Hi

I've been checking out alchemy mods, but none of them seem to correct the imbalance of potion quality and price in relation to the raw ingredients that make them.

For example, mix two common plants together and you'd get a restore fatigue potion with the same effects, duration and price as if you'd mixed together two expensive and rare ingredients - you get exactly the same potion which is commonly worth less than the raw ingredients.

I feel that better quality ingredients should make better quality and more expensive & more desirable potions - is there anything that does this?

Yup. I have been mentioning the same. Allthough what I have said is that all ingredients need to be adjusted with duration and strength after it's quality and rarity and this should be taken into account when making a potion.

But then there will be a different potion whenever you switch an ingredient. This could be countered with an alchemy mod like RDrush Advanced Alchemy's "set duration" if that will lock the potion effect to a lower grade so you could use higher grade ingredients to make a potion that is less strong than maximum. Or by going by recipe.

That is one issue I think should be addressed at the same time if someone chooses to look at implementing this. A way to "nerf" ingredients so you don't end up with a gazillion of different potions in your inventory.

:thumbsup:

I don't see it myself. Why should an ingredient that is more expensive automatically make a better potion? It has nothing to do with the resale value of a plant but about it's chemical makeup. Chemically a piece of Corn can be just as effective as an ingredient as a Minotaur Horn. It has nothing to do with how common something is or how much you can make if you sold it as is. Look at penicillin in the real world, you can extract it from bread mold.

You would think this would follow the same logic as weapons and armor. Steel is more expensive and better than iron, ebony better and more expensive then steel. So in Alchemy, getting the essance from a minotaur horn should be more effective than lets say an apple. I think if you consider the concentration of the extract as opposed to the component itself and the source, you can get over the real life penecilin made from bread mold issue. If you take it to the real life exreme, alchemy should not work with 90% of all the flora in the game (probabkly not true, just trying to make a point). This is a fantasy game after all.

It seems game breaking that I can spend a rel hour gathering plants to make 100 restore fatigue potions and 100 restore health potions. And these are better than the 100gp potions in the shops, but mine only sell for 15gp.

It is surprising that among all the overhauls, this one was never really done except for how you make potions and bottle weights.

Exactly.
There will be a need for an overhaul of the ingredients to give them different values in all categories.
When you sample a plant you get the first effect. But all effects have a magnitude set for them. It is this magnitude that could be taken into account.
My guess is jackstarr is thinking that the rare expensive ingredients are just that because they are sought after by alchemist Because of there special properties, which might include stronger essence.
We are talking magic here too, it is not only chemical derivatives we are looking at here.

But I don't see it as big issue.

If there where an alchemy mod that took this into effect I would like to see it companied with an ingredient overhaul that would revamp the price, magnitude, harvesting time and maybe even regional harvesting time if they are placed in all tamriel (that would require scripting).

It would mean more micro management overall I think, not all players are fond of that.

Cheers!

That's not how I see it. An ingredient becomes more expensive simply because it's harder to obtain. I would certainly expect to make more money after battling a Minotaur and getting it's horn than simply picking a cob of corn from some farmer's field, or taking it off someone's dinner table. That doesn't mean though that the Minotaur Horn is in any way more potent as an ingredient. It only means you have to go through alot more trouble in order to get it.

That can't be done. It's tied in with the cell reset time and there's only so much you can do with having varying values. ShadeMe in his SPAWN mod tried to create varying spawn times for outdoor cells that included flora but his options were limited. All he could manage was a blanket rate that affected all outdoor cells.

Oh but we can There are nice little boxes for all the flora that gives the chance of harvesting spring/summer/autumn/winter. So the basic chance can be changed globally for the seasons. And with a script I guess one could auto harvest all flora in a cell to a container or such to make the PC unable to harvest any of the script removed plants.

Values for the ingredients need not change - that is the monetary aspect. But the magnitude could be looked over to ensure it fits the value and exotica of the ingredient.

Cheers!

Hmm, I never thought of attaching a script to the base flora objects. I'm not sure whether you could get a regional time value though, it would probably have to be simply a global one. Maybe you should contact ShadeMe about that, he could probably work up some sort of script for them.

I think it is all rhetorical because I don't think there is a script function in either the vanilla or OBSE that can get the magnitude of the different effects in ingredients. At least I think that was what RDrush told me.

