Alchemy 101 (Script for my youtube video)

Guildark

Member
Mar 24, 2021
19
33
13
So, you’ve started making potions in Mortal Online 2. You threw some sea dew and blood ore into a potion, but what did you actually achieve? What did each ingredient do? How do you maximize your end result? How do you organize the data you’ve just found on a spreadsheet? How do you understand the date you’ve just collected? We’re going to answer all those questions and maybe a few more today, so buckle up buttercup, it's gonna be a bumpy ride.

To start, what is alchemy? Alchemy is the base skill required for potion making, among its child skills are skills like Potion Making, Taste Identification, Alchemical Dissolvents, Alchemical Contraptions, and Alchemical Mineralogy. Today we’re going to be focusing on Potion making and Taste Identification, as well as Advanced Potion Making which is the child skill of, you guessed it, Potion Making. The other child skills of alchemy aren’t necessary in all cases, but I’ll get into that in another video.

Now we’re going to ask ourselves, do I like spreadsheets and nerd shit? If you answered yes, Alchemy is definitely for you! If you answered no, please continue watching and see if you change your mind. Alchemy has a lot to do with how different ingredients interact with each other, and if you don't already have some experience with google sheets, Excel or another spreadsheet program, I’d recommend watching a quick tutorial on whichever spreadsheet program you have access to or prefer. Personally I use google sheets and if you want a tutorial on how to use that for these purposes, leave a comment below and let me know.

With all that out of the way, let's get started! The first base you’ll want to use is sea dew. Sea dew can be found along the coast near the city of Meduli on the West side of the map. The easiest way to get a lot is to just follow the coast and pick all that you can find, and then pick as much as you can on the way back as its respawning as the spawn times for it are fairly quick. You can also buy some off the broker if you have the gold to spare so please feel free to further the economy of Mortal.

Once you’ve gathered a sizable amount of sea dew, you can either leave them as is, or process them further into sea dew leaves at an herbologium. When testing I prefer to leave them as just regular sea dew as the results of testing will transfer over from base sea dew, all the way to salvia oil, but we won’t get into all the science behind the reason for that in this video. The next step is to get a baseline for what we’re working with, so just slap 11 of whichever you decided to use, either sea dew or sea dew leaves, into the potion crafting table and wham bam thankyou ma’am you should have a potion with 1 Potion Unit of healy juice in it.

Looking at what we’ve just done a little further you’ll see that the weight of the vial you placed the base ingredient in has changed after we filled it, it should be .01kg heavier than it was before you placed the ingredients into it. Every .01kg is representative of 1 Potion Unit, or PU for short, meaning that a small vial with 10 PU’s should weigh about .2kg, .1 for the weight of the vial and .1 for the 10 PU’s residing in the vial. Another thing you’ll see is that you’ll have a Direct Healing value, or DH, associated with your potion that is either 1.8 for sea dew, or 2.4 for sea dew leaves.

So now that we have a baseline for testing, we’re going to look at figuring out how to classify items based on whether or not they add Volume, or Weight, to our potion. The easiest way to do this is to take 10 units of a known base, like sea dew or water for instance, and then one unit of whatever item you want to test and throw them into the potion table and if it makes a potion, well you’ve got yourself a volumizer, meaning it adds volume to the potion. If it spits your ingredients out like a Llama not wanting to eat its dinner, then you’ve got yourself a multiplier. Not every volumizer will increase your DH value and not every multiplier will either, they’re just terms for us to categorize items based on what they do to our potions.

Whew, that’s a lot of information so far and we haven’t even made out potions any better than they were to begin with, so let's do that next. To start we’re going to take an item like blood ore for instance and throw 1 unit into the potion table with 11 units of our base, either sea dew or sea dew leaves, and see what happens to the base value. Low and behold it will increase because blood ore is a DH multiplier! We can repeat this process with any multipliers we find to determine whether or not they increase our DH value. We can also repeat the process with volumizers, but with a slight alteration. We are going to take 1 unit away from our base, as volumizers will add to our volume, hence the term volumizer. So it should be 1 unit of volumizer and 10 units of base. An example of a commonly used volumizer is musefruit.

Now that we’ve discovered some items that increase our DH value we’re going to find out how much of each item we’re supposed to put into a potion to achieve the maximum result that we are after, the “peak” of each item if you will. To do this we need to use 100 units of our base to get 10 PU’s and a more accurate measurement of the peak. The more volume in a potion, the more accurate we can make out measurements. Now remember me mentioning spreadsheets at the beginning? This is where those come in. I’ll show the example spreadsheet that's available on my alchemy discord to all Apprentice Alchemists here.

