Alchemy Tips

Ah, alchemy. Although this is only one skill among many in Oblivion, it's one that almost everyone can take advantage of, no matter what your level is, and no matter what your chosen character archetype. It's a great way to make lots of money by selling potions, or to increase your efficacy in combat by producing useful potions and poisons. This chapter is intended to help you get the most out of your alchemical experiments.

Equipment

It'll take a while for you to get up to Master-level equipment, but as you upgrade, you'll notice your potions getting better and better.

At its root, all you need to perform alchemy is a mortar and pestle (which counts as one item). Real alchemy, however, will require a mortar and pestle, an alembic, a retort, and a calcinator. Alembics reduce negative effects of ingredients on your potions, while retorts and calcinators improve the efficacy of your potions. You don't need all four pieces of the puzzle to make a potion, but they're relatively easy to find, at least in the beginning of the game.

The catch is that there are different levels of equipment, ranging from Novice to Master. Most of the items you'll find in the game world will be Novice equipment, with a few Apprentice pieces here and there. If you want Journeyman equipment or higher, you'll have to find them in loot, usually in boss-level treasure chests deep within dungeons. Since these are randomly generated based on your level, you won't be able to head off to a dungeon at level one and find a set of Master-level alchemy equipment. Note, however, that you can mix and match equipment from different levels without a problem; if you have a set of novice equipment, but find a journeyman mortar and pestle, you can drop your novice mortar and pestle and use the journeyman M&P instead. It'll work just fine with the novice equipment you already have.

If you're looking for a set of novice equipment, join the Mages Guild at any of the local branches at the beginning of the game. This will let you pick up any equipment you find in the guildhalls, which will usually include a full set of alchemical tools. As you level up and want to find more advanced equipment, you can usually check in either a Necromancer-inhabited lair, or in the upper levels of Oblivion plane citadels. The loot is randomized, so it won't always be around, but these are both good places to check for them.

Ingredients

Ingredients are everywhere you look in Oblivion: in the towns, out in the wilderness, on the bodies of your enemies, in containers, on people's kitchen tables, etc. For the most part, though, if you want a lot of ingredients, you'll probably have to harvest them from plants in the wilderness. You can find plants all over the place, so just run outside and look! Anything that looks even the least bit out of place or distinct from the usual trees and grasses can probably be harvested. Just run over and point your cursor at the plant, and it'll probably turn into a hand icon. If you get the prompt to activate the plant, attempt to do so.

Whenever you visit a safehouse, be sure to dump your ingredients into one of your treasure chests. Unless you have a huge Strength score, there's no point lugging them around everywhere.

At this point, you'll usually get a message saying that an ingredient has been delivered into your inventory. We say "usually" because it's not guaranteed. Most plants will give you a 20% chance to fail in your harvesting, which will result in you "using up" the plant and not gaining anything, but some plants can have a failure rate of up to 50%. Wisp Stalks and Cairne Bolete mushrooms, both found in caves, have dismal failure rates of around 75%, meaning that you'll only get an ingredient once in every four tries.

Many monsters also have ingredients on their bodies when killed. Rats and crabs will drop their meat for you to harvest, ghosts will drop ectoplasm, vampires will yield dust, and the dreaded Dremora will actually let you pick up their hearts. Mmm-mmm good!

What we usually like to do is have a storage place for all of our ingredients. Doesn't have to be anything fancy. We used the house for sale in the Imperial City (in the slums on the waterfront), which, when upgraded a bit, had three treasure chests to use. Since chests have an unlimited amount of storage space, you can dump all of your ingredients into one of them, along with your alchemical equipment, and come back to it for large potion-making sessions.

In your travels, you're going to be picking up a lot of ingredients; check your encumbrance every so often. When you're about to stop moving because you have so much stuff in your bag, head back to your house and indulge in a little alchemy to convert everything into potions, then sell off the potions you don't actually want or need. Although potions won't initially be worth very much, you're going to be making enough of them to eventually make quite a bit of money off of them when they're sold.