Distillation — Alchemy Overhaul

Every drop counts.

Also on Modrinth and GitHub Releases. Visit the website for the full feature list, config reference, and command guide.

Distillation is an alchemy overhaul for Minecraft 1.21.1 (Fabric) — the brewing stand, potion recipes and durations, and how effects are applied and cured. Vanilla brewing is learned from a wiki or not at all; Distillation's stand teaches its own recipes, brews the effects vanilla shipped without one, scales known recipes to six bottles, and makes curing a decision instead of a bucket of milk.

Not yet released. The mod is implemented against its committed design and behavioral spec; this page describes the first release.

At a glance

• Minecraft 1.21.1, Fabric loader (0.16.10+), Fabric API required.
• Install on the server and every client.
• Every feature independently toggleable through Mod Menu / Cloth Config or config/distillation.json — hot-reload with /distillation reload.
• Every recipe brews from items vanilla already ships — no new crops, plants, mobs, or dimensions.
• MIT licensed.

Features

Brew by Discovery

Hold an ingredient over the stand and the vapor clouds with a color hint of what it would become. A failed combination bottles a Murky Draught whose tooltip names one ingredient that would have worked, and every success is written permanently into your recipes page, right in the brewing screen. No wiki required — the stand is the teacher.

The Missing Brews

Every vanilla effect that shipped without a recipe becomes brewable: Resistance from a shulker shell, Haste from honey over a sugar brew, Absorption from a golden apple, Luck from a nautilus shell, Glowing from a glow ink sac. Redstone and glowstone variants where the effect supports them.

Batch Brewing

Set your brewing stand on a water cauldron heated from below and a recipe you've already discovered fills 6 bottles in one pass at 1.5× the ingredient cost — one brewing session kits the whole raid party. The shortcut is earned: undiscovered recipes still brew three at a time.

Honest Durations & Draughts

Utility potions (Fire Resistance, Water Breathing, Night Vision, Invisibility) base at 8:00 instead of 3:00; combat potions keep their short timers. Sneak-drink to sip half a potion now and stopper the other half for later — and a half goes down in half the time, a quick swallow you can afford mid-fight. Re-drinking a brew that is still running tops its timer up instead of resetting it, up to twice the base duration — no bottle wasted for being drunk early.

Premium Brews

Redstone and glowstone stop being mutually exclusive: brew a potion's own reagent onto it again — two blaze powder total for Strength — and the concentrated brew takes both dusts for an extended and amplified result: Strength II for 4:00 instead of choosing between II at 1:30 or I at 8:00.

Antidotes

Surgical cures brewed from the affliction's own source — poison from a fermented spider eye, wither from a wither rose, and four more. Each strips exactly one effect and nothing else; milk still clears everything, buffs included. Throwable as splash and lingering for mid-fight support.

Lingering Worth Throwing

Lingering clouds last 60 seconds at a 4½-block radius; splash potions apply a flat 87.5% of the drinkable duration, no distance falloff. A beneficial splash or cloud you throw is attuned to your side — it buffs only players and their pets, never the hostiles standing in it — while harmful potions stay grenades for everyone. A dedicated brewer becomes a viable support role.

Enhanced by (never required)

• Tribulation — its shard debuffs gain brewable antidotes of their own.
• Mercantile — the cleric sells rare brewing ingredients at reputation.
• Prosperity — far-tier chests turn up rare reagents.

With no siblings installed, nothing is missing.

Part of Concord — a modular collection of system overhauls. Install any, combine all.