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Alchemy Guide Anthology
A Collection of User-Written Guides to Alchemy
A Collection of User-Written Guides to Alchemy
Welcome! In this thread you can find links to all of the most useful user-written guides that can be found in the Alchemy Forum (and a few from other forums!) This is an updated version of Sharacia's Alchemy Guide and Information Database, which served us all well until the thread owner left Gaia and updates ceased. Enough new Guides have come out since then that I felt the need for a new thread gathering all of the user-written guides; I hope this helps Alchemists new and old find the information they need!____________________________________________
The Basics
The Basics
An Introduction to Alchemy
This guide is Alchemy 101; it covers everything you should know about Alchemy before you dive in! Failure to read this thread has been known to lead to poverty and frustration.
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Formulas and Components
Formulas and Components
The Alchemist's Encyclopedia
This thread is packed with useful data on formulas and component RIGs. If a formula exists on Gaia, you'll find info about it here. Sorted by level and then by source of the formula, and providing lists of components, Cost to Craft, Crafting Rate, and Marketplace links for both the formula and the finished product. This thread is still technically under construction, but does have all of the formulas. It also has lists of every item found in the different Philosopher's Caches, and in a wide variety of RIGs that contain items often used in Alchemy.
Nothin' But Cache
This guide focuses on a subset of the formulas, namely those that you can complete using only the items found in Philosopher's Caches. (What are Philosopher's Caches? Go back and read the Intro to Alchemy!) These will be the easiest formulas to complete for many new Alchemists, since other formulas require items that can be very difficult to find.
What Are The Odds?-Collating Crafting Chances
What's the difference between High and Very High? For that matter, what does Very Low really mean...and why can't I craft this formula, even after 50 tries!? Check out this thread to have the five different "Chance of success" entries (Very High, High, Medium, Low and Very Low) translated into some actual percentages for you.
Quest Formula Information
The most valuable formulas on the site, bar none, are the ones that craft Legendary Angelic and Demonic Backwings. They come in six varieties, and each crafts backwings of three different sizes. This thread is your go-to place to learn everything there is to know about them.
Quest Formula Tracker
This thread keeps track of people's progress in completing the most difficult challenge an Alchemist can take on: crafting one, more, or even all six of the Backwing Quests. It's mostly just for fun, but some people will decide to do the quests only partway and sell the small or medium wings they've gotten, so this thread will help you find them if you've bought a pair of small or medium wings and want to develop them all the way to large (the wings may not be soulbound, but the formulas you'll need to improve them are!)
Crown of the Thrice Great - Component Details
Here's another thread focusing on giving you detailed information about a single formula; this time it's the Crown of the Thrice Great, a level-10 formula that is automatically granted to any Alchemist who reaches that level. You can consider crafting this formula to be a test of your level-10 Alchemy skills; its components include components that must be crafted from components that must be crafted from components. This thread spells out what you'll need from the bottom to the top.
Alchemy Component or Not?
This guide lists every single item on Gaia, of any kind, that appears at least once as a component in an Alchemy formula! Check this to find out whether you should hold on to some random item you were thinking about getting rid of! The thread lists which formula(s) each item is used in. The list is mostly sorted alphabetically, but don't forget to check the section at the bottom, where you'll find items that are used in the Backwings formulas.
What Makes What?
Like the previous thread, this one lists Components and tells you what items you can make using them. So how is this thread different? It specifically only lists the Game Items that were newly created to serve as Alchemy Components, it doesn't separate the ones that are only used to make Backwings, and using icons and text colors, it tells you where each item comes from.
Component Map Quest
This thread helps bridge the gap between the above two. It tells you where on Gaia, other than the Marketplace, you can acquire any of the items listed in "Alchemy Component or Not?"
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Alchemy RIG Contents
Alchemy RIG Contents
Opening the Base Cache: Probabilities
Opening the basic Philosopher's Cache item will usually grant you a smaller, color-coded Philosopher's Cache item, chosen at random. This thread lays out how likely you are to get each of the colors, as well as how likely you are to score a GoFusion Heart Charm instead.
Opening the Alchemist's Case: Probabilities
The 89 formulas found in the Alchemist's Case include some common ones and some rare ones (although, given how many possible prizes there are, even the common ones are rather uncommon.) This thread lists all 89 formulas two different ways: by rarity and then by level, or by level and then by rarity.