Yeah, one could attach a script to each object but better still would be having it run slowly in game mode. Although editing the plants magnitude would still incur mod incompatibility; unless one could bash it?

An other problem is that you will have to play with a high time-scale to be able to even enjoy the different seasons. Imagine being stuck in winter and never having any plants to harves :hehe:
Or one could do the other time skipping I suggested and add a month or two each time one does a major quest.

Fun to think about but in the end it might be impractical. :cookie:

Hi All, thanks for your responses so far.

I will explain the logic of my original posting....

1. Re: why should a potion which includes Minotaur horn cost more than one that has Apple?
In the real world the chemical effects for an ingredient rarely play a part in the costing of it.
Shampoo that boasts "Pearl Essences" fetches a higher price than one that doesn't boast such a claim - is it any better for your hair? doubtfully...
A cup of Carrot and Apple juice would fetch one price, whereas a cup of Apple, Carrot and Wheatgrass juice fetches double. When the benefit of the added ingredient is unquantifiable.
Pasta made with mushrooms is sold for a particular price, in a fancier restaraunt it would be 'Truffle Lasagna" and cost three times as much - is it any better in quality, perhaps, but mainly it uses ingredients that are harder to come by and are much rarer...


2. Re: why should a potion which includes Minotaur horn have different effect/duration than one that has Apple?
Are we really going to say that every single item in the game that happens to hold a particular property has exactly the same amount of 'essence', quality, or ability to use all of the item in order to make a potion out of it? So rather than diversity you have uniformity - everything is just as good as each other.... This doesn't seem very realistic, and could do with a tweak in my opinion. Now I'm not just saying that because an ingredient is rarer, or more expensive it should be better or more powerful - maybe the opposite should be the case for some items, i'm just saying having everything be the same takes the fun out of searching for ingredients, because there's is no incentive to look for new ingredients if you have an existing recipe...

3. I'm definitely not a modder and am not going to go into the technical side of things, but at the moment the game is able to create potions with different weights according to which ingredients you used for it (i.e. a potion made with a pumpkin is much heavier than that made with some seeds)... could the same mechanics possibly be used for costing?

Well as mentioned, having different potencies would cause a few problems with the game. Each potion would be unique and nothing would be able to stack each other. Personally I'd find that very annoying. There's a very good reason why Bethesda went for uniformity in this case as far as I'm concerned.

What about the idea that the rarer ingredients provide a bump in potion quality that may exceed what is possible with current skills and equipment?

So minotaur horn plus some other rare ingredient will bump the potion to the next level of quality even if you the lowly chemist can barely mix them together. Only one rare and no bonus.

Or maybe as things like magic extender gets more mature and more magic effects can be possible (and uniform) then modders can use this to create more ingredient effects.

Do you mean that it would be possible to see more effects than your current alchemy level allows? If I can only see two effects at a lower level, a rarer or more expensive ingredient would allow me to see three or four effects?

Or do you mean that it temporarily fortifies alchemy when I have and try to mix a rarer/more expensive ingredient?

And in reply to Belanos' point (which is a very valid one), I've seen before that there are mods to create collapsible 'folders' in your inventory... is there anything available to hide away all potions dependant on their effect (in a similar way to the key chain mod)?

More the first is what I meant, but implementation is beyond me. Doing this would utilize the current system it would seem instead of redoing the current system.

The extended magic project and new magic effects to be had is the future for better ingredients if you ask me.

The game allows you to haggle up the price in the barter menu. Your argument is the equivalent of haggling the PRICE versus the VALUE, and that's not the Alchemy part.

Yes, or else the four properties each have to have individual levels as well. E.g. the expensive Ogre's teeth may be an excellent source of Shock Damage, but poor in Resist Paralysis. It's even more likely than differences between ingredients. The current levels of zero and one are enough complexity. In general rare ingredients have rare effects, and that's why they have higher values. The common effects they have aren't what makes them valuable.

Again, yes, but right now price depends on your Alchemy skill and Mortar and Pestle quality. I.e it's all in the making, not the ingredients. Your fancy restaurant has a better chef, not better veg. Just sell the ingredients if you want those prices to be the ones that matter, and don't do Alchemy with them.
Yes, but why bother?