Potion Craft – Useful Tips

Things I Found Useful to Know / Do in Game

All credit goes to hardiharhar!

I want to compile a list of things I found useful to do/know in game that I want to share. Most players probably know about these but in case there is something here people find useful I decided to type it out.

Map Related Stuff

• Dotted lines from the centre hints at the location of the potion effects.
• The bottle on the map also has a faint line that points back towards the centre of the map for when you need to dilute the potion to align it to the effects for tier III potions. Try to match up the line from the bottle to the dotted line going from the effect.
• Types of ingredients have different speed when travelling on the map (helpful to know when traversing through bony areas). Mushrooms are slower than herbs and roots.
• The cardinal directions are associated with the 4 main elements. Fire is West, North is Air, East is Water and South is Earth. The name of ingredients usually hints to which element (and direction) it is associated with.
• Heat the mixture up with the bellows while moving around on the map let you travel faster, which is helpful if you are grazing a bone pile and need to move past it quickly. However, heating up the cauldron also activates the vortex which pulls you into the centre of it and uses up the path from ingredients you have already added to the cauldron.
• For the alchemy machine: order of effects for the potions required does not matter, just go with the most cost-efficient route on the map when you make these.
• When making potions with more than 1 effect or potions required for the alchemy machine recipes, you can start directly from the location of one of the effects if you have the recipe saved (i.e. for a Necromancy III + Acid I + Explosion I potion, if you have the recipe for Necromancy III just go to the book and click on “start brewing from here”).
• If you have the pages for them, make sure to save the recipes for all of the potions required for all the legendary recipes, so that when you are finished with the Philosopher Stone and have all 23 effects recipes, you are probably only 10 pages or so away from achieving the 100 recipes objective in Chapter 7.

Money Related Stuff

• Try to get tier III recipes for all potion effects from the get go, don’t bother with lower tiers. Tier III is when the bottle on the map is aligned nearly perfectly with the potion effect on the map.
• Diversify the ingredients you use in more complex recipes. This will save you from a bind if you run out of one ingredient and the merchants don’t have it in stock (I came close to running out of waterblooms and the herbalist just didn’t have it for 10 days straight and what I managed to get from the garden was not enough).
• If possible, try to haggle with every transaction at the beginning as this will allow you to be a bit more comfortable with money. It’s pretty repetitive so when your popularity is at level 6 or more, just haggle when selling potions that are priced at above 500g or more. But by end game there isn’t really a need for haggling since you want to optimise the amount of popularity earn from each transaction from that point onwards to get to a higher popularity level (since you are less likely to turn away evil customers to gain popularity you are more likely to dip lower in the morality scale as well lol).
• Same as above, but always haggle with merchants. Also try not to be too safe with money when it comes to ingredients. Always buy out the entire stock of basic cardinal direction herbs regardless of price (waterbloom, windbloom, terraria, firebell) since these are what you probably use for all recipes in the beginning anyway.
• Buy out the entire stock of any ingredient that are on sale (prices shown as green). Even if you don’t use it for any of your recipes, you can sell them back to the merchants once prices go up, which is a nice bit of extra gold as well, or use them to finetune recipes that only use basic ingredients (good to diversify ingredients used). It never hurts to start stockpiling ingredients from the very beginning so you can avoid ever running out of ingredients/have alternative ingredients to work with if you run out of the basic ones. Same goes for minerals and recipe pages, just buy when prices are green (I know this seems kind of unnecessary and also depends on playthrough but I feel like a lot of players seem afraid of overspending and not buying enough ingredients and then running out quickly, then having to turn down customers which makes it a vicious cycle, so just want to include this in the list).
• Customers’ requests that sound a bit more vague as to what potion effect they are asking for usually have a 2-effects potion solution. If you are efficient with how you use ingredients, then you can usually net a nice sum of profit if you can offer customers a 2-effects potions (make sure that the tier III effect in the potion has a higher base price to push up asking price).
• Focus on adding talents point to Trade and Haggling at the beginning so you get a healthier cash flow and more gold to play with later on. Map visibility and experience are not that important right at the beginning imo.
• You can put every ingredients of a recipe in the cauldron all at once before switching to the map : the path will be lengthen to the sum of all the ingredients paths and be regarded as one single path.
• If you forgot to harvest your garden, don’t panic : the herbs will stack from day to day.
• It could be useful to sort your ingredients by quantity (rather than by name, for ex.) in order to have an instant look at your stock and to see which ones are low in quantity to optimize your .purchases.