health or below X% health.)
Pankakeman, again.
all non-crushing attacks are instantly X damage, if damage is lower than X it is raised to X, if damage is higher than X, it is lowered to X.

Rare Attributes: (Rare Attribute Can be either Good or bad, and always give some sort of Excitement to the game)

Changes the Gravity field around you (Can be Higher Or Lower)
Teleports you back onto your Ship (Rare, due to it being Tedious)
Creates a large Cave under you, keeping the floor you stand still intact (Would be buggy ._.)
Casts a meteor to fall to the ground
Random Set of White/Green/Blue/Purple Weapons Rain from the Sky Around you (White being Less rare than Purple, being extremely Rare, Item Count ranges from 1 - 10)
Jumping causes a powerful Knock back Ability that drains 25% of your Energy Bar (User Can jump, but at a price.)
Random NPC's Of your race come to assist you at that exact point of drinking (Assisting can range from gifts, praise, a quest starter or Aid in fighting, may be perm or come and go)
All ground becomes slippery and you slide instead of coming to an absolute stand still
Random Liquid Bursts From the ground Somewhere on the planet
Pankakeman
Teleportation to a random location on your current planet.

Delivery methods are how you use the chemical, some are useful in some situations, some are used automatically, others manually.

• You "consume" the chamical and its effects are applied to you or are centered on you.
• You throw or fire the chemical, and its effects are applied to anything in the splash radius (another stat)
• You apply the chemical to an item in your inventory, giving the item a temporary modification.
• The chemical activates as soon as it is crafted, its effects are applied to a nearby player or mob. If there is nothing nearby then only environmental effects happen.
• The chemical is used as a crafting material for certain procedurally-generated weapons or armors, the weapon has the stat of the material.
• The chemical is burnt for fuel for furnaces (if they require fuel) or your ship. Sometimes they'll have an effect (your furnace runs X times faster, emits a light X times brighter than it normally does, or any number of other interesting effects, it could even make the furnace run backwards temporarily.)
• the chemical is used after a certain amount of time has passed, if it's in your inventory, it will act on you, if it's in a chest, it will act on a nearby player/mob

Delivery methods can be determined by what sort of flask or container you use, many delivery methods don't care what sort of flask they're in, they'll happen anyway.

If you have an idea on how the potions should work or on their effects, don't be afraid to comment.
(or vote up, for that matter.)

 

Thanks for submitting a new suggestion!

Please remember to give your opinion on this suggestion by voting on our suggestions page.

 

Really good idea! I said long time ago i was gonna do something about chemistry, but its not my type of suggestion. Upvoted
The last ones remind me somewhat of the random spell generators. As long as your whole body doesnt have an org*** permanently...

 

Only if the first thing everyone has to do when they want to use chemistry is beat spacechem.

 

Yes, i approve, i want to build an underground laboratory and spend hours looking for unique chemicals to weaponise experiment with and destroy improve society.

 

more like space station 13

 

So if I understand this correctly, the chemicals would each have a sort of "Seed".

Like, the pure chemical types would be 11111111, 22222222, 33333333, 44444444, and 55555555.

Mixing chemical type 1 and chemical type 5 would give you chemical type 11115555. This would be from taking the first, third, fifth, and seventh numbers from the first chemical's seed, plus the second, fourth, sixth, and eighth numbers from the second chemical's seed. From there you can continue combining chemicals to alter the seed.

For example, you could combine that 11115555 with 33333333 and get 11553333.

Then you could take 22222222 + 44444444 = 22224444 and then add 55551111 to get 22445511.

Mix those together: 11553333 + 22445511 = 15332451.

This would give you exactly 100'000'000 combinations if you had ten base chemicals. Since the effects and intensity would be randomly determined by the seed, it could take a lot of time and effort to find the very most effective ones. The modders/developers who create this could carefully bias the RNG so that the more basic/pure chemicals have fairly decent and reliable effects so that the chemistry system is still n00b-friendly.

 

NO

IT NEEDS TO BE AS HARD AS SPACECHEM OR IT WON'T BE REAL ENOUGH.

 

You're right. Because minigames are a good thing. They should be as painful as possible.

Maybe while travelling between planets we should be forced to play Asteroids, Galaga, or Starfox.

 

Mother.

Fucking.

Gradius.

 

This would work, but wasn't quite what I had in mind. This would mean that you could only go up 10 tiers of chemicals, which means that once you reach that limit, you have to find a more "standard" approach. With an infinite system, you'll have some people trying to make tier 100 chemicals, while others set a limit and try to make chemicals in a certain region. And still others just randomly explore.
If we used a coordinate system, perhaps where the pureness of each chemical is its own value (think like a 5-dimensional graph), so the original compounds would look like (1,0,0,0,0), mixing them together would get (0.25,0,0.25,0.25,0.25) or weirder things that I don't have the time to figure out. Then, from those coordinates, the computer will plug those numbers in and find what stats the chemical has.

 

Eh, close enough. I think my method would be much easier to code, and you could probably spend your whole life cataloging tier 10 chemicals and not have all of them. Also, no matter what system they implement, it will be based on bits and bytes of binary data, so there will always be limits on how much unique content is possible.

 

Anyone remember the old cauldron system Minecraft had in Beta 1.9 Prerelease 2? I would like to see something similar to that, and most of the suggestions on this topic seem to agree.

