Note: I KIND of asked some Smiths and Muses who decided the Furthest Ring was a nice hangout about what they alchemized and...it rapidly flooded the place.
Quick tip for alchemists everywhere: If you don't have anyone with an art modus to make ghost images;
Camera && Captchalogue card = Captcharoid Camera. Great for getting codes of large, hard to pick up objects like Skaia, your friendly neighborhood horrorterrors, your friend's Land, or large landforms, and subsequent alchemy shenanigans.
Using this for selfies and then alchemy means making replacement body parts easily, but things like people's brains are hellishly expensive. However, taking ghost images of Holopad-based holograms nets you the code of the original, allowing you to save grist on middle steps in alchemy when you have an end goal in mind and no use for the items in between. The color scheme of the camera varies depending on the modus setup of the card used. Alchemizing someone/thing's brain && something about that person like their art || the camera all three at once allows you to take of things as that entity would have interpreted them into that art or whatever. Useful for ghostwriting fanfiction with the right tools.
Picture of people hugging, possibly with platitudes about how hugs and friendship are good || Healing item = Potion/Pill of Hugs. Less likely to work than average, similarly to named items that reference something from the host world that is not a universal constant, or items referencing a player. && variant also exists, which keeps the health potion aspect. Consuming the result or even getting some on you feels like the warm friendly hugs it was made of, sort of like an invisible ghost shows up and hugs you. Not NEARLY as good as the real thing especially for game purposes, emotional comfort, removing *corrupting influences* (did you really think I would tell you something that would really help you keep us out), or treating problems, or anything you would naturally exploit a hug for, but in a pinch it'll work as a last-ditch help when you're all alone and you could really use a hug or that extra kick to make someone calm down without actually having to hug them, such as if they're wearing incredibly spiky armor or are currently a huge rampaging monster. I saw the idea on here and after several *nano-pieces* of cold-messaging random players and dersites with access to travel managed to get someone to do it for me.
If your session's host world had the game Aura Kingdom, you might be able to do this one, which is a favorite recommendation to spearkind/staffkind/stickwiththingontheendkind Rhyme players unwilling to get over to the Others' side in order to open up their trust.
snake || staff = snake staff
gold && snake staff = gold snake staff
icicle || gold snake staff = Merrilee's Staff. It's a staff that can shoot really sharp icicles that the non-pointy ends have ice roses on them when pointed and shaken or aggressively pointed (don't have shaky hands when pointing at friendlies). It scales with some complex combination of the user's echeladder and times they've used a crystalanth to heal or eaten sprite-made food for that session, so remains useful for a while if you tend to need a lot of healing, or as a backup ranged weapon for more melee fighters willing to keep something in the general sylladex that doesn't need much training. If you think about the power of love while holding it, it amplifies your health vial's regen rate and regular bodily healing a little and makes the icicles burn things they hit somehow, but focusing on love tends to make combat necessities like dodging, aiming, and not dying difficult except for trolls with a particularly heated pitched crush going on elsewhere. Got a nice Rhyme charge with a very small Life one behind it.
Normally stuff associated with the Adam and Eve myth, particularly Eve, would create something with Angelic corruption, which I would be against, but the concept of lesser eidolons having to use a distinct other person to actually manifest coupled with Merrilee's whole friendship-magical-girl shtick and the game's ok-you're-not-turning-into-a-horrible-monster-by-using-this-thing in most universes has made it a safe bet when I've seen it. And honestly, if you're listening to a spooky beast about alchemy suggestions so easily, you're probably only few inches from Speaker of the Furthest Ring anyways and it doesn't matter if it's angel-tainted or not because you're right in our waiting tentacley arms.
On that note, this is a great tool for Needlekind users.
Wizard statue || knitting needles = Needlewands.
Magical lasers, yaaay! Sadly, not exactly impressive. If you share it with another entity or otherwise only use one of the needlewands, it works for wandkind. Surprise surprise. You can probably get this on your first or second day.
