Brewing potions isn’t a craft… it’s an art! Selling potions is one of the better ways to make money early game, as herbs are plentiful and (mostly) free - an enterprising Henry can turn two green thumbs into a steady supply of groschen. While a good bit of the potion brewing process is a matter of in-game skill, the player shoulders a considerable amount of responsibility for the outcome as well, and the better you brew, the more potent (and hence valuable) the concoction will be. This page will provide hints for brewing perfect potions in Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2!

Page Breakdown¶

Potion Quality Overview¶

Brewing potions might initially seem more complicated than it really is - to start brewing you only need materials (typically herbs) and an alchemy bench. The fire is always roaring and you’ve infinite access to the alchemical bases for each potion (water, wine, oil, etc.). You don’t even technically need the recipe for the concoction you’re trying to create, if you know it, Henry doesn’t need to - mixing the right things together the right way will still create what you want. Depending on how well you follow the recipe - and a few other factors - you will create potions of varying quality: weak, normal, strong or Henry’s, the latter of which can only be unlocked when you have the “Secret of Secrets” perk. The higher the quality of the potion, the better its effects will be (healing more, bonus buffs, longer duration, fewer negative side effects, etc.) and the more it’ll sell for. In addition, if you have the “Secret of Matter” perks you’ll get 4-6 potions per brew instead of the standard 3, which massively increases the efficiency of your alchemical endeavors!

At a glance, potion quality depends largely on how well you follow the recipe, but in practice there are only two ways to negatively influence your alchemy outcomes: omission or poor timing. In the former case, this is a simple procedural issue - not including the right amount of an ingredient, failing to grind something, etc. It happens, but this page can’t help you with that - Henry’s alchemy tome is right next to you on the alchemy bench during the brewing process, unless something is cooking you can just consult this tome any time you wish. The latter bit is more prone to player error, as the timing window for boiling can be rather tight, especially at lower Alchemy skill levels… and the sandglass is by no means an exact measurement.

As your Alchemy skill improves, the brewing process will become more tolerant to mistakes, so don’t get frustrated early on if you can’t regularly brew strong potions - you might not be that far off, and leveling Alchemy may suffice to smooth out minor errors. Also keep in mind that the quality of the materials you’re using can negatively influence the outcome - don’t use herbs whose condition is below 40, and keep in mind that dried herbs may inhibit the quality of potions you brew. In the case of dried herbs, a single dried herb or two probably won’t prevent you from creating the highest tier of potions, but in our experience using exclusively dried herbs will.

Anywho, now that we’ve covered the basics of brewing - especially how potion quality works - let’s discuss the mechanics.

Recipes and Ingredients¶

Recipes aren’t technically necessary, but they can prove handy. You can generally buy recipes from merchants - alchemists, herbalists and characters whose professions are… of less repute. Some recipes can also be learned via quests. Either way, once you have a recipe, be sure to use it from your inventory to add it to your alchemy tome (recipes learned directly from NPCs will be added automatically). Once you’ve learned a recipe you can check them out whenever you wish while brewing potions at the press of a button, so you can check exactly what ingredients you need, how many, and what you need to do to successfully brew the potion you’re keen on. There is no penalty for doing this (unless you’re actively boiling something, obviously) and you can even automatically place all the correct ingredients for the selection recipe via the tome. It’s a useful tool - if you’re uncertain about the order or amount of something, consult it and you’ll entirely avoid a wide range of potential mishaps.

Boiling and the Sandglass¶

The alchemy bench may seem complicated at first, what with its four bases, bellows, distiller, phials mortar and pestle and all that, but as long as you’re following the potion’s recipe, almost everything you do is foolproof. The only part of brewing potions that’s remotely performative is boiling, and just about everything needs to be boiled, sometimes repeatedly, and in stages. Generally the more you have to boil something the more prone to mistake the recipe is, so this will be the part you need to practice.

Fortunately there’s a simple method by which you can make even this aspect of the brewing process trivial. Once you’ve got the base added along with whatever components that need to be boiled, here are some steps to keep in mind:

• Lower the cauldron (if you’re using a controller you can just press )
• Immediately use the bellows ONCE (just press ) once!)
• As soon as you’re done with the bellows, flip the sandglass
• Raise the cauldron off the flames BEFORE all the sand has fallen out of the top half of the sanglass!

There shouldn’t be any downtime between you lowering the cauldron and turning the sandglass, save for Henry’s unskippable animations performing the tasks directed. Lower cauldron, blast the bellows once, flip the sandglass. Most recipes do not call for the use of the bellows, but this gets the cauldron’s content’s boiling faster and seems to sync the process up with the sandglass better. Wait until the sandglass is mostly empty, then raise the cauldron (or flip the sandglass, if it requires two or three turns) - if you wait for all the sand to be gone, you’ll wait too long, and it’s safer to err on the side of too much sand left in the sandglass than too little. It’s not an exact science, the sandglass, and it’ll become less demanding as you brew more potions, but using this method we had no problems always getting strong (or better) potions from Alchemy Lv5 on.