Comprehensive guide to potion making

Potioning

A comprehensive guide

Abstract

This is currently a work in progress, I'll link it when done.

Preliminaries

NPCs

• Mira in Whitestone, 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 potions), close to Irsis storage
• Mariana in Aeth Aelfan, quite a walk but only NPC that buys Invisibility Potions. 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 mortars and pestles.
• Harvy trades vials for 5 quartz and 3 gc (not advisable) as well as Mercury.
• Closca in Melinis sells vials.

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.

A little math excursion

Let's talk about profit, basically profit is the difference between profit and cost to make. Cost to make is calculated from ingredients costs, tools costs, food costs and failure rate. The failure rate affects the cost in two ways: non-critical failures simply add to food cost, while critical failures add to ingredients costs.
We will assume the following formula for fails: <math>p_{\text{fail}}=\frac{\text{your level}}{2*(\text{recommended level})}</math> with a chance of 1 in 3 for a failure to be critical.

First steps

Quests

Potion Quest

This quest will get you almost to level 9, do it.

Wine Quest

This quest will enable you to buy wine at 0.75gc (20 wine for 15gc) from Vesine, the only reason for a potion maker to not do this quest would be the Antisocial perk.