Is there a quest that gives you a chemical synthesizer or do I have to make one from scratch? I've nearly completed all of the quests in the first set, and got a chemical decomposer as a quest reward which left me hanging on the counterpart. If there's a quest for one, perhaps these two quest rewards should be in succession instead of spread out, and if you aren't given one as a reward, perhaps you should put a quest in that gives it. Without minechem, getting iron is INSANELY slow even with an automatic sieve, and the pack stalls there.
Edit: I finally found the synthesizer quest. Personally I would move the decomposer reward to the beginning of the "I was bad at math, but..." quest tree, and make up a new quest to get it, as right now it seems completely disconnected and hard to tell what quest to follow up to progress.