Chemist
Chemist
Superiors: Chief Medical Officer
Difficulty: Medium
Guides: Guide to Chemistry, Guide to Medical
Access: Medbay, Chemistry Lab
Duties: Make medicine, and other chemicals requested by crew.
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 whatever 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 50 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 many 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:
- Strange Reagent: A dangerous chemical used to revive unclonable patients. Gibs the corpse when used improperly. Doses of 1u are sufficient.
- 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 and burn damage. 5u is sufficient for large amounts of toxins and harmful chemicals, and metabolizes out quickly letting you administer other medicine.
- Mannitol: Quickly heals brain damage.
- Mutadone: Cures all genetics defects, works in trace amounts of less than 1u.
- Oculine: Heals eye and ear damage. 5u is generally enough.
- Mitocholide: Heals internal organ damage, a less risky, but very slow alternative to surgery. In pill form, can be used to quickly refill Mitocholide bottles.
- Iron: Replenishes blood. Very useful when dealing with the victims of Vampires. A 25u pill can help recover about 1/10th of the patient's blood.
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 50 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 surgeons and used to heal dead limbs or organs.
- Hydrocodone: A painkiller that can be used by those who cannot use anesthetic tanks. Often used diluted in IV bags for more efficient application.
- Synthflesh: Instantly heals large amounts of both brute and burn damage when splashed. Is also used in curing husked bodies. In liquid form, can be used to refill auto-menders to drastically improve their effectiveness.
Patches
Chemical patches apply chemicals to the body through touch. The amount of reagents applied is cut in half, but only a tiny fraction of them is injected each cycle, helping most chemicals last slightly longer than when ingested directly in full amount. Applying multiple patches at once will drastically reduce their efficiency, significantly shortening their duration. Whilst most patches can be applied instantly, patches with unsafe chemicals in them will still require time to apply, similar to pills.
Good examples for patches:
- Styptic Powder: Rapidly heals brute damage. Even just 10u will heal severe amounts of damage over a minute.
- Silver Sulfadiazine: Rapidly heals burn damage. Even just 10u will heal severe amounts of damage over a minute.
- Perfluorodecalin: Heals massive amounts of respiratory damage, stabilizes patients with ruptured lungs. Often produced with a 10u dosage. In pill form, can mute the patient if the dosage is too high.
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. An addition of even 10u of epinephrine allows cryo cells to treat critical patients.
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 empty IV bag 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. You can get them from primary tool storage or garden, or ask for one to botany or cargo.
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.
- It might be easier to load a patient into one of the medical sleepers located in medbay, fill them with the sleeper's medicine and dialysis it out for a much faster process of 'making' a few meds.
- A lot of the stuff you need to make chemicals are easily accessible in your labouratory but not everything:
- Fungus/Space fungus which is used in some of your recipes commonly grows in maintenance tunnels, you can scoop it up with a beaker. It can also be grown 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.
- Omnizine is needed for the important strange reagent and if the CMO doesn't give you some from their hypospray you can resort to warm donk pockets, ask the chef for one. You'll need to feed it to someone/monkey from genetics, put them in a sleeper and do dialysis on them.
- Wine will be easy, the bartender will have it and the bar is just outside of medbay.
- 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 labouratory 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.
The Harmacist 
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 before you using any Pyrotechnics, unless you are a hijacker.
Aside from the obvious power of knockout chemicals delivered via a syringe gun or grenade, an experienced chemist can get very creative with their traitorous repertoire. Water (or space lube) in a spray bottle can slip those who dare to chase you, a little splash of thermite melts through reinforced walls like butter, stimulants of various kinds allow you to resist disablers, and so on. Taking time to prepare some nasty surprises for Security is a good idea, and as a general rule of thumb, it is better to use creative and uncommon means over simple pyrotechnics.