My Guide to Alchemical Brilliance in Skyrim!

[rageofthemage]

Well two people asked, and that's all it takes to motivate me so here goes.

MY GUIDE TO ALCHEMICAL BRILLIANCE WITHIN SKYRIM

Alchemy is a pain in the everything that is capable of feeling pain to upgrade. It is a mostly passive skill that doesn't really seem all that important until you've completely run out of healing potions in a dungeon, but have a *$%#ton of ingredients and there sits a lone Alchemy table; mocking your low level Alchemy skill. Investing in Alchemy isn't just a wise investment into your health though, as the potions that you can whip up can provide some serious cash; and with ingredients literally sitting at the side of the road, there is money in the ground waiting to be picked.

Follow this guide to take your character to the full limits of his alchemical brilliance in no time, and make some serious scratch along the way. Gold that you earn can be dumped into your other more important skills like Speechcraft. HAHAHAHAHA just kidding, that skill is useless.

Step One.
Ingredients.

Finding ingredients to make stuff out of is pretty much the easiest thing in the game to do. All you have to do is walk outside. There you go. I'll repeat that... take your character and walk outside. Ok. Now that you've got that taken care of I can give you some specific tips for sourcing ingredients.

Don't underestimate how many ingredients you will need, even the basic ones. I can't count how many high level potions I could have mixed but was missing yet another Red Mountain Flower, or something trivial like that. These easy to find ingredients saturate the landscape and over time you can become sort of numb to their presence and ignore collecting them altogether. Don't. Snowberries, Mountain Flowers, Tundra Cotton, and other really super easy to find ingredients are essentially the bases for a lot of higher level potions despite them becoming totally ubiquitous before long. Also, look under bridges and in the corners of lakes or at Giant camp's for Nirnroots. Nirnroots and their Crimson counterparts are a big part of high level Alchemy so always keep your eyes to the ground and your ears open for their distinctive singing.

You will find the highest concentration of “exotic” ingredients in the southeastern to true east parts of Skyrim. So if you were to take a carriage to that wretched hive of scum and villainy that is Riften and start walking north, you would hit Merryfair Farm, and Shor's Watchtower or at least you should. My advice is try and stick sort of close to the road and head northwestish until just before Bonestrewn Crest, and then hook it west until you can find the major road and follow it north. Do this little pilgrimage correctly and you should end up at Windhelm. Along the way you should have found all kinds of good stuff like Canis Root, Creep Cluster, Dragon's Tongue, and lots of usable insects. Marching along the road will have yielded you more base ingredients, and a few roadside bandits to murder to keep your combat skills busy. Once you hit Windhelm visit The White Phial in the market district.

Step Two.
Potions.

Making potions is actually fairly simple, and if you followed my guide thus far you're at The White Phial in Windhelm right NAO. You'll notice a couple of weirdos, one named Nurelion and the other named Quintus. Quintus is a jerk. Nurelion has plenty of ingredients and potions for sale, but he usually has a couple of potion recipes on hand. I would suggest memorizing Blue Mountain Flower, Charred Skeever Hide, and Giant's Toe. Blue flowers are pretty much a roadside attraction, and the other two ingredients are mainstays of most dungeons. This recipe should pump out a potion that's worth around $500 gold, and fortifies and restores your health. Plus once you mix it, it's in your recipe list. Suck that Sinderion! If you really don't feel like memorizing potions at all or buying recipes from Nurelion you can take the easiest way out and check out the Skyrim potion app.

http://rp.eliteskills.com/skyrim.html

This nifty little tool lets you add ingredients as you collect them, and then it continuously produces a list of the most valuable potions you can create based on what you actually have. Sweet deal huh? It's also particularly useful for sorting potion recipes by effect or value depending on your intent. I tend to keep all the restorative potions for myself and mix the high level poisons to sell to shops. This gives me more than enough gold to dump into skills or crafting materials while being able to move around and freelance stuff.

Still need some more recipes for the helping of getting gold into your pockets? Here's the ten most valuable potion recipes according to the Alchemy calculator.

$1050 ectoplasm
glow dust
jarrin root

$1050 glow dust
nightshade
jarrin root

$1049 blisterwort
human heart
jarrin root

$1044 crimson nirnroot
hanging moss
jarrin root

$1044 crimson nirnroot
glow dust
jarrin root

$1044 crimson nirnroot
human heart
jarrin root

$1043 chicken's egg
crimson nirnroot
jarrin root

$1040 crimson nirnroot
luna moth wing
jarrin root

$1040 chaurus eggs
crimson nirnroot
jarrin root

$1006 fly amanita
human heart
jarrin root


Step Three.
Profit.