Needlewands && Flowers = Flowering Needlewands. They look like someone put artsy magicalshiny flowers like Skaian endgame lotuses on the needlewands not-sharp end. Has a decent amount of Life charge so it is really good for making plants grow or the ground move. They make a perfect gift to Miss Taylor/Miss Tailor/Mademoiselle Tallier (She was a minor exile in one session, one of those guys who doesn't interact with the players post-exile but helps build a city in the aftermath to ensure the exiles have a decent life especially in the later session and she changed her name slightly after she landed in France) to allow her to defend herself at least a little, as she has enough basic training with needlekind from her sewing experience that she can stab imps to keep them away from herself.
Needlewands && Grimoire for Summoning the Zoologically Dubious = Thorns of Olgogoth.
Some of the most powerful needles available short of Echidna's Quills. Depending on your starting grist, land composition, and prototypings, you can actually make these pretty early. As in, first few days early. You may have heard of tentacleTherapist, who wrote that atrocious entry guide which is half wild mass guessing and half apocalyptic log. She got these and went grimdark and was a wonderful asset to us with these on her first day, no less. Then she apparently died and her session Scratched.
If you're worried about getting corrupted from reading this,
Frog && Goggles = Froggles!
The corruption-prevention properties of frogs mean that unless you're hugging a horrorterror with a suit of spikey armor on and getting ichor all over your face the goggles themselves won't get corrupted too badly. It has no real protective properties to the wearer, however it MIGHT reduce the corruption from staring at us during a Dersite eclipse from "Speaker of the Furthest Ring" levels down to "Your color scheme changed, there are tentacles everywhere, you're speaking broodfester, you're sopping wet with inky ichor, and you need a hug before you explode everything in the game" levels, depending on how much of the frog's anti-corruption properties got in. The lenses are tinted green and have this comical frog trim. It didn't help the people I talked to so really it's just colorful eyewear.
Froggles! && DBZ scanner = Expendable Others corruption checker monocle.
Quick way to tell if your friend's 'secret information source' is one of us squiddly buggers watching your every move with telescopes from the Furthest Ring or not without glitching out your more important or multipurpose scanner abilities. May explode in/on your face if aimed at someone whose corruption is visibly obvious, rising quickly, or is actually an Other. The Angels are harder to scan for primarily because of what you would have to alchemize is less than trustworthy and the fact that as Others the giant bulk of Lands usually blocks us from seeing what they're doing down there all that well. The people who I talked to said that they usually had froggles lying around to be alchemized by coplayers to notice this going on, so...
Prospitian Clothes && works where angels are depicted as powerless assholes who can be killed and are not organized and individuals made of individuals' sapience independent of being not unlike shinies and their song doesn't burn mortal ears and any other things countering angelic themes (His Dark Instruments in some universes is an appropriate series for this, especially the Amber Spyglass bits where angels die) = Angelic corruption resistant clothing.
Prospitian clothes are already very slightly Angel-resistant (much as Dersite clothes are slightly Other-resistant, possibly indicating whatever madness made this thing FINALLY realized Angels could break out of Skaia and that us Others were having a flagella party at point-blank range), but adding that extra "Angels are bad rawr" kick in the pants usually tells Sburb to break out whatever reject-the-obvious-code-editing-invader properties it has that apply to Aspects that do not like Angels wrecking their champions' shinies and copy them to this clothing anything that was coded right. This is best followed up by staining them with aspectshakes resistant to angels or further alchemy. If you're entering the Underworld, these will come in handy if your players do not meet in person enough to give some badly-needed hugs. Reach the Heart of the Land and banish every one of those winged bastards!
This was discovered in the very large session (About as big as one of those sessions that had an entire grade of high schoolers. Dozens of players. Lands everywhere.) that took 132 Speakers to exterminate every last one of the angel-tainted entities.
White Queen Chess Piece (unless you are rain or have certain moduses with glitches to captchalogue and intellibeam laserstation WQ herself, but that's going to murder your carapace rep unless she's asleep and nobody notices) && Sorbet (other ice cream like things tend to work well too) = White Queen's Sorbet.
