Old Material Science

This page is about discontinued content. The following information is not current. It is kept for historical purposes. For the current version, see Material science.

Old Material Science
Location
Metallurgist's paradise.
Access	Everybody

Turning raw ores or metal bars into weird, fancy alloys is possible with the help of an arc smelter. The public one (and the main subject of this guide) is located between the engine cold loop room and the cargo bay airlock. The mining department has access to two arc smelters: one near the mineral magnet and another smelting room is tucked away in the derelict mining outpost.

So fucking metal!

The devices scattered around the room are as follows:

Arc Smelter: This giant contraption in the back of the room is where dreams are made. Simply insert a material into the smelter by clicking it with the desired material in your hand, then click the smelter with an empty hand to refine that material into an alloy bar, then click it again to retrieve the bar. Up to two materials can be loaded to make a combination alloy that combines the functionality of both materials (i.e. combining a metal and a crystal will have it be recognized as both metal and crystal). Note that every use of the smelter causes slag to build up inside of it which, if not removed, will decrease the quality of each successive alloy and cause smoke to billow out of the smelter until it's fixed. Remove slag by clicking the smelter with the slag shovel. Most compatible materials are listed here, though you can also use obscure things like the removed slag, gold or even human flesh with a willing donor. Experiment!

Fabrication Unit: The janky-looking thing on the right side of the smelter. This is where you insert your alloy bars to make stuff. Most schematics require either metal alloys, fabrics, rubber, leather or crystals. A single bar can be made to fill all needs.

Material Recombobulator: The computer to the smelter's left, a creative tool for the chemists. Pour a chemical into it and you can then treat the alloy in that chemical, applying its effects (and in the case of certain chems, stat alterations) to the final product; the more you use, the greater the effect, and rarer chemicals tend to have more interesting effects. You'll have to test with lots of chemicals to see what does what! Sadly this is being revamped and doesn't work at the moment, so try not to insert reagents into it that you can't get back for now.

Loom: Accepts fibrilith, cotton and other fabrics. You can also recycle regular jumpsuits and shoes.

Material analyzer: The hand-held devices on the table next to the general manufacturer can scan and tell you all sorts of info about a material such as its resistance to damage, its value, if it has any unique quirks, etc. You can use it on most materials as well as most things made with the smelter, loom, fabricators and workbenches.

General Manufacturer: These are found all over the station, really. As you'd expect from the name they're supposed to be used for producing general objects, but in Ore Processing it's more for material storage so people don't dump a huge mess of materials all over the room. Comes with a couple bars worth of mauxite, pharosium and molitz to get you started.

oh god what are all these numbers

The material analyzer spits out a lot of information about a material when it's scanned.

Not all of these entries may be correct, be warned! If anyone has corrections to make, please do so!