I suppose this is highly subjective, but in my opinion Alchemy is one of the simplest, quickest ways to make serious cash in Skyrim. See the thing that makes Alchemy so damn awesome is that the ingredients are everywhere. Like everywhere everywhere. Outside? There's some stuff to harvest. In a dungeon? You bet there's stuff to harvest. In town? Hell yeah! Harvest time! In your house? You get the idea... Alchemy yields the obvious benefit of cash and skill grinding, but it also produces some really useful potions and deadly poisons that can come through in a pinch. Besides, only suckers buy potions, real Dragonborn craft them.

With alchemists in every corner of the map it's always easy to find someone to buy your potions, and with high level potions and poisons at the ready, you'll empty their gold out quickly. Make the rounds of it and you'll find yourself with a tidy little sum while still being able to quest or side quest as much as you like. It's been brought up that you can do the thieve's guild stuff and open up the fences who have lots more gold than the alchemists. Yeah you sure can, and then you can sell them potions. Expensive potions. However if you're playing a warrior type that doesn't associate with shifty ne'er do wells that hang out in humid sewers under Riften, this might prove useful as an alternative path. Don't forget you can also sell your potions to general goods merchants.

If you ever forget just who in the hell will buy your $678 potion of Damage Reputation With Sheogorath check out the link below. It's just a list of all the Alchemy shops in Skyrim, but hey, even I forget about ole Elgrim every now and again. I mean the Riften city Council really boned him on municipal placement. Keep this list handy, and you should be well along your way to wealth in no time.

http://elderscrolls.wikia.com/wiki/Category:Skyrim:_Alchemy_Shops

Addendum.
Last few tips and advice.

SkyUI
SkyUI is kind of an alchemists best friend. It makes sorting all those pesky potions that much easier. You can sort them by effect or value depending on the situation, and I for one really like being able to sort by health potions so I know which one's I'm not going to sell, and tuck those into a chest somewhere. I then just take the rest of the potions and dump them onto merchants being able to sort by highest value. SkyUI makes all that possible, so if you don't have it, you should, and if you don't have it, you're kind of silly.

Alchemy is a skill, and it has a skill tree. Don't forget about it, but also DON'T SPEND EARLY SKILL POINTS ON EXPERIMENTER. It's a totally worthless skill, especially with the Skyrim Alchemy Calculator I linked earlier. Focus your skill points on the base skill itself which is “Alchemist” to make your potions and poisons stronger. When that's wiped out you can dump extra points into Physician and Benefactor as soon as possible to get even more powerful potions. These skills are the fast track to valuable potions and poisons that are actually worth a crap to sell or keep. I would suggest you also spend the money on Poisoner and Concentrated Poison if only because Poisoner ups the value on your poisons, and Concentrated Poison gives you access to Green Thumb which allows you to pick two ingredients from every plant. Snakeblood is take it or leave it for me, but others may find Purity particularly enticing. If that's the case you can spend a point on Experiment to open it up, but don't spend anymore than a single point on that skill.

With this focused approach to Alchemy you'll start to pile up cash more quickly because you're selling high level potions you don't want, and getting to keep the restorative potions you would have otherwise spent money on, or time questing to find. This is arguably mercantilism as a trade in Skyrim if you focus Alchemy, gold, then training, but it is very effective and is very opt in and out giving you the flexibility to focus Alchemy when you choose.

I'll add and edit to this as I receive feedback and death threats.

[frogprincess_q4]

Nice guide :) For your valuable potion list, though, noobs might not realise that Jarrin Root is not readily available without mods. I use "More Plants and Recipes for Hearthfire", personally. That adds Jarrin Root to plants that can be grown, as well as three samples to each BYOH chest. I don't much like messing about with Jarrin Root, my Dragonborn ate it once - accidentally - and died on the spot. Without mods one of the most valuable recipes has to be Salmon Roe (comes with Hearthfire), Jazbay Grapes and Histcarp. More valuable potions level your PC up faster too for some reason.

Another helpful perk tree for Alchemy is of course Enchanting. I like to keep a set of high level Alchemy Fortified gear near my alchemy table. I don't like to carry my ingredients around as they get heavier than expected, quicker than expected, so I dump all my ingredients in a container, then do batch sessions when convenient.

I have been considering making a mod for an Alchemy College, because I find alchemy fun, but retraining each new PC a pain. It will be a while coming if I do though as I am deeply involved with another major mod project atm.

Anybody want to share their favourite alchemy potions?

[Jogon]

I would like to see a mod that allows you to access your ingredients straight from the your store without having to load them everytime. At the moment I have them in a satchel on the Alchemy Table but then have to access and load them before using. Being able to automatically use the whole store without doing this would be great.

[VisciousFishes]

Thanks for the guide. I'm already on the alchemy bandwagon and have been since Morrowind. It's an oft neglected skill that has saved my life a few (hundred) times. I have three comprehensive alchemy ingredient effect lists (one for Skyrim, morrowind and oblivion) that really save my bacon when I use my Altmeri Arcane Archer.

