Can you collect igredients for the alchemist quests...

[Shaidyn]

...before you actually pick up the quests?

Whenever I roll a new vict-er, character for ToME, the first thing I do after getting out of the starter dungeon is collect the four alchemist quests so I can start collecting. Is this necessary? If I play to level 10 and then get the quests, will I have some of the ingredients already?

Thanks.

[Radon26]

prety sure the quests do not check for what you already have, so yeah, you probably will.

[Amphouse]

Yes, you can take the quests whenever you want and it won't make you miss out on any ingredients. In fact there is an option to see what ingredients you have in the ESC menu.

[ghostbuster]

Ingredients are also useful in Embers. Some tinkers require ingredients like a minotaur nose or a sandworm tooth. Ingredient collection is completely independent from alchemist quests.

[Shaidyn]

prety sure the quests do not check for what you already have, so yeah, you probably will.

Just in case someone googles this years from now, you can collect ingredients for the alchemist quests in advance of picking up the quests themselves. This makes the early game a lot less annoying for me.

[Radon26]

i might have misunderstood the initial question.
yeah, things still drop, regardless of whether you have a quest for them or not.

[Coldbringer]

It's worth it to go to all the towns right away to see if there are equipment upgrades in the shops, and drown the rare citizens. Might as well pick up the alch quests while you are there.

But you get ingredients regardless of whether you have the quests or not. I know because I sometimes struggle to find the hermit, but once I do I can often complete one of his quests right away, or have a few of the ingredients he requires.

[Zizzo]

The earliest implementations of the alchemist quests (way back in the pre-1.0.0 betas IIRC) worked the way you feared: you could only collect ingredients that were mentioned in a potion recipe you'd been given. That got changed pretty quickly, for exactly the reason you describe: if you'd cleared the Scintillating Caves, for instance, before getting a recipe that called for a red crystal shard, you were pretty much up the proverbial creek. If you watch the game log carefully, you'll see "You collect a new ingredient" messages from the very beginning of the game, from things like trolls and red crystals and bears (or orcs, for Dwarves).