Talk:Stackable

When to dilute potions for alchemy?

The article states:

It can be advantageous to dilute (by dipping once) every potion a player finds at the first opportunity

Is this really a good tradeoff?

Advantages

From the entry:

• It won't affect the qualities of the potion

It does if the fountain happens to curse the dipped potion!

Some qualities do differ. This probably won't make a difference in a regular game, but could be important if you're attempting a food conduct for example. Potions that act differently when diluted are:

• potion of booze - undiluted can heal 1 hit point.
• potion of fruit juice - undiluted has greater nutrition
• potion of see invisible - different messages only.

• it is generally easier to do as one traverses the dungeon

If you dip as you find, you'll end up doing a lot more dipping, as dipping a big stack of potions of object detection is a lot more efficient than dipping them one-by-one as you find them.

• the fountains near your stash won't last forever

You can often make it last forever. Sometimes pools are created when dipping or quaffing. If it's really important to you, you can dig down on the fountain, which usually produces pools of water.

Other things you can do to reduce any perceived inconvenience:

• acquire teleport control and levelport to a fountain to do your dilution for alchemy
• establish your stash near a pool or moat as a permanent source of water. Typically serious alchemy occurs after visiting Vlad's Tower, with its guaranteed boots of water walking. Or you can always go skinny-dipping with your potions.

Disadvantages

That I can think of:

• Perhaps the author never makes a mistake, but for those of us who have a nonzero chance of making one, diluting useful potions unnecessarily simply makes it more likely that we will lose them in a water-related accident. Advice on Wikihack should be relevant to such players.

• Dipping in fountains early on is a really bad idea for the following reasons:
  • You're less able to deal with hostile water demons or water moccasins
  • You'll have a harder time recovering your important items from a water nymph
  • Drowning your pet early on can be inconvenient
  • You may not have a unicorn horn to remove any wisdom loss due to abuse
  • Personally I like to wait until I have at least 4 luck then quaff fountains for the stat increase - I never seem to find enough potions of gain ability, even though I hoard them and bless them before quaffing. This generally means waiting until you have found a (noncursed) luckstone and either a full moon or a coaligned altar or unicorn.

• Fountains are best kept for creating holy water and scrolls of blank paper if you have a magic marker. Generally it's more inconvenient to have no fountains and a cursed magic lamp in the early game than to have lots of undiluted potions to alchemize and a long trek to Medusa in the mid/late game.

• Diluted potions don't stack with undiluted potions. This could cause inventory management issues if you haven't found a bag yet.

I'll leave this for responses for a while then change the page appropriately unless there are strong objections. Don't worry I won't put all this up.

--Rogerb-on-NAO 23:25, 22 May 2008 (UTC)