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Alchemy, in one case referred as forging, is a recurring element and process in the Dragon Quest series, in which new items can be created from existing ones, often after mixing them with a wide variety of materials.

Introduced as a complete gameplay mechanic in Dragon Quest VIII, the process not only is controllable but it is also an excellent mean for either creating new items manually, or enhance an already made item.

Alchemy is a fantastic way to recycle older equipment, with the results often significantly greater than the sum of their parts and well worth resisting the temptation to sell the old scrap off.

Appearances[]

Dragon Quest IV[]

Alchemy first debuted in the series as a crucial plot element mentioned in IV, in relation to Meena and Maya's father, the esteemed Mahabala. A true genius in his field of expertise, Mahabala not only found a way of creating gold using alchemy, but he made also many other amazing discoveries, such as the Night light, or the magical elevators in his private secret laboratory.

Unfortunately, his latest and perhaps greatest breakthrough lead to the rediscovery of the Secret of Evolution, a forbidden and dangerous alchemical art not meant for mortal use; recognizing its enourmous danger, the master alchemist tried to destroy his research, but before he could do that, Mahabala met his demise at the hands of his second apprentice, Balzack, a traitorous individual who was waiting, biding his time for such an occasion to backstab his master and steal his research for himself.

Due to Balzack's self-serving agenda, the Secret of Evolution fell into the hands of Psaro, the misguided Master of Monsterkind, and his much more loathsome right-hand man, Aamon, which not only lead to many inhuman experiments being performed, but also endangering the world as never before.

Dragon Quest VI[]

While not a complete example of alchemic synthesis, VI presents the option to strengthen some pieces of equipment thanks to the Fashion Forge, a shop found in the Real World. While the process is primarily meant to increase the Style value of the object, it will sometime strengthen even its other characteristics.

Dragon Quest VIII[]

Main article: List of alchemy recipes in Dragon Quest VIII

Alchemy debuts as a gameplay feature in this title.

After may nights of hard labor, King Trode repairs the Alchemy Pot he had managed to salvage from the ruins of his castle, and presents it, fully repaired, to the Hero while aboard the ship sailing to Peregrin Quay. At first, only two ingredients can be combined, but the pot will be upgraded by Trode to handle three at once after the Pickham incident.

In the original PS2 version of the game, the pot will boil as it combines the ingredients while the Hero walks through towns and the over world, but not in dungeons where the Wagon cannot traverse safely, with different times required depending on what difficulty rank the recipe was classified as; the pot can however, be upgraded to instantly complete a concoction as a reward for defeating the Lord of the Dragovians. In the Nintendo 3DS port, this boiling system was however scrapped, and instead the recipe will always finish immediately once the ingredients are added; as such the reward from the Lord of the Dragovian's defeat was changed to unlocking the dungeon of Memories Lane.

Many alchemy recipies can be found by reading books from bookshelves and speaking with townsfolk, though some recipes, like some redundant or downgrade ones, are never fully alluded, making it necessary to freely experiment with the system in order to discover them all; however as a general rule of thumb, if there is a recipe to upgrade an item, then there is also a recipe to downgrade it and return it to the original form, thou this is not always true. In the original version, most formulas taken from tomes only hinted towards their required materials while leaving some elements unclear, but in the 3DS port, all ingredients are listed in the recipe book once the player gets the initial hint.

There are four recipes that are found, instead from hints from people or inside books, as notes dropped on the floor, as part of a game of hide-and-seek proposed by the armor shop merchant of Farebury; not only these notes are barely visible, they only appear in hard to find places after certain story events, and are furthermore, since they are not technically counted as items, not signalated by the Nose for Treasure skill. These four recipes are:

The armor shop merchant of Farebury will offer an hint to where to find the next recipe note, if spoken to after the necessary story events have been achieved; however, he will skip any previous hints, if multiple progression prerequisites have already been achieved, meaning that he will only speak about the most recently available recipe note. The 3DS version makes these notes slighty more easily findable, thanks to the balloon of interaction popping out when near them.

Should the selection of ingredients attempted to be used in Alchemy result into a failure, the ingredients are not lost, instead they are simply ejected back into the bag.

Dragon Quest IX[]

Main article: List of alchemy recipes in Dragon Quest IX
Main article: List of alchemy ingredients in Dragon Quest IX

Even further expanded in IX, the Hero can use alchemy to create a huge selection items, one of the largest in the entire series, thanks to the use of the sentient Krak Pot at Quester's Rest. The Krak Pot does not become available until after the gate east of Stornway opens. Erinn then puts the Krak Pot on the inn's counter for usage.

In IX, alchemy is by far, the primary mean to obtain superior gear, with its best recipes surpassing by a large margin in quality any equipment bought or found in chests. Like in VIII, these recipes can be found by searching bookcases, for both common and rare items. In fact, mechanically speaking, alchemy has not changed much from VIII: it is still possible to manually mix items, which may or may not produce a resulting item, If an item is not made, the items are returned to the bag and not consumed, and most of the recipes are still left to discover though experimentation.

