Reactions and Alchemy

Reactions is two instant tabs: Planner (pick a product, plan the chain) and Alchemy watch (market-wide scan of every alchemy pair), with the Reaction facility card above them.

Reaction facility

Reactions run only in refineries — so the card offers exactly that: an Athanor (M rigs) or Tatara (L rigs), in low or null space (reactions can't run in high-sec, so the option doesn't exist), with the owner's tax and the refinery's actual reactor rigs. An Athanor takes per-type ME rigs (Composite / Hybrid / Biochemical — the Composite rig also covers alchemy's Unrefined intermediates); a Tatara fits one combined L rig that covers everything, including Molecular-Forged reactions, which no M rig covers. Reactor rig ME is 2.0% (T1) / 2.4% (T2), scaled ×1.0 in low and ×1.1 in null — different multipliers than manufacturing rigs. No refinery configured means an honest floor — 0% tax, no rig bonus — and the card says so; both the Planner and the Alchemy watch compute with whatever is selected here.

The reaction planner

Pick a reaction product and a number of runs — reactions run in fixed batches, so this is a run-count problem, not a per-unit one. The plan sizes every step in the chain, lists the exact base materials to buy (down to the gas), shows each step's leftover from batch rounding (reported, never silently credited), the job fees, each step's job time, and the total vs just buying the product outright.

Under the steps table the plan sums the time up: total slot-time, the critical path (the floor with unlimited slots — parallel branches take the slowest, not the sum), and how long your reaction slots (1 + Mass Reactions + Advanced Mass Reactions from imported skills) take to run the whole chain. Times include your Reactions skill (−4%/level), the Tatara's −25% bonus and your fitted reactor Time Efficiency rigs.

Alchemy — the cheap route around expensive moon goo

Some composites have an alchemy variant: an "Unrefined X" reaction that swaps the bottleneck input (Dysprosium, Promethium, Thulium…) for a cheap substitute. The unrefined intermediate isn't used directly — you reprocess it into the real composite plus most of the substitute input back.

The app models the whole chain:

• Reprocessing uses your Scrapmetal Processing skill (Skills menu): flat 50% base +2%/level, max 55% — structures, rigs and implants don't apply to it, only the facility's reprocessing tax does. Outputs are floored per unit, exactly like the game.
• The reclaimed input is credited against the chain cost, giving a net cost per composite unit — directly comparable with the direct reaction and the market price. Both routes are costed with the same fee model and the same price snapshot.
• Picking an "Unrefined" product in the planner shows the full breakdown; picking the composite shows the same card from the other side.

Alchemy watch

One click (Scan all pairs) compares every composite that has an alchemy route — 17 pairs — sorted by edge, alchemy wins highlighted. Alchemy pays off when the bottleneck goo spikes; the watch is how you catch that moment. Results carry the yield and time they were computed with, and warn if you've changed region or price mode since. Click a row and the Planner tab opens with that pair loaded.