Alchemy - Morrowind Mechanics

hey gang what's good welcome to my Morrowind video guide all about alchemy alchemy is one of several utility skills of Morrowind you can use it to easily earn gold sustain your character in combat and create some incredible enchanted items as well of course potions as always feel free to use the provided timestamps to skip around if you're already confident with certain aspects ok let's get to it then your alchemy skill is increased through two methods the first and most simple is by just eating a raw ingredient and eat a raw ingredient your alchemy skill will progress by 0.5 points and you'll have a chance to receive the first listed effect on the given ingredient on screen now is the formula used to determine this chance from this we can tell that your alchemy skill denotes your base success chance every 5 points of intelligence or every 10 points of luck further increases your success chance by 1% lastly as is the case with most things this is multiplicatively impacted by the fatigue modifier your fatigue modifier is essentially your current fatigue relative to your maximum fatigue your modifier can be as high as a bonus 25% at full fatigue or as low as a negative 25% at empty fatigue now you may notice that durations and magnitudes ro such effects are not listed on individual ingredients these are determined in part by using the result of the success chance formula this is where things start to get a little complicated on screen now are the various formulae used to calculate the duration and magnitude of the provided effect don't worry if this seems confusing fortunately most of this information is totally inconsequential to us during gameplay there's just two key things to keep in mind the first being that the duration and magnitude skills directly off of everything that's also used to calculate your success chance so a higher success chance hydration and magnitude secondly ingredients with spell effects that have higher base costs will tend to also have lower magnitudes mind you that base costs refers to the magic a cost of a spell effect if you were to cast it as a spell while consuming raw ingredients is often terribly inefficient it can be helpful if you're in a tight spot especially in the case of the luminous rasullah fungus if you're underwater and in danger of drowning you can eat this mushroom as it's the only ingredient in the entire game with water breathing as its first effect even just one second of water breathing is enough to completely refill your air gauge no matter how empty it is before we move on there's one more thing we need to cover while we're on the topic of alchemy ingredients that's exactly how we're able to see each of the four effects in the first place this is based on your alchemy level at alchemy level 15 you can see the first effect at alchemy 30 the second effect becomes visible at level 45 the third and it's 60 the fourth effect an easy way to remember this is that each threshold is at increments of 15 with that out of the way let's look at the second method for increasing your alchemy skill which is also far more practical that's creating your own potions each potion you mix advances your alchemy skill by two points and Morrowind to begin mixing potions you need at least a mortar and pestle of inequality there's several other tools as well but we'll cover them all in detail later on after you use your mortar and pestle you'll need to pick at least two ingredients from your inventory to combine a potion is created when you mix two or more ingredients with at least one identical effect fortunately you don't need to have the ingredients effects visible in order to create a potion if you know the recipe by heart or maybe you found a recipe in game you can use that information to create a potion for ample a handy recipe to remember is that salt rice Marsh marrow and wick wheat can all be used to create a restore health potion these are all ingredients that grow in abundance in certain regions of Morrowind and are often found in the dwellings that you'll be exploring not to mention all three of them also have a weight of just 0.1 the weight of your ingredients is important because the weight of the potion you create is the average of all of the weights of the ingredients that went into making it now it is important to know that unlike in later games potions with only negative effects cannot be applied to your weapon and used offensively instead using such a potion just makes your character consume it like any other potion so the practical use for a harmful potion is really just to sell it to a merchant for gold now let's look at the formula used to calculate your success chance men attempting to create a potion as you can see the alchemy success chance formula is surprisingly simple relative to many other formula you'll see that your base success chance is your alchemy skill level from there every 10 points of intelligence or 10 points of luck increase the success chance by 1% this is a little weird because intelligence and luck are weighted equally so it's a little bit more difficult to get a 100% success chance and of course you'll also notice that the fatigue modifier is also not taken into account here finally we can see that our alchemy equipment isn't a factor either so if they're not used here then what do all these pieces of alchemy equipment do well let's take a look at each individual piece of equipment and what its function is in creating a potion the mortar and pestle is where it all begins and is used in the formulae for determining a potions base duration and base magnitude a calcine ater retort and Alembic all impact the base duration and base magnitude in different ways the calcine aider will increase duration and magnitude of all effects the retort increases the duration and magnitude of only the positive effects finally the Alembic reduces the duration and magnitude of negative effects so if you