It is time already for a new content, and this time it is about Research and Design!
Allowing player-made design is a major objective in EXODE.
So it is no surprise that it will actually take several articles.
This one will tell you a lot more about Chemicals.
Chemicals are only one part of the designs you will make.
They allow you to "create new materials" and are also an essential part to several components in starships, especially for hyper-engine technology or powerful weapons. Or fuel!
It is the most complex part of designs because it allows to make entirely new materials. We begin with this in case it will interest new alchemy inventors.
But we'll also get to know later how to design buildings, modules, weapons and armor, and where this chemical information will fit in the big player economy.*
Please note the following information is subject to change at any time, be it for balance, gameplay or clarity.
Step One: Find something to study
You have a unique planet with unique properties, and it gives you plenty of options to make your own set of designs and deliver it to player market. It also has a collection of features to allow player designs to fit with each other and make the market alive.
But first things first:
You first have to discover and retrieve new creatures and vegetation on your planet.
Your Away Teams will take care of that!
Step Two: Make a Lab Team
Once you would have captured some creatures or plants, you need to make sure you have a Lab Team.
A Lab Team can have 1 Leader and any number of assistants, including 0.
This feature will be available once we activate the "Research Step" of colonization.
Step Three: Do it!
Now let's take a look at all the next steps:
Your team can analyze the creature or vegetation you just found!
It will come back with results; it may find one or more biochemicals on it.
You order a lab team to analyze every biochemical, one by one.
This is what we call the Chemical Analysis. (see below)Once you have analyzed several chemicals (at least two!), you can order a team to combine them and design a new chemical solution. This is what we call Experimentation! (see below)
Did you make your first solution already? you can always try to design more solutions (with new Experiments), or directly launch production of anything you have discovered.
About production, you have to know that any design you make actually reveals four designs at once: the Normal version, the Rare version, the Epic version, and the Legendary version. When you produce these units at any time you can end up "making a superior version" instead of a basic one!
Usual chances are:
- 88.9% for Normal.
- 10% for Rare.
- 1% for Epic.
- 0.1% for Legendary
However, thanks to the quality of your design, you can have more or less chances.
So this means when you produce 1000 units of something, you actually make 889 normal, 100 rare, 10 epic and 1 legendary unit. (on average!)
These are the chances when trying to combine base units to produce your solution. However in production you can combine superior elements (such as trying a production using two Rares, or two Epics, and so on) to improve your results!
For instance you can have a design making a solution A,
and another design making a solution B.
Then you can make a third design, using A + B, that makes a solution C.
Let's suppose C is the thing with the immense market value.
This is your main objective for quality.
If you combine Epic Quality units of A with Epic Quality units of B, you can improve chances to have an Epic unit of C, or even a Legendary one!
Oh, and don't forget to use that:
We will explain how this works later!
Are you still with us pilot?
Because this was actually a quick summary!
Now let's look at some details.
You have to take your white blouse and enter the next laboratory.
We'll begin with what you can do with your science team:
your Chemical Analysis.
Did you get it?
Now let's get at what we call the Experimentation step.
This is where the scientific fun will begin!
So everything new can unlock several new options and make your economy new again.
Ok, let's try something first!
So with this, we can make a solution already.
But you can decide to combine with a Neutral (N) instead of a Positive (+).
This will do the following:
So now you know how to make the "powerful but unstable" ACTIVE SOLUTION. (+ and +)
Or the less powerful, but more stable PASSIVE SOLUTION. (+ and N)
How about + and -?
You cannot combine a pure chemical (+) with a pure chemical (-).
This just does not work.
You can't combine pure chemicals if they are opposed, but you can can combine opposite SOLUTIONS instead. We'll get to that in the next part!
So you have seen several combinations already.
They obey to the following rule:
So if you read that correctly, this means that you can design:
- Active Solutions (+ and +),
- Passive Solutions (+ and N),
- But also new combinations using your Active and Passive solutions, and your existing chemicals.
There are other rules here to understand:
- you can also use - and - to make negative Active Solutions.
- you can also use - and N to make negative Passive Solutions.
And once you have solutions of both signs:
- negative solutions can be combined with positive solutions, and any number of Neutral chemicals and passives. This is how you actually create a synthetic chemical.
So as you can see, there is a lot of alchemy going on here!
And you can't even imagine how interested you can be in other players chemicals, synthetic or natural, to unlock new solutions for you.
Designing chemicals work as a game on its own.
Yet there are many other rules regarding physical form (liquid, gas, etc) and chemical groups (from I to XXVI). We'll get to explain these when getting into "our chemical part 2". Before we get there though, we'll explain other types of designs - this way you will see where chemicals can enter the scene.
This is the end of your first Chemical Lab Lesson!
You'll have to stay tuned for Part Two!
More information about EXODE can also be found on our Discord, or multiple posts such as this one about our epic characters, or this trailer made by a fan, or this review or this one . A summary of latest posts and events is also here.
Also running a witness node:
And we can't believe we are at around position 100.
You can help if you think we deserve more game witnesses and EXODE is one you like!
Thank you pilots, see you soon in eXode!
