Chemistry Tips

[SilverLightsune]

Hello!

This guide assumes you already have a fair grasp on the Guide to Chemistry provided at the wiki.
Here I mostly aim to share things that maybe aren't as common knowledge, tools of the trade that I've learned from and handed on to other chemists.

These might range from simple steps to more complex ones, but center around a theme that came up in a Discord discussion I had recently:
Most of chemistry is about taking shortcuts.

I'll be mostly coming from a MedChem perspective since that's what I tend to play, but I am quite well aware that I don't know everything. I'll try to make this list approachable for relatively new chemists. Suggestions to add to the list are welcome as long as they are working, general-purpose advice for chemistry that's not immediately apparent.

 

So, let's begin.

1) Buckets are your friends.
You start with two sizes of beakers. Small ones hold 50u, large ones hold 100u. You can essentially print small beakers by bottling and dumping liquids from the ChemMaster, while large ones are a little limited in supply among your roundstart equipment. However, from the start of the round you can get access to buckets, 120u containers, with a little bit of legwork or a little bit of luck. If Botany comes to you asking for unstable mutagen, you may be able to swing a deal for one of their starting buckets as compensation for helping. Otherwise you'll have to leave the lab for a bit and go hunting for supplies.

Your closest option is normally to go ask Cargo to print you some buckets from their autolathe. (Four is a good number, for reasons we'll get to in a bit.) If for some reason Cargo can't or won't do that, in a pinch you can walk a little further to the Garden near Arrivals and steal borrow the two buckets from there, though that deprives any would-be gardeners of their tools to water plants.

Why buckets? It's partly due to the expanded capacity being good in general, but also because the specific capacity of buckets makes the chemistry math work out nicer. The highest number of reagents to a chemical reaction I know about (Sarin) takes 8 reagents, and medicines use no more than 6 (Pentetic Acid, Epinephrine). In brief, 50u and 100u containers both divide evenly into 2, 5, and 10 - which means that you can use the full capacity of the container for any chemical recipe with 2, 5, or 10 reagents (or 'parts', for recipes where it's not an even amount of each). 100u containers also divide by 4 and 20, though making or measuring exactly the corresponding 25 or 5 units is often not convenient except for pure chemicals. If the recipe calls for a different number and combination of reagents that don't divide nicely, you're wasting some of the volume in the container by not utilizing it.

120u containers, on the other hand, divide evenly into 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 10, 12, 15, and 20. (20 is the largest number of required parts in a single reaction, Soapification.) Therefore, you can use the bucket's entire volume for recipes that use any of those numbers of parts. Almost every recipe listed in the Chemistry guide falls under this umbrella, meaning that if you want to complete a recipe in a single container and get the most you can out of it, the bucket is handily superior to beakers for most use cases.

2) Bulk chemical mixing with multiple containers.
Alternatively, let's say you want to make large quantities of a particular chemical as rapidly as possible. One solution is to have four equally-sized containers. (This is why I recommend four buckets, above.) Set three of them on the ground or a table nearby where you can reach them easily; these are now your mixing containers. The remaining one becomes your working container.

Now, you dispense or mix one chemical at a time in your working container. Evenly pour it into two or all three of your mixing containers depending on the recipe. If you fill the mixing containers completely and successfully mix all of them, then congratulations! You've roughly doubled or tripled your production with very little added effort!

(Note: This will burn out unupgraded chem dispensers very rapidly.)

3) Simple machinery knowledge can make the chem lab better.
Let's say that your chemical dispenser hasn't been upgraded and you've run out of machine charge despite a greenlit APC, or your use of buckets leads to an annoying situation where you constantly have 20 units that don't fit in the ChemMaster's buffer.

With a little bit of elbow grease and some supplies, you can resolve both of these problems!

You will need:
- 1x Screwdriver
- 1x Crowbar
- 1x 100u container (e.g., large beaker) [optional; improve ChemMaster]
- 1x High-Capacity Power Cell [optional; improve Chem Dispenser]

The first two you can more than likely find within your department (Science has toolboxes and tools scattered around, Medical has a screwdriver in the break room and crowbars in the oxygen cabinets in the lobby) - though please do put them back when you're done so they're not just missing. Failing that, Cargo can print these and other standard tools in the autolathe. Next, you'll almost certainly have a spare 100u container at hand near the chemistry setup, especially if you upgraded to buckets. (If not you can make one, more on that later.)