OH GOD IT TASTES AMAZING. Dear Jenna this is the good stuff. If you have the sanity to not try to steal the WQ's delicious food right from under her face (and as anyone who has seen Tyrannical Souschef's impersonation of gentlemanMannerism's disapproval vision can attest, trying to do it in the kitchens or on the way to the queen is likely going to get you permakilled) you should try to alchemize it. As a game-generated food it won't suffer from quality decay. And it tastes delicious. Dear god, it's like a full replenishment to your health vial and your pluck is going to revive and cooldown timers skipped and you get a ton of buffs asdfghjkl it's like the ultimate in cuisine it's sooooo delicious. This is to players as Squiddle Treats are to me. Alchemizing it with potions is iffy and can be a downgrade but the base food alone is totally worth it.
Squiddles merchandise anything (pretty much anything Others corrupted or corrupts-when-alchemized works too) && food (good-tasting fish usually works best but WQ's sorbet and bacon works too) = various derivatives of Squiddle Treats. I love these and pretty much everybody else in the Furthest Ring does too. Some of us (me included) will even offer you discounts if you give us some of these. How much corruption varies with what you used to make it. Corrupted players tend to like the taste of these more. They're like pet food to uncorrupted people, a favorite snack for the minorly corrupted, and if you're visibly different it'll be pretty much WQ's sorbet for you. Using WQ's sorbet, bacon, good-tasting fish or fish-based food, or anything else that tastes awesome as the food item tends to make it taste way better, and the better it tastes the more pliable those who respond well to feeding will be. If you've got the right flavors...
If you have the right equipment, you can alchemize a spacesuit && frog to make a frog-themed spacesuit. ((Frog-themed spacesuit && suit of armor && bunch of aspect charged stuff)) && computer && time travel device creates a Ringhopper, which is basically a corruptionproof froggy spacesuit of armor with spacetime manipulation abilities and aspect powers allowing you to pilot the Furthest Ring potentially safe from corruption, attack, and spacetime derps. We of the Furthest Ring will still crush you to death with tentacles or laser you to death with eldritch majjyks or actively manipulate spacetime to halt your progress and flood your sensory input with corruption, but if you, say, make a deal...we can let you go where you're requested.
The real use for this device is to be able to go on Derse during an eclipse and fling large amounts of Squiddle Treats at the Others. We view it as kind of funny and grab the food you throw at us and eat it because who doesn't like some free snacks while watching the game. It is fun you should try it sometime if you don't mind the corruption risk if Jack Noir breaches your spacesuit by stabbing you or something.
Ringhopper && Spaceship (Skaian battleships work well) && Skaia = Ring Traveler Vessel. A larger scale version of the above. Inputting Skaia makes it exude a universeness-field, complete with spatiotemporal stability, potential immunity to session decay, and exuding a small version of that horrorterrors-gtfo script that incipispheres have. May operate on different captcha codes entirely or keep a shitton of multiple-code-referential alchemiters and it gets ugly...
This is the 'special precautions' you need to survive in a session post-session-decay in its highest form. Once the Reward self-destructs with the frog it allegedly led to and the whole session, or it otherwise times out and decays, you basically need something like this unless you side with us to be escorted out of the angelic war into the flagella party that is the Furthest Ring. However, it is totally unaffordable, and only rarely even possible. It costs an utterly excessive level of grist. Like, you will need to have a Ringwraith small-scale [RED MILES] open the Denizen Vault for you and nab all the grist planet by planet and everybody's grinding and gristtorrents it to one person in a huge session and you have a godtier void displacement player and a godtier mist player or coins maybe spam-free-create and unmake perfectly generic objects or matriorbs or junk or miniature Skaias upscaled by the Space player whatever and unmake them for grist and then you make a deal with the Noble Circle themselves to create inter-session gristtorrenting from a bunch of people who just left their sessions and your Space player's denizen to create this specialized super-atomyk-ebonpyre somewhere so you can farm for moar grist and then sacrifice like everything you can get rid of now for grist and have everyone go godtier and use high-level godtier abilities to farm better etc. etc. do as many of those as possible and then some more. You need all the grist all of it.
