Comprehensive guide to potion making

Potioning

A comprehensive guide

Abstract

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

Preliminaries

Mortars and pestles

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 vials 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 below.
• Buy Potions of Mana or 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 break rate modifier is positive!
• Buy them from Closca in Melinis for 5gc each. You can either haul them Thelinor by the cave from Melinis (you will need a monster magnetism cape or perk) or to South Redmoon Island by Hurquin - this route is free of aggressive creatures save Leonard at night but takes longer.

Food

You have the usual options and we'll discuss them by potion below. However the Potion skill comes with two advantages if you want:

• make your own Potions of Feasting,
• make your own Poison Antidotes

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 Scientists Day).
In the 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 (see the discussion below for details).

Animal parts

There are a number of animal parts that are used in various potions, we'll discuss the usefulness and market for those 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 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

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 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 (100gc cost, 1 in 300 chance to break). 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 (1/3). 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.

File:Failrateformula.png
with a chance of 1 in 3 for a failure to be critical. Experience shows that no matter how high your level is, you will most likely have a fail rate of at least 1%. Thus the cost to make an item needing n tools is
File:Generalcosttomakeformula.png
Now the only tools you'll need for making potions are mortars & pestles, their break rate is 1 in 300 (on average, and then there's astrology, depending on your experiences you might want to calculate with a higher or lower chance to break), so that formula looks
File:Generalcosttomakeformulaforpotions.png
We will use that formula to determine the break even levels for some important potions, due to the multitude of different outlooks on costs as mentioned above it won't be possible to discuss all options for all potions.
In the general case this means solving an inequality:

costs(your level) ≤ price

which is equivalent to

your level File:Compareforprofit.png

where f is the food cost, t is the toolcost multiplied with the break rate and c is the cost of ingredients for one item. Keep in mind that the fail rate is probably at least 1% so the formula works only as long as your level isn't more than twice as high as the recommended level.

Here's an example:

Potions of Spirit Restoration take 1 wine, 2 Blue Star Flowers, 1 Blue Quartz and 1 empty vial. We discuss 3 basic cases:

1. everything that can be made is free (costs: 0.75gc for the wine)
2. harvestables are free (costs: 0.75gc + 5gc for the vial)
3. buying all ingredients (costs 0.75gc + 6gc for the vial from somebody + 2gc for the blue quartz + 1gc for the flowers)

For simplicity we will assume food costs to be 2.2gc (this would be the case if you only use Potions of Feasting) and mortar and pestle cost to be 100gc in all cases. Using a spreadsheet application we get

1. a negative number, that means you're always making profit considering NPCs pay 13gc per potion. If you're considering food to be free you're still always above break even.
2. we get a negative number as well, which means that in theory you will be making profit from the first level, which is kind of surprising and ought to be tested.
3. gives surprising results as well, you will break even if you charge
   • 15gc at level 19
   • 14gc at level 27
   • 13gc at level 35.

This is obviously just an academic example as your fail and break rates depend on astrology and chance in general. -->

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.