Now as you can see I’ve plotted this using sea dew leaves, but if you use regular sea dew the same principles still apply and the same amount will be used, your spreadsheets will just look a little different value wise. There are plenty more items that increase DH than these, these are just some examples to give you a nice basis to work with. Please note that these values are subject to change the more items that you add to the potion, as a bigger potion actually requires less items, but the less items you add make a smaller potion thus requiring more items, but I’ll leave more complicated math like that for another time.

Once you’ve gotten all the peaks for each item, slappem together in any order in a potion with the strongest base you can find and bamba jamba mamba samba ramba, you’ve got yourself a nice big health potion. This will apply for every base that gives DH and the same principles should apply to every single stat you can get from a potion, so this all applies to Direct Poison, Poison over Time, Healing over Time, Healing Length, and Poison Length. Each stat has its own bases and multipliers, and sometimes there are neutralizers for stats, like cotton, that will neutralize several different stats.

So, in conclusion, Alchemy is a beautifully complicated beast. If you are willing to put in the work you will be greatly rewarded. If you just wanna mooch off of others research, you can eat a big fat log of hog. If you would like more instruction, please leave a comment below and let me know what I should make a video about next. If you want to join a community of alchemists please look in the description for the link to my discord where I do one on one lessons with those that ask and where alchemists can put their heads together to discuss prices, ingredients, and help each other understand alchemy better.


Link to the referenced spreadsheet :

(I will add a link to the YouTube video once it's created if that's more your medium.)
 
Last edited:

Illuana

New member
Jun 1, 2020
29
14
3
45HP potions +/- 20G each
20MP potions +/- 200G each
40HP+20MP potions = infinite money
Mortal Online economy is perfectly balanced
 

Guildark

Member
Mar 24, 2021
19
33
13
45HP potions +/- 20G each
20MP potions +/- 200G each
40HP+20MP potions = infinite money
Mortal Online economy is perfectly balanced
I sell my 45 hp pots in meduli for 5g a piece, and mp don't exist yet to my knowledge so.
 

Illuana

New member
Jun 1, 2020
29
14
3
And I feel like you could get more than 5g for a 45 hp pot. We are literally setting the economy now for what will be the future when it gets flooded by new people. It can only go down, don't start at a low rate while demand is low.
 

Guildark

Member
Mar 24, 2021
19
33
13
And I feel like you could get more than 5g for a 45 hp pot. We are literally setting the economy now for what will be the future when it gets flooded by new people. It can only go down, don't start at a low rate while demand is low.
No one sees the importance of pots right now. And 45 hp is easy to make honestly. 5g in meduli is a good price. Maybe 10 I'm like bakti or mk. Because lack of resources.
 

Illuana

New member
Jun 1, 2020
29
14
3
I know when I was making pots for some guild members, that they would be in a fight and totally forget to use them. Of course I wasn't making really strong pots... like 26hp pots, basically a bandage at that point, and they'd forget to use em and die.
 

barcode

Well-known member
Jun 2, 2020
370
352
63
valuation of pots is difficult, but consider the time investment. How much coin could you make if you roll out and farm for the same amount of time it takes to get all the materials for your pots? even farming pigs just outside towns is a nontrivial amount of money per time considering there is more or less zero risk. how long would it take you to get 5g just farming pigs? and how long does it take to gather all the mats for making pots? somehow i doubt your numbers will add up in your favor (i.e. you're probably better off just farming pigs for coin at that point).

Of course, this doesnt solve the real problem... people are generally unwilling to really pay much for pots and dont include them in their regular gearsets. The lack of market demand is what keeps prices down, and unless the time investment is somehow reduced, there will be far better ways to make coin. Maybe public perception on the usefulness of pots will improve in mo2 but i wouldnt hold my breath waiting for the market.

-barcode
 

KermyWormy

Well-known member
May 29, 2020
270
288
63
California
We're still lacking a lot of tools that help bring down the required time investment for alchemy. I found the buy orders, when population was decent, to be a great way to kind of crowd source resource gathering in the old game, or even finding a few players who actually like going out and gathering things and buying stacks from them. We don't have those tools, or even a motivation for those types of players to gather and sell in the game yet.

But even when population was good, resources were available for purchase etc, keg sales were always inconsistent, and never were the best way to make money, but not everything can be the best, it just has to be decent for those that are interested in it. And when supply would dwindle the price would go up to balance it out.

It's impossible currently to establish a real value tho, and changes will be made between now and persistent that will further change things. For example, even somewhat established prices for things like steel/tungsteel are currently and will continue to go down because of recent changes to extraction timers and the continual farming and hording of resources without much being actually taken out of the game, so supply will continue to outpace demand.

I do believe alchemy, if nothing new and interesting is added to it which will have to be researched and discovered again, will severely lag behind other trades if only considering profitability. There is nothing unknown in the system anymore and every new alchemist just looks up the info that's been published and can make the same stuff as anybody else.

