How to Alchemy - Mechanics and Start Guide for Morrowind

alchemy is one of the strongest and most useful skills in marwyn but based on some of the comments i've seen on my other videos it also appears to be one of the least understood so to combat that today we'll be showing an example of an ideal alchemist character setup going over some early potions and items explaining the alchemy mechanics and of course teaching you the exploits [Music] so just be warned that some of the strategies shown in the second half of this video can definitely lead to game breaking effects so if you're a newer player you may just want to save that piece to later but public service announcements aside go ahead and grab your mortar and pestle and let's get into it so first things first if you're trying to be the best alchemist that you can possibly be well then you're going to want to direct your attention to one of three character setups the first is going to be a high elf because as you can see here they get a 10 point boost to alchemy right off the back as well as the breton that gets a five and then the female argonian specifically who also gets a five now you might also say well the wood elf also gets a plus five to alchemy why not mention them well it's because the high elf bretton and female argonian all have the highest possible intelligence stat that we can get at 50 points and the most important things to keep in mind when you're trying to do anything related to alchemy is going to be your intelligence and your luck now every race starts with a base luck of 40 across the board you can't get anything higher so to start here i'm going to pick the high elf just to you know maximize in both regards skill bonus and intelligence and we'll start moving on here next up we're going to want to create our custom class and the first thing we're going to want to do here is take our specialization as magic as you can see alchemy is one of the stats that will be boosted five points by taking this as your specialization and we of course are trying to max that out as much as possible so let's take that here we'll then move down to our favorite attributes and again keeping in mind that the most important things and all of our alchemy formulas are going to be intelligence and luck so we will take both of those here as our favorite attributes and then moving on to major skills it of course goes without saying that you should be taking alchemy as a major skill this will put alchemy's base point level before any of our racial boosts or specialization boosts at 30. once we've set up our class let's take a peep at the stats here and you'll see we have albert the alchemist and we have an intelligence of 60 a luck of 50 and an alchemy of 45 and those are going to be the only three stats that we really care about if we're only trying to focus on being a potion maker so of course when you're making this class be sure to fill in all your other major and minor skills with the you know the various things that you want your character to do besides potion making but again i'm just using this as an example on how you can how you can min max your alchemical ability so let's move on now now as always we want to start by stealing the old limewear throwing it on the ground yeah oh yeah look at that wow nice and free now uh if only real life worked that way i'd be a menace at stores but we're going to come in here we're going to steal everything off of this shelf and out of the room and this is all going to play in here in a little bit so i'd be interested to know how many thousands of times this guy's had his dinner stolen off the table from the other room and his place just ransacked by a bunch of prisoners who just showed up all right now once we're out of the census office we're gonna come over to fargoth hand him the old ring as always and then head over to our laze and then dump off all of our wares that we just stole out of the census office and we'll be putting this gold to good use right here in just a couple minutes all right so now let's sell all of our items to rla and yes even the shirt off our back hey we're trying to make it here in the world so sacrifices have to be made but you can see we're getting 660 gold from him and then also before we head on here i would like to point out that if you're if you're not trying to get crazy or do any exploits or stealing the items the quickest mortal and pestle you can get will be the apprentices mortal and pestle right here but this is a coffee nut video and you know we're not interested in apprentice level items so let's go ahead and sell these to rla and then we will move over to home sweet home of balmora i feel like if there was a passport for morrowind it would literally just be balmora beginning to end for me like it would just be stamps on every single phrase cover to cover just balmora i really need to switch it up man i need to do like i'm gonna do gnarmock for my next video right probably not but it's a fun thing to think about now right when you hop off the stilt strider here start digging through some of these containers as a lot of them will actually have ingredients in them and good ingredients at that so just to point out here salt rice and marshmallow we have both here and these are the two ingredients for a restore health potion or at least the two most abundant ingredients oh and there you have them again so right off the bat you have 14 restore health potions worth of ingredients just from looking through crates here so let's grab all of that and then we're going to move over to the mages guild and we're actually going to talk through just the ingredients