Alchemy screen Mark III

[Zini]

MWWorld::World::createRecord.

Make sure to only go through this function, because the implementation will have to be changed drastically at some point.

[veepee]

I think Skyrim's improvements are great and should be be emulated. That would mean greying out ingredients that are known not to produce anything with the ones you've already picked for brewing. So there would be a behind the scenes list of tried combinations.

Problem with that is there's some fundamental differences with how Morrowind's alchemy works. In Morrowind, it's possible to fail at making a potion because of your skill/luck, not because it's a bad combination, and you implicitly know when a certain combination will produce an effect.

It does highlight a nasty flaw with MW's alchemy, though. Your alchemy skill determines what effects you know about an ingredient, but when you're in the alchemy screen and matching up ingredients, you magically know which combinations will produce what effects. What's the point in hiding the effects in the inventory if you still know them when working in the alchemy window? It just adds tedium as you select and deselect dozens of combinations of ingredients to find usable potions at low levels, instead of being able to quickly match them by looking at their list of effects and filtering the available list of ingredients based on the effects of already-selected ingredients.

I'll reply here because that above post of mine should've been here to begin with.

Improving on the above (and further emulating Skyrim), how about if in place of ingredient effects there's a text saying something like "effect unknown" or somesuch when either there will be an unknown effect OR there won't be any effect (but it's not known). Then after say, 5 failed attempts the ingredients would grey out if that mix won't produce anything. Then the text would be "no effect" or such. This would mean that the game helps players a bit, but it's not much given the amount of wasted ingredients.

And when there will be an effect that's not known beforehand, there's a message saying that the effect from that ingredient was discovered. This would also be the case when player brews a potion with known effects, but at the same time also discovers a new effect because of the unknown effects. Afterwards the player knows that effect regardless of wheter it would be known based on skill level or not. I think in Skyrim this system works well because it rewards experimentation.

If it would take 5 tries to prove a failing combo, that would mean there aren't usually many greyed ingredients. But otoh if one could discover all effects for many ingredients by experimentation, they would also be greyed when appropriate.