General Tips

Alchemy In The Isles

If you're already advanced in your alchemy skills when you enter the Shivering Isles, you'll find a whole host of new ingredients to play around with here. That's good, since most of the ingredients from Cyrodiil won't appear at all! You may find the odd bonemeal on a corpse or the usual assortment of fruits in people's cupboards, but for the most part, you'll have to deal with a whole new set of ingredients.

Here's a few recipes to get you started. Most of these ingredients will assume that you have an Expert level in Alchemy, and we're further going to assume that you only use ingredients from the Shivering Isles. If you bring in a load of plants from Cyrodiil, expect to have a much broader array of choices here. We're just going to deal with a few damaging potions; there are plenty of ways to make Restore Fatigue and Restore Health potions with these ingredients, especially if you get yourself up to Master alchemy and can make potions with one ingredient.

Bone Marrow + Letifer Orca Digestive Slime = Damage Health / Damage Magicka

Black Tar + Scalon Fin = Damage Health / Shock Damage

Bone Marrow + Rot Scale = Damage Health / Paralyze

Madness Ore and Amber Equipment

As you adventure around the Shivering Isles, you’ll note the appearance of two new kinds of substances: madness ore and amber. Madness ore often drops off of veins in some of the more structured ruins in the world, and off of grummite enemies. Madness matrices are generally found either on grummites, or in chests in grummite lairs. Amber and amber matricesis found on gnarl enemies, or on amber roots in gnarl lairs. Matrices are going to be somewhat rare unless you go exploring quite a bit.

Most of the weapon matrices will give you weapons with a handy Damage Health enchantment.

Note that these armors are probably going to be the best armor you can find in the game, but if you have already maxed yourself out with an 85% armor rating (which is definitely possible if you’ve been using heavy Daedric armor and a shield), you’re unlikely to get much benefit from having a new set forged.

Note, however, that crafting a weapon or piece of armor when you possess the appropriate matrix will allow you to make a magical piece of equipment. You can’t choose the enchantment that gets built into the equipment, so some of them might not wind up being worthwhile to you. The magical equipment will also have the exact same weight and armor or damage stats as the normal equipment will, but with the simple addition of an enchantment of some sort. In some cases these are going to be useful enchantments, but for the most part you'll probably want to get the basic kinds of armor and use those with enchantments to custom make a set of armor to suit your needs.

When you find madness ore or matrices, bring them to Cutter's Weapons in Crucible to get them forged. Amber can be brought to the Missing Pauldron in Bliss.

Previous PageNext: The Adventure Begins