A Chemistry Station is a rack of burners, beakers, and salvaged laboratory glassware. It handles everything that has to be mixed, synthesised, or packed — chems, medical supplies, syringer ammunition, and every explosive in the game but one.
Chemistry runs on Science
Chem and medical crafting is an 🧠 INT + 🔬 Science Test. Explosives are the exception: they are a 👁 PER + 💣 Explosives Test at the same station.
What You Do Here
| Operation | Test | Perk | 🔨 Time |
|---|---|---|---|
| Basic chems | 🧠 INT + 🔬 Science | None | 30 min – 2 hr |
| Advanced chems | INT + 🔬 Science | 🎖 Chemist (🔬 Science +5, INT 4) | 30 min – 2 hr |
| Medical items — 💉 Stimpak, 🧼 Antiseptic, 💊 Antibiotics, 🧵 Surgical Sutures, 🧂 Smelling Salts | INT + 🔬 Science | Varies by recipe | 30 min – 2 hr |
| Syringer ammunition | INT + 🔬 Science | 🎖 Chemist | 30 min – 2 hr |
| Explosives, grenades, mines | 👁 PER + 💣 Explosives | 🎖 Demolition Expert | 15 min – 2 hr |
| Energy devices — Plasma, Pulse, and Cryo grenades and mines | PER + 💣 Explosives | 🎖 Demolition Expert and 🎖 Science! | 1 – 2 hr |
Each craftable item carries its own recipe and 📊 DC in the Crafting callout on its page. The full explosives table lives on 🔨 Crafting.
DC by tier: Basic/T1 10, Standard/T2 15, Advanced/T3 20, High-end/T4 25. Explosives run one band lower than that, because they are gated harder on perks instead.
🎖 Chemist does two things
It unlocks advanced recipes — and it doubles the duration of every chem you create. A Chemist’s Jet lasts twice as long as one bought from a trader.
Failure
A failed chem or explosive consumes its components and produces nothing. On a 🎭 CRITFAIL, the GM may rule the batch is actively dangerous — a toxic chem, an unstable charge — rather than merely wasted.
What a Chemistry Station Can’t Do
| You want to make | Go to |
|---|---|
| Weapon, armor, or robot mods | 🔧 Workbench |
| Gear built from scratch, ⚙️ Scrap Refinement, kit refills | 🔧 Workbench |
| Cooked food, alcohol, purified water | 🍳 Cooking Station |
The industrial-workshop rule applies here too: a Chemistry Station cannot manufacture ammunition (syringer darts are the sole exception — they are chemistry, not cartridges) or manufactured medical kits like the First Aid Kit and Doctor’s Bag. Those are found or bought.
The Molotov needs no station
Finding One
Chemistry Stations are far rarer than 🔧 Workbenches. They turn up in laboratories, hospitals, clinics, chem dens, and the better-established settlements — anywhere someone was doing medicine or manufacturing before the war, or is doing it now.
A party that wants reliable chem production generally has to negotiate access to somebody else’s station, which makes the people who own one worth staying on good terms with.
Related Systems
- 🔨 Crafting — the full crafting system
- 🔧 Workbench · 🍳 Cooking Station — the other two workstations
- 🔬 Science and 💣 Explosives — the skills used here
- ⚕ Medicine — what the medical items you craft here are used for
- ⚪ Scrap — the mechanical component of most recipes