Tuesday 24 May 2016

How to Add Chemicals to the Science Kit in C1

If you've read the promotional material for the purple mountain norns or the life kit norns, you know that they use new chemicals to produce new effects and behaviours in the norns.  The trouble for mad scientists is how do you track and measure these new chemicals?

This is how you can manually add new chemicals to your in-game Science Kit. 

Firstly, if you're using The Albian Years, use the remastered patch to make sure your Genetics Kit can talk to the game.  Before you get started, the relevant files to make backups of are 'allchemicals.str', 'chemicals.str' and 'themes.str'.

Open the official Genetics Kit and go to the Biochemistry tab.  Scroll down to chemical 80 (purple mountain alcohol or dancing) and click on the leftmost number.  Then click "Add Here".  It will pop up a window giving you the option to name chemical 80 (if you've chosen "Add" by mistake, it will give you the option to name chemical 73), and then provide a caption.  Captions can be added later, and they won't show up in-game.  Scroll down to 91 (Activase), 92 (Turnase) and 93 (Collapsase) and use the "Add Here" button to add names to those chemicals.

When you're happy with it, go to the advanced menu at the top and choose Save Chemical List, then Install Chemical List.  It will give you an option asking you if you're sure, and let you know if it can make a backup or not.  (Yes, you are sure, because you made a backup at the beginning.)

The next time you open your game and scroll through the Science Kit's list of chemicals, you should find the new chemicals in between Vitamin C and Energy.  This graph shows the results - a hippy purple mountain norn enjoying the altered pianola with chemical 80 named 'Jive'.