Medic Crafting
How do I craft my own medicine?
First you will need resources. Once you have those, look for the Generic Crafting Tool in your inventory and double-click it. If you don't have one, buy one or ask an artisan to craft one. You can also use a food and chemical crafting tool (which might be better if you plan on advancing to a specialized medical profession). Once the window for the tool opens, choose the schematic for "Small Stimpack - A".
Stim A is the easiest stim to make, requiring only 8 organics and 8 inorganics. On the left hand side of the Stim A schematic you should see the organics and inorganics from your inventory, and in the middle are two slots that need filling. You can drag-and-drop the organics/inorganics into the slots from your resource stacks, or double-click a stack to make the required amount of resources jump into a slot. Note that you can't put different types of resources into one slot: they must be identical.
Click "Assemble" and the game will ask if you really want to do this. On the last stage you can rename the stim, which can be quite amusing but is not necessary. There will now be a pause while you wait for the Generic Crafting Tool to manufacture the item and put it in your inventory. You will get a message when it's finished, and you should then have a spinning Stimpack A with about 11 charges as the final item in your inventory. Congratulations, you just made your first stim and earned some medicine crafting experience points (XP), which are used in training Organic Chemistry.
Wound medpacks are a slightly different story. You can't make Health Wound Medpack A or Action Wound Medpack A until you have enough medicine crafting XP to train in Organic Chemistry I (after crafting about 17 stim A). But like stims, these A-level schematics simply require 8 organics and 8 inorganics. As you advance in organic chemistry, you can also make medpacks to heal stat wounds, such as Stamina Wound Medpack A (8 organics, 8 inorganics).
At higher levels of organic chemistry, you gain the ability to make B and C-level stims and medpacks (then D and E in elite professions). These heal more points per charge, but they are also harder to make. And you have to find someone who is really hurting to make it worthwhile to use a stim charge that heals for 1000 or a wound heal for 500. For example, stimpack B is a multi-stage process where you make three initial components from various resources, then combine the components with more organics and inorganics. All up, a single stim B uses 64 resources. Many medics continue making stim A as their standard self-crafted medicine in the field. But the good thing about Stim B and Medpack B is they only require +5 medicine use skill (skill mods are listed in the lower left of the Ctrl-C screen), meaning novice medics can buy and use B packs, and others can make money selling B packs to novices. The C and higher versions require far more medicine use skill.
How can I speed up crafting?
The Yes/No confirmation boxes are annoying. You can get rid of them by pressing Ctrl-O to bring up the options screen. Select the "Misc" tab and switch off "confirm crafting actions". Goodbye confirmation boxes, hello faster crafting.
You can also resize and line up the crafting windows so that each "accept" button appears under the previous one. You only have to do this once and the window position should remain the same. This makes clicking much more efficient and comfortable.
The most important tip is to start using multiple crafting tools. When you open up the generic crafting tool, you'll see that in addition to the food and chemical crafting tabs (where the stimpack and medpack schematics are stored) there is a tab called "generic items". It has a schematic for building Food & Chemical Crafting Tools, using some metals and other resources. These dedicated tools can only produce medicines and food, but you'll need them to produce higher level items. For some recipes you also need to be near a public food & chemical crafting station (found in cities) otherwise the schematic doesn't even appear in the crafting tool.
If you can scrape together enough resources to make two Food & Chemical Crafting Tools, you can put the Generic Crafting Tool in the bank for later. Having a pair of tools avoids downtime, because you can start crafting in the second kit while waiting for the first one to empty its output hopper. Later you'll want three tools, because the hopper waiting times are longer for more complex items.
How can I make better medicines?
The amount healed by one charge of a stim or medpack is random, but will be higher if you used good quality resources. If you examine resources you'll see they have their own statistics (flavor, potency, overall, etc), so there are different types and qualities of wild rice, aluminium, etc. Read the schematic to see which statistics are important in determining the properties of a crafted item (e.g. Stim A mostly wants high Overall Quality). Avoid making stims with poor-quality resources because you'll end up healing 70s when you could be healing 220s. You might also want to try experimenting on your stims and medpacks to increase the charges, increase the base amount healed, or lower the required medicine use skill. To do this, you need to be near a public food & chemical crafting station, which causes extra options (including experimentation) to appear during the crafting process. Experimentation becomes more important with advanced medicines. The best medicines are the result of successful experimentation with high-quality resources. You can even experiment on the sub-components of higher level stims.
