Would be better if there were recipes that could be discovered in game through gameplay means. Don't have to be any good recipes per-say. Just something standard to steer people towards special recipes.
Ways this could be done would be things like the recipe could be written on walls in a dungeon, be it with symbols representing the "material" or in a language we'd have to translate to understand it.
A recipe could possibly be found at random when killing certain enemies. It would have to make sense though. Animals wouldn't necessarily have a piece of paper or a book on it... But what if you killed a bear and it had a bag that you find when you butcher the carcass. Then that could contain a book/parchment/folded note, this could have been owned by a "npc" alchemist, herbalist or whatever and that would give a believable reason why an animal would have it and you would have to happen upon it by chance. It adds these sort of "common" recipes that people can discover outside of pure profession grind and might get someone not interested in alchemy interested in it. Heck add a lot of literature around in the world unrelated to professions too, could be stories. Like the books written by the players back in Mo1, that sort of world building. Journals of a npc that... abruptly end. History books about events that have happened. They could be mostly useless lore but there is plenty of space to sneak things into most of these to hint towards treasure, recipes for cooking, alchemy, weapons, armor. Everything doesn't have to be very straight forward, but it does have to be made pretty clear that things like this exist when it does. Otherwise there might be a whole slew of things in the game that not a single player knows even exist.
Ways this could be done would be things like the recipe could be written on walls in a dungeon, be it with symbols representing the "material" or in a language we'd have to translate to understand it.
A recipe could possibly be found at random when killing certain enemies. It would have to make sense though. Animals wouldn't necessarily have a piece of paper or a book on it... But what if you killed a bear and it had a bag that you find when you butcher the carcass. Then that could contain a book/parchment/folded note, this could have been owned by a "npc" alchemist, herbalist or whatever and that would give a believable reason why an animal would have it and you would have to happen upon it by chance. It adds these sort of "common" recipes that people can discover outside of pure profession grind and might get someone not interested in alchemy interested in it. Heck add a lot of literature around in the world unrelated to professions too, could be stories. Like the books written by the players back in Mo1, that sort of world building. Journals of a npc that... abruptly end. History books about events that have happened. They could be mostly useless lore but there is plenty of space to sneak things into most of these to hint towards treasure, recipes for cooking, alchemy, weapons, armor. Everything doesn't have to be very straight forward, but it does have to be made pretty clear that things like this exist when it does. Otherwise there might be a whole slew of things in the game that not a single player knows even exist.