Hawks beak, vampire dust and luna moth wing - invisibility, cure disease, regenerate health

Chaurus eggs + deathbell + falmer ear = Weakness to poison, damage health

I do have some others that I can't remember at the moment like a slow and lingering damage health (salt pile + river betty+ deathbell) or "Giant Killer" as I call it. Then there's a paralysis and lingering damage health or "Giant killer while thumbing my nose at giant".

As much as I agree with you about the Alchemy skill being well worth the investment (also agree with the distribution of perks), the oft ignored skill is cookery. I know it's not going to get you the level ups but any mage worth their fire salts should make "Elsewyre Fondue". Great for those "oops crap, run out of potions and got no more magic left" moments. Also keep moon sugar for potions too. Jazzbay, moon sugar and something else (memory savage right now) gives you fortify magicka, restore magicka and fortify magicka regen.

If you have Heathfires installed then you can get a really cool water breathing potion of salmon roe and chickens egg (or nordic barnacle) gives you a fantastic water breathing potion that is worth good amounts of gold. There's also some good soups and stews you can make that will be as good as any poition.

[rageofthemage]

Yeah I guess the main goal of this guide is to show that alchemy is useful, but also that it provides good resources for your other skills by producing high value potions and poisons that you can sell for gold. Gold = Training. Training = More dead stuff faster. Not that I'm disputing any of what you're saying at all though. If anything I really wish alchemy worked more like Morrowind... it's very nerfed now and a lot less complex but I really think that the game suffers for the perceived accessibility.

[VisciousFishes]

@ Steve: Yeah, I agree that Morrowind had the best alchemy system out of the three TES games I have played. Alchemy in SKyrim is a P.I.T.A compared to the "old skool" way Morrowind did alchemy. No renaming of your potions, depending on the order you mix the ingredients largely depends on whether you end up with a potion with positive and negative effects or a poison that "paralizes and restores the enemies health", FTW?. Great if you want to abuse giants or vampires for an hour.

I'm not trying to say "you're wrong wiith your guide" - in fact it's the dead opposite. I think your guide is wicked for those who have no idea about the difference alchemy can make for a low level character, much respect and all that! An hour spent with the right ingredients and an alchemy set up can lead to some cheap level ups and a character that can deal damage to anyone.

And you're right, it's percieved accessability. My real frustration with the alchemy in Skyrim is the fact they removed it from being a "magic school" talent and moved it to the "stealth class" talent. In morrowind, the skill of alchemy felt a lot more rewarding. Now, and I don't want to sound rude about it, but now it's "anyone with a bunch of ingredients can make potions". Whereas in Morrowind you actually had to invest in the skill.

I didn't play with any mods on Skyrim till I'd completed the game. Now with a mod that allows me to wear unlimited rings (as I felt 1 ring was a bit wrong when I have ten fingers) I have nerfed my alchemy even more. I made a ring to boost my alchemy - a modest 8%. Now, because of this ring mod, I'm wearing 22 rings of minor alchemy @ 8% each. So now my potions are stupidly over powered. Salmon roe and Nordic barnacle now produces a potion worth over 5000 gold and offers me approx 1200 seconds of water breathing. No-one in the game has the funds to buy my potions and there's nowhere in the game that requires me to swim for twenty minutes. One paralysis potion offered to paralyze someone for 91 seconds AND do 91 points of damage health.

Back on topic - I added those potion recipes because I found them particularly effective for my adventures. It's nice to see a thread about alchemy that doesn't say how nerfed it is but advises how you can use it effectively for your character builds. I just though a few recipes may be of interest to you or anyone else reading this thread. The cookery and alchemy together are great tools to use if people wish to invest a little time and effort or do something in Skyrim that doesn't involve "running through a dungeon, kill everything, grab and sell the loot. Rinse and repeat"

[rageofthemage]

Originally posted by jakethebusker:

@ Steve: Yeah, I agree that Morrowind had the best alchemy system out of the three TES games I have played. Alchemy in SKyrim is a P.I.T.A compared to the "old skool" way Morrowind did alchemy. No renaming of your potions, depending on the order you mix the ingredients largely depends on whether you end up with a potion with positive and negative effects or a poison that "paralizes and restores the enemies health", FTW?. Great if you want to abuse giants or vampires for an hour.

I'm not trying to say "you're wrong wiith your guide" - in fact it's the dead opposite. I think your guide is wicked for those who have no idea about the difference alchemy can make for a low level character, much respect and all that! An hour spent with the right ingredients and an alchemy set up can lead to some cheap level ups and a character that can deal damage to anyone.

