Chemist
Chemist
Superiors: Chief Medical Officer
Difficulty: Medium
Guides: Guide to Chemistry
Access: Medbay, Chemistry Lab
Duties: Make medicine and research grenades.
Departmental Head
Chief Medical Officer
| Chief Medical Officer • | Medical Doctor • | Paramedic • | Chemist • | Geneticist • | Virologist • | Psychologist • | Coroner |
| Guide to Medical • | Cadavers • | Guide to Cloning • | Surgery • | Chemistry • | Virology • | Genetics • | MODsuits • | Medical Items • | Medical SOP |
As a Chemist (Also known as a Pharmacist or a Pharmacologist), your job is to mix chemicals for the medical staff to use. Your work will be needed mostly by Medical Doctors as they often require important chemicals.
Overview
You mix and deliver chemicals for crew and medical staff. That's it. Some of the time you can do what ever you feel like, but for most of the round you'll be making chemicals for the medical staff.
Knowing Your Chemicals
As a chemist you'll either be swamped with requests or have none at all. A good chemist revels in making busy work constantly for themselves regardless. It's nice to keep spare bottles/pills of commonly requested medicine, even if no one asked for it yet. Cryoxadone is usually one of the first things requested since it's used in the Cryopods and to make synth meat for the cloners. It's a good idea to have some experience as a Medical Doctor to have an idea of what meds are useful to make.
Often you're going to encounter other employees asking you for certain chemicals. While giving the botanist some unstable mutagen and the virologist some radium is normal, you should probably consult the Chief Medical Officer before handing out any chemicals to crew that are obviously not intended for their job. Distributing narcotics and dangerous chemicals, especially without prior authorization, can get you arrested or fired.
Mixing
You can mix chemicals in a few ways, but the easiest way is to add a beaker to the chemical dispenser and then dispense appropriate amounts of base chemicals. If the mixture is correct, the solution will bubble and you'll now have a some of your end product chemical.
Mixing directly from other beakers, droppers and syringes also helps if you need a certain amount of each chemical. Just click one holder on another to pour some of the solution.
Adding any solution to a ChemMaster 3000 will let you isolate and make pills or bottles of the chemicals you add to it.
Pills
Pills are a great way to administer large amounts of medicine at once. If you are going to make medicine that will be single serve, make it in pill form. Each pill can hold up to 50 units of reagents at one time, and up to 14 pills can be stored in a single pill bottle! These are even small enough to store in your pockets. As a cautionary note, remember that most chemicals have an overdose (OD) limit, so make sure to reference the chemical guide often and be careful with how much you add to a pill. Normally, 10 units per pill is the standard and safe amount.
Good Examples for pills:
- Pentetic Acid: Heals massive amounts of radiation and toxin damage and purges all other chemicals. Has a chance of dealing a small amount of brute damage.
- Mannitol: Heals brain damage.
- Mutadone: Cures all genetics defects, works in trace amounts of less than one unit.
- Saline-Glucose Solution: Restores blood and efficiently heals brute and burn damage over a longer period of time.
- Oculine: Heals eye and ear damage.
- Mitocholide: Heals internal organ damage, a less risky and faster alternative to surgery.
Bottles
Bottles are meant to contain material that should either not be used all at once or are most effective in liquid form. They can also be used to store reagents you're going to use in chemistry later on. Each bottle can hold only 30 units, and can be splashed onto things. Syringes can draw liquids from them and inject it later, making them useful in combination with syringes.
Good Examples for bottles:
- Cryoxadone: Typically used to refill the cryo cells or make synthmeat (biomass) for cloners by combining cryoxadone with blood.
- Mitocholide: Liquid mitocholide is typically requested by skilled doctors and used to heal dead limbs or organs.
Patches
Chemical patches apply chemicals directly to the body. Addictive substances in patch form will not cause addiction, but cut the amount of reagents applied in half. Whilst most patches can be applied instantly, patches with harmful chemicals in them will still require time to apply, similar to pills.
Good examples for patches:
- Perfluorodecalin: Heals massive amounts of respiratory damage, stabilizes patients with ruptured lungs, but is normally addictive if used in pill form.
- Silver Sulfadiazine: Heals burn damage
- Styptic Powder: Heals brute damage
- Synthflesh: Heals both brute and burn damage much more efficiently, but takes a bit longer to make.
Creating a cryomix
Chemicals applied to the cryo cells are 10x more efficient than when applied normally, which means that in most cases, you won't have to re-stock your cryomix after you've made it, unless someone sabotages the cryo cells. Supplying the cryo cells with the necessary chemicals is just another one of your burdens, and while cryoxadone will work for the most basic of cryomixes, you should consider adding additional chemicals to treat types of damage that are not covered by cryoxadone. Adding mannitol and mitocholide, for example, will usually help cure serious brain damage and smaller traces of internal damage in general.
Useful Information
- It's a good thing to prepare the most commonly used medicines right at the beginning. You'll score some respect with the Doctors and will be able to use your lab to engage yourself in more questionable activities.
- When someone requests something dangerous/annoying that is obviously not for their job, it's usually a good idea to ask the CMO for permission or tell the person to get a perscription from a doctor. You never know if you will get fired/arrested for it.
- If you lack blood to make synthflesh or other chemicals with ask Genetics to give you an animal cube, unpack it and use a sink or splash a water beaker on it to get yourself a monkey filled with fresh blood. Attach it to an IV drip with an empty beaker in it to siphon blood if you're making chemicals en-masse and don't want to wait a few seconds every time to draw out a small amount of blood with a syringe.
- A good idea is getting a few buckets to use instead of the normal beakers, as they can hold 120 units of reagents, making them very useful in certain recipes.
It's heresy using buckets, beakers are the only thing a chemist holds dear. But no one is stopping you from using buckets you filthy heretic. - You can click on pills or bottles with a chemistry bag to scoop up all the pills/bottles on that tile. Click on a chemistry vendor to load it with the contents of your bag. You can also fill up pill bottles in a similar fashion.
- If R&D upgrades the medical sleepers located in medbay it might be easier to simply load a patient into them, fill them with the sleeper's medicine and dialysis it out for a much faster process of 'making' certain meds.
- A lot of the stuff you need to make chemicals are easily accessible in your laboratory but not everything. Space fungus which is used in some of your recipes commonly grow in maintenance tunnels so it's a good idea to become buddy, buddy with the botanists who inevitably shows up at your desk. If you provide them with a lot of easily accessible unstable mutagen they'll be a lot more willing to listen to requests from you. If you want to create something like Strange Reagent then it's a good idea to ask the chef for hot donk pockets. These items need to be ground in your grinder before you can use them.
- Since the latest rework of the station there are actually two medical storages: One is inside the medical department and is inaccessible for civilians, another one is in the lobby, right next to your laboratory desk. Use common sense when putting chemicals into the lobby medical storage but by stocking it sensibly you can save yourself a couple of interruptions and trips to your desk.
If the CMO is not willing to share their hypospray, then feeding someone a hot donk-pocket and using dialysis in the sleeper might also be your only way to get omnizine.
Traitoring
Chemistry is one of the most dangerous jobs on the Med/Sci staff, and it's easy to be a good Traitor. A LOT of the chemicals you have access to will kill when injected. Access to grenades is a plus, not to mention the infinite sedative refills. Remember to keep it sane and stealthy. A bunch of napalm grenades thrown around will not win you any points. Remember to ahelp it before you use any Pyrotechnics.