Property	Explanation	Notes
Value	The selling value of the material.	Some alloys are more valuable in bar form than they are as their base material.
Radioactivity	How much radiation the material puts off. The higher this value is, the more RAD you take from it.	Standing on something made of radioactive material or (obviously) wearing it will apply radiation to you.
Electrical conductivity	How well electricity passes through the material. Ranges from 0 to 1, with 0 meaning non-conductive and 1 meaning perfectly conductive.	You'll usually see conductive materials in wires.
Thermal conductivity	How well heat passes through the material. 0 means no heat escapes it, 1 means it loses heat in a heartbeat.	Spacesuits have this set to 0.1.
Quality	The higher the value, the more the infused chemical will transfer on hit.	Meaningless until the material recombobulator is made to work again.
Instability	How likely the material is to break, safely or catastrophically, when struck by a regular attack.	Erebite is known for being very unstable.
Hardness	How much damage the material does if you whack someone with it.	Works wonderfully on powerful melee weapons like fire extinguishers and toolboxes.
Toughness	How much melee damage is negated by the material when worn, such as from blunt objects and thrown items.	This is only if you're struck in the place where the worn material is; body armor alone won't do much if the attacker goes for your face instead.
Permeability	How well the material handles most chemicals. The lower the value is, the less likely it is that chems will reach you if splashed on you.	Biosuits have this really low.
Tensile strength	Resistance to bladed weapons like knives and C-Sabers.	The higher this is, the less likely you are to bleed when hit.
Compressive strength	Resistance to bullets. The higher the value is, the less damage bullets do, as well as being less likely to get the bullet lodged in you.	Armor-Piercing (AP) rounds always ignore this stat, be advised!
Shear strength	Resistance to explosions. The higher this is, the less damage you take from explosions, and the less likely the material is to be destroyed by them.
Flammability	Fire resistance. The lower this is, the less BURN you take from fire and heat.	Environmental heat can still murder your lungs without internals, however!
Energy	How much power the material puts off when used as a fuel or energy source.
Corrosion resistance	The higher this value is, the less likely material is to be reduced to goo when it comes in contact with an acid.	People like to splash acids onto your headgear.
Reflectivity	Resistance to lasers. The higher this is, the less BURN you take from them.	Sadly, it doesn't actually bounce lasers off of you. (Probably should though?)
Scattering	The chance of the material breaking into pieces of scrap when destroyed.	Scraps can be recycled into usable materials using a portable reclaimer.
Transparency	How see-through the material is.	Useless, but nonetheless neat.
Melting point	How high of a temperature a material can take before it burns away.	Materials that simply can't burn are given a message stating as such instead of a value.
Superconductive Temp.	If the material exceeds this temperature, electricity will pass right through it.	Mostly pointless, but it has a niche use in building walls for a safe area from arc flashes, like say if some traitor hotwired the engine.
Permittivity	How susceptible a material is to EMPs and other electrical issues.	Pods really appreciate a high amount of this due to most electrical attacks shorting out their systems.
Dielectric strength	How well the material works as insulation.	Mostly used for wires, but clothing with a high value of this will cause electricity to do less damage to you. Insulated gloves have this very high.
Luminosity	How much light the material produces.	Self-explanatory, but rare.
Unique properties	Notes whether or not the material in question has anything special about it that doesn't fit under the other entries. This doesn't appear at all if there are no specialties to speak of.	These can range from teleporting you randomly to color-shifting and so on. Experiment to see what does what!

That's nice, now what can I make?

The Fabrication Unit have a bunch of neat blueprints in them:

Product	Requirements	Location	Description!
Glass sheet x10	1x Crystal alloy	Ore processing Waste Disposal	Dissatisfied with the flimsy glass that the station uses? Whip up some of your own with your sturdier alloys.
Metal sheet x10	1x Metal alloy	Ore processing Waste Disposal	Make floors, walls, lockers, crates, etc.
Jumpsuit	1x Fabric alloy	Ore processing Waste Disposal	Someone steal your jumpsuit? Whip up a new one laced with whatever materials you want, it can provide surprisingly good defense!
Slag shovel	1x Metal alloy	Ore processing Waste Disposal	Did someone steal the shovel that came with the room? Teach them a lesson by beating them over the head with a newer, stronger one.
Emergency Toolbox	1x Metal alloy	Ore processing Waste Disposal	Comes with a crowbar, a flashlight, a station bounced radio and a fire extinguisher, all forged from the material of the bar used to make the toolbox.
Fire Extinguisher	1x Metal alloy	Ore processing Waste Disposal	A custom made fire extinguisher. Custom made for what? Hell if I know. To explode on use, or to poison who ever picks it up. Use your imagination.
Shoes	1x Fabric alloy	Ore processing Waste Disposal	Not very protective, but now you can pimp your footwear or turn them into chem dispensers.
Gloves	1x Fabric alloy	Medbay Engineering	More useful than you might think, giving gloves a high Damage value improves the power of your punches. Giving them a high Dielectric strength also makes them act like insulated gloves, neat!
Pod Armor	3x Metal alloy 1x Crystal alloy	EVA	One of the main reasons to get into smelting: Pod personalizing! Durability, speed and crew capacity depend on the materials used. Note: The alloy stats used for the Plating part of the armor are the only thing the game checks for in calculations (damage, atmospherics, unique properties, coloring, etc.). The other alloys are only used in construction and nothing else.
Spacesuit	2x Metal alloy 2x Fabric alloy	EVA	Useful for making spacesuits that can take a beating from the monsters and radiation that lurks in space.
Gas mask	1x Fabric alloy	EVA Engineering	Turn your internals into makeshift armor.
Mechanical Toolbox	1x Metal alloy	EVA	Comes with complete set of tools all in the same alloy as used for the toolbox.
Electrical Toolbox	1x Metal alloy	Engineering	All parts made in the compound of your choice.
Firesuit	1x Fabric alloy	Engineering	Protects against temperature change and can be tailored to be form of armor.
Heavy Armor	1x Metal alloy 1x Crystal alloy	Security	The other main reason to use the smelter: a super-tough exosuit! Become an armored giant that can shrug off all kinds of abuse to anything not aimed directly at your head, carrying innate defense boosts even before factoring in material stats. Slightly slows you down when you wear it unless you have another kind of speed-boosting effect active. Remember that this is not a spacesuit and will not protect you against the cold of space on its own... unless you can give it a low Thermal conductivity, of course. Note: Like the Pod Armor, only the Plating alloy stats are applied in the game's calculations.
Stun Baton	1x Metal alloy	Security	Traditionally used to stun people, but with the use of a fabricator you can now make a baton infused with coffee to help with your crippling coffee addiction, or you could make a baton out of pure gold to truly show those criminals who's the man.
Handcuffs	1x Metal alloy	Security	Home made handcuffs can be pretty mean to the person stuck wearing them, depending on what they're made from.
Watering Can	1x Metal alloy	Botany	Container for water and just about everything else you might want to stuff in there.
Chainsaw	1x Metal alloy 1x Energy source	Botany	Used for carving up plants and people. Nastier alloys are nastier to plants and people.
Labcoat	1x Fabric alloy	Medbay Research	Protects against diseases, and can now be tailored to protect against even more stuff.
Gas Tank	1x Metal alloy	Medbay	Regular gas tank that can now be built to withstand explosions... or cause explosions, and much more.
Beaker Box	1x Crystal alloy	Research	Box of beakers, all the beakers will be in the material of your choice.
Atmos Canister	1x Metal alloy	Research	Tired of having your tanks rupture in the Toxins lab from too much pressure? This is for you.
Cutlery set	1x Metal alloy	Bar	Knife, spoon, fork, the complete works. All in your alloy of choice.
Drinking glass	1x Crystal alloy	Bar	Drink from a golden cup.
Plate	1x Crystal alloy	Bar	Make armor-plated plates. Tap them on someone's head.
Rolling pin	1x Metal alloy	Bar	The chef's tool of choice. Now available in multiple alloys.

