Complex drug manufacture needs added for optional high quality product.

[David Davidson]

-Meth shouldn't need to be a 2 step process with quality dependent on the quality level of the pseudo. You should be able to raise quality by:
1) Crushing, dissolving and then filtering low quality pseudo to remove binders from the pills, this initially uses coffee filters. A lab table with a vacuum filter can be bought later to filter the liquid almost instantly. Brings low quality up to mid and so on.

2) Do an acid-base/polar-nonpolar (requires acid, lye and lighter fluid) extraction on liquid meth to bring quality up further, requires a pipette at first to extract the base layer in the lighter fluid. A T2 lab bench would have a separating funnel. You'd add acid, filter, discard the solids, add lye to the acid (slowly), add lighter fluid, shake/stir let the two solvents settle then extract the liquid meth in the lighter fluid. Further increases quality by 1 point.

-Coke quality shouldn't just depend on leaves. If you have low quality coke, you can increase the quality at a lab bench by using acetone and a filter. This reduces yield by a percentage dependent on how high you want to push the quality, say up to 50% to make high quality from low quality.
From this point you can either choose to make cocaine base (crack) by adding baking soda and water to the filtrate and skimming the crack off the top.
Or you can simply put it in an oven to evaporate the acetone off, to produce cocaine HCL.
Low (terrible?) quality coke could be bought in bulk at a lower price later on and then refined into higher quality coke, which can be sold/ sold for a higher price.

-The whole cauldron system should be (optionally) more complex too, involving the leaves being put in a coffee grinder to break them down before putting them into the cauldron. This would make coca leaf paste which would take, say, 15 leaves and give one heap of paste which is as good as 20 leaves; enough to make one batch.

-Meth and coke should be able to be mixed, giving the 'long lasting' effect, with a hit to quality, but a boost to price for customers who want this.

-Also butane hash oil should be a thing. 20 buds + one BHO extractor and a tin of butane lighter gas would yield 5 units of BHO, which would be more valuable than buds alone.

[Tox]

Props for the attention to detail (truly, no sarcasm; it's refreshing seeing others who know a thing or two), but that level of realism may be dangerous territory for a game with booming popularity and would be a bit of a departure from the simplified representation currently presented (which makes the game more appealing to people who are less into the hyper realism side and accessible for those who are more suited to a simpler game).

[Артём]

♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ we've found walter guys he's alive

[David Davidson]

Publicado originalmente por Tox:

Props for the attention to detail (truly, no sarcasm; it's refreshing seeing others who know a thing or two), but that level of realism may be dangerous territory for a game with booming popularity and would be a bit of a departure from the simplified representation currently presented (which makes the game more appealing to people who are less into the hyper realism side and accessible for those who are more suited to a simpler game).

Appreciate it.
Yeah, I'd see the more advanced steps as entirely optional, for an increase to either yield or quality. You could still buy high quality pseudo and only need to filter to produce heavenly meth (which still isn't a thing), for the people who enjoy the simplicity, they can just fall back on the older/slower/more expensive methods.

As for the realism being dangerous, it's very soft realism, if it went into specific quantities, mass, moles, volume and so on rather than "One unit of acetone" et cetera, it could maybe lead to illegal activity, though highly realistic firearms sims exist (and there's no reason they shouldn't) so this should be much less of a concern to people. After all, if you want to make cocaine, you're going to need much more than a few coca plants to produce more than a few dozen milligrams. Though I do see where you're coming from.

Dev has said Heroin is on the roadmap though and given that poppy seeds are something you can pickup from a bagel, I'd assume it's closer to the Aussie homebake method where you start with morphine and heat with AA to produce Heroin.
Or you grow a single poppy, scrape the opium, cauldron it and put it in the oven where it magically transforms.

[Bloodbound89]

can we please stop treating every game as it is a freakin simulation ?
you could easily kill the fun of the game for about 75% of the players with such a move

[David Davidson]

Publicado originalmente por Bloodbound89:

can we please stop treating every game as it is a freakin simulation ?
you could easily kill the fun of the game for about 75% of the players with such a move

You're joking, right?

Go to the steam page for Schedule 1.
Now look at the tags.
See the first one?
Tell me what it says.

