Alchemy (Potions) in Video Games

Ah, so you're an alchemist then!

In the ancient times when high-end graphics meant using special characters in ASCII art, potion recipes used to be made of random ingredients so people couldn't cheese the system with previous knowledge. Minecraft was planned to emulate these old systems, which is why we have leftovers like the Mundane Potion and Thick Potion.
That being said, I almost never use potions outside of healing potions, I just forget to drink them.

Alchemy would prbably be fun in a world without the internet. Where ypu just mess around and find all these cool new potions you can make. But instead you just look up a guide on the internet and you have to look up the guide cuz some of the potions are super obscure and they have to be obscure because the internet exists and they don’t want their game to be “solved” in a week.

In Terraria there are some geniunly cool and really useful potions like obsidian skin potion (no damage from lava) spelunking potion (highlightes all of the ores/treasure present on the screen) and even gender change potion but they have a big problem where they cost half a kidney to make and last just a couple minutes

Surprised I havent seen Potion Craft mentioned here. Obviously a game that is 100% about making potions is going to have a fun potion making mechanic, but I think it does it really well, and it shows that its possible to make potion creation fun and complex without needing to study a 10 page guide

I've reached the point with consumables where I'll just waste them on every boss because half the time you can easily restock them, though sometimes usually the final boss they revoke the ability to restock and its fucking annoying.

Like the samurai Jack game for example with its healing, akus lair just does not have an item shop so you're just fucked if you used your healing which you most likely did because theres a boss where you're fighting 6 enemies at once which gain rage when one dies that stacks.

Counter argument: Morrowind

If you're going to demand a lot form the player it ought to be super worth it. If it's just one ingredient you can turn into something nice then sure, and making health potions from home is usually required. Skyrim however requires you to level into it and learn how all ingredients interact to make stuff when you could just slam people with a sword. Minecraft can be interesting but the splash potions are mostly weak and require nether items farmed. Noita looks cool where different liquids that are easy to come across can form strong chemicals which rewards knowledge above just brewing another way to throw damage.

Alchemy in morrowind is the most powerful thing in the entire game.

Me : drinks a badass potion, only lasts a little bit. Runs out and I get flattened
Boss : drinks a badass potion, lasts forever

Witcher 3 has a pretty good alchemy system. Yes you need to spend 12 days finding 3 ounces of a trolls dick breath but once you do, you don't need to worry about it anymore. The potion has a certain number of uses before you rest and use a single, VERY common consumable to refund all of your potions. I'm a potion hoarder in just about every game ever but having them be "reusable" makes it feel more like abilities you invest in to overcome challenges instead of making you feel bad since you wasted 500 gold by using a potion because you weren't good enough to deal with the situation on your own.

Oh yeah, and there's another reason I feel like alchemy sucks. Would you rather have 20 random ass potions of randomness, or 10,000 gold you can use to buy that enchanted sword that will always be useful?

Oh yeah x2, all of those random potion effects in most games are actually just the exact same as what you can do with a magical ability. So why bother with the headache of all of the inventory management when you can just sell all your ingredients and potions and use a spell or enchantment you know you'll always have?

Alchemy in World of Warcraft took an entire bag of inventory space away from me for eight straight years.
And I loved it.

terraria: heres seven flowers you can farm In seconds, get some fish as well, ask the guide if you need help

Minecraft: heres a small chart with four actual useful potions.

those are the only games I have ever played

I'd like to talk about chemistry in Space Station 13, as I feel it's an interesting system. Space Station 13 is a social deduction game similar to among us, but waaaay older and with a frankly absurd amount of features. All players are assigned a job, and each job has a different role to play on the station (e.g. engineering keeps power flowing, security captures criminals, medbay patches you up, cargo orders goods, service provides food and entertainment, and science... I mean, I'm sure it does something beneficial). One (or more) of the players is the antagonist, which can be one of many different types of fiends, and the round ends when their shenanigans cause the shuttle to be called.

In most branches of the game Space Station 13, chemistry allows you to make chemicals with various effects. Mixing base chemicals can make stronger chemicals, and most of the time these base chemicals only cost station power (which, in the branch I play, is only a problem later in the round). Generally, the main issues keeping you from making endgame chems immediately are experience and the actual time it take the chemicals to mix (which is longer on certain servers than others). Because of the resetting nature of the game, you can't really just stock up on chems and go hog wild, because you may have as little as 20 minutes to prepare. As well, chems work by treating the body as a beaker or other container that slowly drains chems according to their "metabolizing rate", and every metabolism cycle that much of the chem is removed and the effects of the chem are applied. Additionally, some chemical reactions have effects outside the body. Some explode, some make fire, some freeze things, some make the floor slippery and GOD D*MNIT WHO GAVE THE CLOWN SPACE LUBE!?