Most departments have their own fabricators for other job-specific stuff. Go check out what your department has access to, you might find something you like! You can also add a blueprint to a fabricator to permanently unlock a new item, but you have to find one first.

So where do I get all the stuff I need?

Procuring the right materials can be a bit luck-based. Sometimes the Quartermaster will get special materials from trades, and the Merchants that come by shuttle can also have some goods. In most rounds however you'll be relying on the Miners, whom you should yell at regularly to bring materials to the smelter since they're literally just down the hall from Ore Processing.

As for what materials you actually want, it really depends on what you're making and why. Here are some baselines:

• Floors, walls, grilles and the like? Make metal sheets out of something with a high resistance to explosions. These can't (normally) be destroyed with melee or bullets, so explosives are the only thing you need to worry about.
• Heavy Armor? You will want to mash together as many high protective stats as you can. A properly-smelted Heavy Armor is hands-down the most defensively robust piece of wearable gear in the game, and you can't skimp on defense if someone is on a homicidal rampage, whether the rampager is you or someone else.
• Pod Armor and windows? Stack on protection from explosions and bullets. Protection from melee damage is nigh-pointless for Pods since most of the harmful stuff they deal with is ranged or shouldn't reach them to begin with; just beware of AP rounds. As for the windows, it's not hard for people to find a Screwdriver and Crowbar to displace them with, so firefights and explosions should be your priority.
  • Note that you can produce reinforced alloy glass with regular metal rods. You don't need to go out of your way for exotic metal rods if you don't want to (though it does help).
• Gloves and Jumpsuits? These will always need at least one piece of fibrilith/fabric (they're counted as the same thing) per construct, so bother Hydroponics/the Head of Personnel/the Miners for some. Human flesh is an acceptable substitute if someone suicided into the smelter.
• Atmos Tanks? Go for resistance to whacking, exploding and heat: whacking makes it not break from holding too much gas, exploding makes it not be damaged by other exploding canisters, and heat keeps it stable when another canister starts releasing flaming gas. These are all common dangers in the Toxins mixing lab.
• Slag shovel? Well... let's be honest, the only reasons you'll be making this are if 1) someone steals the original shovel (rare, but it happens), or 2) as a melee weapon. If it's the latter, grab something with a shit-ton of Hardness and go to town.
• Selling stuff? Your only focus should be on Value.

