Alchemy Tips

Alchemy is very effective for leveling, making money, and making extremely strong armor and weapons when paired with Enchanting.

Leveling
Alchemy increases proportionally to the cost of the potion being brewed. Cost of the potion depends on its effect types and strength. Potions with multiple effects cost more (effect costs are additive, even if the effects themselves do not mix well, such as "Damage Health" and "Restore Health"), and different effects have different costs (for example, "Slow" effect costs a lot, while "Damage Health" is very cheap). Effect strength increases with skill level, perks, and certain apparel enchants.

The most expensive single effects are invisibility, paralyze, slow, and the regenerate types (health, stamina, magicka). These are two to three times more effective than other potions when giving skill points. Since the effect costs are additive, a potion with more effects may have higher cost than a potion with one of these high value effects. Hanging Moss + Bear Claws, Dwarven Oil + Salt Pile and Vampire Dust + Luna Moth Wing are the best cost/reagent combinations.

It is also best to make big batches of potions at one time. First visit the thief guardian stone and if eligible get the well rested benefit. With these two bonuses and mixing high value potions this can greatly reduce the time drag in leveling alchemy.

Enchanting apparel is an excellent way to create more potent and valuable potions. Bracers, Headgear (helm, circlet), ring, and amulet can all be enchanted with Fortify Alchemy , and the effects stack additively to create an alchemists wardrobe to wear while mixing potions. Creating/collecting an "alchemy suit" of four +25% (or higher) items can more than double the cost of the potion (and thus the skill increase.)

Note that this cost is not the vendor price; improving vendor price does not change the base cost and thus does not affect the skill increase.

Skyrim: Alchemy Recipe Helper
This web application is able to find all the recipe combinations for a given ingredient. By default it will show the recipes which discover the effects of the ingredient, for example, given 'Glow Dust' it will find the three unique recipes which will discover all 4 of the Glow Dust ingredient's effects. You can also select the optional 'Display all recipes' flag to show all the recipes, some ingredients can create some awesome potions with 6 effects. Play around with it and see what you find!

For now you can use CTRL+F to search through the results if there are too many. Improvements to allow easy searching and filtering of results are in the works.

Making Money
Alchemy is also very useful for money-making purposes. To reach level 100 Alchemy, around two hundred thousand (200,000) septims worth of potions needs to be brewed. As early as level 60 one could be making 1500 from a single potion. From a single dungeon one could extract 100 or more Chaurus Eggs, and a simple walk around Whiterun outskirts at twilight would provide several Luna Moth Wings, resulting in a rather valueable Invisibility potion, excluding effects that could be added through putting more ingredients in the mixture.

For a full list of the most expensive potions, see this list of potions ordered by value.

Profitability Calculator


This is another web application that is intended to help you find the most profitable potions to create from your ingredients. It can be a good help if you want to level your skill quickly, but also if you're only interested in making potions to sell.

Start with choosing an ingredient you have lots of. You will easily find the most profitable effect this ingredient has, and what your options are for the second ingredient in the potion. Once you have figured out the first two ingredients, you will be given a list of options for the third ingredient, ordered by profit.

Exploit For Extremely Powerful Weapons And Armor
Using Alchemy, enchanting and smithing, ultimate weapons can be made. To do this, start by using Alchemy to create potions of "Fortify Enchanting", which allows the player to create stronger enchantments of "Fortify Alchemy". The player can now create a stronger potion of "Fortify Enchanting" and so on building on each other. The process is described below.

Usually the player can make a set of four items of +25% alchemy skill for any fortification skill like alchemy and enchanting. There is an exploit in which you can wear a Falmer helmet over a circlet and both have stacked effects [Tested PS3]; quite useful for this. So now make 25% fortify alchemy enchantments on the Falmer Helmet, any ring, any necklace, and gloves/bracers and a circlet. Note that the falmer helmet and circlet can be worn at once. Wear all of the enchanted equipment and make a fortify enchanting potion. With this potion, you should be able to create fortify 29% alchemy and smithing enchantments. Also while enchanting try to be quick as potion lasts for 30 seconds. Note that there is a cap of 29% fortifying alchemy and smithing enchantments so going over this number is not possible. Using this you should be able to create 147% smithing fortification potion [Tested PS3]. Also a 37% enchanting fortification potion can be created but since 29% has been reached its not much useful for this but quite good for other enchantments.

Using this we would get 4 x 29% smithing gear and 147% smithing potions. Using these, staggeringly powerful weapons and armors can be made and improved.

For this process to be possible it is required to have 100% in enchanting, alchemy and smithing with the relevant perks.

Note: This process uses the falmer helmet worn over circlet glitch which ultimately allows a potion of 147% fortify smithing potion and 37% enchanting potion to be brewed.