Editing Comprehensive guide to potion making (section)

== Preliminaries ==
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*   Preliminaries
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*     Everything that's common to a lot of potions and making them
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=== Mortars and pestles ===
[[Mortar & Pestle|Mortars & Pestles]] have a chance to break of 1 in 300 uses. That means you will need a lot of them. You have basically three options of getting mortars&pestles:
* Buy at general stores for 100gc,
* buy from players or
* make your own, once your manufacturing level is high enough you will be able to beat the NPC price but it will obviously take longer. You should make them at the [[Gypsum]] deposit.

=== Vials ===
You will obviously need plenty of [[Empty Vial]]s to make potions. There are five options to obtain vials but only three of them will be feasible in the long run:
* Get them from [[Harvy]], this is the worst option, see [[#NPCs|below]].
* Buy [[Potion of Mana|Potions of Mana]] or [[Potion of Minor Healing|Potions of Minor Healing]] from [[Mira]]. When you use those potions you will get an empty vial. You can try using them for mana or healing while fighting to get vials.
* Buy them from players.
* Make them yourself, if you want the crafting experience and already have a sufficiently high crafting level. Make sure that your [[Astrology|break rate]] modifier is positive!
* Buy them from [[Closca]] in [[Melinis]] for 5gc each. You can haul them to [[Thelinor]] by the cave from Melinis (you will need a [[Monster Magnetism Cloak]] or [[Monster Magnetism Perk|perk]]) or to [[South Redmoon]] by [[Hurquin]] - this route is free of aggressive creatures save [[Leonard]] at night but takes longer, or you can use the [[Hazardel|HazMat storage]] in Melinis; if you're not willing to [[Teleport to Range Spell|teleport to range]] every trip, this will require monster magnetism as well and will take longer than the trip to Thelinor.

=== Food ===
You have the usual options and we'll discuss them by potion [[#Potions|below]]. However the [[Potion]] skill comes with two advantages if you want:
* make your own [[Potion of Feasting|Potions of Feasting]],
* make your own [[Poison Antidote]]s
at least from a sufficiently high level on and provided you can get your hands on the [[Book of Poison Antidote]] (or get lucky with a [[Special Days#Scientists day|Scientists Day]]).

In the [[#Money Talk|Money Talk]] subsection we'll look at different player types' outlook on ingredients for now let's just say that if you calculate with market prices for ingredients and value your own time, you will be better off buying feasting potions from NPCs.

==== High food items ====
Potions or items in general that require a large amount of food for creation pose the potential problems of 
* boredom if you're using feasting potions or
* extra costs for [[Poison Antidote|antidotes]] and [[Health Essence]]s if you're using toadstools or a combination involving toadstools.
And even if you're [[I Eat Dead People Perk|eating dead people]] you might regret going through your food so fast. If you're just going to make a few, possibly because of a request, waiting for [[cooldown]], getting [[poison]]ed and such won't be so bad but for leveling you'll seriously want to consider saving your ingredients for a [[Special Days#Day of Joule|Day of Joule]].

One obvious point to be considered when making high food items is finding a good food mix, even on Day of Joule. Things to be considered are
* reduce the time you have to wait for food with cooldown (if applicable)
* balance the waiting with chance to be poisoned (if applicable)
* optimize use of food items (e.g. try not to "waste" the 5 food from feasting potions by going below 0 food prior to using them)
You will have to find a combination that works for you for a given item either by careful calculation or by trial and error, a combination (both of foods and the methods to get to a food combination) will probably do nicely in most cases.

=== Animal parts ===
There are a number of animal parts that are used in various potions, we'll discuss the usefulness and market for those [[#Potions|below]]. As a general rule of thumb you might want to
* kill everything that moves and isn't quick enough to get away and
* save the bloody remains.
* Especially beginners should remember to save the bones and the meat, furs and other parts usually will have a use or a market at some point.
Some animal parts will be extremely hard to come by later.

=== NPCs ===
* [[Mira]] in [[White Stone]], buys and sells potions, reasonably close to [[Nordcarn]] storage.
* [[Vesine]] in [[Morcraven Marsh]], sells wine (20 wine for 15gc) after you completed the wine quest.
* [[Derzelas]] in [[Irsis]], buys and sells potions (including [[True Sight Potion]]s), close to Irsis storage
* [[Mariana]] in [[Aeth Aelfan]], quite a walk but only NPC that buys [[Invisibility Potion]]s. Also buys and sells some other potions.
* All taverns sell [[Ale]] and [[Mead]] as well as [[Wine]], but you should get that at Vesine.
* All general stores sell [[Mortar & Pestle|mortars and pestles]].
* [[Harvy]] trades vials for 5 [[Quartz]] and 3 gc (not advisable) as well as [[Mercury]].
* [[Closca]] in [[Melinis]] sells vials.
* [[Henrik]] in [[White Stone]] sells some animal parts.
* [[Iazurn]] in [[Morcraven Marsh]] is [[Jayden]]'s priest (see below).

=== Jayden (potion goddess) ===
As a serious potion maker you will most likely consider following [[Jayden]] for the experience bonus that her followers get. As attaining the higher ranks is quite expensive you might want to consider waiting until you really decided that potion making is a serious passion of yours or until you can easily afford it.

=== Money talk ===
As with almost everything in Eternal Lands you can consider everything except for wine, ale, mead and some of the books to be free in making potions. It is obvious however that obtaining some tools and ingredients takes time away from actually making potions. For some players and some items such as mortars and pestles, vials or meat this may provide a welcome opportunity for experience in other skills, for other players this might not be the case. What it comes down to is that depending on your playing style or philosophy you will find some potions more or less desirable to make, the most prominent being the ones requiring animal items and from those most likely feasting potions. From a serious potion maker's perspective, acquiring animal items by actually hunting for them takes a lot (too much) time away from making potions.

==== Schools ====
If you don't mind throwing your money to the wind for experience, schools provide a nice way of doing it and if you harvest everything on your own, you might not even "lose" much besides harvesting time and the vial and food cost. Once you can make True sight potions sufficiently well, you can even afford it but at that point the very same True sight potion will provide experience and income... (also compare note on Extracts in the [[#Beyond vegetal 4|potions]] section below).

=== A little math excursion ===
To determine when to start making a certain potion (or item in general) is difficult because of the stochastical nature of failures and successes. An in-depth discussion can be found in the [[Guides/Probability|probability]] guide.

For making potions you will have to include the price and break rate of mortar & pestle in your calculations, which comes down to 0.33 gc (100 gc cost, 1 in 300 chance to break) per attempted mix.

Ideally you don't fail and you don't lose ingredients, so your cost in making an item is the sum of the prices of the ingredients, the price for the food to make one item and the tool price per item (0.33 gc). However that's not reality, so you'll have to calculate with failures both critical and non-critical and you have to keep in mind the price that NPCs sell the items for, which might make making some potions unprofitable for you; while the fact that NPCs buy some potions will make some potions very profitable for you as well as set a lower bound for what you should charge players.
With that said you will find, using the tools of the probability guide, that some potions will be profitable for you even if you loose half of your ingredients while others will never be profitable.