Also, what does adding soil. planting a seed, making sure a plant has light and watering it constantly feel like to you? An arcade game?

Also, you appear to have not read the thread title, where it says optional you'd be able to do all of your basic synthesis teks and rely on Shirley to provide you higher quality pseudo, or spend time drying leaves/growing more coca with these suggestions. I'm hardly demanding you pay your electricity bill monthly, your phone contract and eat/drink to not die now, am I?
Though speaking of eating and drinking, the toilet in game needs a use. We need to make Jenkem too. That needs roadmapped.

Currently chemists cost more than any other employee and do the easiest task in-game, which is picking a few things up, stirring, pouring and setting a dial. Even less if it's cocaine you have them working on, which is "throw leaves in cauldron, wait, put base in oven".
By the time these optional changes would have any major effect on your empire, you'd probably have at least one chemist working for you, who'd actually earn their pay by doing the more complex, but slightly more time consuming synths/extractions.

[Cursed Hawkins]

Publicado originalmente por David Davidson:

As for the realism being dangerous, it's very soft realism, if it went into specific quantities, mass, moles, volume and so on rather than "One unit of acetone" et cetera, it could maybe lead to illegal activity, though highly realistic firearms sims exist (and there's no reason they shouldn't) so this should be much less of a concern to people. After all, if you want to make cocaine, you're going to need much more than a few coca plants to produce more than a few dozen milligrams. Though I do see where you're coming from.

It's more about the risk of potentially teaching people the ACTUAL recipes for making drugs, that disclaimer that appears when the game first boots up is there for that exact reason, the recipes in Schedule 1 are intentionally made to be fake recipes on how drugs are produced, even the PayDay franchise used a fake recipe when it came to cooking Meth.

[restarter]

damn, somebody knows their ♥♥♥♥.
Reminds me of this dude I knew way back in the day who would "clean" meth. I don't know what he did but he would take garbage ass street crank and turn it into glass. The yield would be a lot less but it was a whole other level of quality.

[Sugarwolf]

Alright Waltuh take it easy. I'm a sim enjoyer but the simplicity of this game is what makes it fun and probably what made it so successful.

[David Davidson]

Publicado originalmente por Cursed Hawkins:

Publicado originalmente por David Davidson:

As for the realism being dangerous, it's very soft realism, if it went into specific quantities, mass, moles, volume and so on rather than "One unit of acetone" et cetera, it could maybe lead to illegal activity, though highly realistic firearms sims exist (and there's no reason they shouldn't) so this should be much less of a concern to people. After all, if you want to make cocaine, you're going to need much more than a few coca plants to produce more than a few dozen milligrams. Though I do see where you're coming from.

It's more about the risk of potentially teaching people the ACTUAL recipes for making drugs, that disclaimer that appears when the game first boots up is there for that exact reason, the recipes in Schedule I are intentionally made to be fake recipes on how drugs are produced, even the PayDay franchise used a fake recipe when it came to cooking Meth.

Cocaine is made from coca leaves, just many, many more than ingame, the extraction is more complex, though it does utilize some of the methods used ingame, just with (many) interim steps.

Cannabis (ironically the only Schedule I drug in Schedule 1, cocaine and meth are schedule II federally as coke has a single medical use-case and meth is used to treat ADHD or get people to lose weight prior to surgery which they'd be too obese to undergo otherwise) growing is accelerated, though quite detailed and correct in the way it's done.
Meth manufacture does indeed use red phosphorous and pseudoephedrine (sudo/pseudo) for some (most clandestine) synthesis methods.

The actual 'recipes' for drug production are far flung from anything my OP (which skips a lot) and would require controlled factors that wouldn't be in-game such as quantity of solvent, temperatures, quality of solvent/product and so on. With some of the roadmapped features, I can't see how they're going to be done without going into at least some detail.

Also, someone can just go down to their local library and request a copy of PiKHAL or TiKHAL if they want detailed guides on synthesis. Or go to one of many websites I won't name here.

I'm not suggesting the game start telling people how to get lithium from batteries here and what to do with it. Just some ways to boost purity/yield based on very basic principles, like "blend coca leaves to increase surface area" everything else in the OP used to be a single google search away before google started making a 'responsible search engine' at which point it isn't really a search engine, but I'm going off-topic on that.

