Old Material Science
| Old Material Science | |
| Location | |
|---|---|
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Metallurgist's paradise. | |
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Everybody | |
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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.
Additive barrel: The barrel to the smelter's left. A creative tool for the chemists. This will treat the alloy bar in the inserted reagent upon smelting, 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!
- Note that the barrel only applies one reagent (whatever there is most of in the barrel) and can only be used once per smelt. You can't remove your chems after inserting them, so don't mess up!
- Smelter smoke caused from not removing slag will carry the infused reagent with it, which is almost always bad.
Loom: Accepts fibrilith, cotton and other fabrics. You can also recycle regular jumpsuits.
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 everything made in the smelter, loom and fabricators.
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 20 bars each of basic 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. It's all explained in the "Dummies guide to material science" book on the table, but for the sake of completion it might as well be listed here too:
| Property | Explanation | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Siemens coefficient | Conductivity rating. Ranges from 0 to 1, with 0 meaning non-conductive and 1 meaning perfectly conductive. Less conductivity means less damage and stun from electricity | Insulated gloves have this at 0.1, for example. |
| Heat transfer coefficient | How well heat is kept in the material. 0 means it never loses heat, and goes up to 1 which means heat transfers through it immediately. | Spacesuits have this set to 0.1. |
| Thermal conductivity | Basically Heat transfer coefficient as it would apply to floors and walls. This isn't always the same as Heat transfer coefficient, so pay attention to it if you're making a room. | |
| Temperature Protection | How well the material protects from heat if worn. If your current temperature exceeds this value, you will start taking burn damage. | |
| Heat capacity | This is probably the limit before an Atmos Tank of this material ruptures from too much heat, but due to the atmosphere coding being mangled beyond recognition it no longer applies. Just ignore this. | |
| Permeability coefficient | How well the material resists chemicals. 0 means fully resistant, 1 means it might as well be thin air. | Biosuits lean towards 0.1. |
| Disease resistance | Exactly what it says on the tin, this is how well the material resists diseases of any sort when worn. Unlike the above, 0 means it's completely powerless against disease, while 100 means completely resistant. | |
| Melee Protection | How well the material protects you from being whacked with stuff. Protects both health and stamina. Higher is better. This value is always rounded off to the nearest 1, i.e. it can be 7 or 8 but never 7.5. | |
| Bullet Protection | Get shot with a bullet, divide the original damage with this value, and the new value is how much damage you actually take. Again, higher is better. Higher stats also drastically lower the chances of the bullet getting stuck in you and causing bleeding. Unlike Melee Protection, this value can go into decimals, and its lowest value is 1 (i.e. bullets are not impeded at all). | Armor-Piercing (AP) rounds always treat this stat as 1, be advised! |
| Explosion resistance | The more of this the material has, the safer things behind it (not what is made of it) are from explosions. This only applies to walls. This value rounds off to the nearest 1. | |
| Explosion protection | This is protection for the material itself. The higher this is, the less damage, stun and chance of limb loss the material and its wearer takes from explosions. Also rounds off to the nearest 1. | |
| Radiation Proof | Whether or not the material protects from radiation. A simple Yes or No. | |
| Magical | For wizards, this is if the material lets you channel magic when worn. The more magical stuff you wear, the less time your skills take to cool down! Again, a simple Yes or No. | |
| Value | Want to sell the alloy bars instead? This is how valuable the bar is. | |
| Damage | The higher this value is, the more damage it does when you whack someone with it. Rounds off to the nearest 1. | |
| Quality | This determines how often the infused chemical will be dispensed and how high the rest of the materials stats will be. | |
| Durability | Works off of a "# out of #" system. It decreases as the material is hit, and when it reaches 0, one of two things happen: the material no longer blocks damage nearly as well, or it outright breaks (this is only for certain things, like windows being beaten with a toolbox). | |
| Hardness | How hard the object is, obviously. This is a modifier for certain values, and depending on what you're making, you may want either less or more. | |
| Material has unique properties. | This will only display when the material has a certain quirk to it that doesn't fit under the rest of the info. This includes obscure stuff like molitz being see-through, telecrystal randomly warping you, and a few additive reactions. Experiment to see what does what. | |
| Autoignition temperature | Once the temperature in the area reaches this value, the material will catch on fire and, if not put out, will be reduced to ash. If the material simply can't burn, this value will be replaced with a line stating as such. | |
| Burn output | How much energy it puts off when burning. Think char ore in the furnace. Like Autoignition temperature, this value won't be listed if the material can't burn. |
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 Siemens coefficient (conductivity) of 0.1 also makes them act like insulated gloves, neat! Note: I'm not sure if this will allow you to make stun gloves out of them. Experiment!? |
| Custom .22 bullets | 1x Metal alloy | Ore processing Waste Disposal |
Handmade rounds for the .22 Pistol and Zip Gun. Comes out as an ammo box containing 8 rounds. Making them out of metal treated in chemicals is a nasty way to kill someone, as it injects them with the infused chemicals constantly until the bullet is removed. Note: Merely holding the ammo box injects chemicals too! Be careful! |
| Pod Armor | 3x Metal alloy 1x Crystal alloy |
EVA | One of the main reasons to get into smelting: Pod personalizing! Acts like the Light Pod Armor in terms of speed and capacity, but uses the durability and defense of the alloy you make it out of. 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 Heat transfer coefficient, of course. Note: Like the Pod Armor, only the Plating alloy stats are applied. |
| 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.
IMPORTANT NOTE TO MINERS: You now having your own smelter on the magnet is not an excuse to stiff the main station on ores. When you're done harvesting shit, separate the ores you need from the ores you don't need, and bring the unwanted pile to the QM / station smelter for the crew to use. People will get pissed off at you if you don't do this.
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 Explosive Resistance/Protection. 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 much Melee, Bullet and Explosive Protection 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 Bullet and Explosive Protection. Melee Protection 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 Melee and Explosive Protection. Melee makes it extra sturdy and increases its pressure tolerance, and Explosive gives it less chance of breaking when something else explodes next to it (a common danger 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 high Damage stat and go to town.
- Bullets? Damage, damage, damage. You won't be shooting anyone with non-harmful intentions, so you have to make every shot count. Making bullets out of the right stuff can turn your weak .22 Pistol into a truly monstrous stealth weapon.
- Selling stuff? Your only focus should be on Value.
- Experimenting with additives? This is a work in progress as the smelter becomes more refined, so it's kind of hit and miss what works. Most additives go right into your body if you pick the item up, but not all of them work if you're walking across floors or objects made from the material (though somehow removing the victim's shoes helps).
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 Melee Protection of 3 and another had 7; if you mixed them, the combined alloy would have a Melee Protection 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 spastic 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 it can sometimes help the important stats that go up in intervals of 1 (Melee Protection, Explosion Protection, Damage).
- 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 Melee Protection, but absolutely no Bullet or Explosive Protection 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. And if you want to be really mean, erebite bullets work wonderfully in your normally weak Silenced .22 Pistol. Like with regular material acquisition, erebite is easiest to acquire as a Quartermaster or Miner depending on how the RNG rolls.
...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. Forget the explosive punches, you should make explosive-resistant armor if you plan on handling erebite at all, lest your traitor round 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. This can also be done: the .22 bullets can be quite nasty with the right chemicals infused, injecting them constantly into the poor sap's bloodstream on top of the usual bleed damage until the bullet is removed. 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!