Comprehensive guide to potion making
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
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}}=1-\frac{\text{your level}}{2*(\text{recommended level})}</math>
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
<math>
\text{cost(item)} = \text{cost(ingredients(item))}\left(1+\frac{p_{\text{fail}}}{3}\right) + \text{foodcost(item)}\left(1+\frac{2p_{\text{fail}}}{3}\right)+(1+p_{\text{fail}})\sum_{i=1}^n(\text{tool cost(tool(i))})\cdot(\text{breakrate(tool(i))}).
</math>
Now the only tool you'll need for making potions are mortar & 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
<math>
\text{cost(item)} = \text{cost(ingredients(item))}\left(1+\frac{p_{\text{fail}}}{3}\right) + \text{foodcost(item)}\left(1+\frac{2p_{\text{fail}}}{3}\right)+(1+p_{\text{fail}})(\text{cost of mortar \& pestle})\cdot\frac{1}{300}.
</math>
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: <math>\text{costs(your level)}\leq\text{costs(price)}</math>which is equivalent to
<math>\text{your level}\geq \frac{\text{recommended level}}{t+f}(2t+f-\text{price})</math>
where f is the food cost and t is the sum of costs for ingredients, food and tools 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:
- everything that can be made is free (costs: 0.75gc for the wine)
- harvestables are free (costs: 0.75gc + 5gc for the vial)
- 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. We get
- <math>\text{cost}=0.75+2.2+\frac{100}{300}+p_{\text{fail}}\left(0.75+2\cdot 2.2+\frac{100}{300}\right)= 5.4833+\left(1-\frac{\text{your level}}{2\cdot 20}\right)\cdot 5.48333</math>so 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.
- <math>\text{cost}=8.2833+\left(1-\frac{\text{your level}}{40}\right)\cdot 10.4833</math>will be less or equal to
- 15 at level 15
- 14 at level 19
- 13 at level 23
- <math>\text{cost}=12.2833+\left(1-\frac{\text{your level}}{40}\right)\cdot 14.4833</math>will be less or equal to
- 15 at level 33
- 14 at level 36
- 13 at level 39
This is obviously just an academic example as your fail and break rates depend on astrology and you might want to work with more conservative numbers.
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.