Alchemy

Brew a range of player-enhancing potions, then drink them, throw them at your friends/foes, or coat your weapons with them. Most recipes use flowers and herbs gathered from the world, ground down with a mortar & pestle and distilled into potion bases.

Potions

Potions come in weak, medium and strong tiers. The current line-up:

• Archer's Flask: better ranged accuracy, damage and draw/load speed
• Fighter's Flask: more melee damage
• Hunter's Delight: more animal loot and faster harvesting, plus more forage and wild crops, and a wider animal seek range
• Looter's Delight: more gears from metal piles, more contents from broken storage vessels, and extra forage and wild crops
• Miner's Flask: faster mining on stone and ores, plus more ore from mined blocks
• Sprinter's Flask: faster walk speed
• Vitality Flask: raises your maximum health for the duration
• Healing Oil: restores health over time
• Potent Oil: increases healing effectiveness
• Spiked Oil: poison that damages over time
• Predator Pheromones: widens your animal seek range, drawing creatures toward you
• Scent Mask: shrinks your animal seek range, hiding you from creatures
• Purging Brew: increases hunger rate
• Settling Brew: lowers hunger rate

Most potions come in three strengths - a higher strength increases the size of the effect, not how long it lasts.

Utility flasks:

• Recall Flask: teleport back to your spawn/return point
• Glow Flask: emit a bright glow
• Water Breathing Flask: breathe underwater
• Warmth Flask: keeps your body temperature from falling below normal
• Stability Flask: a one-time boost to temporal stability
• Nutrition Flask: evens out nutrition across food groups (usually at a small overall cost)
• Featherfall Flask: reduced fall damage
• Spider Flask: climb any surface
• Growth Flask / Shrinking Flask: grow or shrink your size until death/disconnect
• Reshape Flask: reopen character creation once via the .charsel command
• Flight Flask: lets you fly for the duration (creative only)

 Utility flasks come in a single strength and last for the duration shown on the flask.

Making potions

Alchemy is split into three tiers, each needing progressively more advanced equipment. Every recipe is in the in-game handbook (search "potion"), but in short:

• Tier 1 - Edible Herbs: the earliest form, needing only a mortar & pestle. Grind mushrooms and horsetail into a basic potion base, grind herbs/flowers into a weak base, then combine them into an edible herb ball you eat directly for a weak effect.
• Tier 2 - Medium Potions: liquid brews made in a brewing cauldron (copper age). Seal a basic potion base with water in a barrel to make potion tea, then brew a weak base + potion tea in the cauldron with a wooden stirring spoon, and bottle the result into flasks.
• Tier 3 - Strong Potions: the most powerful brews, adding glassworking and aqua vitae. Dry herb cuttings on a herb rack, cook them, craft a strong base, then brew it with aqua vitae and potion tea using a glass stirring spoon.

Brewing cauldrons are dedicated to brewing potions in larger batches then cooking pots (not for cooking meals) and come in many metal variants. Place one, build the firepit under it with dry grass and firewood, attach the right stirring spoon, add the ingredients, and light the fire beneath it to cook the brew.

Ways to use potions

• Drink them for a personal buff. A progress bar shows while consuming, and healing effectiveness can optionally affect drink speed.
• Coat your weapons - apply suitable potions (such as Spiked Oil) directly onto melee weapons to pass the effect on to whatever you hit.
• Throw them - throwable flasks (both glass and ceramic variants) shatter on impact and apply their potion to every creature in the splash radius.

In-game guide

The handbook now contains a full set of alchemy guides - covering how to make potions, the herb/potion tiers, weapon coating, throwable flasks, and a Potion Effects Glossary that explains the underlying stats. Search for "potion" in the handbook to find all recipes and guides.

Configuration

The mod is highly configurable - there are hundreds of config values to adjust. If you want to change anything, I highly recommend installing ConfigLib, which gives you an in-game settings menu instead of editing files by hand.

Among many other things you can:

• Enable or disable individual potions entirely.
• Tune each potion's effect strength, duration and per-tier scaling.
• Adjust drink/eat/coating times, and whether healing effectiveness affects them.
• Configure side effects (health, intoxication, psychedelic and saturation changes on drink).
• Toggle and tune weapon coating - which potions are allowed, max charges, coating strength, and which items can be coated
• Tune throwable flasks - splash radius and applied strength.