All of this is, of course, subject to change depending on your objective and motives. You'll have to discover suitable materials for yourself, but after that it's all up to your imagination.

Alright, I got all that. Now how do I become indestructible?

Indeed, no crafting system is without a few advanced tricks. Here are some things to know:

• When you combine two materials, their stats average out. Let's say one material had a Hardness of 3 and another had 7; if you mixed them, the combined alloy would have a Hardness of 5.
• Merged materials will take on a mix-and-match name of whatever you put in, starting with the name of the first material and ending with the second. Additives will have their full name prefixed before the alloy name.
  • If you're clever with the material order, you can cram all sorts of things into an alloy and then revert it to a base name. Make a jumpsuit out of starstone but prefix it with slag, no one can tell the difference without the Material analyzer! A very devious yet underused trick.
• Once a material is smelted into an alloy bar, that bar will keep the material's typing and quirks forever regardless of how many reforges it goes through. You could fuse whatever you want into a telecrystal and it would always have its warping properties, you could pump a hundred ultra-dense uqill into fibrilith and it would still be considered a fabric, etc.
  • This does not work with additives however, so make sure to apply the additive last!
• Need one alloy for its typing/effect but desire another alloy's stats? Grab as much of the desired alloy as you can find and gradually pump it into the base alloy. The increasing stat average will push the numbers of the final product up to where you want them to be.
  • This doesn't work as well if you're doing this wanting the stats of more than one alloy, but some increases are still better than nothing!
  • Note that constantly sullying the mixture like this will decrease Value, but if you're not selling it then you don't have to worry about that.
• On the flip-side of things, if you're fighting against someone rocking some ridiculously sturdy armor, knowing what alloy gives what stats can provide a hint of what method of attack to use; just examine him and look at the alloy name of his armor. For example, uqill has top-notch Toughness, but absolutely no Compressive or Shear strength on its own, so a gun or bomb will drop him as easily as anyone else.
  • This is providing of course that he hasn't done the renaming trick as stated above. Be wary!

Evil Blacksmith

So you're a traitor? I'm sure you've already seen the boons of durable armor, so I have just one word for you: erebite. Erebite ore tends to make a powerful explosion from so much as being looked at wrong: the slightest impact, be it from smacking, throwing, heating, electrifying or explosion knockback has a chance to make it go off, and the chance increases as its durability decreases. This extends to anything you make out of it or mix with it, so smelting a single erebite bar into a stack of metal gives you ten easy pipe bombs (possibly more if you make the stack into floor tiles!). Pod Armors made of erebite are especially devastating, essentially being a 2x2 bomb with an engine strapped to it that will tear a huge chunk out of the station. Better still is mixing erebite into gloves for EXPLOSIVE PUNCHES; if you can use it in conjunction with a Heavy Armor that has high explosive protection, the explosions will barely hurt you while your target is totally floored.

...There's just one catch though: erebite can sometimes explode from being put in the smelter to begin with. That's how volatile this shit is. Make something that resist explosions before handling erebite, or your traitor round could end prematurely. Don't say we didn't warn you.

Or, perhaps explosions too crude for you and you want to get scientific with your traitoring. Making a Heavy Armor and Gloves with chemicals that react with each other and then punching yourself will trigger the reaction, which can be pretty devastating if it's something explosive. Even the humble floor tiles become a terror; they replace the floor as well as the hull with the alloy, which can make for fun times if you fill a hallway with them and infuse them with ice or space lube to cause everyone to slip and bang their head, or just make them out of telecrystal for a chance to warp people to a random spot with every step, making the hallway of choice nearly impossible to navigate. The fun never ends!

OR, maybe you're looking at this section because your assassination target has armored up and is proving to be a huge pain in the ass to take down. Worry not! As a traitor, you have access to Armor-Piercing (AP) rounds for your guns, which fly right past the Bullet Protection stat and do full damage. Then when he's shouting at you wondering why the fuck he's in crit already, you can taunt him about the value of AP rounds, finish him off and steal his armor for yourself!

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