Crafting: Alchemy

Hello there:)

This week I am going to expand a bit on the new alchemy mechanic, which is one part of the overall crafting system (the other being blacksmithing). My alchemy has been vaguely inspired by Skyrim, but without the experimentation failure part; while I personally enjoy it a lot, it's probably a bit too tedious and time consuming to be a secondary mechanic in a porn game lol. My alchemy instead works through recipes, which is similar to how the crafting in original Domina was handled. My main goal with this rework was to make crafting actually worth it. The system isn't required to progress, but due to the removal of normal vendors, your only other way to acquire potions is through random loot (which is usually low quality potions). Potions have also been expanded greatly with dozens of new effects and properties, buffing attributes and resistances to different affinities/Dominas, or allowing for greater offence through poisoning. The new Item Magnitude stat also comes in incredibly useful here, as it directly affects and multiplies all potion and poison effects. You could literally just make an alchemist build, taking all the Item Magnitude related perks from each perk tree, and having your potions and poisons hit like trucks.

A) Reagents

Reagents are the ingredients you'll be using and combining to make elixirs. Reagents can be harvestable flora, usually found on exterior areas or deep cave systems in each realm, and they can also be body parts from creatures you kill. Flora locations are semi-randomised and reset every time you die (and get reborn); this signifies a passage of time and new plants growing in different places, as in the new lore your "rebirths" take a few in-game months to reincarnate your body. Dying and respawning is also the only way for the flora and mobs to respawn, so once again, dying isn't considered a bad thing (at least not entirely). Each realm has a unique and thematic set of flora and fauna, which naturally also means new unlockable potions every time you reach a new realm. Each Reagent has 1-4 properties, which are always revealed from the start and viewable in the inventory UI.

B) Potions

Potions are categorised in 3 ranks: Impure, Potent and Sophisticated. Impure mixtures are easy and simple to craft, and they always ask for a property instead of a specific ingredient. This means that you can use whatever reagent you have on hand, as long as it contains the needed property. You also need to have 3 of the same reagent, which isn't hard to achieve unless it's a rare one (in which case you should probably be saving it for a more advanced potion anyway). Potent and Sophisticated potions tend to require specific ingredients instead of general properties more often than not. Potion brewing also requires a "base". Bases are either Alchemical Paste (for Impure potions), Fortified Alchemical Paste (for Potent potions) or Alkahest (for Sophisticated potions). These can be crafted or found in loot. There are multiple ways to craft each, but usually the easiest one is to recycle potions you don't need on a cauldron (probably found in loot and not useful for your build). Lastly, potions can be useful both in and outside combat; Health doesn't auto-restore after battles, so you will definitely need a good healing potion supply to venture into the deepest depths of the new dungeons (the deeper you go, the higher the rewards!). There are also specialty potions useful only on the map, for example to heal permanent injuries or turn you invisible and allow you to sneak past mobs (mobs are now map entities that charge at you upon spotting, not invisible random encounters). Lastly, poisons are also a thing here. Using a poison in battle (or even outside battle) will have your character coat their weapon in it, and their next attack will transfer it to the target enemy. Poisons aren't guaranteed to work, and the enemy can simply resist them sometimes. Chance of a resist increases vastly if an enemy is already inflicted by a poison effect of the same type, so stacking Paralysis poisons to completely immobalize the enemy permanently is very unlikely to happen (you can still use one immediately after the previous one expires without penalty though).

C) Recipes

You start the game with no potion recipes known, the MC is new to this world of demons and Goddesses. There are 2 ways to acquire recipes: loot and experimentation. I already mentioned that there is no classic experimentation as in manually combining ingredients and seeing what happens; but I still think an alchemy system without some sort of experimentation is just chemistry. I have implemented a simple experimentation trigger that fires every time you craft a potion and gives you a chance to discover a new recipe, loosely related to what you just crafted. The more you craft, the more recipes you learn. I've made sure to create several dozen recipes for the remake, and I am planning to add more with each update, the goal being to add an element of variance and luck in your alchemical journey - I want you to be playing with different recipes and crafting different potions in each new playthrough.

Thank you for the read and cheers:)

alchemy (Streamable)