There will probably be enough alchemists that each guild will have enough to supply their own needs and will not need to source from outside, which will even further kind of lower the opportunity to make good money with the profession.
 
  • Like
Reactions: Amelia

Guildark

Member
Mar 24, 2021
19
33
13
We're still lacking a lot of tools that help bring down the required time investment for alchemy. I found the buy orders, when population was decent, to be a great way to kind of crowd source resource gathering in the old game, or even finding a few players who actually like going out and gathering things and buying stacks from them. We don't have those tools, or even a motivation for those types of players to gather and sell in the game yet.

But even when population was good, resources were available for purchase etc, keg sales were always inconsistent, and never were the best way to make money, but not everything can be the best, it just has to be decent for those that are interested in it. And when supply would dwindle the price would go up to balance it out.

It's impossible currently to establish a real value tho, and changes will be made between now and persistent that will further change things. For example, even somewhat established prices for things like steel/tungsteel are currently and will continue to go down because of recent changes to extraction timers and the continual farming and hording of resources without much being actually taken out of the game, so supply will continue to outpace demand.

I do believe alchemy, if nothing new and interesting is added to it which will have to be researched and discovered again, will severely lag behind other trades if only considering profitability. There is nothing unknown in the system anymore and every new alchemist just looks up the info that's been published and can make the same stuff as anybody else.

There will probably be enough alchemists that each guild will have enough to supply their own needs and will not need to source from outside, which will even further kind of lower the opportunity to make good money with the profession.
I think you make some good points. But I also think that you're off in some regards. As most guilds will have to outsource for any potion above 120hp. Sure there are recipes floating around for some high potions, but nothing like what we have the capabilities of making once all the proper ingredients get added to the game.
 

KermyWormy

Well-known member
May 29, 2020
270
288
63
California
I think you make some good points. But I also think that you're off in some regards. As most guilds will have to outsource for any potion above 120hp. Sure there are recipes floating around for some high potions, but nothing like what we have the capabilities of making once all the proper ingredients get added to the game.
Nah it's all known pretty much. I quit doing alchemy and pretty much the game before sarducca, and all the stuff I found has been published by others overtime. I could make 110hp way back then, so I was only missing 1 good multiplier..maybe 2. So even tho I don't have that right in front of me, I know it's been done.

I don't think people will bother making 120hp for quite some time, but it's not a matter of knowledge but resource gathering.

But this is all just my thoughts on it. I enjoyed doing the actual research way back when everyone thought it was broken and didn't work, and it's frustrating in a way that they just copied over the old system. I would love to see them revisit both alchemy and cooking to breathe some new life into them.
 

Illuana

New member
Jun 1, 2020
29
14
3
Personally as an alchemist I'm not going to invest the time and effort to make 120hp potions. There's just too many things that can go wrong with the gathering, I'll be happy to make a potion like 60hp-80 that is cheap/quick/abundant to make for sales as well as for guild mates but I'm more about that mass production and sales instead of quality like 100+. I will also be trying to put towards potions that can do healing over time, I want to get around 30hp per tick for 30 ticks... basically a low powered regeneration potion that people pop early in the fight and then just go full ham without regard cause they won't be able to die -unless they get focused.
And then... there's food... Mana regen foods and fat foods for mages and stam food for fighters, throw in some taming sales and I think I'll be doing alright for coin.
Other than that, I'll just do dungeon runs and hang with my guild, I look forward to the full release of game.
 

~ M_A_N_T_R_A ~

New member
Feb 13, 2022
11
3
3
I hear stories about alchemy all the time. can you tell me, as experienced veterans, what do you expect from alchemy yourself, besides cans for health?
 

~ M_A_N_T_R_A ~

New member
Feb 13, 2022
11
3
3
Sometimes I like to think of the game as something more than just health banks. I want to wait for a miracle. and how do you feel it? I thought that if a mixture of ingredients gives magical skills, then it is possible to get cans that will combine ingredients that will give magical reactions. what do you think?
 

NINEN

Member
Dec 20, 2020
56
29
18
I usually try to stay absolutely silent about anything Alchemy, but I’ll reply here because you all sparked my interest.

30 Hp per tick for 30 ticks is not ever going to be possible. One tick occurs about every 2 seconds, so that’s 30 Hp every 2 seconds! That alone is impossible. That potion would be 900 HP!

However, I’ll say that @Illuana is absolutely on point about crafting 60 to 80 Hp potions. Which is such a very smart approach to the craft. I really hope you give Alchemy a try.

The best advice I can give any young Alchemist is to have patience and gather all the materials you need, then go crafting. Also, test everything.