Like you have to have the entire session dedicated to farming grist whenever possible, for years. If you're in an unwinnable session that won't self-destruct for a long while, go godtier and then literally farm for grist for like ever and make this if you are pretty much left there to die and no help is coming.
The cool stuff you could do with this if only the grist cost was affordable. Like watch a Skaian Birth, or reroll your native or a role you love and then just quit, quit everything...Join the horrorterrors in their reverie of watching reality...
Well, yeah. Theoretical can town right there.
EDIT: During our research on multicorruption and rainy sciences, we discovered something freaking awesome!
Weird Bug, the thing used to cure rangoon, is an alchemical counteragent to angelic corruption, like frogs are to Others, without breaking the Law or anything. I noticed this when I was rereading a story with a rain player and a law player using the magicant clocks to something and deal with wraiths. Weird bug is a pretty strong neutral/player decorrupting influence. Going into the Underworld? && Weird Bug some stuff and you'll be fine with a good spiritually reaffirming decorrupting calmdown friend hug and psybuffs afterward. They're not nearly as good as frogs against Others but it does provide some measure of tangible and workable corruption resistance so it's better for Dersite eclipse travel than nothing if you haven't executed all the agents yet and your particular variant of Dersite law expressly forbids frog iconography even by mostly-excused political guests (i.e. players).
Frog && Weird Bug && Healing Item (Potion of Hugs && variant is recommended and usually works best, but the syrupy blood in pre-ascension godtier glitch-bodies (but NOT the similar substance in saccharine doppelgangers) might be a viable replacement with rainbow bullshit or alchemiter hacks) = Corruption Remover 9001 "Purity In A Bottle".
This. It's got a ridiculously pretty bottle that looks like someone decided to Skaia && Expensive Fancy Glass Bottle (Fun fact; Shove the empty bottle in Recipe Modus and you might see that) but while it in and of itself is pretty corruption-resistant that's not the point the liquid inside is. It's actually kind of expensive and the direct captcha code from card might require the Intellibeam Laserstation or a special modus like it's some form of debug item or something but so, so worth it if you need to hurt an angel or protect a game abstraction from corruption.
The liquid and bottle actively destroy and repel corruption and remove its influences from salvageable abstractions (like players or carapaces or meta-objects or quest-vital verdancy or anything that requires [RED MILES] to erase like pendants and quest beds and bedrock and godhoodies), and being soaked or stained with it makes the effect lasting while ingestion is a faster and more direct hit. The Royal Vault's outer section that stuff can actually be stored in without deletion appears to be regularly washed with this substance to prevent the queen's treasure hoards (no, don't steal them, most of it's just gold and gems and some powerless regalia and only a few booncases' worth of money piled around, any grist is in like cases and throws security into high alert if stolen) from being corrupted whenever the Queen throws something corrupt into the inner royal vault. It works mostly by code functions for actually damaging the sources so it's useless against anything in the Ring or Angel HQ.
It's why the dream moons are so virtually impenetrable to corruption until the session is horribly glitched despite being right next to places where physically poking the sources of corruption is possible under certain circumstances, which is allegedly why Sburb has so many ingame methods to obliterate them according to a code comment note in another version that was only half a joke.
Frog && Weird Bug = Bugfrog or Frogbug, depending on your session. Works for general shoving of corruption resistance unless another recipe overrides it. The general aesthetic of anything that possesses the qualities tends to be some weird frog-temple-like aesthetic, but the bug makes it seem...More advanced, vaguely egyptian-temple-ish? I'm not sure, but it's very Sburbanlore of design.
Frogbug && Computer = Safeputer. Tired of your stuff getting corrupted, and all that rangoon making it impossible for you to be understood? DESU. Comes with Sburb Antivirus, which annihilates any and all infection capability of rangoon on it, as if it had manually been typed by that and not afflicted with anything STUPID. The frog's anti-Others and bug's anti-Angels skills also allow you to do stuff like look at pictures of horrorterrors without drowning in ichor and getting shiny new aura tentacles, though it tends to explode when actively assaulted with too much corruption to be purified by anything less than fire or a firehose with an infinite supply of bottled purity as a defensive measure, and while it prevents the message from corrupting you, there is now absolutely nothing stopping you from googling a grimoire and doing corruption-inducing arts and crafts that way.
