Apothecary LE- An Alchemy Overhaul
Apothecary is a complete overhaul of Skyrim’s alchemy, food, and alcohol systems designed to balance existing options while adding powerful new effects to the game.
Description below from Original Page
Apothecary is a complete overhaul of Skyrim’s alchemy, food, and alcohol systems designed to balance existing potions, poisons, foods, and alcohols while adding powerful new effects to the game. The mod normalizes the magnitude of all alchemical ingredients in order to eliminate the gameplay loop of checking UESP to see which effects have slightly higher potencies, or chasing Salmon Roe to level up. It also significantly reduces the gold value of both player-created potions and generic potions while ensuring that the player still levels at a faster rate than Vanilla. In addition, the mod rebalances generic potions so that their strongest and weakest variants match the potency of player-created potions. Finally, Apothecary removes several useless or poorly implemented effects in order to make room for more interesting new effects without adding new ingredients.
Apothecary does not require my other mods, but it is designed to be consistent with them. For instance, Apothecary adds poisons for each of the new Illusion archetypes and several of the new Alteration archetypes added by Mysticism 2 – A Magic Overhaul.
The Apothecary Food and Drink Addon is offered as a separate ESP with no dependencies on the main file of Apothecary to allow users the freedom to mix and match Apothecary with other mods.
Potions
The magnitudes in the following list reflect the strength of a potion created by a character with 100 Alchemy and all of the Vanilla perks. Generic potions have been reworked to be consistent with player-created potions at all levels.
Notes
Restore Health, Magicka, or Stamina Potions work over 5 seconds. They do not stack, but they are affected by abilities that increase potion duration. Potions such as Fortify One-handed and Resist Fire have high potencies (50%) and short (60s) durations. Potions such as Fortify Health, Fortify Magicka Regeneration, and Fortify Armor Rating have lower effective potencies and extended durations. New utility potions allow the player to experiment with effects that were much rarer in the Vanilla game, such as Become Ethereal and Waterwalking.
Poisons
The magnitudes in the following list reflect the strength of a poison created by a character with 100 Alchemy and all of the Vanilla perks. Generic poisons have been reworked to be consistent with player-created poisons at all levels.
Notes
Damage Health, Magicka, and Stamina poisons deal (stacking) damage over time. Lingering damage poisons are still clearly differentiated from other poisons. Poisons replicate all of Illusion’s influence effects, including new archetypes added by Mysticism, allowing poison-focused characters to manipulate the battlefield. Poisons replicate all the new debuff effects added to Alteration by Mysticism, with higher potencies to compensate for their one-time-use nature. All Poisons benefit from Weakness to Poison, allowing you to increase the strength of poisons such as Damage Armor, Fear, and Weakness to Magic.
Apothecary Food and Drink Addon
In addition to overhauling alchemy, Apothecary also offers an optional plugin that tweaks food, alcohol, and drugs.
The Apothecary Food and Drink Addon adds several new foods and changes the recipes for existing food items. It also adds new alcohols and adds themto the appropriate leveled lists.
Food
In Apothecary, food items provide long-lasting buffs to Health Regeneration, Magicka Regeneration, and Stamina Regeneration. The type of buff a food item provides, and the magnitude of that buff, are based on the items used to create the food. Meats and stews provide Health Regeneration; desserts and cheeses provide Magicka Regeneration; and breads, vegetables, and soups provide Stamina Regeneration. Since players can have one source of each buff active at a time, Apothecary encourages the consumption of a wide variety of food items.
By default, all food items last for 30 minutes. If you are using a survival mod and would like to reduce the duration of food items, I have provided an optional patch which reduces the duration of these items to 10 minutes. You can also use the patch as a model for creating your own custom duration for food items.
10% Foods
These foods are raw or uncooked items. They are not intended to be eaten in their current state.
25% Foods
These foods represent the basic components of a full meal. Most of these recipes simply require combining salt with one additional ingredient.
50% Foods
These foods represent the highest quality meals you can create. Most of them require additional ingredients such as Garlic or Lavender. Some of them require the specialized crafting stations found in Hearthfire kitchens.
Homecooked Meal
The homecooked meal represents a “super food” that grants you 50% Health, Magicka, and Stamina Regeneration, essentially rolling three of the best food items into one. You can only acquire a homecooked meal through marriage, and you are limited to one such meal per day.
Alcohol
In Vanilla, alcoholic drinks are largely forgettable, since they often restore small amounts of Stamina, while subsequently reducing the player’s Stamina Regeneration. In Apothecary, ales, meads, whiskeys, and rums buff the player’s Stamina and reduce their Magicka, while wines and brandies buff the player’s Magicka and reduce their Stamina. All alcoholic drinks last for five minutes.
Drugs
Apothecary also edits Skooma and Sleeping Tree Sap. Skooma has a buff that is similar to that of ales and meads, while Sleeping Tree Sap has a buff that is similar to that of wines and brandies. Redwater Skooma also has a unique effect. The buffs from Skooma and Sleeping Tree Sap do not stack with the buffs from alcohol.
General Changes and Removed Effects
Apothecary removes several potion effects from the game. Sometimes, these potion effects were removed for balance reasons (Fortify Smithing and Fortify Enchanting); sometimes, they were only removed because they were redundant with a new or existing effect (Damage Magicka Regeneration,
Fortify Light Armor). Removing these effects allowed us to add our new effects with minimizing changes to existing recipes, so most of the combinations you remember will still work fine. However, in a few places, we did make changes to existing effects, and we do welcome feedback as to whether some effects feel rarer than they should be. We also changed the rarity of a few ingredients. Now that we’ve normalized the magnitude of all potion archetypes, it simply doesn’t make sense for items like Salmon Roe to be as rare as they are. Finally, we tweaked Sinderion’s Serendipity (it’s called Sinderion’s Legacy now) to be a little more desirable and to work better with perk overhauls.
Compatibility
Apothecary is not compatible with other alchemy overhauls. You will need a patch for any mod that adds new ingredients, in order to adjust their magnitudes, durations, and gold values to be in line with Apothecary. Apothecary may also have some minor compatibility issues with mods that add new player-crafted enchantments. This is because both alchemy and enchanting mods need to make use of the same “Unused Actor Values” to implement their effects. The incompatibility should be limited to specific enchantments that use the same actor values as Apothecary.
The Apothecary Food and Drink Addon is not compatible with other mods that change food and alcohol. It should be compatible with Sunhelm out of the box.
