Currently, alchemy is only good for healing wounds. It’s actually pretty great at that, and I wouldn’t change anything there. It’s a good addition to standard healing and completely worth the effort required to discover the recipes. It also works well in the late game, when your character has a lot of HP and, therefore, potentially many wounds that take time to heal -- alchemy is crucial for speeding that up.
However, when it comes to other positive effects, such as bonuses to stats or skills, it’s completely useless. The +20 Farming? It’s a joke. Once your village is developed enough to support you with all the ingredients needed to discover good recipes, that bonus basically means… nothing. The same goes for all the other stats and skills. That’s a real bummer. The thing is, such bonuses would be great during the first week, but they’re already completely irrelevant by the time you actually start doing alchemy and only keep getting worse as the time goes.
So, my suggestion:
- Stat and skill bonuses should be percentage-based and provide a noticeable boost (like 10% base at Q10)
- The effect duration should be increased
The expected effect:
- Potions could potentially be used as temporary combat enhancements. For PvP, it wouldn’t change that much -- if your melee or strength increases from 300 to 360, that’s not a huge difference, especially if the effect will last only for a while, you can only drink one, drinking isn't instant and more importantly, they cannot be consumed while in combat. Still, slightly rewarding a prepared party doesn’t sound too bad either way. Making these potions take some time and resources, discovering them also requires a lot of effort.
- But it could be especially fun for miners or crafters. You drink a potion, sniff some boar tusk snuff, and suddenly your miner has enough strength to break through a hard node on level 9 of the mine. Or enough masonry not to cap the stones when you found a great quality node. Or you temporarily gain enough survival not to softcap the new stone axe, etc. etc.
It wouldn't be a game changer, you could ignore the alchemy altogether if you wanted to, which is fine, but at least it wouldn't be as useless as it is now.