Do chemists need a buff?

[ZombiePumpkin]

I think they should have a supply shelf like botanists do.

[Xenomorph]

A handler would have to keep the chemist shelf supplied. If the chemist is assigned 4 stations, the handler moves ingredients from the 4 supply sheves to the 4 stations, so 4 shelves to work on. If the chemist had a shelve, the handler would have to move ingredients from 4 shelves to another shelve, that'd be 5 shelves to work on.

Basically, no point.

[0hnoM]

Yeah, when I first set up the chemist I couldn't figure out why he wouldn't cook. Then I put the ingredients into the labs and he started to cook.

[ZombiePumpkin]

Originally posted by Xenomorph:

A handler would have to keep the chemist shelf supplied. If the chemist is assigned 4 stations, the handler moves ingredients from the 4 supply sheves to the 4 stations, so 4 shelves to work on. If the chemist had a shelve, the handler would have to move ingredients from 4 shelves to another shelve, that'd be 5 shelves to work on.

Basically, no point.

But the chemist wouldn't have four different supply shelves, they would have one like botanists do, and take it to four different stations, like botanists do with eight different pots. Where are you getting four supply shelves from?

The whole point of chemists having a supply shelf is so handlers don't have to stock stations from the shelves. This would free up handlers I don't understand why you think this makes chemists more dependent on them.

[Xythe]

Originally posted by ZombiePumpkin:

But the chemist wouldn't have four different supply shelves, they would have one like botanists do, and take it to four different stations, like botanists do with eight different pots. Where are you getting four supply shelves from?

A shelf can only hold 8 stacks, so with 4 mixing stations you could only get 40 product made before you'd have to manually restock again. You could tell a handler to restock that shelf from other shelves, there's no current way to say "only put this specific item in this specific space". You'd have to make sure to put the items in the right order on the chemists new shelf and hope the AI works predictably and flawlessly.

All that said, you're right. It's dumb I need a separate employee to move a box of tylenol half a meter. But your specific suggestion would require changes to some other systems before it was useful.

[M41NFR4M3]

Chemists didnt go to school to move boxes they are above that

[roboticaust]

Kinda dumb logic. If they had a supply shelf, they would just grab the top left most item for everything until it ran out then moved on to the next. Meaning your mixes would be dumb and your chemistry stations would be loaded with the wrong items consistently.

The real solution would be to set the stations they use to have a supply location to ensure they could be set intelligently.

But time will tell. Tyler already said the next focus is on employees. So I expect he will add a few improvements to go along with debugging their low IQ. Guy made a banger game and has big ambitions to make it better during early access, so we just gotta let him cook.

[Nimbus]

Originally posted by roboticaust:

Kinda dumb logic. If they had a supply shelf, they would just grab the top left most item for everything until it ran out then moved on to the next. Meaning your mixes would be dumb and your chemistry stations would be loaded with the wrong items consistently.

Not really "Dumb." logic per'say considering if you put full stacks of items on a shelf, as of right now much like botanists, they will keep grabbing from the left, so if you put things in a specific order, in a full stack, and have the handlers fill the shelves, you can just keep funnelling manual loading into the shelves and with enough handlers everything will run like clockwork. Adding a supply shelf to a chemist would actually make life a lot easier especially when you start hitting 600k net worth, it's just a QOL thing that SHOULD happen to be fair, I don't want my handlers having to use 4 of their routes just to fill cauldrons, and then to only have 1 route left to move baggies to a package station, meaning i then NEED to have more handlers just to automate even a part of my operation. where as with a supply shelf, like i mentioned above, if chemists had one, the 4 routes of even 2 handlers could then be used way more efficiently.

But of course that's not going to happen for a while if it ever does, The dev has his own goals and i respect that, i also really love this game and i'm happy with or without the supply shelf for em, though i do wish they had one

[This PC]

Originally posted by ZombiePumpkin:

But the chemist wouldn't have four different supply shelves, they would have one like botanists do, and take it to four different stations, like botanists do with eight different pots. Where are you getting four supply shelves from?

The whole point of chemists having a supply shelf is so handlers don't have to stock stations from the shelves. This would free up handlers I don't understand why you think this makes chemists more dependent on them.

You really don't want this, unless you have a handler restocking that shelf.
You really want to go reload that shelf every 5 minutes of gameplay time ? :P
You absolutely would still need a handler, 100%, if you want any kind of efficiency. You might as well not have the chemists and mix yourself with your suggestion. At least, I wouldn't assign that shelf myself and I'd still use handlers.