And only by experimenting it is possible to create a set of the rarest, and strongest, recipes of them all, the 22 Alchemiracles, a reaction that occur as a low-chance event during particular mixings.

Dragon Quest X[]

Once again, Alchemy return as both a gameplay element, and also an important story element, being used at multiple points in both the story, and various sidequests, in order to solve some crucial issues. Both the Hero's sibling, and Linker, are noted to be supremely talented master alchemists.

Alchemy can be accessed through the Alchemy Pot, used to create some useful items.

Rocket Slime[]

In Rocket Slime, the Krak Pot must be found on Mt. Krakatroda. It requires the use of recipes, most of which are acquired from rescued slimes.

Dragon Quest XI[]

Known in this title as Forging, it is accomplished thanks to the Fun-Size Forge, an item gifted to the Luminary by Erik while inside The Manglegrove. The basics of forging are pretty much the same as classic alchemy, use raw materials to create something new; however the process is this title is strictly relegated for pieces of equipment, no consumable items; furthermore there is no free development, meaning that acquiring forging recipes is necessary in order to create each object.

Unlike alchemy, forging is an active process, requring to pound into shape different sections of each items, filling in the process a meter. Each meter has a sweet spot, which is considered the perfect point to reach; failing to reach said ideal spot, either by not filling the meter enough, or by overshooting it, will result into a smelting error, which may drop the overall initial quality of the item.

As the Hero increses his level, he'll learn more exotic forging techniques, such as a cross hit, heating up the forge, or cooling it down, which combined will increasingly make forging a perfect piece of equipment, more and more easy. Leveling up and collecting recipes also gives him more focus, allowing him an easier timr at hammering tougher into shape equipment.

Forging also offers the possibility to enhance already made equipment pieces, up to three extra "levels of quality", +1-3, with no detriments as, once raised, the quality of the object cannot drop. The better the forging process is executed (by reaching gold in the various bars, or as close as possible), the better will be the initial quality of the equipment created, with an almost flawless forging usually resulting in the item already being of +3 quality. One doesn't have to get all bars to gold standards to get a +3 ranking, usually about half the number of gold bars will do.

Should the initial forging process be less than optimal (be it because of under or overshooting a bar's acceptable range), it's still possible to enhance the item thanks to the use of Perfectionist's pearls, usually received after the successful creation of something on the forge or bought at L'Académie de Notre Maître des Médailles; the better the piece of equipment, the more pearls it will require to work on it.

No matter if they were created on the forge from the beginning, bought in a shop or found as a treasure, almost every piece of equipment can be enhanced up to a +3 quality, with only certain exceptions being unable to be enhanced at all. Due note however, overshooting in forging is a massive detriment to the item's quality.

Dragon Quest Heroes[]

Alchemy returns pretty predominantly once again in Dragon Quest Heroes, performed thanks to an Alchemy Pot similar in appearance to the basic model of the one in Dragon Quest VIII, and each operation requires a fee of gold.

With the alchemy shop found inside the Stonecloud, alchemy is trictly used to only create Accessories; once again, there is no free development, requiring to posses the related recipes in order to create items. Most accessories have three different tiers of recipes, Quick, Classic and Luxury, with the exception of the first five items, the Gold ring, Gold chain, Gold bracer, Scholar's specs, and Bunny tail accessories, which have only the first two recipe variants. The Quick recipe for the Gold ring is made available after speaking to the old alchemist the first time once his alchemy pot is up and running, alongside its required ingredients.

Once learned, a recipe can never be found or bought again and it is brought over with the Flying Start Mode (essentially New Game+), making them, by all means, permanent.

Usually, the better quality recipes not only require a less quantity of, or perhaps a more common alternative, of raw materials compared to the inferior recipes, but they also having better chances to receive additional perks thanks to a Sweet Success creation. This additional perk is applied alongside their default abilities, and each type of accessory have their own separate polls of possible perks to choose at random from.

Accessories can also be fused together in order to increase their rank, up to a +3 quality, with each rank allowing an additional extra perk to be stacked on the same accessory. During the fusing process, its possible to choose to trasfer one of the perks already possessed by the accessory used as material to the accessory used as a base, or to leave to chance on what new perk the item will receive,

There are two ways to obtain Alchemy recipes: firstly, unlike the other two tiers of recipes, the Quick recipes have the additional option to be purchased by exchanging Mini medals; the other method, which is the only way to find Classic and Luxury tier recipes, is to obtain them as secret drops from monsters, drops that are not listed in their Monsterpedia entries. The Recipes can also, according to the old alchemist, randomly appear inside treasure chests, although this is an extremely rare occurance. It should be noted, that if a recipe is found on the battle field, that particular mission must be completed or the spell Evac must be used in order to keep the items found. If the Mission fails, all the Spoils found, including any possible Recipe, are lost.

