Draft:Potion
Potions are single-use liquids that restore health, remove conditions or grant temporary abilities. Ordinary potions appear as a light-green !. Omega has 18 ordinary kinds, including Azoth. The potion-shaped artifacts Life and Death share the random appearance pool but belong to the artifact category and use a different command.
Drinking an ordinary potion takes half the time of reading a scroll and remains possible while blind or afraid. A known potion in an accessible slot can therefore be a recovery tool precisely when a scroll cannot be read. Unidentified liquids can instead poison, weaken or kill the drinker.
List of potions
Ordinary potions weigh 20. Base values are in Au; shop quotes depend on the transaction and identification. Item level governs random generation, not drinking eligibility. This table summarizes non-cursed use, with important exceptions called out; the individual articles give exact effects and failure conditions.
| Potion | Base value | Item level | Main use or limitation |
|---|---|---|---|
| Quenching thirst | 0 | 0 | No restorative or magical effect |
| Alertness | 100 | 0 | Improve searching and reactions to certain surprise attacks |
| Object detection | 10 | 1 | Briefly mark ground-item locations in the current map view |
| Monster detection | 10 | 1 | Briefly show living monsters in the current map view |
| Speed | 40 | 1 | Haste and removal of slowness |
| Levitation | 50 | 1 | Temporary hovering; no benefit while mounted |
| Curing | 50 | 1 | Clear disease and blindness; reduce poison |
| Healing | 40 | 2 | Restore HP and clear blindness |
| Neutralize poison | 20 | 2 | Clear all current poison |
| Invisibility | 100 | 2 | Temporary invisibility; some monsters can see through it |
| Breathing | 30 | 2 | Protection against drowning while active |
| Banishing fear | 50 | 2 | Clear current fear; does not grant fear immunity |
| Restoration | 50 | 3 | Restore drained current attributes |
| Chaos | 100 | 3 | Move alignment toward Chaos |
| Accuracy | 200 | 3 | Does not provide its intended melee hit bonus in 0.90.4 |
| Regeneration | 100 | 4 | Gradual healing that spends mana |
| Augmentation | 200 | 5 | Raise current attributes, not their permanent maxima |
| Azoth | 1500 | 7 | Requires positive enchantment and blessing; raw doses are poisonous |
Potion-shaped artifacts
| Artifact | Base value | Item level | Weight | Use |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Potion of Life | 500 | 6 | 10 | Double maximum HP and heal to the new maximum |
| Potion of Death | 500 | 3 | 10 | Kill the user directly |
Both use the yellow artifact symbol & and Activate → artifact, not Quaff. Their ordinary random generation is subject to artifact uniqueness. They are absent from the normal potion-acquirement list and from automatically generated pawn-shop stock. Neither is an extra outcome hidden in the 18-kind potion probability table.
Obtaining potions
Ordinary potions occur in random treasure and monster loot. The pawn shop generates identified stock at source level 5; quenching thirst, whose base value is zero, is excluded from its normal restocking. Acquirement provides another route: an uncursed scroll chooses a random potion, while a blessed one lets the player choose any of the 18 kinds. The acquired potion does not inherit the scroll's blessing.
Ambrosias transforms selected corpses during daytime. A tse-tse fly or torpor beast yields alertness, a floating eye levitation, a transparent nasty invisibility, a tasmanian devil speed, and a denebian slime devil curing. These products are blessed; where the normal enchantment is zero, it is replaced by the monster kind's level. The price is twice the corpse's base value, at least 10 Au. Eating the corpse is a different action with different effects: a floating eye grants clairvoyance when eaten, for example, but produces levitation through alchemy.
Normally generated ordinary potions start uncursed. Except for Azoth, their enchantment is randomly 0 or higher: half are +0, one quarter +1, one eighth +2, and so on. Enchantment matters greatly to healing but not to every potion. Azoth starts at -1 and needs deliberate preparation; its high price does not make an unprepared dose safe.
Drinking and identification
Use Quaff (q) with a potion in accessible possessions, not still in the pack. A normal drink takes 10 time ticks. Blindness and fear do not block it. Cancelling before selecting a potion spends no item; after drinking begins, a dose is consumed even if it has no useful effect. Ordinary potions are not activated by merely carrying or equipping them.
All 18 ordinary kinds and the two potion-shaped artifacts receive different appearances from one shuffled pool of 20. The correspondence is fixed within a game and changes between games. No container description guarantees a healing potion, and Azoth does not retain a fixed mercury appearance. The artifact symbol and use category still distinguish Life and Death from ordinary potions.
An observed effect may let the player infer a kind without the game recording it as known. Most beneficial non-cursed potions automatically teach their type, but curing, regeneration, chaos, Azoth and quenching thirst do not. Conversely, accuracy can identify itself without providing the expected combat benefit. Use identification for the detailed state of a particular copy; Jane's guide may teach the whole ordinary-potion category, but not the two artifacts. Buying a known potion at the pawn shop also teaches its type.
Cursed names describe alternate states, not additional kinds. Potion of debilitation can mean cursed restoration or cursed augmentation, while Antinomy! is shared by multiple items. Some names even misdescribe the current effect: cursed invisibility causes vulnerability rather than making all monsters hostile, and cursed alertness does not actually put the drinker to sleep. Identifying the underlying kind is more useful than guessing solely from that name.
Choosing a remedy
Healing, curing and neutralize poison solve different emergencies. Healing restores HP and clears blindness but leaves poison and disease. Curing clears blindness and disease and removes a limited amount of poison; neutralize poison removes the whole poison counter. Regeneration spreads healing over time and requires mana, so it cannot replace an immediate heal at low HP. Carrying several distinct remedies is more dependable than treating every restorative-looking name as equivalent.
