This guide aims to explain how Alchemy works. Starting from how you brew potions to how exactly every property of a potion is calculated, and how you can find out the exact property values of any ingredient.
Creating Potions
Alchemy is pretty simple in a nutshell. Put a bunch of ingredients along with a vial on the Alchemy Table and get a potion. You start with just a single slot when you have no Alchemy-related in-game skills. Two skills help unlock more slots:
If you are new to this, put a Minor Vial and 11 Sea Dew on the table. That’d be your first healing potion! Extract Sea Dew Leaves from Sea Dew on the Herbologium table. 11 Sea Dew Leaves make an even stronger potion.
Potion Units
The amount of a potion you have in the vial is measured in Potion Units (PU). 0.01kg = 1 PU.
PU of your potion is calculated as:
PU = (W - 1) / 10
The division here is integral, meaning you should truncate the fractional part.
If the result of truncation is 0, you won’t get a potion.
Alvarins have a Clade that increases the result of this formula by 10%, rounded down.
W in the formula is a sum of Alchemical Weights (AW) of all ingredients in a potion. AW is either 0 or 1, depending on the type of the material. Plants, edible ingredients, carcasses have AW = 1, while minerals, metals, and (non-edible) animal materials have AW = 0.
So if you mix 11 Sea Dew you get PU = (11 - 1) / 10 = 1. And if you add 10 000 Blood Ore to that 11 Sea Dew, you still get 1 PU, because Blood Ore has AW = 0.
The formula above simply means that the PU you get is distributed in ranges:
Potion vials differ in their PU capacity:
Each character has a Thirst attribute that puts a limit on how much PU the character can consume at a time. The default maximum for Thirst is 10. A character with 10 Thirst can consume up to 10 PU at a time. The Thirst limit is increased by 1 for every 10 points in the Potion Utilization skill. Oghmirs have a Clade that increases it by 10. So the maximum achievable Thirst limit is 30 for an Oghmir.
Potion Properties
The properties a potion can have are:
The resulting value of a property in a potion is calculated as:
A - Advanced Potion Making (APM) multiplier. Ranges from 1.0 with 0 APM to 1.2 with 100 APM. So if X is the APM level, then A = (1 + 0.2 * X / 100).
Ci - Count of the ingredient in the potion
N - Total number of ingredients (sum of all counts)
Bi - The base property value of the ingredient
Mi - The multiplier value of the ingredient
Li - Lore multiplier of the ingredient
The result is rounded to 3 decimal places. If the result was 0 or lower before rounding, the effect will not be in the potion. If the result was higher than 0 before the rounding but was rounded to 0.000, you will still see the effect with a value of 0.000.
The Lore Multiplier is calculated as (1 + F * L / 100) where L is the level of the corresponding Lore skill and F is the "lore factor". Lore factor is different for different lores. Notice that the Lore skill of the ingredient affects the base value, but not the multiplier.
Now for some examples. Sea Dew Leaves have PDH = 1.2 and DHM = 0.0. Muse Fruit has PDH = 0.15 and DHM = 0.44. Let’s see what DH you get when you use these in a potion.
Lore Factor is 2/3 for Herbology. With 100 Lore the Lore Multiplier equals 5/3. And with 100 Advanced Potion Making, its multiplier is 1.2. So the total "extra multiplier" would be 2 with 100 of both those skills. I will use it directly below.
DH of 11 Sea Dew Leaves
2 * 1.2 * 11/11 * (1 + sqrt(11/11) * 0.0) = 2.4.
DH of 11 Muse Fruit
2 * 0.15 * 11/11 * (1 + sqrt(11/11) * 0.44) = 0.3 * 1.44 = 0.432.
DH of 11 Sea Dew Leaves + 1 Muse Fruit
2 * (1.2 * 11/12 + 0.15 * 1/12) * (1 + sqrt(11/12) * 0.0) * (1 + sqrt(1/12) * 0.44) = 2.508
Because Muse Fruit has a non-zero multiplier for DH, we were able to increase the effect of Sea Dew Leaves from 2.4 to 2.508 just by adding 1 Muse Fruit. That’s the basic idea behind improving the potions. Find out what multiplies the effect, find out the best ratio, and voila.
Notice how adding an extra ingredient reduced the ratio of Sea Dew Leaves, which decreases the sum that gets multiplied. After reaching a certain ratio of the multiplier, the total result will actually start decreasing, because the multiplication in the formula will no longer be significantly affected, but the multiplied sum will keep decreasing.
Because many ingredients have multiple non-zero properties, obtaining the best healing potion is not just a matter of maximizing the DH output. You should also keep in mind the poison. Many ingredients may have positive DH multipliers, but also positive poison bases and/or multipliers. However, in the current version of the game (0.1.9.12) the HoT and PoT values are very low, making HoT potions useless and PoT not significant enough for you to care too much about reducing it. Hopefully, this will change in the future to add more depth to alchemy.
Creating Potions
Alchemy is pretty simple in a nutshell. Put a bunch of ingredients along with a vial on the Alchemy Table and get a potion. You start with just a single slot when you have no Alchemy-related in-game skills. Two skills help unlock more slots:
- Potion Making. Unlocks 4 slots total at 100. The in-game description says it unlocks more, but last time I checked it was 4. Not sure how many it actually will unlock in the end. But if you are serious about alchemy, you should unlock all 16 slots anyway.
- Advanced Potion Making. Unlocks the remaining 12 slots at 100. Also, it multiplies the effects of your potions by 1.2 at 100. More on this later.
If you are new to this, put a Minor Vial and 11 Sea Dew on the table. That’d be your first healing potion! Extract Sea Dew Leaves from Sea Dew on the Herbologium table. 11 Sea Dew Leaves make an even stronger potion.