Alchemy setup all-in-one && basic jpeg compression artifacts object (You may have to use Rain players to illegally pick these up separately from a jpeg-artifacted object) = Really glitchy hacked alchemy setup, known as " 'alchmy thang' " by the game, complete with airquotes with some extra jpeg artifacts for good measure. Yes, even sarcastic misspellings find this thing a joke.
Because of the relative importance of this thing, I have had a proxy recipe-modus it to decipher some alternative recipes. Many of them require Rain or unjustifiably random/failed alchemy results.
Troll Synthesizer Lathe (that thing that you see in barracks and on ships that makes stuff in weird pods) && Rainbow Bullshit
French Horn || Potato bomb (
??)
Matriorb && Inverted Color Corn of some form I have not found (possibly antimatter corn because Sburb is weird when making antimatter things?)
Hashtag && Lachesis' Rule (Golden Sun item for the latter, this recipe has been known to produce the item Brand of Fate, which is just a hashtag on a stick with an absurdly huge Fate charge that shoots those Fate arrows)
Jpeg artifacted comic strip, (usually the 3rd captchalogued by players in host universe somehow) && Portal Gun (when it doesn't create a magicant hole driller)
TARDIS || Smith godtier outfit (when not making a Smith of Time or Space outfit)
Hammer made of gemstones && Brassspritesprite sitting on a consort (again,
??)
Omniweap && Silly Hat (usually one of CD's clown-prototyping hats, though hats spawned worn by imps even with no clown prototyping in session can be valid if they do not just create an aspected omniweap)
Quintessence of Aspect (usually only made by Smiths of the matching aspect, though Mist and Rain and Void displacement players can shenanigans up some depending on version) && Glitching dust artifact (You will need aspect powers to harvest this. Rain works as always but Breath can move it and abuse the cardslam trick to get it carded and coded)
Illegally picked up objects, when they do not have a preset code, have a really hidden or to-be-determined code that requires the Intellibeam Laserstation to access, or are explicitly designed to have no code at all and thus be outside alchemy use altogether even with IBLS insertion scripts, tend to fit into Sburb's decently large captchacode-free-space-buffer to allow for insertions of completely made up items, the vast majority of which are extremely unanticipated alchemy results that by some miracle of chance do not conveniently run into a different premade recipe (who alchemizes jetpack-with-concrete-brick-and-flowerpot-and-violin-jammed-in-it with the astrolabe outside Prospit's Great Library and a trash bag from Derse and DOESN'T get a peregrine falcon portrait?) or things aspect powers did by accident or in the case of Rain on purpose. This causes the alchemy machinery also produced to make things with similarly strange codes or noncodes.
This thing, despite costing an utterly excessive positive amount of artifact grist (hope you like incredibly shitty jpeg artifacts polluting your incipisphere because unless you can get them into the Ring or corrupt them and thus have the Queens vault them away you're going to have them in huge quantities) you can use them to do illogical or completely impossible things with alchemy, like alchemizing things && beyond holes allowed or || past being blank. Items at these point have illegal codes (such as having incorrect digit amounts, rendering their use in conventional alchemy impossible, or using symbols that cannot be input on a standard card such as extremely detailed engravings of frogs consuming cheese, and giving you a pretty much infinite captcha register) and if you peek at the cards used they have hole patterns that are physically impossible, are improperly located, or both, such as being off the card or having negative holes. Don't touch those last two ones, unless you want to horribly mutilate yourself and probably bonk someone in the Magicant with your ripped-up body parts too. Most impossible recipes, unless they are incredibly bugged, still cost normal grist types so unless you do some very very arcane HAX! you are probably going to be unsafe.
