In BDO, alchemy is a highly useful life skill that can earn you a lot of silver if done correctly. It can also ensure access to the best-boosting elixirs. To be able to do alchemy, you first need to get yourself a residence and buy or make an alchemy utensil. You also need to know what materials are required to make some concoctions since, unlike other games, your character does not learn recipes. You need to do that yourself. In this BDO alchemy guide, I will show you how to get a residence, how to get an alchemy utensil, where to find recipes, show you an example of alchemy, and finally, how to minimize the time needed for each alchemy batch.
Finding a Residence for Alchemy
The only way to do alchemy is by using an alchemy utensil inside your residence. There are residences all over Black Desert, so just choose one that is in a place that suits you. Getting a residence is easy. Just open up the map, go into the town where you want to get a residence and start clicking on the house icons. When you find a house with the residence option that’s in a location you like, you then simply need to buy it with contribution points.
The contribution point cost ranges from a single point to a few points, depending on the size of the residence. The image below shows the location of a residence in Velia you can get for a single contribution point.
The size or location of the residence itself doesn’t really matter regarding alchemy; you just need to have one. So, choose one where you spend most of your time in BDO. Personally, I use the one in Calpheon at Market Street 6-1, 2F, because it is right next to the Calpheon storage and close to the central market NPC.
BDO’s Alchemy Utensils
After you have invested in a residence, you need to buy (or make) an alchemy utensil. There are a few different alchemy utensils in the game that give different bonuses (or penalties). The easiest utensils to get are the Basic Alchemy Utensil and the Balenos Traditional Alchemy Utensil, as they can be bought from a General Goods Vendor NPC (the ones that sell the HP/MP/SP/WP potions).
The basic utensil has no bonuses and 100 durability points. The Balenos Traditional Alchemy Utensil has 500 durability points, but the production time for each batch is increased by 5 seconds. Of these two, the Balenos utensil is better used for long AFK alchemy.
The other more advanced utensils are listed below, showing both their durability and the alchemy time adjustment. Personally, I favor the intermediate alchemy utensil as it’s not too expensive, has decent durability, and has no penalty for alchemy time.
When you have acquired an alchemy utensil, you must place it inside your residence. To do so, you need to press the P button while inside your residence to access the placement mode. Then, just select the alchemy utensil from the tab at the bottom of the screen and place it in your house wherever you wish.
Making Your Own Alchemy Utensils
You will also need a worker to make the utensils and the required materials, which you can see on the crafting screen from the workshop. Note that the materials need to be located in the storage of the town where the worker is located which you are using to make the utensils.
If you have difficulty finding alchemy utensils on the central market, you might need to start making them yourself. To do so, you need to get access to a level 3 or level 4 tools workshop and upgrade it to its highest level. Level 3 workshops can make intermediate alchemy utensils, and level 4 workshops are needed to make advanced alchemy utensils. Most cities have level 3 tool workshops, but level 4 workshops can be found in Valencia and Duvencrune.
Starting Your BDO Alchemy Career
When you have gotten a residence and placed an alchemy utensil there, you are ready to start making your first alchemical concoction. To do so, you need to activate the alchemy utensil by pressing R while standing next to it. This opens the screen you see below.
If you haven’t made the recipe before, you need to place the exact amount of each material for a single batch of whatever you intend to make. This is important: Only place the amount needed for a single batch. Anything more, and you will lose the extra materials. The window below shows this for Clear Liquid Reagent, as it is often the best recipe to start with.
Once you have selected the raw materials and entered the correct amount, you can choose to run a single batch or go for continuous production. If you want to run multiple batches, you can press “Continuous Production” and then max. Doing that will keep your character doing alchemy until he runs out of materials or the durability of the alchemy tool gets to zero.
For example, the Clear Liquid Reagent recipe is 1x purified water, 1x Sunrise Herbs, 1x salt, and 1x wild grass or weed. To run a 500 x Clear Liquid Reagent production batch, you would then need 500 purified water, 500 Sunrise Herbs, 500 salt, and 500 wild grass or weeds. You then place one of each into the boxes, as seen above. Then press “Continuous Production” and press maximum quantity. It should show 500 runs, and when you press “OK,” your character will start running 500 batches of clear liquid reagent.
If you place fewer materials than required in the boxes, the batch might fail, depending on your skill. While it is supposed to be possible to place less than the optimal recipe when your alchemy skill is really high, I haven’t quite found the benefit of it yet as I still fail a few times (at Master 2) and the failures generally cost more than the materials I try to save.
If you have already used a recipe, you can find it again in the list to the right. Once you click on that recipe, it will show you the ingredients you used last time. You can then select it again, and the ingredients will automatically go into the boxes. Also, if you check the “Learned Only” button, you will eliminate all the “unknown” recipes.
Note that as your alchemy skill goes up, you will start getting more products out of each production batch in addition to a blue version of your product (blue versions of consumables usually last longer and are more valuable). You should also get more of the side dish “Mysterious Catalyst”, which can be exchanged for rewards with Bofin of Olivia. You can select one of the following for each 10 side dishes you exchange.
