After 75 hours, I finally cracked what I was doing wrong in Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2’s terribly explained alchemy system

Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 is rife with sim-y, medieval stuff. You can whet your blades, forge horseshoes, throw some dice, do your laundry, wash yourself in every trough in Czechia, and, of course, do alchemy.

If you’re anything like me, that last one is a problem. In my 75 hours in KCD2, I never once managed to produce anything other than a ‘weak’ potion from my time at the alchemy bench. Even when I felt like I was following recipes to the letter and the nanosecond, Henry would grumble about screwing it all up when I finished. Even the perks which explicitly said they’d make the alchemy process more tolerant of errors didn’t help. It got to the point that I thought that was the joke—alchemy isn’t real, so of course it never works.

But no, I’m just dumb. Or, actually, the game is just really bad at explaining how alchemy works. I’ve now cracked how alchemy actually works. I’m even getting Strong Saviour Schnapps out of dried ingredients. It’s all to do with the game’s bellows.

Basically, never use the bellows unless you are strictly instructed to. Despite the alchemy tutorial presenting the bellows as, in essence, a faster way to get something boiling, they’re actually used to generate a different kind of boiling entirely: vigorous boiling.

Like me, I bet a lot of you have been chucking your ingredients in the pot and then bellowing the hell out of them to get them boiling faster regardless of whether the recipe calls for vigorous boiling or not, only turning your hourglass over once it was good and bubbly. What you should be doing, it turns out, is lowering the pot over the fire and then simply waiting for vapour to appear. Once it does (you don’t have to wait for the bubbles) turn your hourglass over. Once it’s empty, that’s one turn. Keep the boiling going for as many turns as the recipe requires, and you’re golden.

Or, you know, to reduce these several paragraphs to one easy-to-digest sentence: don’t use the bellows unless the recipe calls for vigorous boiling, and turn the hourglass once you see vapour.

And that, honestly, is all there is to it. After 75 hours of churning out terrible Saviour Schnapps, I just made four strong ones with dried nettle and belladonna. The problem is the game never really explains that the bellows are their own thing. So long as you don’t use them when they aren’t necessary, it all gets way easier.