The impossible recipes created by 'alchmy thang' tend to operate more on the spirit of alchemy than the factual code of regular alchemy, and Transmutancy stops being a luck skill and MAYBE a quality-determinant for non-game food degradation, and starts being an actual confirmed quality-affecting factor for recipe creation and even recipe use if the laser bacon story is true. I am pretty sure this device or similar is where we're getting all these stories of impossible alchemy recipes that in any normal session would have too many holes or none at all or are way too categorical-changing for Sburb to make sense with them and not just hand you something completely different.
It is widely assumed that physically impossible alchemy or using combinations that are invalid in your session are made from working here instead. As the glitchiness warning indicates, be careful with this thing as it has a bad habit of barfing out glitches when the game just refuses to create something, and monsters when it does anyway.
Alchemiter && Alimentator = Cookchemiter
alt. recipes
Alchemy-all-in-one && Cookalizer && Alimentator
Alchemiter && weird orange oven (
)
[pile of dream moon cooking equipment, yes it has to say that on the card] && or || cruxtruder (it varies)
'alchmy thang' && Alimentator && Cookalizer (usually if basic alchemy set won't work)
Several unspecified variants of 'alchmy thang' recipes.
The cookchemiter is basically an alternative to the 'alchmy thang' that works by putting whatever 2 or 3 items (carded or not carded, your choice) you intend to alchemize on the small green platform (2 or 3 small card images will appear above the dial below, allowing you to change the fusions to &&-based or ||-based but the rough tendencies, not the exact mechanics), then setting the dial below to what you want to get out of it. The dial is extremely inclusive, hosting several categories and subcategories. Once you've decided on what category you're in, push the dial upward to change the options to subcategory sections, then push in once it's specific enough to make it exist on the large white platform. Because of using the alimentator/cruxtruder/oven/wtf/whatever for power, the grist cost is heavily reduced or gone entirely, meaning you can use cheap items and grist recyclers like the gristwidget or an alchemiter function of some sort to get infinite grist. The dial may change between attempts for strange reasons, and there also are some options that exist even if nothing is on the platform, mostly things that could be made by viable component materials like cruxite dowels and basic foods, or session essentials like captchalogue cards. There are even some cookchemiters which just realize their exploitative potential and allow you to directly create grist without having to fight enemies, though unless you're Light the odds of Sburb being that nice are virtually nonexistent unless your session is so utterly fucked it ceases to matter if Sburb is rude or not.
For example, someone puts an apple and a toy pony/small hoofbeast on the small platform. They set it to weapons, then put one end on "Rain" and the other on "Basic" instead of going into various further subcategories of stuff. The Rain one is a Pinkie Pie themed pink heart club with a rainbow decal on it that has a Rain charge like you wouldn't believe and deals a fuckton of damage, and the other is a yellow-with-red-details gun that shoots apples with a rainbow on it and makes horse noises when fired, both for only a few of some basic grist types each. Using conventional alchemy, these two items would have taken huge levels of grist and way more middle steps to create.
This item both cuts out several middle steps and the net cost of both is vastly reduced, plus gives you more control over the result's purpose than regular alchemy. The && or || options hint generally at what steps must be taken to create the item via legit alchemy and may be a form of alt recipe valid in a different session.
Brass Doorknocker && Pornography Collection = [placeholder] (unless it creates Inappropriate Time For Brass, which is usually its || combo or what happens if you forcibly prototype both in the same sprite)
Anything Sburb did not expect you to alchemize with the other item && or || said item in general really, if it doesn't autofix to something else.
Some combinations are so utterly inane even Sburb cannot come up with a replacement recipe, nor find a convenient coverage recipe to prevent it from working right, or even rapidly create a bestfit item. This is a glitch, as even first-timers' alchemy sprees do not usually find something so incomprehensibly what that Sburb cannot create a proper item for it. [placeholder], though seemingly a harmless block of abstraction-matter like a grey-instead-of-green perfectly generic object, will often quickly randomly and especially violently explode into various things, though it is almost always derivatives of rainbow bullshit, glitches, jpeg artifacts, reality warping, aspects, Furthest Ring like conditions, or other weird things players would find extremely unpleasant to have all over their alchemiter, or rarely something useful or at least not problematic. The [placeholder] has a much lesser chance of exploding inside abstract spaces like meta-inventory, so if someone sends you one of these and it's not actually the grist type that looks exactly like it, either run like hell or captchalogue it immediately. If it does not explode on its own, applying force of any kind (Even a gust of suspiciously non-destructive wind from an amateur breath player) will properly ignite detonation. Throwing a bunch of big ones at the Black King will seriously distract him and harm his health bar somehow, if it doesn't glitch out into healing items or random art.
