Table of Contents
Introduction
Black Desert Online is probably one of the most unique fantasy theme MMO that you can play. It has attracted a broad audience thanks to its very appealing graphics that paint a vast open-world with endless possibilities and activities, not to mention countless options for character customization.
In BDO, alchemy stones are items that can give the player benefits that depend on the type of stone in use. In this in-depth guide to alchemy stones, we will hopefully cover everything you might want to know about these items.
Types of Alchemy Stones
There are multiple different kinds of alchemy stones. You can find them in the marketplace, in the Alchemy stones section on the left.
Here you will find several types of alchemy stones: Destruction Stones, Protection Stones, Life Stones, and Spirit Stones.
Spirit stones can be bought relatively cheaply, and you get the same stats as a sturdy stone of any of the three types. If you don’t want to upgrade your alchemy stone, you can just buy a Spirit Stone. Nevertheless, if you reached for this guide, it means you probably want to know how to make your alchemy stone, so let’s proceed.
Tiers of Alchemy Stones
The basics of alchemy stones are that for each tier, they give different stats. For example, an imperfect alchemy stone will give +2 attack; the rough will give +3 and so on.
When you get to sturdy and then to sturdy yellow, they provide a lot better stats.
Alchemy stones go by three colors: they start at white, they progress to green, blue, and yellow. Yellow is the best one so far. You can also proceed to shiny, splendid, and fancy. They’re like accessories; once they blow up, you can’t get them back.
The destruction stones are for offensive combat.
Protection stones are for people who want to play a little tankier; Defensive stones give defensive stats like evasion, resistance, more HP, etc. A lot of people use life stones for all that proper life scaling.
How To Make Alchemy Stones
To make them, go to your alchemy tool. There is no specific recipe for making alchemy stones that will save itself in your knowledge list. First, you’re going to need Shining Powder. You can get this as a by-product of doing any sort of alchemy.
I would suggest making alchemy stones if you are artisan alchemy because that gives you the highest chance of getting shiny powder and of making alchemy stones instead of broken alchemy shards.
Ingredients For Alchemy Stones
These are like crushed alchemy stones, but they’re the by-products of alchemy stones. Next, you’re going to need Sinner’s Blood and then Clear Liquid Reagent. Lastly, you’re going to need Powder of Time, which you can get by going to any lead or node where you will get powder of time as secondary material. The amount you need is 10 of each, which is to ensure a 100% success rate on the alchemy stone crafting.
- 10x Shining Powder
- 10x Sinners Blood
- 10x Pure Powder Reagent
- 10x Clear Liquid Reagent
- 10x Powder of Time
You can use fewer materials to make the alchemy stone. For example, 9 Shining Powder, 6 Blood of the Sinners, 10 Clear Liquid Reagent, 10 Pure Powder Reagents, and 7 Powder of Time, but that works 70% of the time. This is why I would suggest going for 10 of each since it’s the simplest and safest way to go. Once you have all the ingredients, just click Continuous Production and F to do your max.
As a side note, alchemy stones and upgrading can be costly, so if you don’t have the extra money or silver lying on the side, I really wouldn’t recommend upgrading one of these for yourself. It would probably be a lot cheaper just to buy one off the market.
Alchemy Stone Proc Rate
You’re not going to get an alchemy stone every single time, but you will be able to get many of them at artisan. You’re probably going to proc more alchemy stones than you are going to proc broken alchemy stone shards.
The broken alchemy shards you can just sell to an NPC, or you can just trash them. Also, you should keep in mind that, as a general rule, the Imperfect stones of Life and Destruction can be sold on the market. The Protection stones just don’t seem to raise the same interest to people on the market. You can sell these as well to an NPC.
In the market, you can make about 400.000 silver off of each one you make. I wouldn’t recommend buying Shining Powder off the market just because it is costly (36.6 cases over each and they usually do go for max), and you do need ten each attempt on an alchemy stone you make.
Going back to the marketplace, go to the register, and you’re just going to register your alchemy stones here. This is the part where you can make some good money. If you gather all the materials yourself, you will make a profit of 400.000 silver. If you decide to buy some of the materials, for example, half of the required amount, you are going to lose out on some of that silver. Remember to put them for max because they will always sell at max themselves.
Recharge, Polish and Growth
Let’s say you have an imperfect alchemy stone of life. You can click the alchemy tab in the inventory where you will find three options: recharge, polish, and growth.
Recharge is where the durability of your alchemy stone runs out every single time you use it. If you take your alchemy stone and you throw it into your recharge section, it will tell you that you need an ingredient to recharge.
