Potion Mixer

If you're like me, over the course of a game you tend to either forget to use or outright ignore many of the lower level potions you still come across all over the game world once you start finding or making really good potions.  Whether from enemy loot, dungeon chests or just lying around loose, most players tend to accumulate a large amount of low level potions that have effects that are fairly weak and useless on their own if you don't intend to use 5 of them at once.  This mod allows you to combine these lower level potions into higher level ones at a cooking pot or spit, making those formerly less than useful potions and poisons useful again as you use your Alchemy skill to combine them into much more potent versions.

At a low Alchemy skill level your available crafting recipes will be rather inefficient as you will require more low level components in order to create high level results.  The higher your Alchemy skill rises as you improve your skill from this mixing along with your normal alchemy pursuits, the fewer the number of low level potions and poisons are required to create the higher level versions as lower level and inefficient recipes are replaced with high efficiency and in some cases extra powerful recipes - that is sometimes you'll get a more powerful result than what you might have expected from the components you put into a combination if your skill level is high enough.  All of the various cooking apparatus (pots and spits) have been modified to grant Alchemy skill when creating items at the respective crafting station so just doing some basic low level potion mixing will start to raise your skill levels to useful numbers.

All recipes are conditioned to require you to have a certain number of lower level potions before they appear in your crafting list.  This cuts down on menu spam so you don't have a massive list of possibilities to scroll through when crafting as only the recipes you do or come close to qualifying for (considering skill level and crafting components in inventory) will appear in your available listings.  The new recipes also take into account your Alchemy skill when it comes to when the more efficient recipes become available, higher level potions with effects deemed to be more powerful tend to have higher requirements when it comes to the "skilled" recipes available.

For example, high level recipes for a Paralyze poison require more Alchemy skill to appear then a simple Restore Stamina potion would as the Paralyze effect is generally considered a more powerful and useful effect than Restore Stamina.  The exact requirements vary by effects, generally most effects start to get their more efficient recipes available by Alchemy skill level 40, with the moderate power effects requiring 50 or even 60 skill, and the most powerful effects and combinations requiring 80 or so Alchemy skill before you can create high level poisons and potions at a high efficiency level.