Alchemy

Alchemical Tools
To become an alchemist you must first set up alchemist tools in your house. You can obtain alchemy tools from a haberdasher or by creating one through a Tool Workshop production workshop.

You must choose your ingredients wisely and use them in the tool. Using an excess of items will use up unnecessary resources so choosing the correct amount of ingredients is optimal to maximize resources and reduce cost.

Ingredient Tiers & Substitutes
For all recipes/designs you can use the general substitution rules based on tiers: Other options of interchangeable ingredients: Blood is interchangeable in certain groups: Different amounts of ingredients might work too.
 * 1 ingredient of green grade can be replaced by 2-3 white grade ingredients and vice versa.
 * 1 ingredient of blue grade can be replaced by 3-5 white grade ingredients and vice versa.
 * 1 fresh fish can be replaced by 2 dried fishes and vice versa.
 * Wild grass can be substituted with weed

Plant Ingredients
Plant ingredients are obtained sometimes when gathering from plants or mushrooms or - more frequently - when harvesting the farmed version. Some can be obtained by logging trees by workers or manually.

Crystals & Gems
There are several Gemstones which are either mined from certain rocks once one achieves Gather: Skilled(5) or from certain Nodes - both yield the raw material as "Rough ..." which can be processed by grinding them. Last but not least they can be obtained via heating of certain accessories:
 * Diamond - Yuria Accessories, Rainbow Stones
 * Emerald - Kalis Accessories, Rainbow Stones, Beryl veins in Secret Cave
 * Ruby - Bares/Elisha Accessories, Rainbow Stones, Coal Node in Omar Lava Cave
 * Sapphire - Hesus Accessories, Rainbow Stones
 * Topaz - Talis Accessories, Rainbow Stones
 * Opal - Strange Rocks Epheria Ridge, Copper Node in Mediah Shore

Powders & Traces
There are "Traces of ..." as well which one can obtain from worker after one has unlocked secret gathering nodes. Reportedly human workers have a higher chance of obtaining those. Prepare to have 5 empty warehouse slots. Some traces are mob-loot only. A few can be obtained by heating looted weapons as well, the latter will yield pure metal crystals too:

Special Products
While producing items through Alchemy, you will occasionally receive items to turn in at collection NPCs. These items can be turned in for contribution, alchemy ingredients, alchemy EXP, and silver in Heidel or Florin.