The Alchemist's Shelf

Every consumable in SotA is data: a bottle that fires the same effect engine a spell uses, paced by a channel budget and a real diminishing-returns sickness stat, with formulas that re-evaluate on login. That is a better engine than most of the genre has. This document audits the power and the cost of the 533-item consumable catalog against shipping game data, takes the genre's lessons from Ultima Online forward, proposes fourteen improvements, and stocks the shelf with fourteen new consumables that revive every dead reagent in the game.

Executive summary

Ultima Online shipped the whole argument in 1997: an alchemist whose skill mattered, potion kegs that turned grandmasters into vendor businesses, and poisoning as its own mastery. The genre then spent twenty-five years learning how to pace consumables. WoW invented the buff slot budget (2007) and discrete quality tiers on consumables (2022). RuneScape priced potency in hitpoints. Guild Wars 2 cut everything to two legible slots. ESO and FFXIV each picked one axis of depth and polished it.

SotA built an unusually good engine for all of this: every consumable is data, a 55-channel stacking budget, a real diminishing-returns sickness stat, formula-driven magnitudes that re-evaluate on login, and a brewing rail that ages casks into forty bottles. Then it stopped stocking the shelf. The demand is on record: the developer discussion venue carries "potion system completion" as a filed idea, players asked this week for exceptional potions, an alchemist's bauble, kegs, and a real potion-crafter identity, and the forum's top crafting ask (47 replies, 2,177 views) is bulk batches. The gaps cluster in three places:

1. Power gaps. No consumable in the game grants Chaos Resistance; the Elemental and Magic potion families cover the other eight schools. Gathering and crafting are a desert: one whiskey's +3% mining chance is the only gathering buff among 533 items. Chain drinking is hard capped at 2.5 potions of value (775 HP from four Greater Health potions), yet the whole low ladder pays the identical cost for a fraction of the effect.
2. Cost gaps. Potion of Acumen costs 1,881g to craft from bought parts against a 600g vendor price, because one skull costs 5,000g. Cooking runs upside down almost everywhere: Baked Trout costs 47.5g to make and vendors at 16g. A crafted Recall Scroll costs 131.6g while the NPC sells the same scroll for 100g.
3. Depth gaps. Alchemy and Cooking are the only crafting trees that throw the exceptional roll away. Three stocked, priced reagents feed zero recipes. The brewing rail that yields forty bottles per cask has never been pointed at potions. Master alchemists have no signature product, no perk path, and no bulk vessel.

How a consumable works today

A potion, a plate of food, and a scroll are all the same thing under the hood: an item that fires a rune through the same effect engine a spell uses. Two paths in, one pipeline, and every step of it is data.

flowchart LR
  A["Double-click in inventory\n(out of combat only, no cooldown tracked)"] --> C
  B["Combat deck card\n(locked 30s or 60s cooldown)"] --> C
  C["The item fires its rune\n(the same engine a spell uses)"] --> D{"Channel check\none of ~55 buff channels"}
  D -->|channel full| E["Blocked, or oldest buff replaced\n(per channel rules)"]
  D -->|room| F{"Sickness gate\nConsumable Power above zero?"}
  F -->|no| G["Drink refused"]
  F -->|yes| H["Formula evaluates with your level\nand Consumable Power Bonus"]
  H --> I["Buff lands; survives relog\nand re-evaluates on load"]
  H --> J["Restoratives also add a sickness stack\n-0.25 power for 30s, up to 6 stacks"]
  style D stroke:#c9a55a,stroke-width:2px
  style F stroke:#c9a55a,stroke-width:2px

• 1The inventory path tracks no cooldown at all; only the deck path is paced. See finding P3 below.
• 2The channel budget is real and strict but invisible. S10 puts it on screen.
• 3The gate refuses drinks silently. S10 adds the meter, S11 the guard.
• 4Formulas are data and re-evaluate on load, so every Tier 1 rebalance applies retroactively with no migration. This is why most of this document is small.
• 5The craft already rolls for exceptional results; Alchemy and Cooking discard the roll. S9.

