So, you want to be an alchemist?
What can you do?
You can take ingredients, and make them into potions, which people drink or rub on things to produce effects.
Where do you get ingredients from?
Your alchemy skills will give you a certain number of the ingredient slots per week. You can fill each of these with one of the five basic ingredients automatically, before play starts, or with an exotic ingredient if you can aquire the material for one in uptime.
How do you combine them into potions?
You simply mix together the ingredients specified in the recipe. This takes 5 seconds per ingredient involved, and must be drunk as soon as you've finished.
Or, alternatively, if you don't want to have to be there when they drink it, there is a skill that lets you preprepare stabilised potions (sometimes referred to as elixirs), which anyone can take away and drink; these take 5 seconds to drink.
What ingredients are there?
There are 5 basic ingredients, which have fancy IC names but are best thought of as Red, Green, Blue, Cloudy and Sparkly. Each of these has an associated skill; you can prepare as many of any of them as you want to (limited by the total number of ingredients your skills let you prepare each week), but no potion you make can include more than your skill level in that ingredient of each ingredient. These can be prepared for free, with no uptime/downtime action needed.
There are also exotic ingredients. If you find something fun in uptime or downtime, like a troll heart or some rockrose, you can prepare it into a special exotic ingredient if you have the relevant skill. To find out what, if any, potions you can use this to make, you'll need to have the alchemical research skill, and spend some time in downtime finding out. N.B. it is quite likely that two seemingly-identical exotic ingredients will have different properties, and that these properties will change over time.
One other ingredient worth mentioning is base. Base is a special exotic ingredient - you don't need to find anything in uptime to prepare it, you just need the relevant skill. Base on its own has no properties, but if you expose it to a magical or spiritual effect it becomes conditioned by that effect for five minutes, and can be used in the preparation of magical and spiritual potions if you've researched a way of doing so.
Can you do anything except make potions?
Yes, there are some other alchemy skills that fit around this. You can learn to recognise alchemical ingredients and potions, for example. See the skills list for further details.