Chemistry: infinite, procedurally-generated compounds.

I don't blame you, but i'm just trying to compile a pool of ideas that the chemistry mechanic can take from. Right now it's quantity over quality to me. The devs (or myself) can take what we want from it to make the concept come to life.

 

This is so well-written and planned, it's not even funny. You obviously went all out with this suggestions, and I would seriously love to see this in-game. This week's Vector Squared will be covering this in our Suggestion Spotlight. Hopefully we can help you get the coverage this deserves!

 

I think this would be great. Upvoted!

 

That's pure awesome! Have my like!

 

This is totally brilliant.

 

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I don't understand so I'll support it so people think I'm smart.

 

This is a great idea. The implementation is obviously not so easy but is a great goal. Implementation aside, simply coming up with thousands of effects would take a good amount of imagination. I'd like to see the system work where multiple combinations would yield the same effect but were used in different manners. So perhaps a good effect would have a hard application but would be easy to make. The same effect in an easier (perhaps drinkable) form would also be available but have a more complicated formula. Then the effect could be applied to a weapon perhaps and proc when used but would require a complex combination of substances. All in all a great idea and one that I hope we see sometime in the future.

 

I'm considering having delivery methods also be randomized, it would make it harder to find the right chemical for the job, but increase the need for exploration. I think I'll keep it separate so that they're more versatile and allow for more creativity on the player's side.
And thousands of effects isn't needed. The randomizer mixes effects. A good number is needed, though.

 

This... sounds.... AWESOME!!
GO CHEMISTRY!!! GO !!SCIENCE!!

 

I would be all for this, but it would have to be under the strict premise that you could not even attempt this kind of alchemy (I use alchemy because chemicals don't cause guns to rain from the sky), unless you are at the highest tier possible already.

Why? Because I could just look up the potion to make purple guns and pixels rain from the sky and revel in my level 1 Lunar Banhammer and level 1 dual plasma laser space Uzi's. Sure, ruining the game for yourself is no one's fault but your own when you unbalance yourself as soon as you step off the platform, but in a multiplayer environment it will spoil more people's fun that just the player. There was another suggestion about using chemistry to make potions/medical tools, which I thought was much more reasonable given the fact that medicine seems to be rare in the game as it is now and it forces players to do good with it.

Just remember that as awesome as dynamite blocks are, there's a reason server admins get nervous when you start playing with them. Too much power in too small a package just leaves you wide open to trolling/accidents.

 

Or chemicals could be as powerful as the planet you brewed them on, or as powerful as the player's gear (either the player who made them, or the player who consumed them. This would make sure that balance will still be maintained.
If there are chemicals that can't be balanced in this way (i'm not sure what they would be), then there would probably be a server-side way to prevent them from being used without restricting it to the highest level of play.
Chemicals are supposed to be a second option to explore, even as you find new planets, they rely on resources that remain mostly constant through the game, it would actually be a really good idea to make sure that chemicals are always useful, but never OP to simply scale them off of the gear that the player is wearing.

 

I don't know. Personally, I would think that scaling to the players gear might not exactly work all the time. Most of the time it would work, but I believe that scaling to the players level instead would make more sense.

I was thinking you could add in some kind of chemist proficiency attribute as well. This could act as some kind of potency booster making potions created by a more adept chemist give better effects. You could also allow them to create an extra potion from one set of ingredients(this would be at chemist proficiency mastery to prevent from being OP). Essentially, this would give the player something to work towards as well besides just discovering chemical combinations.

You could also prevent certain repeated basic chemical mixes from giving experience after a certain number to prevent players from just spamming low-quality potions for chemist proficiency mastery(although I don't know how hard this would be to track).

In addition, I was wondering if you were planning on having level limits on certain potion combinations. This would prevent people from giving you overpowered potions for your level range. Although I realize this is not much of an issue on a game like this, it might still be a good thing to have.

 

Players don't have levels, their power is determined from their gear. Nor do they have stats of their own. the mastery stat comes from you wanting to make advanced machines that automate the process. (have a chest that stores the raw materials, a robot ships them over to the refinery where they're processed into chemical mats, another robot puts the mats into another chest to prevent clogging, where they are then sorted so that the next robot that has a script that selects combinations that haven't been done before can pull them out of the sorted chests. Then they finally go to the lab, are mixed, and once again robotically sorted, selected and put into another chest for the player to analyze. The player has to remain within the bounds of the game to do this, as the machines get really complex, there becomes lots of room for improvment for players to work out and converse about.)
This would be a mid-range automated lab, it could get more complicated if the player wants a device that also discovers

Another way to balance it is to have have different tiers of labs, each one requiring different tiers of resources.
This kinda causes a problem though; it encourages players to not start on chemistry until they have reached tier X, so that they don't waste their precious materials.
A way to get around that is to make each tier dependant on the last one (the tier 1 lab is part of the tier 2 lab, which is a component of the tier 3 one. . .)
Of course this causes the problem of if you decide to start later, then you might have to go alll the way back to tier 1 and get resources. That wouldn't always be fun.
You could get around that by having a much more expensive tier 3/5/8/10 lab that requires maybe 2-3 times as many resources to make, so continuing up the tiers will make chemistry much more convenient and faster to start for each tier. This requires a bit of care, though, if the advanced ones are too cheap, then we're back to the original problem.

 

And these balancing problems are exactly why I don't think chemistry in Starbound should have any more impact than making potions/medical supplies. The system you're describing isn't just complex, it's nearing an almost byzantine level of complexity and it doesn't even stand to make a change in how/how many ways people play on the same magnitude.

