Alchemy/Guide
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Alchemy - More than a profession
This is about the alchemy skill, a skill which is much more than just a profession. It is a lifestyle, a habit, a drug :)
When you start out in the Eternal Lands, you own nothing. This is bad for alchemy, because alchemy is about making things out of things, so you need something to start with. First you need some money. This is how things always start with alchemy - you need to invest something to gain something. The more you invest, the greater the gain. And always make sure to also include the time you need to spend into your calculations: time is a valuable resource, too.
Chapter 1: Fire Essences
Enough talking, let's get started: The beginner item for alchemy is the "Fire Essence" (abbr.: FE). FEs are needed in HUGE amounts: they are required for every metal bar, and bars are required for every metal item, being it weapons, armors or rings, so they are searched by alchemist, manuers and crafters alike. Because of the large amounts in which they are required, and the relatively long time which is needed to gather their ingredients, only few high level alchemist will resort to mix their FEs for themself. This is good for you: this means there are always people willing to pay money for FEs, and many are even willing to buy them "on stock" if they see a good offer (even if they are not going to use them right away).
To mix a Fire Essence, you need 1 Red Rose, 1 Red Snapdragon (aka "snapes"), and 1 Sulfur. Harvesting the flowers is fast and easy, since they are rather abundant and don't require anything to harvest. The perfect beginner spot to harvest them is in the Valley of the Dwarves (abbr.: VoTD), just south of the storage. Follow the path south until you reach a rose bush around a tree next to the path, the snapes are just across the path, next to the big rock. Mark the places on your map (#mark 'roses'), and you can even leave the storage window open while walking to the bush and back. Be aware that there are invasions (agressive monsters will roam it for a while) on that map - you will get an advance warning, so the danger is not too high, but don't go afk on that map (or do it inside a house).
The real hardship is getting the sulfur, because you need leather gloves to gather it, the place is farther from a storage, and it weighs more. Start with the leather gloves: buy them from players. Keep in mind that most players around you either are able to make some right away or have a ton of them in storage because they made more of them for leveling than they could ever use in a lifetime, so they are happy to get rid of them. Don't let them cheat you - the price per gloves should be around 26gc (leather price is fixed, and thread is more or less stable too nowadays). Buy a couple of them, you will need a few since they break during harvesting. About 4 should be sufficient for your first load of FEs. A good beginner's spot to gather sulfur is in the Desert Pines (DP) Crystal Caverns (CC). The cave is located in the mountain dividing the northern and southern part of DP, there are entries from both sides (check for the dark spots on the mountainside). Be careful, collapsing walls can deal up to 38? damage in one blow, and they can hit you every time you mine something (even if there are no walls nearby). The closest storage is either VotD (via ship), or DP storage (south exit). There's no big difference in the time needed for either of them, but you're free to time it for yourself (and add results here).
After a couple of hours you should have gathered a reasonable amount. Noone will bother if you have 20 FEs finished, a reasonable amount is at least a couple of hundred of them. For high level players, amounts begin to get interesting in batches over 1000 FEs. Don't be shocked - you will probably make hundreds of thousands of them in your playing career if you stick to it for a while. Well, there's one thing left to do - the mixing. Basically, there are two different strategies for mixing things - either harvest all ingredients and build up neat piles in your storage, or haul all ingredients except for the heaviest one to the place where you can mine the heavy ingredient, and mix there. While this might make sense for some bars, I wouldn't recommend that for FEs: too dangerous, and not enough advantage (at least when using VoTD and DP CC). Therefore, rather choose a storage to your liking and mix right away. I'd recommend to start mixing using fruit for food, at the beginning the mixing will take so long it will work nice with fruit, they are easy to get, and they are free. When you advance in your levels, you might consider using a mixture of fruit and cooked meat, or getting the "I eat dead people" perk to help you over the cooldown phase. Getting a harvester cape ("Excavator Cape","Ex cape") should also be one of your top priorities, if you don't have one already.
At the beginning, the results of the mixing will be grievous - failure upon failure, and more often than not you will lose your ingredients. That hurts, but it will get better eventually. You should mix FEs for the next couple of alchemy levels, and to get a financial basis you can build up on: you will need money for books to be able to harvest other ingredients for essences and more tools to harvest them.