that you'll need the easiest ways to get them for what i would consider the big three of the restore effect potions which are going to be your restore health restore fatigue and restore magicka now a good place to buy ingredients is going to be ajira for restore fatigue as she does sell crab meat and hound meat which are the two items you would need for restore fatigue and then she sells one half of what you need for restore magicka which is going to be our cone berries and she also sells one half of what you would need for restore health which is salt rice now we'll go over to the other alchemist here in town but first let's just buy all of these items and i'll point out one additional thing here and that is that ajira as well as many ingredient merchants in the game are what are called restocking merchants so you can see i just hit offer i have gotten those ingredients into my inventory but i can immediately go click barter without even closing the menu and boom she has renewed her stock of each of the items i had just bought it looks like excluding salt rice but everything else so let's go ahead rebuy our ingredients here and don't worry we'll make our money back here in a second before we get into the exploit section of the video now another thing that we want to do while we're here in the mages guild before we go and visit that other alchemist is to talk to the old guild guide over here we're going to buy passage to caldera and then we're going to step on down the stairs here do a quick look make sure we're not being followed we're then going to head up the stairs and then you can see that sitting right up here for your taking is going to be an entire set masters alchemical apparatuses so let's go ahead and collect these there's also some nice ingredients here fire salts dro wax that you can pick up and throw into your potions here but let's keep moving on for now now that we've gathered these items let's actually head back to balmora and complete the ingredient gathering for those potions as well as just point out where that other alchemist is for newer players and then once we complete this initial round of potion making and mechanics explanation we'll then get into what i mentioned before which is going to be the exploit section of the video so stick around for that if you're interested on seeing the boundaries get pushed so to find the other alchemist in town we're gonna head up here to the more the more manor style district of balmora and then simply head off here to the right and you'll find our other alchemist now to complete the big three as i mentioned before you can also get marshmallow here salt rice for majira so you can have that recurring stock in your endless supply of restore health potions that you might want as well as you can grab frost salts which are going to be the other component that we need for our restore magicka potions so you can get a recurring endless supply of restore magicka restore fatigue and restore health right here at the start of the game in balmora which is just really going to help in setting you up for success so let's go ahead and buy those and while i'm in here i'll also grab just a couple trauma route and a couple racer plumes and you'll see where these play in in just a minute so let's go ahead and buy that anytime now and then now let's talk through the mechanics of potion making so to begin making potions take your mortal and pestle drop it right onto your character and you should see a menu similar to this it may not be exactly the same again i'm on open morrow end it will look different if you're on xbox or android or something but all in all the menu will have the same components our apparatuses our effects and our ingredients so first let's begin by explaining what the apparatuses do first here we have our mortal and pestle and the mortal and pestle is actually just what enables you to begin crafting potions it doesn't really serve another purpose but it is the only apparatus that is required of the bunch moving on from the mortal and pestle we have the alembic and the olympic is going to decrease the negative effects that we get from potions so these are going to be any of our effects like drain fatigue or drain magicka we then have our calcinator that will increase the duration and magnitude of all potion effects whether those be positive or negative and then we have the retort which is only going to be able to boost the positive effect duration and strength of our potions now another thing to mention here is that the quality or tear of our apparatus does play into our all chemical formulas but i'm not going to get into the math in this video all you really need to know to succeed at alchemy is the general ideas but if you're interested in the formulation do go down and check the uesp page for alchemies as it will have them all laid out there but in essence all the quality does is if you are using a grandmaster's calcinator versus an apprentice calcinator the increase to the strength and duration that you're getting from the calcinator will of course be higher the higher tier the equipment you're using is now the second thing we need to keep in mind when potion making is of course going to be our ingredients themselves and how they play into the potions that we're going to create so first off you'll note that as we hover over a couple items here you'll see between one and four effects listed underneath and if you're playing like a warrior or something you'll probably only see four question marks as this is dependent on your alchemy skill so in order to see the first effect you'll need an alchemy skill of 15 to have