I'd rather alchemy be possible to do without any apparatuses, or very minimal. I've always made at least one ranger character, but it gets annoying because I can't make potions out of my surroundings without lugging around heavy potion making equipment.

I like the idea of only allowing Alchemy at a static station. I have a love/hate relationship with alchemy in past TES games. On the one hand, it's extremely convenient. You can just brew up a potion for anything you need right there on the spot. Got hurt? Bam, health. Too much loot? Lemme just brew up some Feather. Oh this cave is flooded? Water breathing!

On the other hand, it's extremely convenient. You end up carrying around an entire pack mule full of ingredients. In my case, 1-10 of every ingredient in the game. It's rather ridiculous. It also encourages you to just spam gather everything in sight. Sure, I could not do this and pretend to only be able to alchemy at my home, but the game is kinda balanced around the notion that you can alchemy anywhere.

So I would very much like a system where you gather up ingredients, bring it back to your home/wherever, plop 'em in a chest, and then custom brew potions you think you might need for the next quest. To that end, I would like more hints in the quest journal. For example, if you're to kill a wizard in a den of conjurers, you'll brew up some shock/fire/frost shield and some silence poisons. If it's undead, some resist disease/cure disease and fire poisons (rather than damage health). You could still just end up brewing a potion for every occasion but by that point you've earned the right to be that tedious and thorough if you choose.

Another thing I'd like to see with alchemy. You can make potions with matching hidden effects, but those effects will be hidden until the potion is brewed. So, say, you have 2 hidden effects on ingredients. You want to make a healing potion, so you grab some Fancycap and Stickyweed. The Fancycap has effects as follows: Fortify Personality, Restore Health, ? (Light), ? (Damage Speed). The Stickyweed has effects as follows: Damage Speed, Restore Health, ? (Damage Willpower), ? (Frost Damage). You put the ingredients in and see in the output box "Restore Health 8 points for 10 seconds" and "??? This effect is unknown." You brew it up and... damn! A negative effect. Oh well.

It'd be nice if there were more books that told you "safe" recipes for some common potions. Not recipes, just in-game books with suggested ingredients.

As I understand the game will use stationary alchemy workbenches, same way it will use forges and enchant altars. Hopefully they would be buyable for each house, anyway I expect we will get an buyable as we had mods with buyable and moveable enchanting altars in Oblivion.

Does not matter much except in the very beginning I always did alchemy at home and I stored the equipment in the alchemy chest. However if the workbenches don't have safe storage nearby it would be bad.

Don't think it need much changes from Oblivion, some high level perks to use potions as ingredients would be nice, perhaps not a an potion but an mixture for use in the next potion.
The mixtures might be a bit weaker than a potion but if you combine three equal mixtures you get a potion of double strength. you could also easier make potions with lots of effects.

I want both, but using the portable alternative would only be half as powerful, or you would have less control of the effects that appear in the potion.

Using a station would let you choose if it is a potion or a poison, which effects you want from each ingredient, and how much of each ingredient you want to use (to make the potion/poison more potent at the cost of the batch size).

^^ Agreed with above post. Both with the portable mortar and pestle that makes very weak potions

@OP: Query: How do you turn a powder into a liquid? Because even if you heated it, it would still be a solid at the end of the day, and if you diluted it with another liquid in the complicated process, the potion would become less powerful. (say the other liquid is just the base material of potion making which allows all potions to become liquid)

What about alchemy and how it relates to magic spells? They both overlap quite a bit. You can cast a invisibility spell or drink a invisibility potion for the exact same affect. I think they could stand to be a little more different. My idea is to make potions expense slow starting, but powerful and long lasting. A invisible spell might only last a few moments or even less. (The idea is that the spells last so long as you hold down the spell button draining mana fairly quickly.) On the other hand a invisibility potion will last a long time. (1 to 2 quest or about half a hour.) You couple that with potions costing over 10x as much and weighting 5x (magic is basically free).This makes the two systems different.

Also sense alchemy is on the thief branch, why not stuff are potions on are arrows... Ok it's not that realistic, but it would be cool.

I like a lot of the ideas. Particularly the part about making it interactive and labs being stationary.
When I think of interactive crafting, I think of Dark Messiah, and while it was a little bit fast for my opinion (a slider in the settings menu for duration changes would be nice) it managed to keep my attention a bit more than a standard menu option. If its done right it could be neat.