For the uninformed, the 1.9pre2 brewing system worked like this*:
First, put water into a cauldron, then put ingredients in. The ingredient order, ratio and water content would determine what potions you got. Often potions would give multiple effects, usually containing a negative effect. (ie: "Jump Height II [000]", "Mining Fatigue I [00:20]") Even "adding and removing water" counted in the ingredient formula - more "diluted" potions have weaker effects, if I recall.

*You need a mod to enable the cauldron item in the game though. It's functional, it just doesn't have a Block ID in 1.9pre2.
There is also a mod for (I think!) MC 1.4.7 which uses almost the same system, but the mod's rather glitchy and sometimes just gives you potions with no effects.

... But yeah, this is basically DeadlyLuvdisc's suggestion and I completely agree with it.

 

It sounds brilliant. No bunker is complete without some sort of chemistry lab.

That poor janitor. He just wanted some more space cleaner. Instead, he gets injected with chloral hydrate, stripped naked by the clown, and unceremoniously mass-drived from the ship.

 

all while the captain was getting drunk in the bar and the assistants were beating the chief engineers head over with a toolbox

 

And, depending on which version you're playing, the Roboticists are either removing people's backsides and turning them into robots, or building various mechs to drill through walls. Fun times.

But enough of SS13.

Also, what if you could find loot that would help you with various chemical mixtures? Either that, or you buy them/craft them. Devices which would give more information about what you make, and so forth.

 

I was thinking that random drops might occasionally have a potion recipe on them, the drops would be weighted to be useful in some manner.
Certain chemicals could be found as drops from mobs, and they'll often drop something that can be refined into a base chemical.
As for certain devices, i'm not sure what sort of assistant is useful that wouldn't break or damage the chemistry system, it's complex enough as-is.

Also: Hooray! The thread is now railed (at least for now. . .)

 

I absolutely love this idea. The constants and variables of each potion would be amazing to see.

EDIT: I had posted an idea about a "Pet feature just here., I thought it was stupid, so I took it out.

I'm going to suggest any idea I have here, as status effects, whether you care to read them or not, is up to you

Good Attributes: (Generally considered a Good Trait)

Health Changes
Invisibility
Invincibility
Dodge specific attack type
Damage dealing increase when under liquids
Emit Light All around you
Shockwave Created when Green Bar Depletes, damaging, stunning, burning (ETC.)
Increased Movement Speed
Close to Death Attributes (Run faster, Jump higher, Become invisible...)
Weapons Have higher Knock back
Increased Accuracy
Near Missing An Enemy Causes you to Regain 0.5 Of your health

Bad Attributes: (Generally considered a Bad Trait)

Damage yourself
Damage others when they hit you
Energy (Green Bar used as Ammo) Recharges to only Half, instead of Full
Forces all items in your hands to drop onto the ground
Can only Crouch (Can still jump)
Explode, not killing you, but destroying things around you within a 5 block radius (Very Rare, as overpowered)
Unable to jump
Screen blurs
Depth of View decreased
Blinded (Few Seconds max, as overpowered)
Increase specific Damage type
Damage dealing decrease when under liquids
Generic Poison

Unusual Attributes: (Unusual Attributes can be Good or Bad, and give you something to laugh about, and change how you may play)

Randomly sing an ABC File
Become Giant
Become Tiny
Colour Changes
Creates random Particles around you
Emit Light only Infront of You.
Increased Mob Spawn Count (Specific Mob or Random)
Causes specific Crop/flower/living type to grow with every step you take
Forces Rain
Forces Snow
Forces intense heat
Randomly Turn into any Decoration Item in-game (Rare, funny, I think it would fit Starbound's Humour)
Slime Drips from you, damages all those who step on it, including yourself (Sinks into ground after 2 seconds.)
All weapons change to Fire Weapons
All weapons Change to Frost Weapons
All weapons Change to Poison Weapons
Enemies Seem bigger than they are
Hallucinations
Can no longer Walk up One Block Floors
Causes Earth Tremor
Your "Pain" Sound changes to another Sound of a randomly Generated Monster

Rare Attributes: (Rare Attribute Can be either Good or bad, and always give some sort of Excitement to the game)

Changes the Gravity field around you (Can be Higher Or Lower)
Teleports you back onto your Ship (Rare, due to it being Tedious)
Creates a large Cave under you, keeping the floor you stand still intact (Would be buggy ._.)
Casts a meteor to fall to the ground
Random Set of White/Green/Blue/Purple Weapons Rain from the Sky Around you (White being Less rare than Purple, being extremely Rare, Item Count ranges from 1 - 10)
Jumping causes a powerful Knock back Ability that drains 25% of your Energy Bar (User Can jump, but at a price.)
Random NPC's Of your race come to assist you at that exact point of drinking (Assisting can range from gifts, praise, a quest starter or Aid in fighting, may be perm or come and go)
All ground becomes slippery and you slide instead of coming to an absolute stand still
Random Liquid Bursts From the ground Somewhere on the planet


These are just a few, and I'll post more below whenever I have the time (Named as "New Listings")

The majority of these would be unique ones that would be harder to inplement and create into the game, so assume the ones like "Health Increase", ETC, are the generic ones.

Oh, and apologies for my random capitals in places, I'm a little over tired.

 

My God, that is awesome. That's the kind of thing that I wanted to write but didn't have the head to do.
I'm putting that in the OP and adding a few of my own.