As funny as it sounds, we are not doing the animal pooping potions idea...but keep them coming! Everything is cool to read :)
Printable View
As funny as it sounds, we are not doing the animal pooping potions idea...but keep them coming! Everything is cool to read :)
This is not about brewing and I don't know how much of a doctor you want to be in the apothecary, but what about leeches?
They were (and sometimes still is) a common treatment,like phlebotomy(= Doctor cuts your wrists to let out "bad" blood), for many types of illness. They could be collected through fishing or searching in shallow waters, if a certain level of fishing/apothecary is reached, you can build leech bait for more efficent collecting. To continue the guessing idea, you have to watch the patient how the leeches work (looks ill at the beginning of treatment ->looks healthy when leeches worked ->looks ill again if they draw too much blood).
Would give a slightly "Eeeeww!" effect to the job, and it was always hilarious in The Sims: Medieval when the doctor just threw a bucket of leeches in the patient's face.
Ok, now these are (hopefully) some proper thoughts for the apothecary.
You start with a small cauldron, a mortar and a recipe book. At this point you can make simple potions and salves.
Like in Aynen's post, the efficency of the potions and salves depends on how long you cook/grind the ingredients. When over-/undercooked, some potions fail and are worthless, some maybe reveal other unexpected effects (Many of our medicines were discovered by accident).
You can write down your steps in the recipe book by yourself, so you don't have to keep it all in your head and it's something different from the typical 'Unlock recipe and it writes itself down correctly'.
The next tier would add an Alembic (http://c7.alamy.com/comp/CT9JJ7/chem...bic-CT9JJ7.jpg) for simple destillation. If you put basic potions in it, they will get stronger. Because of vaporizing you would need two basic potions to create an advanced one though.
The Alembic also unlocks more products like parfum water (is that a word?!) and essential oils.
The next tier would add a destillery (maybe like the one in Dragon's Breath). Simply destill potions won't be enough anymore to create high quality potions, you have to mix destilled liquids with grinded herbs to make them stronger and maybe even to add some extra effects.
For extra treatment and more accuracy you can buy special tools (like scale, hourglass,...) for the working station.
Well, that was a long thought... Hope it helped a bit. *disappears in dark corner*
I reckon the best course of action for developing potions is to do the whole cauldron thing with the potions and things but I would like to interject that the ingredients should be various plants although nothing as generic as the primary color plants that were in the Rune factory series.
There are actually a lot of interesting plants out there that people have and still use to cure wounds, burns, Basil can repel bugs, and some flowers can be consumed.
Catnip in particular has uses as well aside from the obvious.
Instead of herbs you can have potions made from Alfalfa.
A garden dedicated to your cauldron work.
Happyheretic: nice stuff...some of that is what the design is heading towards. Am thinking 3 types of thing you can craft...Powders, Creams/salves and Potions.
Swifteye: I was thinking of having a herb / flower garden attached to each Apothecary. The reason is I don't want the world having pickables everywhere (as it may be tricky to define what is collectible), so the idea could be that anything that is used in the Apothecary can be grown in the specialised garden (and at your home farm in 'herb' garden patches.
A Mr Fairweather item, The Cupboard of Many Doors can be bought that allows shops to share ingredients, so open the cupboard in one shop and get access to all ingredients from your other shops.
I will be revealing more about the design itself, with diagrams and explanations, when our Backer Dev Forum opens in a matter of days!
Looking forward to it.
just hoping that there'll be some special garden plots to grow said ingredients, or splicing things/plant mutations in such said garden plots. Special pets/faes as assistants.
aside from that, my favorite game is the Atelier series so maaayybee you can see the alchemy system and see if it fits what you need!