Hey everyone,

I’ve been listening to a lot of your feedback on Alchemy, and after discussions with many players, it's clear the primary problem with Alchemy is a lack of informational resources and some missing documentation.

This post will clear that up with a concise, up-to date explanation and a short video that shows a simple strategy to discover new recipes with Alchemy. We also have some new sample recipes for you guys, which will be linked here after this post goes live.

Aspects

There are 10 aspects currently in use on CivEx.

• Fire -- (Things that are hot, burnt, or otherwise related to fire)
• Earth -- (Things that are hard, sharp, raw, or otherwise related to stone and plants)
• Air -- (Things that are light, projectiles, gasoseous, or otherwise related to air and steam)
• Life -- (Things that are healing or sustaining, but also occasionally found in potent plants or some animal products)
• Death -- (Things that are dead, dying, or poisonous)
• Mechanic -- (Things that are intricate, metallic, and move)
• Divine -- (Things that are related to, draw on, or were formed by the divine power of a specific being)
• Arcane -- (Things that are related to or draw on magical energies present in the world)
• Psionic -- (Things that are related to telepathy, mind control, or other often adverse effects of linking souls)
• Corrupt -- (Things that are twisted, corrupted, or driven insane, or things that are related to occult rituals, dangerous soul morphing, or potent delirium)

All mobs drop resources, which can be used in Alchemy. Just like the [Thaumcraft]() mod, every mob resource contains a mixture of aspects. On CivEx, most items contain three different aspects, though a handful contain only two or up to four.

These aspects are hidden from players. While a Charred Bone might contain 5 fire 3 death 1 earth, there is no way for you to find out what is in the item exactly.

Resources are on a scale:

• Common Resources have between 5 and 10 aspect points
• Uncommon Resources have around 20 to 30
• Rare Resources have around 50 to 60
• Legendary Resources have between 80 and 120

Alchemy doesn’t care about resource quality, so a Legendary item with 80 earth and 20 life can be directly swapped for 20x of a Common resource with 4 earth 1 life.

Different mob factions tend to drop different themed resources. The Clockwork mobs drop a lot of mechanical resources. The Ember Legion drops a lot of fire themed resources. To make the most out of Alchemy, you should trade resources with other players.

Most factions offer a mix of aspects amongst their drops, but no faction offers access to all aspects. Likewise, trying to make a fire based recipe is much easier when done with Ember resources than with the handful of fire-themed Clockwork resources.

A 1:1 trade of resources tends to be beneficial to both parties. You should trade your common items for other common items, your rare items for other rare items, etc.

Brewing

Once you have some stores of items ready to use, you can begin experimenting with Alchemy. You first need to craft and place an Alembic, which requires coal and water bottles to function.

To start off with Alchemy, we’ve given you several sample recipes that you can follow to the letter. However, these aren’t useful for brewing large quantities of potions. To do so, you need to find other ingredients you can use to brew, as to not bottleneck yourself.

There are two main strategies with Alchemy: recipe discovery and recipe improvement. Recipe discovery is a lot easier and should be the focus of most Alchemy for the first month of the server.

Recipe Discovery

Discovery is about finding ways to complete a recipe using a new ingredient. Instead of grinding for Tomes of Healing in your health potion recipe, you can use discovery to find an altered recipe that uses a more common healing-themed ingredient.

The best way to perform discovery is to always use extra shaman sap and extra ingredients when performing any swap. This way, if the recipe fails, you can be relatively confident that it was because the ingredients you put in were missing an aspect that you took out.

Video Example

Simple Written Example:

Let’s say you’re using the sample recipe for Health 2 Splash

• 140 Shaman Sap
• 21x Lifeless Ash
• 4x Emberstone
• 6x Mauve Scrapmetal
• 2x Plague Sigil
• 5x Clockwork Repair Kit
• 56x Livingwood
• 4x Dying Embers
• 3x Feverfew
• 6x Armor Plate

However, you’ve been having trouble finding Feverfew and want to find a recipe that uses another ingredient instead.You have some Heal Root lying around however, and upon closer inspection it seems that Feverfew and Heal Root are similar ingredients. You decide to swap out the 3x Feverfew for 4x Heal Root, and add in a single extra shaman sap to make up for any excess.

You won’t always want to swap 1:1 however. For example, if we wanted to swap the Emberstone with more lifeless ash, we would likely need more Life aspect to make up for what was lost from the emberstone. This would require adding more of a life item.

Recipe Improvement

Recipe improvement is harder than recipe discovery, but it will allow you to make more with less. Recipe improvement is all about finding ways to make the same potion with less Shaman Sap or less ingredient cost.

Take the previous health potion example. It’s likely that the lifeless ash is providing excess death aspect that isn’t needed in the health potion recipe. Using a different fire themed ingredient might allow us to use less shaman sap, and potentially save us aspect points.

You should only be doing recipe improvement once you have a handful of valid solutions for a potion you want. Then you can try to use less sap or less ingredients to save a slight amount per recipe. Many of the sample recipes have excess aspects, even for aspects required in the recipe.

FAQ

How does Shaman Sap work?

If you use more aspects than necessary in a recipe, they must be absorbed by Shaman Sap or else the recipe will fail.

Using extra Shaman Sap will cover 20 excess points for an aspect required in the recipe, or 10 for an aspect that isn’t. It also increases the duration of the recipe by one minute.

How do I know if my recipe fails?

When a recipe fails, the Alembic will abruptly stop halfway through the recipe duration and consume all the shaman sap and all the ingredients.

Potions are too expensive.

They really aren’t. Experiment with the ingredients you have, trade for the ones you don’t. There are enough ingredients to make a shitload of potions that are just sitting in chest vaults across the server.

Alchemy is too complicated

Consider trading with someone else who is more comfortable with the Alchemy system.