The Alchemist's Cookbook

The vanilla game includes a handful of recipes for potions and poisons you can make. This isn't bad; it's a more interesting way to discover secondary effects than burning perks on alchemy, randomly combining things until you stumble into new effects, or just looking the effects up on UESP.

They aren't a particularly good system, though. The vanilla recipes don't cover anything interesting. There's not very many recipes, and there are quite a few ingredients and many, many more combinations of ingredients. They don't teach you the effect, so you're still better off ignoring them, and just finding the ingredient on your own and then discovering its effects the usual boring way.

The final problem isn't specific to recipes, it's general to the alchemy system. Your potions and poisons don't usually get more interesting as the game goes on. You're likely to keep slapping together two ingredients that you know work (everyone remembers what Wheat and Blue Mountain Flowers make) and make a simple potion with one effect - maybe two if you're ambitious - rather than the 4 or 5 effects you could have. Otherwise, you have to keep an entire apothecary on you all the time and memorize what ingredients have what effects to make what interesting combination. It's simply too much to remember, and the UI only helps so much because there's so many ingredients with so many effects. Your potions don't get more interesting as you get better at alchemy, you just get bigger numbers out of them.

This is what the Alchemist's Cookbook exists to fix.

Recipes

This mod contains a recipe for every meaningful combination of ingredients. Any two ingredients that have an effect in common and can make a potion or poison are listed in a recipe. Any time adding a third ingredient makes a better potion or poison, that's another recipe. There are 40,000 different recipes just for ingredients in the base game, covering up to 5 different effects. The new recipes are given to alchemy shops across Skyrim, and exist in loot found on some enemies. Reading one will teach you the effects of the ingredients it lists.

You'll gain access to better recipes as you become a better alchemist, meaning that mastering alchemy isn't just a matter of bigger numbers, but making potions and poisons that do even more.

Ingredients from Mods

Out of the box, the installer comes with support for ingredients from the base game, Rare Curios, Saints and Seducers, and Toxic. But if you have other mods that add or edit ingredients, the recipes won't cover new ingredients and won't reflect different effects on changed ingredients. Instead of using one of the pre-made plugins, you'll want to use the zEdit patcher included in the installer.

The patcher will generate recipes by scanning all ingredients from any mod in your load order, checking their c