the second effect revealed you'll need an alchemy skill of 30. to get the third you'll need an alchemy skull of 45 and finally to get all four you will need an alchemy skill of 60. so remember that from character creation our alchemy skill was 45 which is why we can see three of the effects here and that fourth one is of course hidden behind the question mark now another thing to note here on ingredients is that in order to create an effect in a potion you will need to combine two ingredients that share that effect so if we're trying to make a restore fatigue potion we will need to look at our crab meat we see it has restore fatigue we'll then need to look at our hound meat and we can see that also has restore fatigue and combining them together will create a potion with the effect restore fatigue and this applies to creating a potion with multiple effects as well as long as two of the four ingredients that you put in are sharing at least one effect along the line you will then see that effect appear on your potion but let's go ahead and start creating our potions here and then we will sell them back oh actually one additional thing to note is that if you eat the ingredient depending on your alchemy and intelligence skill you will actually be able to proc the first effect listed on an ingredient so here if we were to eat the cone berry we may or may not get the drain fatigue effect if we eat the resin we may or may not restore our health for a undefined duration again determined by your alchemy skill and intelligence skill and the formula that runs behind the scenes but just another thing to note on ingredients but let's go ahead i'm going to create a bunch of potions here we'll sell them back to the alchemist and then we'll move on to breaking down the walls of reality but before we do that let's just hit create we're just going to spam our creating potions this is all you really need to do do our sawtrice and our marshmallow here for our restore health you can see we got a bunch just grabbed a level up as well all right so now that i've crafted a bunch of potions let's actually begin to sell them back here and you'll notice right off the bat that we had 600 gold to start and we are going to have exceedingly more in potion value when we do sell them back to earth and again i didn't even use all the ingredients we had just most of them but you will remember that we put in about 500 ish gold and now we've gotten out 828 so a nice little payday for us on that front and here you can kind of see the power of alchemy as long as you're going to succeed 30 40 of the time you're going to make a good return on the cost of your ingredients especially if you're just creating stacks and stacks of something like restore health or restore fatigue where the ingredients are going to be you know saltrice and marshmallow that you can buy for one gold each this is the power of alchemy but now that we've finished the big three we've talked about alchemy mechanics the only other thing i'd add is that you can level up alchemy by either eating ingredients or crafting potions but crafting potions gives you four times the experience return that eating an ingredient does so two points versus a half a point so just know that if you want to level your alchemy go to a trainer or make a bunch of potions eating ingredients just isn't really worth it but that being said let's come over and then travel to sadrith mora and start to make things interesting so let's come down the stairs here come into the imperial shrine and we will move over to anyas autrys ignoring the incredible altar over there that saved us from greater bone walkers all the time but let's start bartering with him and then we'll show the first exploit here which is going to be the restocking merchant exploit so let's just go ahead and buy 10 aschams from anyas and five bloat as we'll be using both of these ingredients in order to create fortify intelligence potions but we'll get into that here in just a second so first i have bought his stock of ten and five he has now restocked them and got his ten and five back i will then actually sell him the ingredients that i just bought from him so let's offer it open it back up you'll now see that anyas has 20 ashams and 10 bloat so let's do this one more time barter sell it back barter again and you'll now notice that he's at 40 and 20. so again let's buy these from him but you'll notice now that even though we haven't sold him back that 40 and 20 we'll open the menu he has now restocked 40 ashams in 20 bloat despite us actually having the ones that we were pedaling back and forth in our inventory so this is a little trick that you can do with any restocking merchant this isn't just for audience or ashams and bloat but really any ingredient that a merchant restocks if you sell them the ingredient that you are interested in buying you will raise the restock cap that they have so if i sell audience 10 ash hams he then has 20 ashams in his inventory if i buy those he'll restock 20 i can sell him 20 i can buy 40 then he'll restock 40. i can just keep doing this back and forth until they're restocking hundreds of ingredients at the same time so if you have a ton of money and you're just trying to really make a buttload of gold you can do this little restocking trick back and forth to get hundreds of the same ingredients in your inventory and then just mass factory produce a bunch of potions which is actually what we're gonna do right here so let's buy our bloat buy our yams all right so you can see that i've ended up with 120 bloat and 120 ash hams and i think you can guess what is about to happen so