For the power cell, go check with R&D. More than likely they'll have the capability to make it, as the requirements to do so are not a high bar to meet. If you can't get it for whatever reason, don't worry - the purpose of the cell is to help refill the dispenser, and taking the time to visit R&D has let it recharge at least a little so long as the power's on.

Once you have the tools and relevant components, head back to the lab. If you're not familiar with how machines are constructed, don't worry about it - I won't go into detail here beyond what's necessary to this explanation. Using the screwdriver then the crowbar on the ChemMaster will disassemble the machine into its components: a machine frame with some wires, a circuit board, a micro-manipulator, a sheet of glass, and two small beakers. Starting with the circuit board, add all these pieces back to the machine frame except for one of the small beakers. Replace this with your 100u container of choice. Once everything has been added back in, use the screwdriver on the frame again to reassemble the machine. If you did this correctly, your ChemMaster's buffer is now 150 units, more than enough to buffer an entire bucket and enough to buffer half a bluespace beaker! It's possible to use any two fluid containers in this process, but one small beaker and one large beaker tend to suffice.

The process is similar for the chem dispenser, but the components are the machine frame, the circuit board, two matter bins, one capacitor, one micro-manipulator, one glass, and one high-capacity power cell. Swapping the power cell with a fresh one and reassembling the machine can let you keep on using the dispenser rather than waiting on potentially slow recharge times. This is usually less of an issue since if mining and R&D are on top of things the machines will eventually be upgraded, but if you're just racing through the machine's onboard charge then replacing the battery is the easiest do-it-yourself method to get a full charge back.

4) Fire makes things hot. Who knew?
Aside from blowing up the chemistry lab (please don't), fire has a place in chemical mixing. You could use the provided heater, and if you want to I certainly won't fault you since you can let things heat while working on other matters. Alternatively, you can bring along a lighter. These can be found in vendors around the station, but consider adding it to your roundstart loadout. An active lighter, applied to a container, heats up the container and its contents. This heating can be done as fast as you can click and rapidly reach the necessary temperature for most reactions.

5) Making your own containers with chemistry.
The reaction for plastic polymers makes several plastic sheets! These can be crafted into large plastic bottles to make additional 100u containers for whatever uses you might require. One of my favorites is making replacement containers for the cryotubes when I get around to making a chemical mix for them.

Do everyone a favor and get the ash you need to make the plastic from burning paper rather than trying to boil oil. It doesn't require much ash and your life expectancy is higher with the paper option. Also, it's another reason to bring a lighter.

6) Automation allows processes to run in parallel.
Certain tools at your disposal can be set up to run without further input from you. Two in particular are the chemical heaters and IV bags. While waiting on a container to heat to reaction temperature (if you're using the heaters and not a lighter), work on something else! You should have multiple beakers or buckets at your disposal, and time that your chem dispenser is fully charged is time wasted because it's not refilling while you do something useful.

IV bags set to draw blood, predominantly useful for biomass (in cloning) and synthflesh (for medicines) are very much fire-and-forget processes. 200 units, the capacity of an IV bag, is roughly 36% of the blood in an organism...if you're willing and able to be a donor, you can set the bag to draw, stick it in your arm, and carry it around in your pocket until it fills. If using an animal, grab a chair and buckle it in so it doesn't wander off from the bag. When you're not drawing blood from yourself or a lab animal, giving the donor iron and saline-glucose solution allows the blood to passively replenish. (Side note, try to let those two reagents metabolize before drawing blood again, otherwise iron and saline-glucose end up in the IV.) Both of these take very little manual work for a regular quantity of blood.

In cloning specifically, filling an IV most of the way with cryoxadone and getting a lab animal from Genetics is a quick roundstart task that pays dividends into the future. Pull one of the body bags from the table in Cloning, place the animal inside, draw blood into the mostly-cryoxadone IV bag, and zip both the IV and the animal into the body bag next to the cloning pod. This setup will produce synthmeat biomass for the cloner while effectively taking up no space since the closed body bag doesn't collide with passerby.

 

More to be added!

Credits for Additional Tips

Thanks to the chemists who've helped teach me these, though I've forgotten many of the names since I was away for a while.
Thanks to Woj recently for pointing out #2 to me.

 

 

Thank you for reading! I hope this has been helpful.

Edited December 13, 2020 by SilverLightsune