What you described in your previous post is 10 tiers of number games that have to be meticulously balanced with the RNG for existing tiers of planet resources that will have to be cross-checked with the level of the gear players will use at those same tiers. If all three of these things don't jive perfectly, exploits will be found before the game even leaves beta and chemistry WILL be used as a way to tweak out lower tiered characters. At least OP items that drop in chests are sheerly RNG based and have very low probability of unbalancing the game, but this gives us grounds to believe that very powerful things can be made with ordinary materials if someone's careful enough with their resources and uses a wiki.

Limiting chemistry to medical uses creates a class of support player who spends his/her time taking excess building materials from his/her teammates and turning it into something that allows them to prosper when the time comes around to explore again. The threat of OP stuff is there, but it is heavily dependent on whether or not the player can make use of them in combat effectively enough (cooldowns on potions / having to switch away from weapon to use them). I just don't think the idea's going to work if you get too crazy with all the things you can craft and all the rules that go with it. It's practically it's own full-feature game at this point.

 

Think I can post this here.

How about a particle collider? This way you can create new elements (at least for a short time because some are not stable). By "merging" the right elements you achieve different new ones. Those may be radioactive or new metals for crafting.

 

However, there is so much more you can do with the chemistry system. It is fairly simple to generate randomness that always falls within certain boundaries, the terrain generation system is already doing that. Other functions can be very, very random while, again, no single potion would ever be objectively more powerful. Because most every gun in the game is also randomized, the devs must have a very good grasp on how powerful certain effects are. The basic chemistry system could just be an adaptation of the same concept, even reusing much of the same code. A more advanced chemistry would take much longer to code and balance, but be far more interesting.
If a medium number of balanced effects were created, say stun, damage, DoTs, healing, HoTs, shielding, and slowing, then there is already a huge variety of interesting chemicals, and a spectacular variety when you start mixing them in different proportions (a DoT that is slow but deals lots of damage over the long term has an entirely different purpose than a DoT that is faster but deals less total damage, which is also different from a direct damage chemical.) Already you could have plenty of chemicals that do different useful things, and thousands -- if not millions of less useful but funny chemicals.

I thought about a particle accelerator while making this, but It didn't quite fit with what I was aiming for. To me, particle accelerators and cyclotrons are seem like you have to plan out what you're going to do, while this kind of chemistry is more of a mad scientist mixing thousands of glowing chemicals together while laughing madly, which is what I want to do.

 

We don't have a real grasp of how well or not well balanced the RNG is right now at tiers higher than about 2-3, so I sadly have to base my expectations of your suggestion off of what I've seen happen in other games that run too many number games in the background. Your system just doesn't have enough control without some kind of specific response to the "what ifs" of a really powerful compound that gets published on a wiki. It's just plain ignorant of a developer these days to expect loopholes to be impossible to figure out.

 

Well, how i'd go about making a RNG that cannot create game-breaking combinations is by using a point system,
each stat has a certain point value, 1 second of stun might be worth 100 points, and 100 damage is worth the same amount. The game will not generate chemicals worth more than, say, 100*some limiting factor's points (random.randint(25*planetlevel, 100*planetlevel) would do the trick in Python, for example) then it divvies those points up between a random number of the effects. Since this is a mechanic that is supposed to be abused, you're not expected to "take what you can get" you just get the best possible chemical for the job, even if the average chemical is bad, there will be a few good ones, and those will spread via wikis and word of mouth. Some researchers will have a ball discovering new chemicals, those who don't want to do that can just cherrypick the best ones from wikis or not care about them at all.
Numerically there will be no completely overpowered chemicals, there will be very good situational ones, and it might take a bit of player creativity to find great situations for them, something anyone could take part in.

 

I want to believe it's that easy, but I just don't see enough information to go off of to get the impression that it'll be fun and balanced. Maybe if this were an integral part of the game's mechanics from day 1 it could be easier to pull off, but it would the equivalent of League of Legends dropping runes and masteries in for the first time today rather than 3 years back. Not to mention I'm still confused as to what you can make exactly. The idea's pitch basically is the equivalent of alchemy, being able to make anything and everything and improve everything else, which is still a big stopping point for me because that belittles every other existing mechanic.

The system as it is now demeans existing depth by creating complexity in the same areas that the game already covers with other mechanics. Literally every aspect of combat would be impacted by the wizardry this system pulls off and almost always for the worse. Teams can cheat the system to kill off other players by souping up their weapons while others try to enjoy building and exploring, and worse still is that it's not something you can prepare for, you just have to mimick it from the start to survive. You already have to explore and fight to get stronger gear now, why make it so that you have to toil at a chemister's set for an additional 4 hours before you can use it?

That's like how rigs changed Eve Online when they made them super-cheap. Literally everyone had to have them. They became meaningless except in the rare scenario where people who couldn't afford or have access to them had to fight for survival against those who could. Those are the kinds of complexities that MUST NOT go in ANY game. Any time you make players jump through a hoop (one that is itself not part of the experience or the story) just to be able to continue to enjoy the game, you're poisoning the experience.

 

I'm pretty sure that you completely misread the intention of this system.
The chemistry mechanic is designed to not mesh perfectly with weapons, and you certainly don't need "to toil at a chemester's set for 4 hours before you can use [a gun]." Almost all chemicals provide effects like grenades.
Chemicals would generally be balanced (in combat) to be about half as powerful as similar-tiered items. They may be a temporary replacement until you find an item that does what you want, so the chemical completes your build or adds versatility to it.
Yes, chemistry would be necessary for min-maxing, squeezing out an extra tiny bit of damage or being able to deal with extraordinarily rare situations that your standard loadout doesn't quite cover. Over the course of normal gameplay, you need not touch or think about chemistry unless you think that it's something fun to do.