let's put on our mortal and pestle equip our ashams and our bloat and now we move to the second exploit which is going to be our fortify intelligence exploit so what you're going to want to do is create in about batches of five or ten or so fortify intelligence potions so let's go ahead and do that okay i think i got like six ish all right there we go i got six let's hover over it you can see that these potions have the effect fortify attribute intelligence 27 points for 73 seconds now let's grab these drink all of them and our intelligence is now at 222 and now if you remember what i said at the beginning of this video was that the only two attributes that matter are going to be our intelligence and our luck so we can use this exploit a number of times here again let's let the potions take effect and keep going to just artificially inflate our intelligence into the stratosphere so i'm going to keep doing this here we're now at 500 we're now at 900. do it again you can see now that we've already inflated the magnitude duration and value of the potions incredibly what started out as fortify 27 points is now 61. so the curve is just exponential on this exploit and you can easily get your intelligence into the tens of thousands if you really wanted to now my only caution there is going to be that the game can actually break down at that level if you're crafting potions with an ability like fortify speed because the magnitude could be like fortify speed 5 000 points and the duration could be like a week long so you'll you have no easy way of getting out of that effect besides just waiting it out for a week in game time all right so now you can see we've used a hundred of each of our ashams and bloat and we are now at 16 000 intelligence with 64 000 magicka so just take for that what you will because now each of the potions let's actually just create one more as a as a reference each of our potions now sell for 2 000 gold a piece and fortify our intelligence for 670 points and that is good and all and unlocks the door to infinite money for sure but what i am actually interested in doing is using the racer prolongs and the trauma route that we bought from the alchemist in balmora to do something a little more fun so let's create these two potions here and you can see we now have levitate 226 points for 670 seconds and now remember how i mentioned that there is a grandmaster's mortal and pestle that we want at the beginning of this video well let's go ahead and go grab that let's put on our levitation here look at where we are where we need to go to is right here up at the top and using silt striders and boats are lame when you have the power of intelligence at your side so let's take a look at how this is going you can see how the game becomes a little bit different here once you push your intelligence into the thousands and start making crazy effects because we're just you know we're too efficient now we're too powerful [Music] so let's take a look at the map now that we're nice and close and here we are at vallon varyon carved a path right across bartenfell but you know that's the life of the master alchemist the world is your oyster uh but now that we're here let's ignore the orcs they're typically not very friendly to outsiders and head into the propylene chamber now let's try and negotiate ourselves over here and you'll notice that on the table is a grandmaster's set of alchemical apparatuses now all we need to do here to secure these for ourselves is hide just ever so slightly behind this pillar and then boom just like that everything is ours it's like taking candy from a baby this game falls apart so easily once you understand the power of fortify attribute doesn't it i mean we went from 800 gold to flying across the continent we have the best all chemical supplies in the game and now the sky's the limit i mean vivec may as well move over because with our mystic brews we're we're far beyond his power now that that's pretty much everything you need to know about alchemy in morrowind whether you're just trying to use it for good or trying to use the exploits to you know make your next play through something really to remember but i will add one little additional factoid here to the end and that is that abell here is actually the master alchemy trainer so if you want training all the way up to level 100 for your alchemy with all the money that you now have you can come to her and she will be able to train you up to that level 100. definitely a friend that you want in your corner and then now since we're still stuck levitating and we can't rest one thing that you'll probably need to do is actually just fly back over to cull and then just find a silt strider or a bed there to sleep in and wait for the effect of this levitation to wear off because you you can't rest when you're flying sadly which makes perfect sense honestly but i think that's an incredible spot to end it here the world is at our fingertips the daedra now cower before you and you have enough money to buy the continent of arden phil should you so want it so as always thank you so much for watching i've really appreciated the support on the channel recently be sure to hit that big red button if you want to see more morrowind content and as always i will catch you on the next one [Music]

Channel: CoffeeNutGaming

Views: 58,384

Keywords: morrowind, morrowind alchemy guide, alchemy guide, morrowind potions, morrowind potion making, morrowind ingredients, morrowind mage guide, morrowind mechanics, alchemy mechanics, elder scrolls, openmw

Id: EzYFOchMWQM

Length: 23min 42sec (1422 seconds)

Published: Sun Jul 24 2022