Enki's Catch - Complete Item List
The Aquarium merman named Prince Enki was created to provide a new source of Alchemy components and formulas. During a Booty Grab game, he might drop a RIG called Enki's Catch, which contains a bunch of exclusive formulas and components. If a component is exclusive to Enki's Catch, it is used in a formula that is exclusive to Enki's Catch...or a formula exclusive to the rarer Enki Drop that you obtain when Prince Enki dies. You can find the names of the formulas exclusive to the Enki Drop scattered among the above thread's explanations of Enki's Catch components.
Ivan's Garage Sale
Alchemy Fusion Cache Item List
Ye Olde Trunk of Forgotten Things Item List
Some Alchemy formulas use items that were once available from the Cash Shop and generally aren't anymore. As people expend these items in crafting, the supply on the site dwindles. Gaia has created a few RIGs designed to replenish the supply of such items. Ivan's Surplus (not linked above as there is no complete list out there) is a Cash Shop RIG that contains the items used in those 1-GC formulas that craft old Cash Shop RIGs from their own fail items; Ivan's Garage Sale is a RIG sold in Dernier*Cri that contains a wider variety of old Cash Shop items; the Alchemy Fusion Cache is a RIG obtained through GoFusion and stuffed so full of old Cash Shop items that you actually get three random items with each one you open; and Ye Olde Trunk of Forgotten Things is sold in the Bifrost and has the widest variety of prizes yet (though it does seem that each of these RIGs has at least one item none of the others has! Better check all the lists just in case!)
Odds of Getting Nitemare & Angelic Furniture from Trunks
Not every RIG that Alchemists need was created for Alchemy. To craft the Legendary Backwings, you'll need a wide variety of things from all over Gaia, including the angelic or demonic Gaia Housing Items that can rarely be found in the Enchanted Wooden Trunk and the Enchanted Golden Trunk. So, since Alchemists have such need of those items, the Alchemy forum has a guide to what items come out of these Enchanted Trunks and how rare each is!
Odds of Getting Demonflies / Monarch from Bug Traps
Crafting Legendary Backwings also requires two of the rarest Bugs on Gaia: the advanced butterfly called the Golden Monarch, and the advanced dragonfly called the Demonfly. Since the gold shop Loyal's Bazaar introduced RIGs that contain Bugs, including the rare ones, this thread was created to give Alchemists an idea of how easy to obtain these rare specimens are. Answer: not very, but still better than trying to find them in the wild in the Towns Flash environments.
Back Alley Grab Bag
Once upon a time, Gaia Online hosted an MMO named zOMG! This game had a wide variety of loot items you could obtain as drops from monsters, and Recipe items you could create from the loot items in a sort of prototype of Alchemy. When Alchemy itself came out, many of zOMG!'s loot items and recipe items were used as formula components. Sadly, however, zOMG! ended up being taken down. Many of the game's loot items are now found in the zOMG Cache, but not all of them...so sometimes Alchemists will need to dig into the Back Alley Grab Bag, a RIG sold at Back Alley Bargains which contains every single loot and recipe item in zOMG!, even some that were never released in the actual game. Check this thread to verify if something you need is a Back Alley Grab Bag item.
The Fishing Market
Speaking of RIGs designed to provide the drops from an offline feature, Gaia Fishing has been down for a while now. We're pretty sure it's just temporary, but it's been long enough (and will be a while longer) that Gaia has seen fit to give us an alternative means of getting the fish that are used in, among other things, the formula for the Alchemist's Case and the higher-level Backwings Formulas. The Fishing Market is obtained in GoFusion and contains every kind of fish or junk item that could be hooked and reeled in from Bass'ken Lake, the Bay of Gambino, and the Durem Reclamation Facility, as well as some mysterious new fish that are rumored to come from an as-yet-undiscovered fourth fishing spot. (Yes, there are already Alchemy formulas that use them.) You receive three items per Fishing Market RIG.
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Miscellaneous Guides and Things
Miscellaneous Guides and Things
Alchemy Spreadsheet
This thread provides a link to, and directions for using, a spreadsheet in Google Docs that can help you keep track of what you need to level up.
Alchemy: Lost Manuscripts
Need to join a Guild devoted to Alchemy? Why not MaclauMo's? Just be gentle around the screaming mushrooms.
Checkmate's Level-UP Project
Level-10 Alchemist Misfortuned Checkmate has some very big things to craft, and she'd love to give you some XP for helping craft the components for her!
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Got a thread you think deserves to be on this list? Post about it and I'll see if it passes muster!
Is one of these threads dead, and outdated? Let me know so I can remove it.
Have a question that, against all odds, isn't answered in any of the above threads? Ask, and I or someone else will probably be able to answer it. (Although, really, chances are it's in one of the above threads and you just missed it.)