For alchemy stones to recharge, it says on the description on the item what you need to use to recharge it. For example, fuel is oil, blood, and reagents; polishing materials are high-quality crops and particular crops. I use blood, like a sinner’s blood or any other type of blood. You just throw them all in and click recharge. It will also tell you how much you need to recharge fully, but you can throw in as much as you want to.
Polishing Stones
Polishing raises the XP of an alchemy stone for it to grow to the next grade or level. You can attempt an alchemy stone growth at 80%. Basically, by polishing, you reach that level so you can proceed to growth. In the growth section, you will be shown the tears that you can get. You will need to use one black stone weapon for the attempt, and from here, it’s relatively simple.
Growth Alchemy Stones
All you need to do is click growth. The fail penalty will be the EXP down. If the attempt fails, you can go back to growth and see that the EXP decreased from the initial amount.
For example, if I throw an Imperfect Alchemy Stone, which has a 75% EXP, I can polish it by using 50 special strawberries, which will increase its EXP at 108%.
Since it has exceeded 80%, I can go on and attempt the growth. On the left, it is going to show the tiers that you can get. In my case, at the bottom of the list, I have the Rough Alchemy Stone of Life, which is white, the Green Imperfect, and the Green Rough.
Next, you will need to use one Black Stone Weapon for the attempt. From here, it is relatively simple. All you have to do is click growth, and the fail penalty will be the XP decrease.
In my case, since it has failed, now the XP of the stone is 54%. Furthermore, if I throw a sharp alchemy stone of life and it fails the growth, the penalty will be EXP decrease plus a grade down. There is a 3% chance to succeed, a 70% chance to downgrade, and a 97% chance to fail. The success of the growth could be a Resplendent Alchemy Stone of Life, which gives a – 1.7s cooking time, +17% processing success rate, +90LT weight limit, and a +16% gathering item drop rate. This is why it is essential to make sharp backup alchemy so I can attempt it once more.
You might ask yourself if you can do this for every alchemy stone. The answer is no. Every alchemy stone requires a different type of material to polish it. For sturdy ones, you will need pure metals and metal ingots, and for the growth, it still requires the black stone weapon. The weapon will never change; just the polishing materials are the one that varies. As your alchemy stone levels up, the more polishing materials you are going to need. For imperfect stones, meaning the white ones, you will only need 50 special strawberries to cross into the 100% threshold, whereas for a sturdy alchemy stone of life, you would need 200 to 250 special strawberries. As I was saying before, this process can get quite expensive once you get to the higher alchemy stones of life.
How To Get Polishing Materials
In order to get the polishing material, I would recommend getting special strawberries because they do give the highest tier of XP for an alchemy stone of life. Special strawberries on the market go for about 6.000 silver each. They are decently low priced at the moment. It gets expensive, especially when you start going into the tens of thousands of strawberries that you are going to be using to burn into your alchemy stone. What I would suggest in this situation is farming and growing your special strawberries because by increasing your own, you won’t need to buy them off the market, and thus you will be saving a little bit of extra silver. In other words, farms will push you a little bit further in the alchemy stone upgrading game.
To conclude, this is about all there is to upgrading alchemy stones, polishing them, and making them yourselves. You should not be discouraged but be prepared to fail multiple times. Alchemy stones can be a hassle, and they do have a much bigger chance to fail compared to, let’s say, gear crafting.
Tips and Tricks
Other tips that you might want to consider in case you do decide to try your luck with stone alchemy:
Mass enhancing is an excellent way of increasing your odds of success. If you mass enhances, you cut down on the probability that it is going to fail. If you do decide to mass enhance and a stone doesn’t go past a particular color or a specific grade, I would just trash it because otherwise, you’re just going to end up blowing more materials.
When you find a stone that is high color – low tier, you want to stick with that and burn it through to a sharp. A key thing to remember is that you want to go for a high color – low grade. If it’s yellow and perfect, you have a better chance of succeeding at getting a polished yellow, a sturdy yellow, and a sharp yellow.
The alchemy level of your character can also impact your chance.
Another hypothesis is that you need to reach a certain threshold of silver to get the next gain. This could also tie into you need to fail a certain amount of times before you eventually get it, which means that there may or may not fail stocks when it comes to alchemy stones that are just purely hidden.
All in all, alchemy stones can prove to be a lot of work to obtain, but if you get there, you can earn a massive amount of silver from making them and pushing them to the highest tiers.
You will find many theories about what works and doesn’t when it comes to stone alchemy, but don’t forget that this game is really about progression. It’s not a race, it’s a marathon. You will, eventually, get your shop alchemy stone of life, just keep working at it and don’t forget to enjoy yourself while at it.