Blessing

Blessing is a service that upgrades some of your elixirs and powders into blessed versions that last twice as long. It is run through the shop screen of Benita (the code calls the transaction type "Benita"), costs Bone Fragments for every attempt, and works only some of the time. Blessing also carries a hidden reward: enough successful blessings on one potion teach you that potion's recipe (see Alchemy).

How to bless#

1. Open Benita's blessing shop. Its dialog entries are attached to merchant 1904 (StoryDialog 754, 1051, 1533, 2045 and 2005, in two story ids, 99 and 7; the carriage and Karst Cave are the likely places, inferred); none carries a quest condition. The tutorial popup "Benita's Blessing" is tied to quest 15000.
2. The list shows every blessable potion you currently hold (at least one). Pick one.
3. Choose how many to bless. The count is limited by the smaller of the number you hold and the room left in the blessed stack (the blessed version also stacks to 10; the shop says the number has reached its maximum otherwise).
4. The price is the potion's BlessPrice times the count, paid in Bone Fragments (item 40001, see Bone Fragment). If you are short, the game says Bone Fragment is insufficient.
5. Every potion is rolled separately. Successes become the blessed item, failures are handed back unchanged.

Blessable items#

The Elixir of Sanity, Elixir of Hallucination, Potion of Wealth and all throwables cannot be blessed (their IsBless flag is 0). What each potion does is in Consumables; the status rows are described in Buffs.

Success chance#

A single attempt rolls a whole number from 1 to 1000 and succeeds when the roll is below 401 plus the talent bonus, which means:

The talent is on Benita talent tree (slot 307, ItemBlessChance, +300 per mille per level). The game reads it from Benita's save entry even when Benita is not in your team and is not the hero you are playing.

Hidden mechanics#

• The tutorial overstates the reward. The popup says blessing raises the potion's effect, may reveal how to brew it, and does not always work. Only the last two are fully true: the potency is not raised. In the data a blessed status is a copy of the normal one with only the Time field doubled; every strength value is identical. Brute Force and Elixir of Epiphany double their drawbacks (the defence cut and the bleeding) too. The blessed items have the same price and stack limit.
• A failure costs only Bone Fragments. The potion is removed from the bag and added back right away, so you lose just the fee. A success also uses up the original potion (it is replaced by the blessed one).
• The hidden formula counter. Each potion id has its own counter in your save (bless_times). A successful blessing adds 1 to it, and when it reaches 20 you are given the potion's Formula item (its Param1, the last column above) unless that formula's quest is already complete. The counter stops at 20; later blessings give nothing more.
• A 5% jackpot. Every attempt also makes a second roll from 1 to 100; a result below 6 (5%) counts as a jackpot. If any potion of the batch hit the jackpot and the batch had at least one success, the counter jumps straight to 20 and the formula is awarded at once. If the batch hit the jackpot but every potion failed, nothing happens at all (no increase). If there was no jackpot, the number of successes is added.
• The two rolls are probably the same dice (inferred). Both rolls are made with the same seed value, derived from the clock and the potion's position in the batch, and a roll with the same seed gives the same underlying random number. If that is right, a jackpot roll of 1 to 5 out of 100 always goes with a 1 to 50 out of 1000 on the first roll, so a jackpot potion is always a success. That raises the practical chance of the jackpot to a flat 5% per potion, rather than the 2% you would get if the rolls were independent. This cannot be checked from the data alone.
• Expected cost to learn a recipe by blessing single potions, using the jackpot model above (inferred, rounded):

Without the jackpot (pure successes needed) it would take 50 potions at 40%. Since you get the recipe as soon as the counter hits 20, the cheap potions are the cheapest way to learn their own formula.

• Formulas only matter for some potions. Elixir of Health's formula is already covered by the early alchemy quest (15032), so the counter never gives anything. Epiphany and Petrification have no other source in the data, so blessing them is a real way to unlock their recipes (Alchemy#Where the formulas really come from). The others can be bought from merchants, or are quest rewards.
• The rolls follow the clock. The seed uses the last six digits of the system time (reversed) plus the potion's number in the batch, so there is no luck carried over between attempts, and no saved random state to exploit.
• Blessed potions are not ingredients. The recipes for Elixir of Energy and others ask for the plain Elixir of Stamina and so on (id comparison), so blessing a potion that you need as an ingredient removes it from the supply (inferred).
• Maze copies. Deep into the Dark Mist hands out ready-made blessed Elixirs of Inertia, Antitoxin, Energy, Recovery, Epiphany and Petrification Powder, plus a plain Elixir of Hallucination (item ids 72113 to 72119, see Consumables); they are not made by this service and do not touch the formula counters.

Sources#

• luascript/ui/controller/exchangectrl.lua:312-460 (the blessing transaction: count limit, success roll, 5% roll, counter, formula award), :963-1100 (list of blessable items, price, blessed stack check), :1425-1440 and :1500-1515 (affordability check).
• luascript/structdata/ms_itemdata.lua:161-163 (BlessProbability 400, BlessGetFormulaTimes 20, BlessGetFormulaInitChance 0.05, which the transaction code does not use: the 5% is hard-coded as a roll below 6).
• luascript/structdata/fs_itemdata.lua:84-86 (GetCanBless), fs_savestory.lua:3469-3480 and :450-455, :973-976 (counter storage).
• luascript/common/mathhelper.lua:226-236 (seed).
• Tables: ItemData rows for ids 20010-20025 and 21010-21025 (IsBless, BlessPrice, Param1); StatusData ids 10005, 10006, 10007, 10047-10067, 10084-10087, 10054-10055 (duration comparison); HeroTalent row 96 (hero 10003, slot 307, Type 49, Value 300, ValueAdd 300); StoryDialog 754, 1051, 1533, 2005, 2045 (transaction type 4, merchant 1904); StoryTutorial row 92 ("Benita's Blessing"), ItemData 72113-72119 (maze copies), luascript/structdata/fs_herodata.lua:401-433 (talent value = Value + ValueAdd x (level - 1)).