And you're right, it's percieved accessability. My real frustration with the alchemy in Skyrim is the fact they removed it from being a "magic school" talent and moved it to the "stealth class" talent. In morrowind, the skill of alchemy felt a lot more rewarding. Now, and I don't want to sound rude about it, but now it's "anyone with a bunch of ingredients can make potions". Whereas in Morrowind you actually had to invest in the skill.

I didn't play with any mods on Skyrim till I'd completed the game. Now with a mod that allows me to wear unlimited rings (as I felt 1 ring was a bit wrong when I have ten fingers) I have nerfed my alchemy even more. I made a ring to boost my alchemy - a modest 8%. Now, because of this ring mod, I'm wearing 22 rings of minor alchemy @ 8% each. So now my potions are stupidly over powered. Salmon roe and Nordic barnacle now produces a potion worth over 5000 gold and offers me approx 1200 seconds of water breathing. No-one in the game has the funds to buy my potions and there's nowhere in the game that requires me to swim for twenty minutes. One paralysis potion offered to paralyze someone for 91 seconds AND do 91 points of damage health.

Back on topic - I added those potion recipes because I found them particularly effective for my adventures. It's nice to see a thread about alchemy that doesn't say how nerfed it is but advises how you can use it effectively for your character builds. I just though a few recipes may be of interest to you or anyone else reading this thread. The cookery and alchemy together are great tools to use if people wish to invest a little time and effort or do something in Skyrim that doesn't involve "running through a dungeon, kill everything, grab and sell the loot. Rinse and repeat"

You sir, are a scholar among gentlemen, and you have my admiration.

[VisciousFishes]

Originally posted by Steve RAOS:

Originally posted by jakethebusker:

@ Steve: Yeah, I agree that Morrowind had the best alchemy system out of the three TES games I have played. Alchemy in SKyrim is a P.I.T.A compared to the "old skool" way Morrowind did alchemy. No renaming of your potions, depending on the order you mix the ingredients largely depends on whether you end up with a potion with positive and negative effects or a poison that "paralizes and restores the enemies health", FTW?. Great if you want to abuse giants or vampires for an hour.

I'm not trying to say "you're wrong wiith your guide" - in fact it's the dead opposite. I think your guide is wicked for those who have no idea about the difference alchemy can make for a low level character, much respect and all that! An hour spent with the right ingredients and an alchemy set up can lead to some cheap level ups and a character that can deal damage to anyone.

And you're right, it's percieved accessability. My real frustration with the alchemy in Skyrim is the fact they removed it from being a "magic school" talent and moved it to the "stealth class" talent. In morrowind, the skill of alchemy felt a lot more rewarding. Now, and I don't want to sound rude about it, but now it's "anyone with a bunch of ingredients can make potions". Whereas in Morrowind you actually had to invest in the skill.

I didn't play with any mods on Skyrim till I'd completed the game. Now with a mod that allows me to wear unlimited rings (as I felt 1 ring was a bit wrong when I have ten fingers) I have nerfed my alchemy even more. I made a ring to boost my alchemy - a modest 8%. Now, because of this ring mod, I'm wearing 22 rings of minor alchemy @ 8% each. So now my potions are stupidly over powered. Salmon roe and Nordic barnacle now produces a potion worth over 5000 gold and offers me approx 1200 seconds of water breathing. No-one in the game has the funds to buy my potions and there's nowhere in the game that requires me to swim for twenty minutes. One paralysis potion offered to paralyze someone for 91 seconds AND do 91 points of damage health.

Back on topic - I added those potion recipes because I found them particularly effective for my adventures. It's nice to see a thread about alchemy that doesn't say how nerfed it is but advises how you can use it effectively for your character builds. I just though a few recipes may be of interest to you or anyone else reading this thread. The cookery and alchemy together are great tools to use if people wish to invest a little time and effort or do something in Skyrim that doesn't involve "running through a dungeon, kill everything, grab and sell the loot. Rinse and repeat"

You sir, are a scholar among gentlemen, and you have my admiration.

:D thank you squire. I don my hat and take it off to you. Do ya want some of my potions? I'll make them to order if you wish. Oh, and FYI me and the girlfriend literally spent hours writing some Excell spread sheets from internet info and experimentation for Skyrim, morrowind and oblivion. Some of it was me just sitting there eating ingredients and spamming the pestle and mortar. Alas, no longer can you take the alchemy kit and mix potions while singing "kumbyah" next to the camp fires.

[VisciousFishes]

oh, and forgot to mention - of my "22 rings of minor alchemy" I allegedly waring, I am actually wearing 0. That's right, zero, zip, nada, not a one.

[Jogon]

I must congratulate you for giving this info. It is enjoyable getting information on the different ingredients to use instead of spending hours eating and trying combinations of ingredients and then getting a negative result. I collect ingredients everywhere but trying to combine them into usable potions gets a bit trying. Although I have the health, stamina and magica potions at a high level.