Skyrim talk:Recipes

Removed from Article

• If you ask Orgnar for permission to use the Alchemy Lab at the Sleeping Giant Inn in Riverwood, he will tell you that Wheat and Blisterwort create a Restore Health potion. However, this combination is not the best use of Blisterwort and Wheat:
  • This effect for Wheat would be known after eating it. Thus, the recipe merely saves 1 Wheat in the early game.
  • The greater benefit is this Blisterwort effect is 3rd. Eating Blisterwort reveals the 1st effect is Damage Stamina. A Spider Egg recovered during the initial Unbound quest reveals the same 1st effect. This gives the earliest opportunity for a Multiple-Effect Potion (Blisterwort + Spider Egg + Wheat = base value 42).
  • Replacing Spider Egg with Blue Butterfly Wing found along the way to Riverwood yields another dual effect poison (Blisterwort + Blue Butterfly Wing + Wheat = base value 42).
  • Replacing Wheat with Blue Mountain Flower found along the way to Riverwood yields a triple effect potion (Blisterwort + Blue Mountain Flower + Spider Egg = base value 329).
  • Replacing Spider Egg and Wheat yields a quadruple effect potion (Blisterwort + Blue Butterfly Wing + Blue Mountain Flower = base value 404).
  • Replacing Blisterwort and Spider Egg yields another quadruple effect potion (Blue Butterfly Wing + Blue Mountain Flower + Wheat = base value 443), revealing all effects of Blue Mountain Flower.

I removed most of the previous chunk of text from the article because it doesn't even discuss an official recipe. I also think it's far too detailed to be of interest to most readers. The focus isn't even what potions would be useful to the player, but what combinations can be used to discover alchemy effects. Are readers really going to want to scour Tamriel just to find the specified ingredients, solely to use them to discover a full set of alchemy effects for some ingredients? I doubt it. Nevertheless, in case someone else thinks there is some other article on the site where this information may be more apporpriate, I'm leaving it here. --Nephele^Talk 06:59, 23 February 2012 (UTC)

It seemed to me this was a good place to describe how best to test a recipe. Should it be in a "Hints" section? Or a Hints section on the alchemy effects page?

1. As a first time player, the game mechanic (using the interface to substitute one element at a time viewing the resulting values) was not obvious to me, despite the urging of the NPC to try different combinations. It seems better to me having a playable example, rather than the pointers over on the effects page to external calculators that tell you the best combinations. That's not really playing the game.
2. It seemed an especially good example, as all the ingredients discussed are in the immediate area, not needing to "scour Tamriel".

--DayDreamer 10:27, 23 February 2012 (UTC)

Personally I do alchemy purely to either create restore health potions or to discover new effects. The fact that Skyrim remembers failed experiments too, is a nice feature in this regard. Then again I'm purposefully not looking at the wiki when doing that. The page Ingredients combined with the individual effect pages linked there would already work well for someone wanting to discover all the effects without risking failed experiments. I don't think that there is a need for a detailed "walkthrough" how to discover individual effects, but describing the general game mechanics involved would be another thing. --Alfwyn 11:52, 23 February 2012 (UTC)

It's all clearly well-thought strategy but it falls into a common trap for strategy posted on a wiki about a freeform game: it's strategy developed for one specific situation based on one person's priorities. It's not universally true, and it's even hard to take this strategy and see how to generalize it into advice that would be more universally helpful.

It's based on the premise that creating a Wheat+Blisterwort potion is somehow a mistake. But combining Wheat and Blisterwort does exactly what is advertised: creates a Restore Health potion. In my opinion, eating the Wheat is a bigger mistake. You gain almost no alchemy experience from eating the Wheat. You simply lose a 5 gold item instead of converting it into another, more valuable item. You're unlikely to even benefit from the brief 5 pts restore health effect, because you're probably not experimentally eating unknown ingredients in the middle of a battle. Your strategy is based upon your priorities, but those priorities aren't necessarily shared by other players.

Another advantage of Wheat+Blisterwort over any of your suggestions is that it is a combination you learn about in-game. For players who want to be "purists" and not turn to any out-of-game resources, reading your suggestions is as much "cheating" as using an alchemy calculator. Other players might instead be avoiding alchemy calculators because they think that playing the game properly involves thinking for themselves instead of blinding following someone else's advice; these players also won't think that your suggestions are much better than an alchemy calculator.

You've clearly put some thought into coming up with alternative ingredients that other players are likely to have when first visiting Sleeping Giant Inn. But they are only "likely" not "guaranteed". Players might not have collected those ingredients; they might have sold them already at Riverwood Trader; they might have already used them all up experimenting at the alchemy table; etc. It's even more likely that readers will stumble across this information when they're at a completely different point in the game. They might already have Giant's Toe in their inventory, at which point all of your suggestions are worse strategically than potions made from Giant's Toe.

Any of those other theoretical readers can't even read through this strategy and extrapolate to how it might help them. It doesn't explain how you came up with these suggestions, or provide general principles, such as "sort the effects on SR:Alchemy Effects by gold value and use the first available combination".

Alchemy already contains various general suggestions about how to use alchemy, both in the Skill Usage and Gaining Skill XP sections. Useful Potions provides recommendations about specific ingredient combinations. That's where readers are going to turn to learn how to use the alchemy interface, so if there's confusion about the basic mechanics of how to learn ingredient combinations, those are the pages that need improvement. However, such edits need to focus more on basic principles and general strategies, instead of over-detailed specifics. --Nephele^Talk 19:09, 23 February 2012 (UTC)

Personally, it took a long time for me to figure out how to substitute things 1 at a time. The user interface doesn't provide a good way to handle this (requires flipping back and forth). And doesn't visibly provide any ranking of the benefits (I was reduced to selecting each formula and writing down the results). So, I provided a worked out example. It also demonstrates (as do the other recipes on this page) that the in-game formula are not the most optimal. But I'll try to think of a better way to improve the "basic principles and general strategies" on the above pages instead. I'm still learning.
--DayDreamer 21:49, 29 February 2012 (UTC)

Dawnguard only?

Why is the Thistle+Falmer Ear Dawnguard only? — Unsigned comment by 172.243.124.159 (talk) at 21:30 on 18 August 2014 (GMT)

I think you're a bit confused, it's blisterwort and a Falmer Ear that is Dawnguard only. To answer your question, both of those ingredients for the Dawnguard only recipe are in vanilla Skyrim, it's just that the note that provides that recipe is only found in a game running Dawnguard as it adds it. --AKB ^{Talk Cont Mail} 21:30, 18 August 2014 (GMT)

Ah, I did miss-type that. And thank you for the clarification.172.243.124.159 22:16, 18 August 2014 (GMT)