We all know that RNG plays a leading role in research, it can give you anything or nothing at all. All researchers that I met are unique, everyone has their preferred properties and ones that they think are useless, but RNG doesn’t give you a choice to make. The solution that I want to bring here will not remove RNG but at least will give researchers a choice to make. I decided to make logical connections between all properties based on the effect they have. The idea is that you can jump from 1 property to another that has a connection with it. What if there was a machine let’s call it for example “Chemical progressor” after inserting a vial of chemical you need to choose 1 property and after that it will show a list of properties that have connection with it. From there you just need to select the property that you want to get and confirm the process. Property that you have chosen will be simply added to the “Create” section of the Synthesis simulator. We need to balance it by making this process cost Research points or implement new currency especially designed for that progress. The cost of “Progression” is decided by the rarity of property that you want to unlock. Now all Negative properties have purpose since you can get the positive variant of it by this process, for example let’s say you got Cardiotoxic, now with this method you can get Cardiopeutic at the cost of spending some points. To make it more balanced I haven’t included legendary properties in the picture below.
I’d honestly prefer if we could have ODs get increased by adding negative properties but otherwise this is rather intriguing.
that used to be a mechanic but was removed in one of the many many many research nerfs
I really like this idea, what if this progressor doesn’t just add the property to the create section, but instead gives a ‘hypothetical synthesis’ for a chemical with this property. So you put in a chemical you found with corrosive, and choose to branch into anti-parasitic. It then takes time and research points to load, and prints out a new formula for a chemical that would have anti-parasitic in it. Then you just need to make and scan it and bam there you go.
Could also make it so that you can only do the progression feature with a chemical once, so that corrosive chemical is now unable to be used to research any other properties so it kinda comes out like a tree, or you need to be selective with which of the 3 or 4 properties you want to expand on.