Notes

• Balancing is an ongoing effort - suggestions are very welcome.
• The Miner's Flask only speeds up mining on stone and ores.
• The Potent Flask increases healing effectiveness which now only makes bandages quicker to apply (and potions to drink/eat with the config turned on)
• Poison and healing effects are applied over time.
• Potion effects are cleared on death or when restarting the game.
• You need a potion base to make edible herbs/potions. You will need a potion flask to drink them (Can be changed in the config).
• You can't drink a potion while you already have that potion's effect active (Can be changed in the config).

Compatibility

• Should be compatible with most mods.
• Mod patches:
  • Material Needs: Flowers: its extra flowers can be used as herb cuttings, and alternative potion-base recipes are enabled to match.
  • Mycodiversity: some of its mushrooms can be used to craft the basic potion base.
  • A Culinary Artillery: lets you drink potions straight from its glass bottles (when "drink from any container" is enabled in the config).
  • Player Model Lib: adapts to size changes made by player model lib (Growth/Shrinking) flasks.
  • Combat Overhaul compatibility for weapon coating
• Alchemy provides extra recipes for Botania Story (patches are provided on botania story)
• For a renewable source of flowers/mushrooms, any of these are recommended: Wild Farming Revival, Herbalist Pots, NDL ExpandedGrowth (Flower Growth Module) (plus NDL ExpandedGrowth Mushrooms for mushrooms), Gardener's Delight or Only flower seeds. Feel free to reccomend any other mods that provide renewable source of flowers/mushrooms in the comments or on the alchemy thread and I will add it here.
• For jugs to use a transfer size that can be used nicely get Larger jugs handling or Smaller jugs handling
• For quicker gathering of flowers/mushrooms, try Flower Scythe or Dana Tweaks.
• Alchemistry: (last working on VS 1.19.8) overrides the default potion crafting with its own, more immersive distilling system - if installed, follow Alchemistry's recipes.
• If you want flasks placed in a bookshelf try Shelf Obsessed.

Migration & version warnings

New installs can ignore this section - it only matters when updating an existing save.

Updating to 2.1.0 or higher: existing potion liquids and potion tea liquid will shrink. To fix this run /alchemymigrate in chat if you are a server admin or playing singleplayer. This multiplies all alchemy liquids by 25 across every loaded chunk and online players' inventories. Back up your save first. You can also migrate a specific player by adding their name, e.g. /alchemymigrate player Llama3013.

To-do list

This is a simple to do list. I might complete things randomly and motivation for development of this mod ebbs and flows. Feel free to comment suggestions.

• Add a Stoneskin potion (or equivalent).
• Make custom potions easier to define (still fairly hardcoded with the new config).
• Knapping system for turning flowers into cuttings.
• More flower compatibility with mods that add extra flowers (low priority - tedious).
• Glassmaking compatibility for crafting flasks.
• Ancient Tools compatibility for mortar & pestle crafting.
• Rework recipes to make a bit of loose real-world sense.
• Create flower/mushroom scythe tool the sickle (I did a discord poll but players were split on adding this)
• Add an option to have perish times to potions (I did a discord poll but players were split on adding this)

Credits

• Rejn_Bashag: potion flask, herb rack and mortar & pestle shapes, improved potion names, and cover art.
• Brun: chamomile shape and texture plus small cuttings tweaks. Check out their mod Soap and Lye: Bloom and Lather, which also has alchemy compatibility.

 

Translations:

• Russian - ChimMAG (newest), Dr_Oldman (older, x2)
• Spanish - JefferZ
• Spanish (Latin America) - tomandoawa
• Ukrainian - JustOmi
• Polish - FlayedCrusader
• German - Chrizzlybear
• French - Victor Ros
• Czech - DejVIIK (latest), DejFidOFF (older)
• Simplified Chinese - Aimli_ (newest, x3), MoonWalker1997 (older)
• Korean - purple8cloud

 

 

 

Any questions, bug reports or suggestions go to vintage story discord and send a message on the alchemy post. You can still use github, comments below or forum but I will be more likely to see it on discord.

Link to the discord server invite