only use created potions with positive effects and Alembic is kind of unnecessary it's worth noting that skooma pipes can also be used as an extremely poor quality Olympic unfortunately though you can't actually create skooma in Morrowind least not without mods okay now let's take a look at the various formulae used in these calculations as you can see it's quite complex with all of the modifiers from different pieces of equipment it's insane to expect anyone to regularly run numbers through these formulae thankfully though we really only need to know two things that being the general function of each piece of alchemy equipment and that our success chance for creating a potion in the first place has a direct impact on the duration and magnitude of our potions so if we want higher duration or magnitude we just need to increase our success chance of course before we move on we need to take a quick look at the quality stat assigned to each piece of equipment this stat is used in the formulae that we just went over now the important thing here is that when concerning the formulae we just looked at calcine aiders and retorts have their quality stat rounded to the nearest whole number this means that there's really only two tiers of quality when it comes to calcine aiders and retorts Grand Master tier gets rounded to two and everything else gets rounded to just one there is a secret master tier equality but such equipment isn't accessible without the use of mods or console commands now that we know the ins and outs of alchemy let's go over where you can get some good equipment if you aren't above theft you can easily get a full set of master tier alchemy equipment extremely early on at the caldera mages guild from side to mean you can buy passage via silk strider to Balmorra and then buy the services of the Balmorra mages guild to teleport you from the Balmorra mages guild hall to calderas guild hall from there the full set of equipment is easy pickings with nobody around to witness the crime you can also steal a grandmaster tear mortar and pestle from the alchemist in Balmorra but this is just a little harder to pull off lastly while there are several other locations you can find them there's a full set of Grand Master tier equipment available at the stronghold Velen very on in the most northern reaches of the Ashland's you can either buy them from the vendor here or try your hand at stealing them if you're so inclined be wary though the exterior of the stronghold is guarded by several hostile NPCs they'll prove a challenge for low-level or unprepared characters finally we're going to cover the concept of daisy chaining potions specifically fortify intelligence potions so doing this you'll easily be able to reach absurd levels of intelligence and thus reap the benefits of high end alchemy among other things the steps involved are simple enough first and foremost we'll need to horde a stockpile of fortify intelligence ingredients in morrowind there's four ingredients that contain the coveted fortify intelligence effect these are a Siam's bloat Nach leather and worker tusks mind you that Kurtis is only found in the blood moon expansion if you're having trouble gathering large amounts of these ingredients where when you decide to go through this whole process you should know that there's a few vendors who sell them perhaps most notably is Mara Drori who resides in the temple at Nisus she regularly restocks her supply as of bloat and nach leather essentially giving you access to an infinite supply of fortify intelligence potions it's worth noting that because many alchemy ingredients have low prices it's pretty easy to buy out a merchants cheaper stock of ingredients mix up potions that are far more valuable than the cost and just sell the potions back to the merchants it's kind of like free money anyways now that we've got our ingredients will mix up one fortify intelligence potion then we'll consume it and quickly exit our menus to ensure that the effect is applied to our character next we'll use our newly fortified intelligence to make another slightly stronger fortify intelligence potion we'll repeat this process as necessary until our intelligence reaches desired levels just be careful if you go as far as 50,000 or more intelligence around this level you run the risk of crashing the game's engine of course if you're running the game on older hardware this warning applies even more so anyways you'll eventually be making potions with several hundred point magnitudes and that have durations that last multiple days high intelligence also pays off in that our odds when attempting to perform enchantments as well as casting powerful custom spells alright I think that just about covers everything I can think of related to morrowind south hopefully you get more 1000 you try or maybe delve deeper into it if you're already up in that business it's personally one of my favorite parts of the game because of how high the ceiling is on any of its limitations anyhow I've got an ever expanding collection of morrowind guides give them a look and see if there's anything that piques your interest I've also got a weekly playthrough going of morrowind on max difficulty if you're the type of person who's into those sorts of videos check it out as well thanks again for watching peace

Channel: Lyle Shnub

Views: 87,065

Keywords: Morrowind, Elder Scrolls, Walkthrough, Commentary, apparatus, alchemy formula, how to make potions morrowind, how to make potions, poisons, morrowind poisons, best alchemy items, fortify intelligence, super potion, daisy chain potion, wortcraft, raw ingredients, eat ingredients, restore health potion, restore health recipe, potions, healing, ingredients, potion ingredients, alchemy ingredients, how to alchemy, morrowind how to use alchemy, fatigue potion, health potion, alchemy

Id: YbWLiz36Uy4

Length: 12min 56sec (776 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 18 2017