This is the skill that creates drugs, mostly drugs to heal people, but also a lot of drugs to genetically alter a body or to satisfy illegal addictions. In order to create drugs, you need to have the necessary raw materials, in this case all sorts of chemicals, you must stand near a chemistry workbench and you must have tools, a microscope, in your inventory, just like for other productions. For chemistry however you also need a drug book filled with formulas.
The book itself is a simple object that is made by other craftsmen. The formulas must be found. NPCs drop random formulas from time to time when they are killed. these formulas must be transferred into a drug book to be of use. You do this by drag and drop the formulas on your book while you have both in your inventory. Once you have more than 5 formulas in your book, you can not transfer it to other characters! Only you can use this book, it is personalized. When you open the book by double clicking you see this dialog:
In the top list you see the recipes you have available. Those that you can not use because your biochemistry skill is too low are in brackets [] but all others are available to you. To create a drug, you must stand close to a workbench, then open the book, click on the drug you want. the table below shows you the chemicals needed. Now you enter the number of drugs of this type you want to create in the edit box to the right and click the Manufacture button. If you had enough raw material, the drugs are stored in your inventory and the raws are destroyed.
You may also extract a recipe from the book if you want to give it away, but that removes it and puts it back on a scroll. You will only need this in very special situations. You may also extract all recipes at once. These books can not be stolen and are not dropped when you die. The will stay in your inventory unless you drop them or destroy them.
This book also allows you to create fingerprint and DNA records for criminal investigations. Other records are created by other professions.
Drugs have various features that are listed in the drugs section in the item table tat is accessible from your client's Help menu. these features are:
This tells you how many of these drugs can be taken per day. Some drugs are unlimited and you can take as many as you like. Others are restricted, mostly to one per day. Drugs are divided into several groups and you can take one of each group each day. These groups are: Body Alteration, Brain Alteration, Other Drugs. You can take only one from each group per day. You can take the next one after the server did its daily restart.
Each drug has a chance of creating an addiction whenever it is consumed. This number describes the probability. When a character catches an addiction, this means that either his STR, DEX or INT is lowered considerably while the addiction lasts. There are two ways to counter this: You can either live with the consequences for one week, after which the addiction is cured. You can also take an addiction suppression drug that eliminates the consequences of this addiction for the day, but you have to take it every day. When you decide to get rid of the addiction for good, the 1 week counter starts from the day where you stop taking the drug.
What's more, these drugs are illegal. Trading the drugs can create a crime of Drug Trading. This crime is either generated for the buyer or for the seller, but in 75% of all cases for the buyer. Storing illegal drugs in a friends locker for example is a sure way to create a drug crime against the person who owns the locker. Therefore you should be sure that you can trust all people who have access to your lockers or you might find yourself with a drug crime without knowing why.
Vendotronics do not accept illegal drugs so you can't just sell or buy them from a vendor. You have to find your customer / supplier and deal with him in person.
Some drugs can be taken by the patent without help. Other drugs must be administered by a doctor, that is a character with medicine skill of at least 1 level. Such medicines can not be given by anybody without medicine skill
When a minimum skill level is given, then this is the medicine level that a character who administers the drug should have at least. Everything under this level has an increased chance of creating side effects. If the administering character has a lower level, then there is a great chance of side effects. Side effects can be anything from a diseases to a deformed body or sexual side effects. To lower this risk significantly (not totally) have the drugs given by a character of this skill level. Doctors can proof to a character that they have a certain level. Open your Skill dialog and click on the Proof Medicine button. This will show a text to the room confirming your medicine level.
As you can see there are also other chemical products that are produced by biochemists, like paint buckets that must be in your proximity when you want to dye an object, hair color and so on.
