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Very good.

good.

meh.

bad.

Very bad.

[94dima94]

For alchemy I'd have lots of ideas, mostly potion based, but I'm drawing a blank on chemistry.

If farming is still hard (or even harder), chemistry could be the source of some kind of fertilizer, which could become the only way to farm enough food for an entire fortress. Maybe forcing people who don't use it to leave farm plots empty, with some kind of "three-field system" (http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/611244/two-field-system or http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/593743/three-field-system)

Maybe it's too "advanced" for the historical period, and I don't know if it's actually possible, but this could be a new approach to the gameplay: another skill that becomes useful only later in the life of the fortress, but it's very important to have.

[smakemupagus]

I mostly want to avoid dependencies. Alchemy shouldnt have to rely on Chemistry. Alchemy makes artificial gems, transmutes metals and creates gold from lead. Chemistry will use rare stones (rocksalt, saltpeter, brimstone, cinnabar) to make blackpowder, acids, arsenic and mercury...

But I'm not entirely sure what to do with those materials yet. Blackpowder I wanted to use for landmines/turrets, but otherwise ... Oil of Vitriol to destroy items? Some new source of soaps? Fire starting? Poisons?

For alchemy I'd have lots of ideas, mostly potion based, but I'm drawing a blank on chemistry.

Many of the on-timeline uses of chemistry are abstracted already in the base game.

Soaps
Metallurgy (e.g. removing rust, leeching certain kinds of metals out of slag or deposits, alloywork)
Glassmaking, especially clear or stained glass
Paints, glazes, solvents, cosmetics

anachronistic ideas
Batteries and derivative uses like electroplating
Gun and blasting powder
Synthetic fertilizers, polymers, plastics, fuels, etc. made from a common feedstock reagent
Toughened ceramics

This is not a bad quick reference example
https://www.mtholyoke.edu/courses/smoss/TEI_projects/chem250_sp06/MamtaDass/chart.html

Orc fortress has several bits and pieces inspired by chemistry in antiquity, like the tin-lead glazes, stained glass, and using acids as solvents.  Obviously very simplified, and anyway in many cases we don't know exactly how the ancients did things.  Like the Baghdad Flasks that may or may not have been crude batteries used for some unknown purpose.  Plus, if you introduce chemistry at more than a very cursory level then it's hard to leave alone vanilla smelting and glassmaking.

[danmanthedog]

Has the diseases annoying way how transferring to animals which kinda makes them in to infectious carriers.

[Meph]

Has the diseases annoying way how transferring to animals which kinda makes them in to infectious carriers.

This sentence makes no sense. Is it a statement or a question?

[qorthos]

Like the Baghdad Flasks that may or may not have been crude batteries used for some unknown purpose.

Electroplating was one hypothesis that I've read about.  Which could be used by a nefarious race to create counterfeit coins 

[Putnam]

Chemistry is what the reaction raws were made for, remember. Like, literally, that's why they're called reactions that have reagents and products. Metalsmithing is a subset of chemistry and materials science definitely is, so for dwarves you should probably focus on those.

Like the Baghdad Flasks that may or may not have been crude batteries used for some unknown purpose.

Electroplating was one hypothesis that I've read about.  Which could be used by a nefarious race to create counterfeit coins 

Capntastic:   Has this been brought up yet? The Baghdad battery that everyone always brings up all the time.
Toady:   Yeah I think we've discussed that on the forums quite a bit anyway. People still get into fights about this so ... As far as I know you couldn't do anything with the thing, but I saw a fight break out over that already. I'm not an expert on the Baghdad battery, what did I see, a MythBusters episode where a lemon could do more or something? But that's like nothing, so ... I don't want to strike too sharp a tone on that. I certainly don't know of any evidence of things like ancient electroplating from stuff like that. If there is stronger evidence then we could start thinking about that stuff, and it's up to people I guess to decide what their dwarves can do; because a dwarf society is not a human society, and with that stuff if you know how it works then you can do it, but it's not the type of thing that you just figure out. You could use medieval household appliances to do stuff like electroplating but you just wouldn't think to do it because it's completely non-intuitive. But who knows, dwarves are down there all the time, maybe they do stuff like that.