Potion sickness, measured

Each restoration drink stacks a 30 second, minus 0.25 debuff on your Consumable Power. Four Greater Health potions back to back at level 80:

Built already; this document does not re-propose it

• Crafting pull from lot supply chests (in progress): craft from storage, with the rule that the server consumes only what is staged on the table.
• Crafting stations and the recipe book rebuilt in the new UI, including recipe search deep links.
• Buff potions slot into combat decks (fixed, and pinned by an automated test suite).
• Global vendor search with buy orders, and the personal item search window.
• The harvesting swing meter.

The power audit

Every number in this section was read from the shipping game data: the rune assets that define each consumable's formula, duration, channel, and cooldown. Reference character: Adventurer Level 40 / 80 / 120, Consumable Power at 1.0. Formulas are shown as they exist in the data; "~" is a random range and the tables use its mean.

T1 · The restoration ladder

All rows are instant, 30 second locked cooldown, sickness gated, and each drink adds a sickness stack, except the Regeneration rows, which skip the gate, add no stack, and persist through death. Craft cost is at skill 80 from fully vendor-bought inputs (the methodology is in section 3).

*Lesser assumes difficulty 0 and a batch of 3 (48g of inputs). The Potion of Focus tiers use identical formulas. Restoration tiers run Lesser through Aether with the same shape.

T2 · Food vs potion, same stat

Food is flat, potions scale, and they stack, because food and potion channels are separate systems. The potion's premiums are the level term and instant application; its costs are the sickness gate, the hidden attribute penalty, and one hour against food's four.

T3 · The stat coverage map

T4 · Cooldowns and channels at a glance

Cooldowns across 439 rune-bearing catalog items: 1s x85 (fireworks and throwables) · 2s x1 · 5s x218 (all food, drink, and brews) · 10s x57 (mounts and bait) · 12s x10 (weapon poisons) · 15s x3 (cures) · 30s x64 (stat, resist, restoration, scrolls) · 60s x1. Zero-cooldown consumables: none.

Channels across 455 rune assets: EatFood x223 (a budget of 6 by summed weight, oldest replaced) · no channel x172 (all restoratives, which stack freely) · Poison x11 · SpecializationPotions x9 · ResistancePotion x7 · one exclusive channel per attribute potion family · Drink, capacity 1. The sickness gate is set on 49 catalog items.

The ten power findings

• P1Potion healing barely levels. Across 80 levels the level term adds only 100 HP to an Aether Health potion (500 to 600); the dice ranges do all the work, so burst potions shrink against late game health pools.
• P2Chain drinking is hard capped at 2.5 potions of value: four Greater Health potions deliver 775 HP at level 80, then the fifth is refused.
• P3The sickness stack (30s) exactly equals the locked cooldown (30s), so a deck user drinking on cooldown never feels sickness, while the out of combat inventory path tracks no cooldown at all.
• P4One Regeneration bottle out-heals thirteen Aether Health potions (3,600 HP against 550), skips the gate and the sickness stack, and persists through death. Imbued doubles it to 7,200.
• P5Food is flat but never obsolete: the best food Strength is +10 for 4 hours against the potion's +15 to +22 for 1 hour, and the two stack because the channels are disjoint.
• P6Every attribute potion secretly debuffs the other two attributes (-3 base, -5 Aether) for its full hour. No food carries any penalty.
• P7No consumable grants Chaos Resistance. Elemental covers Fire, Water, Earth, and Air; Magic covers Life, Death, Sun, and Moon; Chaos falls between the families.
• P8Duration asymmetry: food runs 20 minutes to 8 hours while nearly every potion pins at exactly one hour. The outliers are Haste at 6 minutes and Distilled Aether at 5.
• P9Gathering and crafting are a consumables desert: aged whiskey's +3% mining node chance is the only gathering buff in 533 items. Forestry, skinning, agriculture, fishing, and every crafting chance have zero support.
• P10The Immortality Fruit's flat 1,000 heal is the biggest instant heal in the game, priced by a 24 hour lockout that survives death. That emergency-button design is never reused anywhere else in the catalog.