And while some alchemy tools, mortar & pestle, could be carried, some could not. Seriously, how much does a calcinator, retort, and alembic weigh? Would you even use such complicated equipment in the wild? Yeah, I'll just wait for my potion to distil, im not in a cave filled with undead. Maybe a crude water-and-lightly-crushed-ingredient combination would make more sense for my setting...

Of course you have to be able to move it somehow, I just think those items should be capable to be assembled into a lab that you could leave somewhere, such as a house. Otherwise i set them up and make it look pretty, which takes like 15 minutes with the physics knocking them down, then to make some more I have to pick them all back up again, make a handful of potions, then set them back down. It would be nice if I could designate it as a lab, and activating them would then open the alchemy menu.

I watched that for 30 seconds and then sustained a stroke.

I think a good addition to alchemy would be to be able to combine more than two ingredients in order to get a more potent single effect.

Let me explain.

Say you want a restore fatigue potion. You combine 2 ingredients to make a potion that restores 100 fatigue, what I'm proposing is that you can add a third ingredient to increase the total amount of fatigue that is restored to you (this idea would obviously work great for poisons as well).

To keep it balanced, perhaps there should be a diminishing return for each ingredient added. So if we add a third ingredient to the restore fatigue potion, it will increase the total amount of fatigue restored by %25 of the original value that you get when you combine 2 ingredients, and if you add a fourth ingredient, it would add an additional %10-15 of the original value to the overall amount of fatigue restored.

2 ingredients = 100 fatigue

3(%25 bonus) = 125 fatigue

4(%15 bonus) = 140 fatigue restored

If they include the perk from Oblivion's alchemy that allows you to create a potion from a single ingredient, Masters should receive an additional bonus like this:

1 ingredient = 100 fatigue

2(%50 bonus) = 150 fatigue

3(%25 bonus) = 175 fatigue

4(%15 bonus) = 190 fatigue


Of course this is a rather simple example as it doesn't take duration into consideration, although if Bethesda decides to implement this idea, it'd be up to them to first decide what the percentage increase would be for each ingredient added, and then whether or not it also affected duration.

You might say that these percentage bonuses are minimal and it'd be a more efficient use of your reagents to craft potions from 2 ingredients, but that depends on how Bethesda is going to implement potions/poisons in this game, and whether or not you can chug them as quickly as you could in OB. If there's going to be a cooldown now, or you can only drink up to 2 potions at once, you're obviously going to want more bang in your drink.

Imagine if you could use this for health potions, and poisons, who's base values will most certainly be higher than 100 once you become good enough, the percentages and the bonus they confer will really start to shine from that point on.

I put a lot of effort into that idea lol... I'd like to hear some feedback on it... and perhaps if I'm lucky enough, one of the developers will be inspired by it.

you obviously never played games on floppy disks. Those KQ series along with other Sierra adventure games were some of the most popular franchises in the PC gaming industry back in the early 90's. what you saw is actually the fan-remake, i was too young to get my hands on the original, as I was born in 1990.

here's a video of the original (beware)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8gNDekfwKYk&feature=player_detailpage#t=355s

check out how the player actually has to remember a spoken incantation here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8gNDekfwKYk&feature=player_detailpage#t=355s

what a different world it was back then we had to use our brains a lot more, at least in a much different way than games now.

I never really used alchemy much in Oblivion, but I like the above ideas. Why not throw alchemy into the list of jobs (or whatever they're called) like smithing, etc. Be cool if you had to heat your ingredients at a certain temperature for a certain amount of time, mix in the right amount of liquid, etc. or else your potion fails and you wind up wasting ingredients.

I find I didn't use ingredients that much because there weren't too many plants with a unique and useful combo of effects. Most all ingredients had damage/ restore health/ fatigue/ magicka making them seem plain to me.

I love alchemy I use it all the time. I would like a mix of books and effects on it. I want to carry equipment around with me I make items on the go to use the potions and shave access weight then I make potions to sell its how I make most of my gold. I would like to see huge alchemy labs sitting around at the Mages Guild or in a house you can buy. They could make the creation process a little more interesting by doing a mini game or some small thing as long as its a speedy process like Morrowind and Oblivion.