Anyways, I think this is a good way of doing things, at least for the specific game mentioned.

Terraria is the only game I've really invested time in alchemy, farming, and fishing in. Because they all feel like quick sidequests. The recipies and easy to remember and I can always give the guide a bottle of water to look stuff up if I don't care enough to get on a wiki. Plus you can just open a chest and stand near an alchemy station to craft potions. Noita also has some fun alchemy but I haven't gotten the chance to learn it. Maybe I'll be able to beat Noita on the day I learn it's alchemy.

I feel the same exact way about potions

The food in don't starve is set up like alchemy. The noobs can eat raw berries and meatballs, and gradually players learn how to make healing foods. The system is definitely complicated and involves reading wikis but at least it avoids the issue of potion hoarding. The character has to eat, and food goes bad over time, so there's little point to hoarding.

Play Shovel Knight Plague of Shadows, potions in that game are not for drinking, but to toss at anemies and all combinations you can make lead to different types of attacks, is really fun and you can even change the potion you're using on the go, try that game is really intuitive too you don't need a guide

YOOOO NEGATIVE XP GO HARD!!

There is this game called project zomboid, it made me finally use consumables.
Because you die easily and you have a lot of urgency in surviving.

I grab my coffee, or i get too tired to fight the dead, and die,
or waste too much time sleeping until i won't have everything ready when the water and/or electricity shut-down, etc etc...

For me, Skyrim's alchemy just felt so unsatisfying. Ingredients are scattered so weirdly, you don't really know what they can do, and then it takes forever to level up alchemy even if you do commit to it. It's just paced so poorly compared to the other skills.

embracing potions/consumables is embracing chaos. Chug those potions, yolo your save, and have fun

Good thing is, someone in terraria suggested a seperate storage for potions, and devs might add it to the game.

Breath of the Wild has an excellent alchemy system

For me, i just dont like buffs that are temporary, mainly because im the type of player that feels i need to save them for a final boss or something, and end up never using them.

I think your approach to potions is why you don't like them. An encyclopedic knowledge of the alchemy system isn't the first step, it's knowing a handful of recipes that you're going to use most often. You build up that knowledge later.

Skyrim actually has a pretty good system for learning the alchemy mindset because there are a bajillion ingredients you're never going to use, so you just focus on the stuff you actually will. I tend to only make poisons, so slaughterfish eggs and scales, imp stool, and those mushrooms you find on tree stumps are the only ingredients I tend to collect.
I couldn't tell you all four effects of any single ingredient in the game if you put a gun to my head because I don't need to know them. I only care about the one effect I actually use, so the ingredients that give me that effect are the only ones that take up space in my brain.

What do you use to edit?

I hate alchemy in games.

In Skyrim alchemy is kind of a slog. I just kind of indiscriminately grab any and all ingredients and just shove em all into a box until I feel like grinding out the alchemy skill. I'll use the useful potions and pawn off all the others or shove them in a different chest and forget about them.

I really don't care to memorize where to find particular ingredients, I don't do that in my favorite game Red Dead Redemption II either (tonics are essentially potions let's be real). Memorizing where to find specific ingredients that would be most useful isn't that fun.

I believe games shouldn't make you read a whole collage thesis to understand the inner workings of their game, slowly introducing mechanics is essential.

As a bloons player I can safely say that alchemy is my favorite part of the game

I am a tested analytical genius:
I'm giving "P-Bean" permission to ask me a bunch of question.

I think alchemy works best in MMORPGs. Because potion-making is so time-consuming, and some people love it while others hate it, but potions are so gosh-darn useful, it's a great way to create an organic in-game economy. Explorers can collect ingredients and sell them to alchemists. Alchemists can make the potions and sell them to fighters.

I also think a procedurally-generated alchemy system would be really cool. Half the fun of alchemy is trial and error, mixing different ingredients to see what comes out, but once it's on a wiki you can just look it up. Making it different every time you play means that metagaming isn't an option, you have to learn new rules each time.

if you hate minecraft's obscure brewing system, with 39 (or a few less or more depending on how you count it) potions, you should really check out the beta system from Beta 1.9 Pre-Release 2. Implemented through a block with no assigned ID or method to obtain, the system was inaccessible in an unmodified game, but if you mod in a method of obtaining and an ID to the block, the system lets you get a whopping 5339 unique potions, with many more being unobtainable to a total of 32768 unique items. it's very weird, but i love it much more than the system we currently have since any combination of items you put in will give you something, allowing for experimentation. it's great, ANY combination of items will give you SOMETHING.