- 900 contribution experience points and 30 alchemy experience points.
- 200 clear liquid agents or
- 200 powder of darkness
In addition to this, you can get “Shining Powder,” a special item you can only get as a side product from alchemy.
Useful Alchemy Clothes.
There are a couple of clothing types that speed up alchemy and increase the experience earned while doing alchemy in BDO. These are the Pavilla costume set and the Silver Embroidered Alchemist’s Clothes.
The Pavilla costume set is a Pearl Store Item. It gives you a +15% bonus to your alchemy experience and reduces the alchemy time of each batch by 2 seconds. Those 2 seconds don’t seem a lot, but for a batch of 500, they reduce the total alchemy time by 1000 seconds, which is just under 17 minutes.
The Silver Embroidered Alchemist’s Clothes also increase the experience earned and reduce the alchemy time. This is, however, dependent on the enhancement level, ranging from just a time reduction of -1 second for non-enhanced clothes up to a +30% increase to experience and a -7 second time reduction for +5 enhanced clothes. When you begin your alchemy career, I recommend you aim for +2 enhanced alchemy clothes as they are easy to buy from the central marketplace. Later, you can go for a +3 or even a +4 one.
Other Useful Items for Alchemy
An alchemist stone is really useful for alchemy as it reduces the time needed to do it. The different grades have different time reductions, but the best grade has a -1.7 second reduction.
Teff bread is also useful for alchemy as eating it reduces the mixing time by 0.5 seconds, and it lasts 110 minutes. You can also eat Cron seafood for a 0.6-second reduction, but it is much more expensive.
How to Get a One-Second Alchemy Time – Minimizing Alchemy Time
The lowest alchemy time you can get in Black Desert Online is a single second. The following are a few methods that should get you there, with the first one being the cheapest silver-wise.
- Buy the Pavilla costume set ( -2.0 seconds )
- Get a +4 Silver Embroidered Alchemist’s Clothes ( – 5.0 seconds)
- Get a Sturdy Alchemy Stone of Life (-1.1 seconds)
- Use an Advanced Alchemy Utensil ( -1.0 seconds)
However, getting a +4 alchemist’s clothes can be hard and time-consuming unless you get lucky in the marketplace. Alternatively, you can aim to get the following to get a 1.1-second alchemy time.
- Buy the Pavilla costume set ( -2.0 seconds )
- Get a +3 Silver Embroidered Alchemist’s Clothes ( – 4.0 seconds)
- Get a Sharp Alchemy Stone of Life (-1.4 seconds)
- Use an Advanced Alchemy Utensil ( -1.0 seconds)
- Use a Teff Sandwich (- 0.5 seconds)
The best combination possible would be the following:
- Pavilla Costume set ( -2.0 seconds )
- +5 Silver Embroidered Alchemist’s Clothes ( – 7.0 seconds)
- Resplendent Alchemy Stone of Life (-1.7 seconds )
- Cron Seafood ( -0.6 seconds )
This combination gives you a -11.3 second reduction. Now, this is something that would only be useful if you use the special alchemy utensils. For example, the Balenos alchemy utensil would take 3.7 seconds for each batch. But honestly, this is pretty bonkers, and the cost would be enormous.
Alchemical Ingredients
There are a massive number of ingredients used for alchemy, which is far too extensive to list here. However, most of them can be found in the central marketplace or, if not there, at least information on how to get them. You should also look at the ingredients sold by the Tavern Vendors. Many recipes need some of these ingredients, which is great as these are the easiest to get.
Where to Find Recipes
As I mentioned, your character doesn’t need to search for recipes to learn them. You just need to put in the correct type and amount of material to make some concoctions. This means that you can simply search on Google for all the recipes in BDO, or you can look at the recipes in BDOcodex.com where you can sort the recipes after the desired effect and what skill level is required for the recipe to work.
Alchemy Mastery System
On top of all this comes the alchemy mastery system. The benefits of a high mastery score are the following:
- Chance to get extra regular items – up to +3.57%
- Chance to get extra special items – up to +1.92%
- Chance to get extra rare items – up to +0.23%
- Increased payment when turning in alchemy boxes to an Imperial Trader – up to 46%.
For each level of alchemy, you get 5 mastery points. To increase your mastery score further, you need to equip special accessories and clothing. The accessories are called Loggia, Geranoa, and Manos, and the clothes are Loggia, Gorgath, and Manos alchemist’s clothes. Loggia is the name of the green-grade items, Geranoa and Gorgath are the blue-grade items, and Manos is the orange grade.
You can buy the green and blue-grade mastery gear from NPCs with the same name in the game, but you need to either buy the Manos gear from the central marketplace or craft it yourself.
So, there you have it, by following this guide you should be able to become a master alchemist in no time. Now if you liked this guide then be sure to share it with your friends and allies and feel free to check out my other Black Desert Online guides.