It is important to know that each accessory's recipe has only a select few monsters that are capable of dropping it, making some of higher-grade recipes quite elusive to find: for example the recipes necessary for creating an Endure ring can only drop from coffer-like monsters, like Canniboxes, while the Elevating shoes recipe can only be found from the Metal slime family members and so forth. Their elusive nature is only further increaded due to the fact that the natural drop rate of the recipes in general, is incredibly low by default, and there is no apparent way to increase it. A general rule of thumb, although not always true, is that the stronger members of the same monster family have better chances to drop higher-quality recipes for the particular accessory they are associated with.

As such, since it is not ideal to find a Quick recipe as a drop that could had been purchased instead, it is preferable to spend some Mini medals and learn all the Quick recipes as soon as possible, thusly increasing the chances for the monsters to drop the better, rarer quality recipes rather then the ones that are already more easily accessible.

Recipe drop list[]

Accessory Quick recipe Mini medal cost Monster species
Gold ring Pink sanguini
Gold chain 1 Slime knight, Metal slime knight
Gold bracer 1 Skeleton
Scholar's specs 1 Magus
Bunny tail 1 Teeny sanguini, Pink sanguini
Slime earrings 2 Slime, She-slime, Agoomulator
Stimulating specs 2 Hell gladiator
Strength ring 2 Troll
Prayer ring 2 Golem
Care ring 2 Chimaera, Hocus chimaera
Endure ring 2 Cannibox, Mimic, Pandora's box
Rousing ring 2 Drackmage, Drackyma
Ring of truth 2 Bag o' laughs, Goodybag
Ring of immunity 2 Walking corpse, Toxic zombie, Corpse corporal
Pink pearl ring 2 Silvapithecus
Bow tie 2 Hawk man
Wrecklace 2 Hunter mech, Killing machine (not the boss variant), Trialblazer (Killing machine variant; Type G0 variant)
Adamant pendant 2 Restless armour
Heart pendant 2 Muddy hand, Bloody hand
Papillon pendant 2 Dracky
Beckoning bell 2 Hammerhood
Banishing bell 2 Bubble slime
Tough guy tattoo 2 Brownie
Lucky dragon's wing 2 Hacksaurus, Tyrantosaurus, Dread dragon, Green dragon (not the boss variant)
Monarchic mark 2 King slime, King cureslime
Loin-girder 2 Grinade
Fishnet stockings 2 Imp
Garter 2 Minidemon
Raging ruby 7 Stone golem
Ruby of protection 7 Lethal armour
Agility ring 7 Cureslime, Genie sanguini
Life ring 7 Healslime, Man o' war
Goddess ring 7 Hellion, Marquis de Léon (not the boss variant)
Mirror ring 7 Archdemon
Nacreous necromonocle 7 Rockbomb, Bomboulder
Sock-it locket 7 Shaman, Sorcerer
Mugger's mask 7 Gold Golem
Gold rosary 7 Great sabrecat, Skeleton soldier, Dark skeleton
Titan belt 7 Living statue, Boss troll (not the boss variant), Stout troll
Block-it locket 15 Gargoyle
Venus' tear 15 Belial, Roseguardin
Mighty armlet 15 Demon-at-arms (not the boss variant), Zombie gladiator, Stone guardian (not the boss variant)
Sorcerer's ring 15 Moosifer, Barbatos (not the boss variant)
Dogged collar 15 Overkilling machine, Überkilling machine (not the boss variant)
Ace of spoils 15 Pazuzu
Catholicon ring 15 Cosmic chimaera (not the boss variant)
Elevating shoes 15 Metal slime, Liquid metal slime, Metal king slime
Meteorite bracer 20 Type G0

Dragon Quest Heroes II[]

Alchemy returns again in this title, performed thanks to a massive cauldron at the alchemy shop of Accordia, and each operation requires a fee of gold. Just as the previous title, alchemy is once again restricted to accessories; compared to before however the process has been overhauled and streamlined.

Accessories are now fairly common drops from monsters, with no recipe required to create one from scratch. Instead alchemy and materials are used to increase the rank of the singular accessory, up to a +10 quality. Each rank increases the attributes of the accessory, sometimes even unlocking additional effects, thou each individual accessory, even two of the same kind, have some variations on what material or in what quantity, each rank require in order to achieve.

Furthermore higher ranks require powder fragments of that particular type of accessory, only obtained by shattering a copy of that same accessory, the better the rank of the accessory shattered, the more powder is obtained. So for example to upgrade to a better rank some Slime earrings, some quantity of Slime earrings powder, obtained by shattering other Slime earrings, is needed, and shattering a +3 pair of Slime earrings will yield more Slime earrings powder than a pair of +1 Slime earrings would.

Unlike any other title, only one of a particular accessory can be equiped at once on the same character, with no copies of the same object being allowed.

Dragon Quest Swords[]

Main article: Sword tempering in Dragon Quest SwordsIn this title, the process is known as Sword tempering; done by the weapon shop in the town of Castle Avalonia, like before, it can be used to transform lesser equipment into stronger tools, but this time around it is only available for Swords. Furthermore, Sword tempering often will yield newly learned Master Stroke techniques alongside the created item.

See Also[]

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