Restoration recovers drained attributes without increasing their maxima. Augmentation raises current attributes above those maxima but still does not improve the permanent maxima. A week of apartment recuperation resets current attributes to their maxima and can erase that surplus. Azoth can increase maximum Strength, but requires its own preparation and an overdose check; it is not a general all-attribute upgrade.
For hazardous movement, take breathing or levitation before entering danger. Levitation does not grant underwater breathing, and the special drowning emergency menu is not a normal opportunity to quaff an accessible potion. Fear removal reopens melee and reading but does not prevent the next fear attack. Buffs should be chosen for the actual hazard and their remaining duration, not simply consumed together because they are beneficial.
Duration and repeated use
Speed and regeneration use minute-type status updates; alertness, breathing, invisibility and levitation use ten-minute status updates. In ordinary indoor time, the latter run at ten-minute boundaries. Minute-type effects also receive an extra update at those boundaries, so a count of 100 is not exactly 100 displayed minutes. Outdoor travel and time-skipping services can advance time differently. The individual pages give durations in these updates so they can be compared without treating one update as one player action.
Many beneficial durations add on repeated use, but follow each potion's actual rule. Most positive timed effects no longer count down naturally once their counter reaches 1000; effects that clear a condition or change attributes do not become stronger by that timing rule. Speed also has a separate combat-stat refresh issue when drunk from a stack; its article explains why preparing a single dose matters.
Other interactions and older advice
Throwing an ordinary zero-damage potion at a creature does not apply its drinking effect. It can hand the item to a creature capable of carrying it, or drop it on the ground. Ambrosias' corpse transformations are the relevant alchemy service, not a recipe system for mixing any two potions in inventory.
Early player guides discuss reusing potions through ring slots. Omega 0.90.4 rejects non-rings in those slots, so that advice does not supply unlimited healing, speed or attribute gains here. Their individual tactical suggestions still need to be checked against the current item's effect and duration.
Random appearances
| Appearance | Appearance |
|---|---|
| vial of dewy liquid | jug of tarry black substance |
| flask of cold smoking froth | phial of glowing fluid |
| bottle of sickening slime | sac of greenish gel |
| wineskin of odorous goo | canteen of sweet sap |
| urn of clear fluid | clotted grey ooze |
| keg of bubbly golden fluid | tube of minty paste |
| pitcher of aromatic liquid | pot of rancid grease |
| thermos of hot black liquid | magnum of deep red liquid |
| vase full of ichor | container of white cream |
| syringe of clear fluid | can of volatile essence |
Generation probabilities
These probabilities apply to the ordinary random-object generator, conditional on the final item being an ordinary potion. Each cell gives the chance of one particular kind at that item level. Multiply by the heading's number of kinds for the group's combined share. The main catalogue supplies every potion's level. Values are rounded to three decimal places.
| Source level | Level 0 (2 kinds) | Level 1 (5) | Level 2 (5) | Level 3 (3) | Level 4 (1) | Level 5 (1) | Level 7 (1) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 0 | 21.270% | 10.794% | 0.317% | 0.317% | 0.317% | 0.317% | 0.317% |
| 1 | 14.065% | 9.423% | 4.782% | 0.141% | 0.141% | 0.141% | 0.141% |
| 2 | 8.772% | 8.772% | 5.877% | 2.982% | 0.088% | 0.088% | 0.088% |
| 3 | 6.959% | 6.959% | 6.959% | 4.662% | 2.366% | 0.070% | 0.070% |
| 4 | 6.242% | 6.242% | 6.242% | 6.242% | 4.182% | 2.122% | 0.062% |
| 5 | 5.995% | 5.995% | 5.995% | 5.995% | 5.995% | 4.017% | 0.060% |
| 6 | 5.767% | 5.767% | 5.767% | 5.767% | 5.767% | 5.767% | 1.961% |
| 7 | 5.659% | 5.659% | 5.659% | 5.659% | 5.659% | 5.659% | 3.792% |
| 8 or higher | 5.556% | 5.556% | 5.556% | 5.556% | 5.556% | 5.556% | 5.556% |
Derivation and limits
Each generation attempt chooses the potion category with probability 10/135, then one of 18 kinds uniformly. For item level l and source level d, acceptance requires l to be less than d plus a uniform random integer from 0 to 2, or a separate 1% chance. This gives acceptance weights of 1 for l < d, 0.67 for l = d, 0.34 for l = d + 1, and 0.01 for l ≥ d + 2.
For kind i, its conditional probability is a(level(i), d) / sum(a(level(j), d), over all 18 ordinary potion kinds j). At source level 0, for example, the denominator is 2 × 0.67 + 5 × 0.34 + 11 × 0.01 = 3.15; each level-0 kind therefore has probability 0.67 / 3.15, about 21.270%. The apparent abundance of low-level potions follows from rejection of other candidates, not a larger initial selection weight for those kinds.
The category's 10/135 weight is not its final share of all loot, since failed candidates restart category selection as well. The pawn shop applies a further value filter: its generated ordinary-potion stock excludes quenching thirst, so renormalize the source-level-5 row over the remaining 17 kinds when calculating that stock's distribution. Corpse transformations, fixed possessions and acquirement bypass this ordinary level filter. Life and Death use artifact generation and are not outcomes in this table.
For normally randomized potion enchantment, P(plus = k) = 1 / 2^(k + 1) for nonnegative integer k. This is independent of the item's level acceptance. Azoth's predefined -1 and the values assigned by corpse transformation are exceptions; the enchantment distribution does not describe them.