The Quick and Dirty Guide to Apothecary

I'm sure anyone who has picked up the skill already will have worked it out. Just in case, here is the quick and dirty guide to brewing potions, making gold and grounding dye.

Requirements.
Apothecary skill (available in Chapter 2 camps)
Container (available from the trainer and merchants)
Main ingredient.

Supplements.
Additional ingredients.
Supporting gathering skill - Cultivation, Butchery or Scavenging.

The nitty gritty basics.

To brew a potion, you need a thingie to put it in (Container), a thing to put in the thingie (main ingredient) and some other stuff to jazz it up a little. As you can tell, my vocabulary has been influenced by the Gamespy comic.

Main ingredients can either be bought from vendors, grown (Cultivation, which in itself needs seeds), butchered presumably or scavenged. Dont be squeamish, reach into that still warm corpse.Mousing over them will give you an idea what level you need to be to cook them and what they'll do.

Vendors will always sell the level 1 ingredients needed to make Accuracy, Strength, Healing or Intelligence potions. (I could be wrong on the fourth, the memory is shoddy and I'm in work).Other random scavenged bits I've come across are below.

Skaven Spit - Intelligence
Leeches - Healing
Ticks/Fleas - AP
Grave Dirt - Spirit resistance
Dryad Husks - Thorny Concotions


The additives at level one are Cloudy Water, Callous Gobsworth or Dusty Fusk.

The Parsley gives your brewing a chance of making more than one potion from one set of ingredients.
The mushroom gives your brewed potions effect a chance to last longer.
The water is your friend and should always be carried. It will stabilise the potion, moving that little bar from failure, through volatile (one water) to garunteed brew (generally two waters, sometimes three depending on level).

Basic prices. Used Vial and Cloudy Water - 5 bronze. Callous Gobsworth and Dusty Fusk - 25 bronze.
You can, therefore, brew up stable but short duration potions if you have a main ingredient to hand for as little as 10-15 bronze.

While stabilisers are needed to move the sucess meter into the green, a potion can be brewed while in the orange range. It will be a volatile potion as a result. This means that it may do exactly what it says on the tin, or it may backfire when you drink it and have a negative effect.

How to brew.
Open your abilities tab. Click the tab in the top right and find Apothecary. Drag it to whatever hotbar button suits you best. You can now open your little bunsen burner that way. Place a container. Place a main ingredient. Add any additional ingredients you want. It must be done in that order initially for everything to lock in. If you run out of main ingredient but have alot of the rest, you can swap other mains in as you please. Hnady for when you want to cook several items in a go. Just make sure you have enough vials, water and whatever else you wish to use.

Your basic low level potion will look something like:
Used Vial (level 1)
Shattered Bear Tooth (Level 1 - Strength)
Cloudy Water (level 1) - Cloudy Water - Callous Gobsworth

Hit the brew button and that should garuntee a nice 5-10 minute strength potion, for when you really need to smash things.

GOLD!
Golden cores are an important ingredient for Talisman making. Sure the tailisman guys can buy them, but you can also make them.

You will need some different kit than your potions. Specifically an Alchemical condenser, some Goldweed, some gold dust and some quicksilver.

The quicksilver and condenser are available at most vendors (though oddly, not in Altdorf from what I've seen) and you can carry a supply around if you want.

Gold Dust is obtained by scavenging. Goldweed tends to be gotten through cultivation. My advice? Make friends with someone who has whichever skill you do not. Scavengers will come across the seeds for Goldweed and cant grow them. Similarly Cultivators wont have a means of getting Gold dust except probably via auction.

To make a Gold nugget and make a Tailsman maker very happy here's how it goes.

Alchemical Condenser
-Goldweed
-Gold Dust
-Quicksilver

Hit brew and you get your nugget. So far I've never had a failure and I don't know if it can fail.The level of the nugget depends on the level of the Goldweed and the gold dust.

No Mr Bond, I want you to DYE

I've not had much experience with making dyes, if only because I've not come across the raw material. Likely it's either from cultivation or butchering. However, whatever the main ingredient, it is much like Gold in that you have a Pestle and Mortar and some Alum.

Pestle And Mortar
Main Ingredient
Alum

Out comes a dye which you can then use or sell on as you please.

In the Field.
I always carry at least three vials of appropriate level (the next ones appear in tier two and are level 10 iirc) and 3 times as many water. Apothecary can be done on the fly and takes seconds. I keep the containers around because sometimes it's just worth brewing up in the field, especially if there's a new ingredient taking up room in your bag, begging to be tried. I also carry as many condensers and quicksilver balls as I have gold dust scavenged. I rely on others to give me the weed so I can make gold, and it's always a good idea to have them to hand just in case. Figure out what works for you. Maybe you dont like carrying materials you may or may not use until back in a town. They're reasonably cheap so there is no harm in stocking up only when you need to. I hope this quick mash up was helpful and that you enjoy giving people bottles of leeches or skaven spit and telling them with a straight face that it is indeed good for them.

Edit
As Pete mentioned in the comments, I had some of my names mixed up. They've been fixed and any other corrections are welcome :)