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Chemistry
I'm endorsing Numaris's Practical Chemist Guide as a First-Stop for new Chemists. It's way better than this one. Go! Click on it! -Nchanter
Overview
This is a guide to what you can do with a Chemistry Laboratory upgraded with an Essential Macerator and an Alcohol Lamp. You need to upgrade the chemistry lab twice to be able to install the macerator and alcohol lamp.
The essential macerator allows you to do several things, among them:
- Perform essence distillation from herbs, tree resins, powdered gems, salts of metals, marble dust, and camel pheremones
- Create Essential Compounds from 5 different types of distilled Essences.
- Create litmus test strips to test essential compounds.
- Perform essential compound extraction.
Note: precisely calibrating a chemistry lab with glassware only effects a couple of operations.
- Yield on pulverized gems increased by a factor of (1+calibration level).
- Essential compound creation requires (10-calibration) drops of each essence.
- How many drops of solution are produced for litmus test creation.
You do not need glassware in all chemistry labs, only as many as you want to be able to do the above tasks in at the same time. (Access to one is plenty for most players.)
Basic Procedures
Essential Distillation
- Grab 10 deben of what you are going to create essence from, along with the correct set of spirits from the Essence Table
- Under the Manufacture menu on an upgraded chemistry lab
- Fill the alcohol lamp with the correct spirits.
- Essential Distillation/Place Essential Material...
- Essential Distillation/Start Essential Distillation
- Wait 2 teppy minutes
- Take/Essence from the chemistry lab
Notes:
- If you misclick on the Place Essential Material step you can select Remove essential material and Take/... from the lab, no harm done.
- If you insert the wrong set of spirits, you can Dispose from the chemistry lab menu. It dumps all the spirits so you have to start adding them all over again. You do not get the spirits back.
- Every essential distillation run requires exactly 10 deben of spirits in the alcohol lamp.
- Yield of drops of essence depend on the lowest quality spirit in the alcohol lamp. Fire spirits give 6 deben back (see next point), air 7, water 5, earth 4, life 8, ra 9, and anything mixture of spirits with grey spirits give back 3 debens only.
- The mixture of spirits needed depends on the optimal temperature for that item. Some items are made using Gray Spirits at the end of the temperature scale and so give reduced yield.
- Each step away from the optimal mixture reduces the yield by 1 deben.
- The output will depend on the lowest quality spirit used. For example, mixing air and fire spirits will give you a yield of 6 debens if the mixture is otherwise correct.
- If the temperature of the alcohol lamp is too far off, you will only get a 'Too hot' or 'Too cold' message. This is how the list below was created in the first place.
Essence distillation is where you want several chemistry labs nearby. This is a great activity to be done in parallel and the two minute timer makes it quick to make a lot of essence fast.
Essential Compound Creation
Note that Advanced Chemistry 2 is needed to mix Essential Compound.
- Grab 10 deben each of 5 different essences (one deben less for each level of calibration your lab is)
- Using the chemistry lab, select Manufacture/Essential Mixture/Add essence to Compound to add all five essences (1 click adds the required debens of the clicked essence). The order of addition does not matter.
- Select Manufacture/Mix Compound. You will be asked for a name for the compound, please read the notes below carefully.
- Select Take/Essential Compound from the main menu.
Notes:
- Essential compound creation is instantaneous.
- Be very careful when naming compounds. There is a nice bug wherein two different but identically named compounds will sort into the same inventory slot. Which means what the resulting 2 debens of compound (after you take it) really are is pretty much unknown.
- If you mix a compound and cancel naming it, the compound will still get mixed, and it will be named "unknown".
- If you have precise calibration level 3 chemistry lab, the number of drops needed will be 7.
- The Essential Compound's attributes are the sum of the attributes of the 5 essences (attributes are Ar=aromatic, As=astringent, Bi=bitter, Sa=salty, So=sour, Sp=spicy, Sw=sweet, To=toxic).
Litmus Test Strips
Currently there are ten types of litmus test strips: positive, negative and one type for each attribute. Instructions for making litmus test strips
Essential Extract Creation
From the Manufacture/Extracts menu on the chemistry lab, pick which type of extract you want to make. Then select the essential compound you want to attempt to use for this extract. If you succeed in matching the request 3 deben of the resulting extract goes directly into your inventory. Every successful extract created in a lab causes all requests on that lab to be randomly redetermine.
Recipe lists for easy mixing of compounds can be found on the Extracts page
What It Makes
- Gear Oil Which can be used to add a temporary boost to the tuning level of tuneable buildings
- Potash Ointment Which turns ash into potash with just one click!
- Lime Emulsion Which turns limestone into lime!
- Gem Glue Which fuses smaller gems into larger ones!
- Explosives
How It Works
Each essence has a value for each attribute between -3 and 3. Compounds are the sums of their essences so for each attribute they range between -15 and 15.
Attribute test strips return a color based on the value of that attribute divided by 5 rounding away from 0. The requirements for Extracts are based on the underlying number divided by 3 rounding away from 0. See the table bellow for detail.
| Color | Min | Max |
| Violet | -15 | -15 |
| Maroon | -14 | -11 |
| Red | -10 | -6 |
| Pink | -5 | -1 |
| White | 0 | 0 |
| Light Blue | 1 | 5 |
| Blue | 6 | 10 |
| Indigo | 11 | 15 |
| ----- | -15 | -13 |
| ---- | -15 | -10 |
| --- | -15 | -7 |
| -- | -15 | -4 |
| ++ | 4 | 15 |
| +++ | 7 | 15 |
| ++++ | 10 | 15 |
| +++++ | 13 | 15 |
Research Efforts
If you're interested in helping figure out the attribute values of the different essences, join EMRA in Shabbat Ab, a chat-guild for coordinating research on chemistry and other game mechanic systems. Nchanter and Traak are already hard at work!
For the former contents of this page see Chemistry In Kush