The cost audit

T5 · Craft against vendor, twelve representative items

T6 · Cost per buff-hour

Across 208 food runes the two hour buff is the mode (97 runes), then 1h x38, 4h x35, half-hour x8. All standard brews run one hour. That makes cost per hour the honest food metric:

Duration tiers are uncorrelated with cost. A level 1 recipe is twenty-four times cheaper per buff-hour than the level 100 signature dish.

T7 · Dead and underused reagents

Three true reagents are stocked, priced, weightless, and consumed by exactly zero recipes: Elixir of Dread, Gem of Truth, Tear of Sorrow. Behind them sits a tail of low-use inputs:

Note the 100x markup from base value to buy price on Daemon Hoof, Lich Skull, and Phoenix Talon against the 2-10x norm; these three alone break the bought-parts economics of every potion that needs them. Every item in section 6 routes through this pool; the delta table at the end of section 6 shows the dead trio ending at 4, 6, and 3 recipes.

T8 · Where the gold actually goes

• The vessel floor. The Empty Flask buys at 10g and is worth 1g. It is 34% of a standard Health Potion's cost and 62.5% of a Lesser's, and a Lesser's 3.2g sell-back cannot repurchase one flask. Cooking's jar costs 2g for the same weight, with no stated reason. The Aether tier repeats this at scale: 300g of hardened flasks is 53% of the craft.
• The round trip. Merchants re-buy at 80% of base value (100% with matching tags) while vendor prices run 4 to 30 times base value: the round trip on a Potion of Health is 25 to 1. No crafted consumable can be flipped to an NPC for profit.
• Dynamic pricing punishes towns, not whales. A vendor's price escalates 20% per distinct buyer beyond the fourth inside a 3 hour window; one player bulk-buying 400 Garlic pays base price while the fifth through ninth guildmates each pay more.
• Scroll oversupply. Recall and Teleport scrolls vendor at 100g against a 131.6 to 138.9g craft cost, and the merchant re-buys surplus at 12g, so stockpiles have no exit except use.

The eight cost findings

• C1Core restoratives are healthy: a Potion of Health crafts at 29.3g per use from fully vendor bought inputs against a 200g vendor price, with 100% success at any skill.
• C2Cooking is margin inverted almost everywhere: every sampled dish except Bacon costs 3 to 15 times its own vendor price to craft from bought inputs.
• C3Three trophies break their potions: Lich Skull, Daemon Hoof, and Phoenix Talon carry 5,000g merchant prices against 50g base values, making Potion of Acumen and Elemental Resistance irrational to craft from bought parts.
• C4Utility scrolls are inverted at the vendor: a crafted Recall Scroll costs 131.6g at skill 80 while the NPC sells one for 100g, and the batch of 12 recipe is worse per scroll, not better.
• C5The Aether tier is a success rate tax: 42.5% success at skill 80 puts Potion of Health, Aether at an effective 444g per use (243g even at skill 120), and each failure destroys 300g of hardened flasks.
• C6The 10g Empty Flask with a 1g base value is the real price floor of low tier alchemy: 34% of a standard Health Potion's cost, 62.5% of a Lesser's.
• C7The NPC spread is 25 to 1 on flagship potions, and vendor tiers have internal inversions: base Restoration (700g) outprices Greater (500g), and Deftness sells at a third of the equivalent Might.
• C8Brewing is the sleeper margin: one cask yields 40 bottles, so Brittany Ale costs 13.2g a bottle against 50g vendor and 25 Year Whiskey 19.1g against 2,500g, gated only by aging time. Meanwhile three stocked reagents feed zero recipes.

