Alchemy Station

Every other station hands you a list of recipes. This one hands you a fire, a set of dials and an empty book.

Research is where it starts. Pick anything in your inventory and spend a little crafting experience to reveal what it actually does to a person — health, energy, thirst, blood, fatigue, sickness. Items that have never been studied do not have those numbers yet; researching one is what brings them into being. You also learn its colour, which carries through into whatever you brew with it.

Infusions are the half the cooks care about. One liquid and five herbs of a single kind go in; the station adds up the stats of all six and then doubles the result. That goes into food and drink at the cooking station, or into something stronger here.

Concoctions are the real work, and they open at level five. Choose your ingredients, how long it brews and how hot it runs. Time raises the numbers steadily. Heat raises them further and makes them wild — the same recipe that gives thirty energy at a gentle flame can give you minus thirty at a fierce one. Nobody knows what a concoction does until it is tested, on yourself or on a friend who owes you a favour.

When you find something worth keeping, scribe it. It becomes a real potion with your name on the recipe, permanent, and other herbalists can go looking for it. Finished potions can be added to food and drink left out in the world — and without the skill to check, nobody can tell whether the meal in front of them has been improved or poisoned. They find out afterwards.