[David Davidson]

Publicado originalmente por Sugarwolf:

Alright Waltuh take it easy. I'm a sim enjoyer but the simplicity of this game is what makes it fun and probably what made it so successful.

Yeah, it's why I'd keep it optional, as stated in the OP. Adding forced complexity for the sake of complexity may remove fun for some people, it might make the game more fun for others. Making it optional strikes a good balance and doesn't detract from the game in either way.

If you want to quickly up your income, but cut down on complexity but not max your potential income out for the tools you can get, then you could either buy better pseudo from Shirley, let your coca leaves dry on a rack, or let a chemist do these steps automatically for you. Realistically it wouldn't be much different to selling raw product (4 weed strains, meth and coke) to selling something that'd you've put through the mixer 4-6 times. You still have simplicity, or you have a complex option.
The mixer does this, but if the gameplay loop is just "Make basic product, insert into mixer, rinse repeat" then the gameplay loop will get stale after a while. Adding more products (Heroin, MDMA and shrooms are all apparently roadmapped) will maybe alleviate this, but more options is always a good thing, so long as those options aren't a necessity.

[Tox]

Publicado originalmente por David Davidson:

Publicado originalmente por Sugarwolf:

Alright Waltuh take it easy. I'm a sim enjoyer but the simplicity of this game is what makes it fun and probably what made it so successful.

Yeah, it's why I'd keep it optional, as stated in the OP. Adding forced complexity for the sake of complexity may remove fun for some people, it might make the game more fun for others. Making it optional strikes a good balance and doesn't detract from the game in either way.

I'd certainly enjoy it, but yeah if there's a way to keep it optional that's best.

[Des]

I like the idea of more cooking complexity. Not just about increasing quality, but generally. There are a bunch of things we learn from Breaking Bad, a whole lot of chemistry, it would be nice if the game leaned more into that, like a Walter White simulator.

Walter took a lot of pride in his work. Why shouldn't we as well?

+1 to making it optional.

[David Davidson]

Publicado originalmente por Tox:

Publicado originalmente por David Davidson:

Yeah, it's why I'd keep it optional, as stated in the OP. Adding forced complexity for the sake of complexity may remove fun for some people, it might make the game more fun for others. Making it optional strikes a good balance and doesn't detract from the game in either way.

I'd certainly enjoy it, but yeah if there's a way to keep it optional that's best.

Yeah, personally I wouldn't mind if it was necessary, though a lot of people like the casual sim aspect and having it as an optional sidegrade way to increase the purity or yield seems like it would be fitting for all players, rather than railroading players who like doing things simply.

As I'd said, it would also make the chemist more useful. Currently he gets paid the most daily and does the least, can't even take stuff from shelves, so realistically a chemist (automated) costs 500 dollars a day as you need a handler. Having the chemist boost the quality based on the tools provided (filters, acetone (could just be called "Solvent" so as to not br overly instructional), pipettes (held by default) or separating funnels on a T2 bench by default seems like the way to go. Currently, compared to the botanist, the chemist does very little.

Publicado originalmente por Des:

I like the idea of more cooking complexity. Not just about increasing quality, but generally. There are a bunch of things we learn from Breaking Bad, a whole lot of chemistry, it would be nice if the game leaned more into that, like a Walter White simulator.

Walter took a lot of pride in his work. Why shouldn't we as well?

+1 to making it optional.

Yeah, some complexity to cooking would definitely make it more engaging, so long as it's optional, I dont see it being any more of an ossue than watering plants frequently to increase quality. Not a necessity, but something that people who find that sort of thing fun to be something they'll do. I've a friend I olay with and he exclusively works on grows because he wants to max out the weed quality. Habing something similar with chemistry would be good too.

On the weed side of things, a 'sifter' should be a table/machine (V1 being manual V2 being semi-automated. You sift the weed to remove the trichomes and make kief, 20 buds makes kief which you can bag, or press into a block of hash.
Again, not straight upgrades, just more choice. Maybe more easily concealed if we get hidden pockets.