Chemist

Description:

Chemistry was a profession that focused on creating drugs, explosives, poisons and various chem-aids (green tagged consumable items). They were created by combining chemical components in combinations of 2, 3 and 4 chemicals.

Investing more character build into chemistry helped you make more complex combinations (combinations of 3 or 4 chemicals were considered more complex than a basic 2 chemical combination).

Chemists learned how to make new things by experimenting, and (later in the game) by breaking down an existing chemical to learn one of its components or sharing with each other.

There were the following types of chemicals: Powders, Greases, Oils, and Waters.

Each chemical type had 3 tiers: Common (I), Uncommon (II) and Rare (III).

Nuclear Engineering

The High Tech version of Chemistry that was introduced as a second tier profession was "Nuclear Engineering", which focused on the use of nuclear reactions to create powerful sources of energy - and destruction.

Inventions

Since chemistry was a closed system, inventions instead focused on alternate ways to utilize Chem skills. These would be turned into new skills that got added to the rulebook for other chemists to buy after a number of games. Examples included: Explosive Bullets, Blanks.

History

Combining Oil and Water caused experiments to fail. Early experimental failures and systemic changes made the player base discourage experimentation highly, resulting in huge gaps in player knowledge of the system for most of the game.

Ultimately we learned how to make every chemical combination in the game when the Directorate killed an NPC known as Mrs. Jones and stole her notes. This revealed that there were a small subset of base infusions one could make by combining chemicals of the same tier. Higher end infusions would revert to lower tier infusions if you replaced one of their components with a lesser component, but lower tier components could be improved by replacing components with their more exotic counterparts.

You can read her notes here (open in google drive, formatting is bad):

Finally, it is worth noting that the work of several Nuclear Engineers in town resulted in a power plant during the final year that provided free power to everyone. You could only power a given device up to its capacity during a recharge, but since many tags lacked an explicit capacity there were some wrinkles in the implementation of this mechanic. The result of this power plant is that people did not fear to rely more heavily on technological benefits which required fuel, and fuel production focused more heavily on refined fuels that provided resistances to breakage (via the sunder call) rather than fuels with long duration.

Player Chemists

NPC Chemists