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Healing in Thymesia is a tricky business - sort of like opening a pack of digestives during an ill-fated picnic. It requires the ingestion of potions, and chugging said potions is a recipe for disaster if you pop the cap at the wrong time and you get a face full of a plague-coated scythe. You need to do it, but doing it can be fatal.
Heck, when you first start, sipping on your lifeline straight up isn’t effective. You will quickly conclude that healing in Thymesia is a bit naff. You don’t have many potions, they don’t heal enough, and more often than not, you are going to exude a whispered curse at the state of your health bar - before and after the gulp. This is where crafting and upgrading come into play.
How To Upgrade Your Potions
If you want your potions to be useful, you need to upgrade them. Upgrading potions is as easy as going to a Beacon, spending resources, and improving Capacity, Healing, and Ingredient limit. It’s straightforward, fairly self-explanatory, and the quickest way to gain longevity when exploring Thymesia.
- Capacity - Each upgrade will increase your stock of potions by one, to a maximum of six.
- Healing - Each upgrade will increase how much your potion heals
- Ingredients - Each Upgrade will increase how many Ingredients you can infuse into your potions, to a maximum of three.
The catch to upgrades is that you need Alchemy Enhancers, all of which are found on the hardest enemies in the game.
Where To Find Alchemy Enhancers
Alchemy Enhancers are dropped by Generals. These enemies are the mini-bosses of Thymesia and are incredibly difficult to kill. Each one is a challenge, but overcoming them is a guaranteed Alchemy Enhancer drop. This is reason enough to not only challenge them but also seek them out at all costs.
Generals become more common in later areas, but even early on, if you explore and complete Subquests, you can drastically increase the effectiveness of your potions. By the end of the second area, we managed to max out every stat of our potion, for example.
How To Craft Potions
Potions in Thymesia can be enhanced outside of simply investing in Alchemy Enhancers. This is done by crafting and is far more effective than simply upgrading your potions. To craft a new potion, your potion needs to have an available Ingredient Slot. Naturally, this makes unlocking an ingredient slot a priority when you are upgrading.
With an open slot, you can infuse an ingredient like parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme. Each one will grant a bonus effect which can range from increased healing (invalidating the actual Healing upgrade), energy restoration, or stat increases. Ingredients are very powerful and should be hunted down.
Where To Find Ingredients
Ingredients are more common than Alchemy Enhancers, but for the most part, they are dropped by the same enemies. This means you need to hunt down Generals and loot their corpses.
The main difference with Ingredients, however, is that their stats are random. Depending on the Sprig of sage, you could be increasing your healing by varying amounts. This makes hunting down more powerful variations of ingredients worthwhile and makes the constant murdering of Generals a must.
Three Different Potions
Finally, there are three types of potions in Thymesia, and they are unlocked as you kill various bosses. Each one has a slightly different effect, and they are all upgraded separately.
- Standard - This potion is your baseline. It is good at everything and has no downsides.
- Long - This potion heals more health, but each sip takes longer. Unlocked by killing Odur.
- Fast - This potion has reduced healing, but you drink it faster. Unlocked by killing Hanged Queen.
As a general rule, we would advise just sticking with the Standard potion, as it is more than capable of carrying you through the game without any negatives.