Game Development: Alchemical Adventures

[Rebs]

Poison in wells when?

[Okocim]

[*] There are also Alchemical Processes, which consume alchemical ingredients to produce new, processed ingredients, combining, and often removing, the potential effects present in the materials used to produce them, to create cleaner ingredients, with fewer potential effects, and thus with less risk of harm.

Please explain what does "combining" means?
Tried making herbal grind and mineral calcination and it seem to me that it produced completely random new ingredient...
None of the effects present in raw material stayed and new ones showed up.
Is it something like Perception+Masonry= Lore?

[jordancoles]

So was the snowfall timer for winter adjusted?

[Vesena]

Well we're on day 7 of the 5 days of Winter, so

EDIT: Upon closer inspection, I appear to be an idiot who assumed you correct Amber's timer by subtracting by 5 when you actually need to divide by 2.

[Enjoyment_2]

Well we're on day 7 of the 5 days of Winter, so

we're on the 4th day of 5... so go to Hel

[Fostik]

And few words about alchemy. Spend 2 days trying to understand principles of alchemy processing and things like that, tried to help community and wiki with this new mechanic.
That looks really meanly when you implementing mechanic, but not telling some essential things, like the fact that there are some kind of dominant and recessive alchemical properties, or not explaining or even giving a clue how processing works, and how it changes ingredients.
Feel like a squirrel in a wheel, although at the same time I understand that there is no any high end idea of this mechanic, it's just same as variable food, but with blindness. I'm fucking done with this game for now.

[Noid]

And few words about alchemy. Spend 2 days trying to understand principles of alchemy processing and things like that, tried to help community and wiki with this new mechanic.
That looks really meanly when you implementing mechanic, but not telling some essential things, like the fact that there are some kind of dominant and recessive alchemical properties, or not explaining or even giving a clue how processing works, and how it changes ingredients.
Feel like a squirrel in a wheel, although at the same time I understand that there is no any high end idea of this mechanic, it's just same as variable food, but with blindness. I'm fucking done with this game for now.

High end idea in H&H updates = Provide a new, useless, time sink mechanic to keep players busy testing it so they forget the real lack of content / endgame.

[Mashadar]

I do like the fact that this provides potential uses for previously useless items, including the various types of stones. Just like the recent satiation changes provided more value to the many different already existing cooking recipes, which I also liked.

Still, I will have to reserve judgment until I better understand ingredient processing and how good the best possible elixirs actually are. Although even now I already know an elixir that cures Bum Burn with little side effects, which might be perhaps a little too good... I hope you guys are committed to doing tweaks and extensions to the system, if necessary. I'd really like alchemy to be useful, although not necessarily in a way where common ingredients can be used to make ridiculously strong elixirs.

[Enjoyment_2]

well, you can change your mind about alchemy when you understand the fact that devs have no idea in what could be created in fact. they've just thrown a bunch of random ingredients with random stats and effects, allowing to mix them in random proportions and wants YOU to make all the "science" and make their work in balancing and polishing it. and in a perfect scenario - you should do it in new bought hat. isn't it fun?

[Mashadar]

well, you can change your mind about alchemy when you understand the fact that devs have no idea in what could be created in fact.

Since devs have full information, they can simulate every possible combination of ingredients and generate a list of the most potent elixirs that can be created. This sort of simulation is generally how I make sure that a new game mechanic is at least somewhat balanced when it involves a fair amount of randomness, be it loot, cooking, alchemy or similar systems. I'd be surprised if loftar hadn't done something similar. Even if game balance wasn't a factor to consider, I would have done it out of sheer curiosity of what the most powerful elixir would be.