Chemistry/Bastet/Guide

Bastet Exploratory Chemistry Guide

This is an informal guide to the kind of exploratory chemistry we're going to be doing for a while in Bastet. There are other useful chemistry guides for when we've actually got some of the numbers figured out.

Equipment and Skills

In order to participate in Essence Chemistry, you will need the Advanced Chemistry 2 skill. You'll also need a Chemistry Lab which has been upgraded with an alcohol lamp and essential macerator. Installing 5 pieces of well-calibrated glassware is a big help.

As consumables, for basic essence distillation, you'll need a large quantity of different types of Spirits, as well as 50db or more of any source material you want to test.

Essences, Essential Compounds and Extracts

There are three main types of products in Essence Chemistry:

• Essences, produced by distillation, are the basic feedstocks of the process
• Essential Compounds are formed by combining 5 different essences
• Extracts are made by using an essential compound that meets a set of random requirements

What we Need to Research

Essences may be made from Herbs, Metal Salts, Pheromones, Resins, and Marble Dust. Each Essence has different properties.

There are two things we need to learn about each essence:

• The correct temperature for distillation
• The value, from -3 to 3, of each of the eight properties of the essence (Aromatic, Astringent, etc.)

To find the temperature, we perform test distillations of the source material. Each test consumes 10 spirits and 10 db of the material, so you'll likely need about 50 db of each to successfully test for temperature.

Once we can successfully manufacture an essence, we need to combine different essences to make essential compounds. We can then test these for their combined value in each of the eight properties using [Litmus Test]] strips, and try to deduce the values of each essence from this data.

Researching Temperature

The 10 units of spirit you place in the alcohol lamp determine the temperature of the distillation. Temperatures from 0 to 90 are possible. See Spirits for an explanation.

Some spirits are much easier to produce in quantity - Wood, Worm, Grain, Vegetable, Mineral, Fish and Grey are very common. Try to use these in your tests, and save the rare ones (Rock, especially) for the situations where they're required.

This guide is written assuming you're testing with spirits of Fire, which are an easy quality to produce in good quantity. If you're using different quality, the number of drops you get may differ - pay attention to this! Also, these tests were done on a calibration 3 lab. This may affect output.

When you test a temperature with a material, one of three results can occur:

• You are told (in Main) that the solution got too hot. This means you were at least 6 high.
• You are told (in Main) that the solution congealed. This means you were at least 6 low.
• You are told that you produced 1-6 drops of Essence. 6 means you're bang on; report your findings! (Assuming fire quality). A smaller amount means you're off by (6 - number of drops yield); change your temperature either up or down and figure out which!