Electroplating may be fine for dwarves, yeah. I used it in one of my old, non-niche mods that nobody played anyway to make adamantine-plated lead; since adamantine is perfectly rigid and ridiculously strong, a single atom's layer on top of lead will give you adamantine that's as heavy as lead. So that's an idea. It used 1 adamantine instead of 150, too, so you could make as much as you wanted mostly as long as you had lead and adamantine.

[Meph]

Not sure about multiplying adamantine like that (even with the weight penalty), but I like the idea of counterfeit coins.

[Nevets_]

I think if you can't find anything to put in the Chemists' shop that wouldn't also fit somewhere else you can just cut it. 

I was thinking it would be nice to have workshops / furnaces that used the blood/tears of Armok as building components rather than non-consumed reagents.  So you could have a Rock Factory which requires both a rough blood and a rough tears to build and can created obsidian stones for free, and occasionally generates a flux stone or ore as well.  You could re-do the big magma forges to require a blood of Armok as a construction item, and make their reactions require no fuel.  I don't think it's possible but it would be nice to be able to have a custom 'well' workshop that didn't need water below it but used a tear of Armok instead.

I think this would look better than using magma tankers to make 1x1 magma pits dotted all over your production floor, which also is kind of cheaty since filling a magma tanker doesn't drain the magma beneath the workshop, so effectively as soon as you can get access to any magma you have an infinite supply anyway.

[Meph]

Nevets, thats not the worst idea I heard. But I need blackpowder for turrets/landmines, thats the main reason I added a chemists shop. But these dont work yet because of the missing spawnunit script, so I was looking for alternatives; for other uses of chemistry in DF.

Magmatanker still exist? (I thought these were only in orc fortress now) Magma is made in the magma well.

[Nevets_]

I'm not sure about the magma tanker, I was trying out Warlocks and Gnomes for the past 6 months or so, I could be out of date on dwarves.

[LMeire]

Is it possible to make a weapon that destroys itself in a fireball when used? If so, a good use for black powder would be just filling a barrel with it to make a powder keg trap. That's how gunpowder was used before guns; just stick it in a weapontrap somewhere you think the enemy will be, they walk over it and BOOM. (Though technically, powder kegs were actually supposed to be used to blow a hole in the walls of a defending city or floated out to sea to sink naval fleets, rather than used against invading infantry.)

[bluntobj]

Well, acids are handy for etching metals, leaching metals from rock, or separating a bimetallic item?  You could also use them in the rune armor or weaponry to make runes, say etching the metal and then working the rune into it?  Rune are super powerful, so maybe this is a bit of balance there.

Mercury is for electrical items, capturing gold fines from alluvium, and for making really nasty projectile ammunition, maybe.  Also, how about golem blood?

Could use a white phosphorus projectile launcher like a wand or m42 thumper, launches projectiles that burn on impact and can't be washed off.  Mechanical constructs that breath fire might require phosphorus or thermite to work.  Perhaps some specialized stuff against metal forgotten beasts?

Could also expand medicine with some chemistry reagents.

[Firehawk45]

chemic sterilizer that heals infections? Acid vial thrower that melts goblins? Silver-coated weapons (just a temporary boost against were-creatures instead of having silver weapons lying about and juggling them with outfits and squads)?

Acids are a safe bet with chemists, they are always fun to tinker with. Exploding barrels are also fun if you can just put them in a weapon trap and have them destroy themselves when they go off. Maybe the creation of mineral poisons too, since those are quite different from plant-based poisons (in creation, anyways, they work basically the same). And of course, fertilizer.

[Tirion]

As for exploding barrels in weapon traps, I suggest some kind of "barrel" ammo item and an oversized bow that launches it. Oversized, so it can be built in weapon traps and loaded, but not equipped by marksdwarves.

[AJC]

cinnabar can easily be made to separate it's sulfur and mercury components crushed cinnabar being roasted in a rotary kiln and it separates out into sulfur and mercury the process was known since the late stone ages and the Romans even documented the process and the acute and long term toxicity of mercury was known as well as another roman account describes the criminal punishment to cinnabar mines as a death sentence.

this could probably be replicated by a reaction that produces a brimstone bolder and probably a special liquid material that replicates the mercury that goes into a flask or vial or a special tool item of a flask of mercury for the cost of a cinnabar bolder and a flask/vial and some fuel.