It works with botanists because a shelf loaded with 60 seeds and 40 blue soils will last for many in-game days, even with 8 pots. Chemists will chew through a full shelf of a single ingredient in half a day. :D

Right now, you can do a setup like this and have everyone be constantly busy - blue arrows are handler assignments, yellow arrows are chemist assignments, brown squares are shelves, black squares are mixing machine. This uses only 1 chemist and 1 handler: https://puu.sh/KrMsh/fd86dd631e.png

[Angela]

It would be better if dev deleted the Handler job, then had all shelves open to all jobs so they automatically took whatever stock was available on shelf. Then simply let us set a recipe to use per station. And we simply locked shelves we didn't want npcs to have access to.

Cleaners should clean to all available bins over full area.

Chemists should take from all available shelves and build to the set recipe on all craft stations their job can use.

Botanists should plant to the set recipe on all pots and take from all available shelves.

And so on.

TL;DR: the setting routes and specific shelves thing and having to set up craft stations with ingredients manually needs a rework. Shelves should be automatically available unless locked by player.

[This PC]

Originally posted by Angela:

It would be better if dev deleted the Handler job, then had all shelves open to all jobs so they automatically took whatever stock was available on shelf. Then simply let us set a recipe to use per station. And we simply locked shelves we didn't want npcs to have access to.

Cleaners should clean to all available bins over full area.

Chemists should take from all available shelves and build to the set recipe on all craft stations their job can use.

Botanists should plant to the set recipe on all pots and take from all available shelves.

And so on.

TL;DR: the setting routes and specific shelves thing and having to set up craft stations with ingredients manually needs a rework. Shelves should be automatically available unless locked by player.

I disagree, without getting too technical, asking every employee to iterate through every storage shelf every 3 seconds is a pretty terrible idea performance wise. :P

We do need better tools though, I won't disagree on that.

[Angela]

Originally posted by This PC:

Originally posted by Angela:

It would be better if dev deleted the Handler job, then had all shelves open to all jobs so they automatically took whatever stock was available on shelf. Then simply let us set a recipe to use per station. And we simply locked shelves we didn't want npcs to have access to.

Cleaners should clean to all available bins over full area.

Chemists should take from all available shelves and build to the set recipe on all craft stations their job can use.

Botanists should plant to the set recipe on all pots and take from all available shelves.

And so on.

TL;DR: the setting routes and specific shelves thing and having to set up craft stations with ingredients manually needs a rework. Shelves should be automatically available unless locked by player.

I disagree, without getting too technical, asking every employee to iterate through every storage shelf every 3 seconds is a pretty terrible idea performance wise. :P

We do need better tools though, I won't disagree on that.

It would be up to player to sort shelves well if they didn't want whatever kind of lag their computer can't handle.

Doubt it would create lag tbh, game isn't very intensive graphically and most computers should be able to handle a database search.

[This PC]

Originally posted by Angela:

It would be up to player to sort shelves well if they didn't want whatever kind of lag their computer can't handle.

Doubt it would create lag tbh, game isn't very intensive graphically and most computers should be able to handle a database search.

iteration already causes stutters with botanists, this is on a 5600x with a 4070ti super. These stutters are very clearly linked to botanists iterating through their tasks when they're somehow stuck, either because output shelves are full or they are lacking supplies.

People wouldn't sort their shelves, they'd complain to the dev. To reduce the performance impact, "sorting" wouldn't help, only solution would be reducing the number of things stored in your property globally.

Not saying this whole employee thing couldn't be handled more gracefully tho. :D

[Angela]

Originally posted by This PC:

Originally posted by Angela:

It would be up to player to sort shelves well if they didn't want whatever kind of lag their computer can't handle.

Doubt it would create lag tbh, game isn't very intensive graphically and most computers should be able to handle a database search.

iteration already causes stutters with botanists, this is on a 5600x with a 4070ti super. These stutters are very clearly linked to botanists iterating through their tasks when they're somehow stuck, either because output shelves are full or they are lacking supplies.

People wouldn't sort their shelves, they'd complain to the dev. To reduce the performance impact, "sorting" wouldn't help, only solution would be reducing the number of things stored in your property globally.

Not saying this whole employee thing couldn't be handled more gracefully tho. :D

Not seeing any stutters in my game though I already try to avoid the automation because it's so inefficient

If it was changed to "all available shelves except for those player has locked" rather than "assign a specific shelf and route etc to each worker" the database for shelves would be unified in the backend rather than per shelf as we would see visually and likely per shelf in backend as it is now which might be the cause of stutters you're getting under this current automation setup. A more unified database would be more efficient on computer resources = less (or preferably no) stuttering.