How do I make mass-produced medicines?
Architects can make food & chemical crafting factories, which are buildings that churn out up to 1000 items at a time. You can buy them or friends can give you access to their factory. You put enough resources in (e.g. 800 organic and 800 inorganic for a batch of 100 stim A), and the factory automatically produces crates of medicines. Before you can manufacture something in a factory, you also need to make your own schematic in a food & chemical crafting tool while in the vicinity of a public food & chemical crafting station. Craft something, experiment on it, and choose the option to make a schematic instead of a prototype. The resulting schematic (found on your datapad, Ctrl-D) goes into the factory along with the resources. You must use exactly the same types of resources as you used in making the schematic.
Where do I get all these resources?
Sometimes people will give you organics and inorganics in return for heals. Other times you'll need to buy them. You can also train in novice artisan and use surveying tools to sample resources. However, the ideal solution is to obtain harvesting machines made by an engineer, which come in different types for different resources (e.g. the simplest organics harvester is called a micro flora farm). When placed on an area with a high enough concentration of materials, harvesters automatically gather resources for you. When you need more, you just visit your harvester and take out the resources it has gathered. Friends can give you shared access to their harvesters. Just remember to keep your harvesters topped up with maintenance cash or they will decay. Harvesters also need power, so your first harvester type will need to be a wind generator or solar energy device (unless you can find power for sale).
There are some other ways to get organics. Training in novice scout gives you the ability to use the "harvest resources" option to collect organics from creatures you kill (the larger the creature, the more you can harvest depending on your skill).
Note that attempting to supply yourself with enough resources and medicines as a solo medic is a long, hard road. Medics can advance faster with friends to give them resources/harvesters, or by joining a PA that supports its medics. If you're going to work alone, you'll need to raise cash by doing missions or ask for payment in return for heals.
What kind of ingredients are useful for making stims and/or wound packs?
This is a very broad question, but for the most part, you can count on the following:
1) All medical items look for Overall Quality, Potential Energy and Unit Toughness
2) The importance of each is as follows:
For effectiveness: OQ 66%, PE 33%
For charges: OQ 66%, UT 33%
3) Using advance components will greatly increase the overall quality of anything your making, But they require very specific resources.
4) A good practice for any starting medic is to get the scout skill and harvest meat off of any animal that you kill. This will be the ideal organic resource for crafting medical supplies.
What resources do I need for advance components?
You will need the following resources:
Advanced Biological Effect Controller: (Used in creating Stims and Wound Packs)
Lokian wild wheat and Tatooinian fiberplast
Advanced Chemical Release Duration Mechanism: (Used in creating Stims and Wound Packs)
Class 4 liquid petro fuel and Herbivore meat
Advanced Liquid Suspension: (Used in creating Stims)
Dantooine berry fruit and Talusian water vapor
Advanced Solid Delivery Shell: (Used in creating Wound Packs)
Dolovite iron and Domesticated oats
Is there a macro for crafting?
There are macros that can assist you in the crafting process, but there are none that will do the process for you. Crafting goes far beyond the scope of just medic, however you can find some great information on how to create a macro here:
Start by getting a metal (either by mining or purchasing; any ferrous metal will do) and begin crafting survey tools. Actually create the 1st tool, and then use this macro for the rest. (Macro by Imodi Ibanei)
Code: Select all
/ui action toolbarSlot01; (uses first tool in F2 box)
/selectdraftSchematic 33;
/pause 5; (this pause gives you time to add in the resources, adjust it as you see fit)
/nextC;
/nextC;
/nextC;
/createprototype practice no item;
/createprototype practice no item;
/pause 2;
/ui action toolbarSlot02; (uses second tool in F3 box)
/selectdraftSchematic 33;
/pause 5;
/nextC;
/nextC;
/nextC;
/createprototype practice no item;
/createprototype practice no item;
/pause 2;
/ui action toolbarSlot03; (uses third tool in the F4 box)
/selectdraftSchematic 33;
/pause 5;
/nextC;
/nextC;
/nextC;
/createprototype practice no item;
/createprototype practice no item;
/pause 2;
/ui action toolbarSlot00; (loops macro)
To use this macro, place the macro in the F1 slot of one of the toolbars, and place 3 generic crafting tools in the F2, F3 and F4 slots. This will run until you type /dump. A good tip to help save time is to double-click the resources into the slots (its even better if you have a mouse that has a third button for double-clicking).
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