What is Medical Brew in ARK?
Medical Brew is a drink that heals you. However, it won’t sate your hunger or quench your thirst. It simply raises your health by 40 points. It’s a niche item without many benefits outside of its purpose. It also has a quick spoil timer and will degrade in a player’s inventory in two hours. Knowing how to craft it and being prepared with storage solutions can help you get more use out of it in the long term. Medical Brew appears as a little glass bottle full of a red liquid. You craft it yourself in the Cooking Pot or, if time is of the essence, in the Industrial Cooker.
How to Make Medical Brew in ARK
Medical brew doesn’t require engrams, blueprints, or any other items to create it. You simply have to put the right ingredients into place. It’s just that simple to make Medical Brew. However, it might seem like a lot of information and ingredients for someone new to the game. Breaking down each item can help make it easier to complete the process.
Tintoberries
Tintoberries are red berries that you can harvest from bushes and shrubs. You can use your hands to do it, but a tame like a trike is a more efficient harvester who will get more berries than you can. You can’t decide what types of berries you get from each harvest. You simply get a variety that the game chooses. However, it doesn’t take long to build up 20 Tintoberries, even if you’re using your hands. The gather rate only becomes an issue if you’re trying to stockpile for an adventure or supply your whole tribe.
Narcotic
Narcotic is easy to create yourself if you have a Mortar and Pestle. Simply put five Narcoberries and a piece of spoiled meat into the Mortar and Pestle. You can craft one Narcotic with that amount. Narcoberries can be gathered in the same way as Tintoberries. Be careful with these, however. They may appear juicy, but they will raise your torpor and even render you unconscious. Spoiled meat will happen naturally in your inventory as long as you place meat in it. If you need more significant amounts, consider using a Meat Spoiler mod to add an item that can spoil stacks at a time. However, you can also increase the spoil rate by unstacking the meat, so each has a separate spoil timer in your inventory. It takes about an hour for the meat to spoil at vanilla rates.
Water Containers
Water containers like the Waterskin or Water Jar have to be crafted and filled with water. Some, like the Waterskin, lose water over time simply by sitting in your inventory. The Water Jar maintains the water but costs more to craft. You can make a Waterskin by combining four hides with 12 fibers in your inventory. The engram unlocks before level five.
Cooking Pot
You must have a cooking pot to make Medical Brew. Unlike some lower-level items, they can’t simply be crafted in a player’s inventory. The cooking pot engram unlocks at level eight, so you will already have everything else you need to craft Medical Brew available when the pot is. You must have 75 stone, 15 thatch, ten wood, and five flints to make this item. Once you have it crafted, use wood to fuel it and ensure that it’s on so that crafting begins.
Industrial Cooker
If you’re at a higher level and need more Medical Brew more quickly than the Cooking Pot can supply, consider making it in the Industrial Cooker instead. One drawback to the Industrial Cooker is that it doesn’t unlock until you’re at a fairly high level – 89. It also takes a lot of resources to craft. In total, you must have:
1800 metal ingots. Scrap metal ingots are also sufficient.450 cementing pastes or Achatina pastes.300 units of oil.300 polymer. You can also substitute organic polymer or corrupted nodules.
There is no benefit or drawback to using one of the substituted items. The Industrial Cooker is crafted the same no matter which ones you use. The Industrial Cooker also requires gasoline to run instead of wood. You can combine hide and oil to make gasoline in the Refining Forge, Industrial Forge, Chemistry Bench, or specific useful dinosaur saddles that double as crafting stations.
How to Make Potent Medical Brew
Medical Brew (Potent) is a version of Medical Brew available to players on ARK Mobile. It raises your health by 70 points instead of 40 but also requires Potent Dust to craft. You use one Ancient Amber to craft two Potent Dusts at the Mortar and Pestle or Industrial Grinder. Ancient Amber can be obtained in various ways, including Daily Pursuits, Supply Drops, picking up stones, mining metal, Amber deposits on the Island, a Loot Drop code, or the mobile ARK store. It is a rare item, so be sure the boost to health recovery is worth the cost before crafting a Potent Medical Brew.
Storing Medical Brew
Once you’ve crafted Medical Brew, you need to find a good storage solution. The relatively short spoilage timer in your inventory means that you might want to store it elsewhere until you’re ready to embark on your adventure.
Store your Medical Brew in tamed dinosaurs when you’re traveling. Medical Brew will last for eight hours in their inventory, giving it a much larger spoilage timer than when it’s in your inventory. You will want to keep some on yourself for emergencies, but storing the bulk of it in a dinosaur is great for travel.A Preserving Bin will increase the Medical Brew spoilage timer to 20 hours. This is great when you are preparing for a trip and just want to make it last a bit longer before you load up yourself and your dinosaurs with traveling provisions.The Refrigerator makes the Medical Brew last for eight days. One person can store it in the fridge for a week and still have fresh Medical Brew for an excursion.
Medical Brew Difficulties
There is one problem some players run into when crafting Medical Brew. It shares many characteristics with certain Coloring items and is crafted in the same place. It’s essential to remove charcoal from the Cooking Pot to avoid this. Some people prefer to use other items like thatch or sparkpowder to fuel the Cooking Pot during Medical Brew creation for this exact reason. Another problem some players notice is that Medical Brew won’t raise the health on your tames. You have to feed the carnivores meat and the herbivores sweet vegetable cake to raise their health. Some players have had difficulties when trying to scale up and use the Industrial Cooker. Rather than adding water directly, they irrigated their Industrial Cooker to have a permanent water source. That appears to fix that issue when it occurs and makes it easier to use that device for other recipes.
