Chemicals & purity
Recipes, contaminants and the cartel behind both.
Chemical product is a purity competition. Buyers pay for what is in the bottle, and the last few percent are the difference between product and waste.
Legal on paper and not in practice: recipes move like contraband and the supply chain runs through people who keep lists.
Chemistry is the station’s highest-skill trade: inputs are dirty, the recipes are not published in-game, and the difference between a batch worth selling and one worth discarding is a measurement rather than a feeling.
The trade also runs on relationship. Suppliers remember volume, buyers remember quality, and a handler who stops visiting takes the raw stock with them.
Where it becomes a strategy is the repeat customer. A buyer who returns for the same product is worth more than the price of the sale, and that is the argument for finishing a batch properly rather than stretching it — the second visit is the one that pays for the machine that made the first one possible.
Counter protocol
- Separate contaminants before finishing — the finisher cannot repair a bad input.
- Purity is a selling argument, so measure it before negotiating.
- A mastered recipe beats a shelf of half-learned ones.
Related stock
Where this comes from
Profitable chemicals depend on recipes that are not public.
“Profitable chemicals rely on closely guarded recipes.”
The chem finisher applies the recipe pass that turns a mixed input into a sellable product.
“Place it in the chem finisher.”
Caption as spoken (verbatim)
place it in the chem finisher.
Tier 1 is the developer or publisher speaking, tier 2 is a large structured reference, tier 3 is player-made material. Anything a player measured rather than read is labelled as community-reported on this page.