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Two Worlds Tuesday: Alchemy

Chemical warfare comes to the age of swords and sorcery.

By Two Worlds Staff

Another Tuesday means another installment of our in-depth look at Two Worlds. This week we delve into the world of alchemy. There's a surprisingly deep system for cooking up special ingredients and using your elixirs to enhance your weapons and armor.

In Two Worlds, alchemy allows your inner mad chemist to run wild with possibilities; you can make a potion that restores health, create a trap that locks your enemy in place, give yourself permanent protection against fire, and thousands of other results. Creating a potion is easy. Creating a potion that's actually worth consuming… well, that takes some practice.

The first step to brewing anything is finding ingredients. The lush world of Antaloor is filled with flora and fauna that will end up in your mixing pot. As you wander, you'll often see a hand symbol appear over plants, which denotes there's an ingredient there to be picked. If harvested, the plant will disappear for the time being, then slowly regenerate itself depending on its growth cycle and the weather. Killing animals and monsters, then searching them for valuable body parts, will also be a favorite pastime of would be alchemists. Even woodland creatures you don't have to fight, such as rabbits and snakes, have useful glands worth harvesting.

All the ingredients you'll find will fall into one of these five categories:

  • Permanent-effect ingredient: These will permanently affect your characteristics such as dexterity and strength, but often have toxic side effects.

  • Temporary-effect ingredients: These will only affect you for a certain amount of time. They normally have a stronger effect than permanent-effect ingredients.

  • Restoration ingredients: Items that can boost your reserves of life or mana. They are mainly used in healing elixirs or poison antidotes.

  • Explosive ingredients: Ingredients useful for making bombs or exploding traps.

  • Mineral ingredients: Minerals are found all over Antaloor. If you get the right combination, you can create traps, bombs, and magical power ups from the five schools of magic.

    With your ingredients collected, you'll now notice that highlighting what you've found in your inventory menu will list its basic functions. You'll also see an inviting black pot on the right hand side of the inventory screen. Making potions is a simple matter of moving things from your pack into the pot. Place as few as two or as many as five ingredients onto the right hand side of the screen, highlight the cauldron, press A, and voila! Your new creation awaits.

    For the most part, what you brew up will be a simple combination of the ingredients' effects. For example, since the Adder Brother plant gives a temporary immunity to poison, and a Goose Liver heals 500 hit points, a potion created from these would give the benefits of both effects. However, improving your Alchemy skill will not only increase the effects of ingredients once they're brewed, it will also occasionally result in unexpected concoction benefits. Exactly how this skill functions, though, is still a mystery to us.

    Whenever you brew something new, you're immediately given the option to name your creation. If you do so, it's immediately entered into your cookbook. This log of alchemic experiments not only saves you the trouble of remembering how to make something, it will also tell you if you have what you need in your inventory to make another. A handy resource for those of us who despise note taking and inventory management.

    If you're playing online, there's another interesting treat that comes with naming your potions. If you're the first amongst your play group to create that concoction, others who make the same brew will not be given the chance to name their creation. The new potion will automatically be given the title that you chose for it.

    Want a head start on the inevitable fantasy pharmaceutical title war? Here are three recipes we've discovered in our quest for magical cocktails.

    Wizard's Friend Ingredients: 2 Lavender shoots 1 Nothern Frostroot

    Result: Permanently increases your Willpower by 1, and your mana points by 20.

    Fire Brand Ingredients: 1 Sulphur 1 Amber 1 Ruby 2 Topaz

    Result: Creates a gem that, when combined with a weapon, will deal fire damage equal to 50% of the weapon damage.

    Big Buff Buffet Ingredients: 1 Wolf Heart 1 Bear Claw 1 Zombie Thyroid 1 Boletus Mushroom

    Result: In addition to healing 20 hit points of damage, this potion increases your Vitality by +16, your Strength by +10, and makes you immune to poison. All these effects, other than the healing, last for five minutes.

    ©2007, IGN Entertainment, Inc. All Rights Reserved

    • 12:00 am PDT June 26, 2007

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