Crafting
Potions are the one thing you make rather than find. This is how the cauldron works, and what it is worth spending a run gathering for.
Senna keeps the cauldron in town, and what comes out of it makes a run better than the one before it. You swing faster, you find more, you last longer. She will brew anything you can pay for, and paying means ingredients you picked up yourself.
You learn a recipe by making it
Nothing in the world drops a recipe. Senna's list shows what you already know how to brew, plus the things she could attempt with ingredients you are holding. The only way to find out what one of those is, is to order it and see what comes back.
An unknown order tells you the kind of thing it makes before you commit. It will say it quickens the hand, or sharpens your luck. It will not tell you the name, or how strong it is. That is the part you are buying.
You start out knowing three, so the first bottle is never far away. A new zone usually puts a new one within reach.
Ingredients come from stopping to pick them
Reagents grow in the world, and you get them by spending a run gathering instead of fighting. You choose that before you set out. A run spent gathering brings back no gear.
One gathering run funds roughly two runs of drinking, so it is a trip you make now and then rather than a chore you keep up with.
Which ingredient you come back with is decided by where you went.
| Reagent | Grows in |
|---|---|
 Barrow Moss | Duskfall Ruins, The Ashen Wastes, The Sunken Depths, The Blighted Reaches, The Abyssal Court, The Eternal Ruin |
 Ashwort | The Ashen Wastes, The Frozen Expanse, The Veil, The Blighted Reaches, The Eternal Ruin |
 Rimecap | The Frozen Expanse, The Storm Peaks, The Shattered Plane, The Eternal Ruin |
 Silt Tuber | The Sunken Depths, The Shattered Plane, The Eternal Ruin |
 Veilspore | The Veil, The Abyssal Court, The Eternal Ruin |
 Fulgurite | The Storm Peaks, The Abyssal Court, The Eternal Ruin |
Every zone past the first grows two things, so whichever zone you have settled in, something a recipe wants grows there.
The cauldron is the bottleneck
Senna brews one bottle at a time. You can queue several, but they go through the pot in order and each one takes real minutes. The queue keeps working while the game is closed.
Gold and ingredients are rarely what stops you. Cauldron time is.
Brewing the same thing makes you better at it
Every bottle Senna makes for you improves her hand with that recipe, and it never stops improving. It shows up in two ways.
Quality is the early climb. It is what the reveal is telling you when it names your bottle.
- Crude
- Sound
- Fine
- Masterful
- Perfected
A better bottle is a stronger effect. The more useful half is the bottom of the ladder rather than the top. As you keep brewing, the worst result you can get keeps rising, so a bad run of luck stops costing you much. Quality does eventually top out.
Duration does not. Once quality has gone as far as it goes, every further bottle lengthens how long the effect lasts, with no limit. In practice there is still a ceiling, and it is an obvious one. Eventually the potion lasts the whole run, and there is nothing past that.
This is tracked per recipe. The bottle you brew most is the one that gets long enough to cover a whole run.
One potion per effect at a time
Two potions that do the same thing do not add up. Drink a second and it replaces the first, at the new bottle's strength, on a fresh clock.
A bottle that grants two effects at once replaces both of the single-effect potions it overlaps with. It is a swap, not a stack.
Effects keep running while you travel between fights, and through a duel. They do not pause, and they run out while you are offline.
Health potions are not part of this
The bottles you drink to stay alive are bought at the gate on your way out, not brewed. You set how much of your gold to spend on them before a run, and your fighter drinks them on their own when their health gets low. Senna has nothing to do with them.
In a duel, every potion is its weakest version
Against another player, whatever you drink counts at the strength of the crudest possible bottle. A Perfected one and a Crude one do exactly the same thing.
That is the same rule the whole game is built on: gear decides fights between players. Time at the cauldron makes you faster and richer against the world. It does not buy you an advantage over a person.