Potion Units
The amount of a potion you have in the vial is measured in Potion Units (PU). 0.01kg = 1 PU.
PU of your potion is calculated as:
PU = (W - 1) / 10
The division here is integral, meaning you should truncate the fractional part.
If the result of truncation is 0, you won’t get a potion.
Alvarins have a Clade that increases the result of this formula by 10%, rounded down.
W in the formula is a sum of Alchemical Weights (AW) of all ingredients in a potion. AW is either 0 or 1, depending on the type of the material. Plants, edible ingredients, carcasses have AW = 1, while minerals, metals, and (non-edible) animal materials have AW = 0.
So if you mix 11 Sea Dew you get PU = (11 - 1) / 10 = 1. And if you add 10 000 Blood Ore to that 11 Sea Dew, you still get 1 PU, because Blood Ore has AW = 0.
The formula above simply means that the PU you get is distributed in ranges:
- 11-20 AW = 1 PU
- 21-30 AW = 2 PU
- 31-40 AW = 3 PU
Potion vials differ in their PU capacity:
- Minor Vial: 15 PU
- Medium Vial: 40 PU
Each character has a Thirst attribute that puts a limit on how much PU the character can consume at a time. The default maximum for Thirst is 10. A character with 10 Thirst can consume up to 10 PU at a time. The Thirst limit is increased by 1 for every 10 points in the Potion Utilization skill. Oghmirs have a Clade that increases it by 10. So the maximum achievable Thirst limit is 30 for an Oghmir.
Potion Properties
The properties a potion can have are:
- Direct Healing (DH). How much HP is restored immediately. It is multiplied by PU drunk. So if DH of a potion is 2 and you drink 10 PU, you restore 20 HP.
- Direct Poison (DP). How much HP is subtracted immediately. Multiplied by PU drunk.
- Healing Over Time (HoT). How much HP is regenerated per second after the potion is drunk. Multiplied by PU drunk.
- Healing Length (HL). How long HoT ticks. Not affected by PU drunk.
- Poison Over Time (PoT). How much HP is drained per second after the potion is drunk. Multiplied by PU drunk.
- Poison Length (PL). How long PoT ticks. Not affected by PU drunk.
- Alcohol (Alc). Seems to have no effect as of this writing.
- Potion Direct Healing (PDH)
- DH Multiplier (DHM)
- Potion Direct Poison (PDP)
- DP Multiplier (DPM)
- Potion Healing Over Time (PHoT)
- HoT Multiplier (HoTM)
- Potion Healing Length (PHL)
- Healing Length Multiplier (HLM)
- Potion Poison Over Time (PPoT)
- Poison Over Time Multiplier (PoTM)
- Potion Poison Length (PPL)
- Poison Length Multiplier (PLM)
- Potion Alcohol (PAlc)
- Alcohol Multiplier (AlcM)
The resulting value of a property in a potion is calculated as:
A - Advanced Potion Making (APM) multiplier. Ranges from 1.0 with 0 APM to 1.2 with 100 APM. So if X is the APM level, then A = (1 + 0.2 * X / 100).
Ci - Count of the ingredient in the potion
N - Total number of ingredients (sum of all counts)
Bi - The base property value of the ingredient
Mi - The multiplier value of the ingredient
Li - Lore multiplier of the ingredient
The result is rounded to 3 decimal places. If the result was 0 or lower before rounding, the effect will not be in the potion. If the result was higher than 0 before the rounding but was rounded to 0.000, you will still see the effect with a value of 0.000.
The Lore Multiplier is calculated as (1 + F * L / 100) where L is the level of the corresponding Lore skill and F is the "lore factor". Lore factor is different for different lores. Notice that the Lore skill of the ingredient affects the base value, but not the multiplier.
Now for some examples. Sea Dew Leaves have PDH = 1.2 and DHM = 0.0. Muse Fruit has PDH = 0.15 and DHM = 0.44. Let’s see what DH you get when you use these in a potion.
Lore Factor is 2/3 for Herbology. With 100 Lore the Lore Multiplier equals 5/3. And with 100 Advanced Potion Making, its multiplier is 1.2. So the total "extra multiplier" would be 2 with 100 of both those skills. I will use it directly below.
DH of 11 Sea Dew Leaves
2 * 1.2 * 11/11 * (1 + sqrt(11/11) * 0.0) = 2.4.
DH of 11 Muse Fruit
2 * 0.15 * 11/11 * (1 + sqrt(11/11) * 0.44) = 0.3 * 1.44 = 0.432.
DH of 11 Sea Dew Leaves + 1 Muse Fruit
2 * (1.2 * 11/12 + 0.15 * 1/12) * (1 + sqrt(11/12) * 0.0) * (1 + sqrt(1/12) * 0.44) = 2.508
Because Muse Fruit has a non-zero multiplier for DH, we were able to increase the effect of Sea Dew Leaves from 2.4 to 2.508 just by adding 1 Muse Fruit. That’s the basic idea behind improving the potions. Find out what multiplies the effect, find out the best ratio, and voila.
Notice how adding an extra ingredient reduced the ratio of Sea Dew Leaves, which decreases the sum that gets multiplied. After reaching a certain ratio of the multiplier, the total result will actually start decreasing, because the multiplication in the formula will no longer be significantly affected, but the multiplied sum will keep decreasing.
Because many ingredients have multiple non-zero properties, obtaining the best healing potion is not just a matter of maximizing the DH output. You should also keep in mind the poison. Many ingredients may have positive DH multipliers, but also positive poison bases and/or multipliers. However, in the current version of the game (0.1.9.12) the HoT and PoT values are very low, making HoT potions useless and PoT not significant enough for you to care too much about reducing it. Hopefully, this will change in the future to add more depth to alchemy.
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