Complaining about needing a guide while playing terraria is just silly when 60% of people playing the game use a guide at least once because of how much stuff there is. Also potions in terraria are just used as a crutch for if you’re doing real shit at the game and most people don’t choose to use them. (Btw is he complaining about inventory clutter when theres like 2 items that basically give you two extra portable inventories-)

My best advice for anyone playing games with consumables is to use them as soon as you think it could be helpful. I recently went through and played Skyrim again and instead of hoarding potions and scrolls and later selling them, I actually used them whenever I felt like it. I didn’t plan on saving them for a boss, I simply saw that they might help me and I used them. That was the most fun I’ve had with a Skyrim play through and towards the end I didn’t need to use those things anymore because my character achieved the powers they gave me. I felt like a badass at the end and I used every mechanic in the game to my advantage at the beginning.

TLDR: use potions when you want :)

I’ve always loved potion making in games, probably cause I love studying pharmacology which alchemy is usually an analog for in fantasy. Though I wish that it was a skill with more depth. Like investing in chem crafting and use in the Fallout games can offer big bonuses for combat and social interactions. I love the idea of potions offering unique and powerful effects if you max out the skill

I'll make potions on the fly cuz ingredients can be labeled stolen but if you make a potion with them the potion is totally yours

this could all have been fixed if we had a potion carrier bag

Ah, alchemy. I love it, but I've found very few game systems where it was anything but either a chore, or so bare bones that it was just a means of supplying items to the player.

Skyrim was the first to ignite my love for alchemy. The fact that each ingredient had traits, and you could make the same potion in different ways, but you could also make complex potions and poisons by getting creative with the traits, or potions with harmful side-effects if you used questionable combinations. Now, Skyrim's balance was terrible, so it was never important to master it, but the fact that it existed got the juices flowing.

Yet I admire Witcher 3's alchemy system as well. Rather than a traditional system, once a potion was 'crafted', you only needed a single Alcohest to remake your entire supply rather than the rare materials that went into the potion initially. This was a nice way of creating a bare bones system that wasn't a chore either, since you still had the draw of gathering ingredients and managing your consumption, but since replenishment was so easy, you were free to use them liberally.

I've grown to dislike systems where there's only one way to make a potion, and it's a one time use. It's stiff, has no creative freedom, and requires dedicated farming to get a decent ingredient supply. I need something more than that, or it's not an alchemy system.

Alchemy is a real historical practice that opened the door to chemistry and the scientific method itself. You should have at least Google search it before doing a whole video about it. You should research John D, Elizabeth the first alchemists

Viva La Dirt League's Herbalist : 😊

Starting a video off by mispronouncing the name of the skill is not a good start

This whole video is nothing but bitching and has no help offered

You do realize your whole argument is “I’m too dumb and or uninterested to engage with game mechanics besides left click” right?

It always annoys me a little bit when games call potion-brewing "alchemy" because potions and alchemy are two COMPLETELY unrelated things. Alchemy was a proto-scientific process that used chemical reactions to "transform" one element into another, like turning basic metals like iron into pure gold. I honestly think it's a missed opportunity.

Potions should be its own thing, and if a game wants to have alchemy in it, it should embrace what it's actually supposed to be and maybe have a feature where you can transform low quality items into higher quality items. Like maybe if you had some rocks or pebbles, you could use alchemy to upgrade it into iron, or turn iron into gold, gold into gems, etc, which would help to make other things.

Alchemy irl was also (mythologically) the source of two important concoctions; The Elixir of Life, and a special chemical that could dissolve any element. If proper alchemy were added to more fantasy games, those two things would be cool to have. The Elixir of life was supposedly a special chemical made with alchemy that if consumed, would cure all diseases and make a person immortal. It was made by liquifying the philosopher's stone (AKA, the magnum opus) which was also made with alchemy. The philosopher's stone was a big deal among alchemists and a myth, it was rumored that some great alchemists managed to successfully create it, but it was just a legend. It could be a very rare, valuable item in fantasy games and something that alchemist players could strive for.

Potion-related things go by various different names, but "Alchemy" isn't one of them. It could be "Brewing", "Potioneering", or since potion-making is all about chemicals, you could just flat out call it "Chemistry" in the game. Maybe lean into the medical side of potions and call it "Medicine". Either way, I think brewing and alchemy should be two separate things in Fantasy games/worlds and its a minor pet peeve when worldbuilders confuse the two. Separating them would be cooler imo.

the only good alchemy in a games is the witcher 3 (I don't know if the previous games same system, so sorry if they do) because you only needed to craft them once. So you're not wasting time getting a thousand ingredients everytime you want a useless potions. It also feels like a actually upgrade, and part of your tool slot, and not like sh*ty after afterthought to make you think a game has depth.

This video is for entertainment and you're allowed to like alchemy as much as dislike it.