Lessons: Ultima Online to modern

Ultima Online (1997) shipped alchemy as a skill whose owner mattered: the thrower's skill scaled explosion potion damage, tinker-crafted Potion Kegs held 100 doses and turned grandmasters into vendor businesses, and Poisoning was a separate mastery. The 2003 Enhance Potions jewelry property (5-35% per piece, capped) let gear amplify every potion the wearer drinks; a 2011 update folded the skill itself into that property so pure alchemists beat jewelry-wearers. World of Warcraft invented the formal buff budget: one battle elixir plus one guardian elixir, flasks filling both and persisting through death; Dragonflight (2022) added three discrete quality ranks on consumables, and The War Within added Concentration, a recharging resource spent to guarantee the next rank. Elder Scrolls Online: every reagent hides four effects; eating reveals the first, combining reveals the rest, though wikis solved the discovery game within a week. Final Fantasy XIV: two-tier quality on everything and radical legibility, one food slot and one medicine slot with timers. Guild Wars 2: exactly one food and one enhancement (a stone, oil, or crystal), always stacking; feasts serve the whole squad. Path of Exile: the flask is permanent crafted gear refilled by kills, powerful but so fiddly it needed years of automation fixes, and everyone self-crafts so there is no consumables economy. Albion Online: consumable crafting as a regional trade profession gated by daily focus, leaning on a full-loot destruction sink SotA does not have. RuneScape: Herblore's level ladder is a potion ladder; doses and free decanting solved vessel logistics decades ago, and divine variants price a locked boost in hitpoints.

Capability matrix

● native · ◐ partial · ○ absent. RS = RuneScape including Old School. "SotA today" = the migration branch, 2026-07.

The pattern is the thesis: SotA is ahead of most of the genre on plumbing (the budget and pacing rows) and behind on content and depth (quality tiers, coatings, utility, margins, identity). The proposals that follow stock the shelf the engine already deserves.

The fourteen improvements

Every card below is grounded in a finding from the audits (the P and C numbers) or a documented player ask. Tier 1 cards are pure data: catalog rows, recipe rows, formula edits, all of which apply retroactively because buffs re-evaluate on load. Tier 2 cards need client code. The two Tier 3 cards are direction, not commitment.

Tier 1 · Data only

Tier 2 · Client work

Tier 3 · Direction, not commitment

Considered and rejected

• Continuous per-crafter potion quality. Continuous or per-instance data breaks stacking and deck slotting; the game's own crafting signatures already block stacking today. Discrete tiers (S9) are the whole answer.
• Kill-charge flasks (PoE style). Per-kill combat hooks plus a gear-like consumable contradict the discrete stackable model; ranked last in our own genre shortlist for exactly this reason.
• Percentage-of-stat food scaling (FFXIV style). Food is flat by design and never obsolete, because food and potion channels are disjoint; making food scale would relitigate all 190 food rows.
• Taste-to-learn reagent discovery (ESO style). Wiki-solved within a week; a one-time experience bought with permanent journal UI cost. (R4)
• Multi-reagent combinatorial recipes. The balance surface grows combinatorially and outputs must stay discrete anyway, at which point fixed recipes deliver the same shelf cheaper. (R5)
• Dose and decant partial bottles. A doses dimension on stackables is per-instance data in disguise; casks (S28) capture the bulk value without it.
• Regional station specialty bonuses (Albion style). Without a full-loot destruction sink the bonus just deflates prices; an economy lever for another document, not a consumables card.
• Subscription blessing perks and XP trading. Monetization scope and flagged trading risk respectively; out of this proposal's lane.

The new shelf

The stocked shelf, in one table

What the shelf does to the dead reagents

Dead trio requirement met: Elixir of Dread 0 to 4, Gem of Truth 0 to 6, Tear of Sorrow 0 to 3.

