Black Desert/Alchemy
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Alchemy
elixirs, potions and stones
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| Type | Life skill |
|---|---|
| Practiced | Indoors, at a tool placed in a residence |
| Requires | An alchemy tool and a house to put it in |
| Supplied by | Gathering and farming |
| Makes | Elixirs, draughts, potions and alchemy stones |
| Bought for | 5,000 silver, for the basic tool |
| Mastery added | September 4, 2019 |
| Related | Cooking, the other indoor craft |
Alchemy is the chemistry of Black Desert, a life skill that turns gathered plants, blood and powders into the elixirs, potions and stones the rest of the game runs on.
It is practiced indoors: an adventurer buys an alchemy tool, places it in a residence and works at it there, which makes alchemy one of the few skills that never requires leaving a town.
Its output is almost entirely for other people's benefit. Combat players buy elixirs for the fights they cannot win unbuffed, and other life skillers buy them to work faster, so a competent alchemist is a supplier rather than a consumer.
1 How it works✎
The tool is the whole apparatus: a basic one costs five thousand silver from an alchemist, and better versions are crafted at a tool workshop or bought on the market. An adventurer stands at it and starts a batch, choosing either a known recipe or the raw ingredients.
Tools wear out, since each has a durability that use consumes, and a spent tool is exchanged with an NPC for a repaired one rather than mended in place.
2 Reagents✎
Almost nothing is made directly from gathered material, because alchemy first converts raw ingredients into a small set of intermediate reagents, and those reagents then appear in nearly every recipe above them.
Clear Liquid Reagent and Pure Powdered Reagent are the two an alchemist makes constantly. Shining Powder and the blood reagents come out of alchemy as byproducts rather than being made deliberately, which means a working alchemist accumulates them simply by doing the job.
Producing reagents in bulk is also how the skill is leveled. The recipes are cheap and repeatable, so an adventurer pushing toward mastery spends a long time making the same two items.
3 What alchemy makes✎
Four kinds of thing come out of the tool. Elixirs and draughts grant temporary buffs, covering nearly every statistic in the game, from attack power to gathering speed. Potions restore health and mana, and crystals and sockets are enhancement materials for gear. The fourth category, alchemy stones, is the one with no equivalent anywhere else in the game.
4 Alchemy stones✎
An alchemy stone is a permanent item rather than a consumable. It is carried, activated for a few minutes at a time, and grants a substantial bonus while it runs.
Three kinds exist: Destruction stones raise attack power and accuracy, Protection stones raise defense and resistances, and Life stones improve gathering and processing. The first two last around five minutes when activated and the third about ten.
Stones are grown rather than bought, and a stone starts imperfect and is raised through a sequence of grades — sturdy, sharp, resplendent, splendid and shining — using rare essence and black stones. The odds fall steeply at each step, and the jump from sharp to resplendent succeeds only a few times in a hundred. That makes a high-grade stone one of the more expensive things an adventurer can own.
5 Mastery and speed✎
Alchemy mastery arrived on September 4, 2019, alongside the same system for the other life skills. Higher mastery improves success rates and the quantity a batch returns.
Speed is the other half of the economics. A craft takes about ten seconds at the base rate, and that figure can be cut to roughly one second by stacking reductions from a better tool, Manos clothing, a costume and the right meal. The difference between ten seconds and one is the difference between alchemy as a hobby and alchemy as an income.