Sequencing

flowchart TD
  S1["S1 repricing"] --> S2["S2 scroll market"]
  S1 -.honest cost basis.-> W1["Shelf wave 1\nS18 S20 S25 S26 S28"]
  W1 --> W2["Shelf wave 2\nS15 S16 S17 S19 S22 S23 S24 S27"]
  W2 --> S3["S3 dead reagent revival\n(delta table met)"]
  S5["S5 poison conserve"] --> S12["S12 Arcanist's Focus"]
  S9["S9 Exceptional"] --> S12
  S10["S10 consumables strip"] -.readability.-> S7["S7 Concentrated"]
  S10 --> S11["S11 consume guard"]
  S28["S28 Physicker's Cask"] -.proves demand.-> S13["S13 potion kegs (deferred)"]
  S14["S14 feast table (deferred)"]

S1 ships in the same export as everything in phase 1. S12 waits for S5 and S9 so its perks have hooks. S7 reads best after S10's meter exists, but nothing breaks if it ships first. S13 is explicitly gated on S28 proving the demand; S14 is purely additive.

Appendix

A1 · Every number was read from shipping game data

Footnotes: the Lesser Health cost assumes difficulty 0 and a batch of 3; the dynamic pricing window is 3 hours per the shipped default; food durations are measured from rune tick data, not the catalog prose.

A2 · Constraints every proposal honors

• Every proposed potion is a fixed catalog item; stacking and combat deck slotting are preserved everywhere. No continuous quality, no per-instance data.
• The crafting engine is untouched; the server consumes only what is staged on the table; new items are ordinary data.
• Crafting success stays a rolled chance; proposals only bias existing stats, never bypass the roll.
• At most three server-direction cards were allowed; two are used (S13, S14), both deferred and framed as direction.
• Nothing here re-proposes shipped or in-flight work; the credit list is in section 1.
• New shelf numbers are illustrative, pre-balance.
• Effect enforcement is being hardened server-side as separate work.

A3 · Test surface

Consumables currently have zero automated EditMode coverage beyond the combat deck slotting suite. This proposal's data-heavy shape is testable: a PotionSicknessTests suite (stack add and expiry, the gate at zero, the 6 stack cap, S7's double stack, S8's half stack), a ChannelBudgetTests suite (the food weight budget, oldest-replaced eviction, exclusive families, each new channel from section 6), and a formula evaluation suite pinning the restoration ladder and every new shelf formula at fixed levels. A small catalog consistency test should also assert that every section 6 recipe's ingredients exist and that the dead trio's recipe counts match the delta table.

A4 · Selected sources

UO: uoguide.com (Alchemy, Potion Keg, Enhance Potions, Alchemist's Bauble, Poisoning) and the uo.com wiki. WoW: wowpedia (Elixir), wow-professions.com and warcrafttavern.com (Dragonflight alchemy, The War Within Concentration). ESO: en.uesp.net (alchemy trait discovery, Laboratory Use), eso-hub.com. FFXIV: consolegameswiki.com (Meals), fandomspot.com (Well Fed). GW2: wiki.guildwars2.com (Nourishment, Enhancement). PoE: pathofexile.fandom.com (Flask), maxroll.gg, poe-vault.com. Albion: wiki.albiononline.com (Crafting Focus), albionmarket.app, albioncodex.com. RuneScape: oldschool.runescape.wiki (Decanting, Divine super combat potion, Overload), runescape.wiki (Barbarian mixes).

Prepared 2026-07-26 against the unity-6.5 migration branch. Companion markdown: docs/plans/2026-07-26-alchemy-consumables-proposal.md. Twenty-eight proposals: fourteen improvements and fourteen new consumables; twenty-one are data only, five need client code, two are deferred directions.

General comments

No account needed. Every proposal above also has its own Discussion box for talking about that one alone; this thread is for the plan as a whole. Comments are plain text, held to basic decency, and may be trimmed.