Flux/Ploy manifestation && Computer = Exile Terminal
alt recipes
Fenestrated Plane (3 or 4 are available at Jack Noir's Cubicle of Vigilance depending on if a player guardian stole one during the pregame somehow, and some worlds have items to create them, it's the viewport window that if broken/opened turns into a teleport device to that location that routes to the furthest ring and dumps people there if someone cuts off the thing while one end still works or something is in transit) || Typewriter
Webcomic && Suggestions Box || Voodoo Doll
Your Flux Player (I sincerely hope you captcharoided them) || Mind Control Hat
Player with good scrying (again, captcharoid) && Mind Control Hat
Ever wanted to manipulate your friends/coplayers? Or just see what they're doing without constant scrying or stealing Jack Noir's cubicle walls? Not a troll psionic with mind control powers or anyone with half-decent scrying and persuasive skills? Make one of those things your exiles use, and behold!
Cow && [pile of food] = Foodcow
Ever wanted a Mooshroom from Minecraft? Well...You can do that with Sburb, sort of. Foodcows rarely occur naturally on Lands where consorts fail to grow food but are not intrinsically always dead, yet also do not have any means of playing the Song of Life at a crystalanth, meaning one or two might be found in an unnatural desert (including even the all-too-weakening Sand berserk trigger if a consort village was only partially caught in the sandblast haboob of sandy destruction) or around a village where the consorts suck at playing music, as a method to provide a logical way to feed the poor guys, and when harvested by various means (everything from milking to just picking the fruit-like edibles growing off their backs) can provide a decent amount of food for a decently large group like a consort village or a few players. Unless your consorts are normally farmers and have a pre-designated space to hold farm animals, they will usually have a pen next to or inside the grocery store and/or farm equivalents of the village since that is the logical place for them. Killing a foodcow nukes your land rep and they're way more useful alive anyways. They are heavily Life-charged and emit Life into the surrounding area, often creating grass for them to consume because Sburb likes violating energy conservatory laws.
The alchemy is expensive as hell (alchemy of living things like consorts or players' body parts is always expensive) but can serve as a replacement if you lack an alimentator or the patience to go get one from the Dersite chef and pass about the code.
The animals are actually photosynthetic omnivores (not herbivores) with aspectivoric capability, so they will eat anything from energy from Skaia (sunlight, landlight, and even Skaian Summonings with excess aspect flowing into the surroundings) to plants (like various grasses and other small herbs to tree leaves and stuff) to meat (meaning those things can and will eat you alive if you attack them, nevermind the fact they have a pretty damn epic kicking ability they use to fend off imps after their bodily crops), so they'll find the energy they need to. Since their gen script is separate from the majority of landgen-based stuff and is actually a shoddy bugfix to consorts dying from starvation, they will often remain as the only spots of life on a dead land after a while, but a half-assed patch to THAT results in them just hopping up the Dwelling Spire to gatehop and then walk to where they are needed, meaning cows with food will be hanging about your dead friend's dwelling spire for a few days
The chief reason to alchemize one is to resolve a Denizen quest where the Denizen has destroyed the food supply of a consort village and you have no gardening skill to repair it manually, or other situations where consort food production would go down and you don't want that.
Your denizen's signature weapon (i.e. Echidna's Quills, Hephaestus' Fear No Anvil, Medusa's head, anything your Denizen always carries around as a weapon) || type of tree or tree-equivalent common to the Land they were on = Tree of the Denizens
Given as a parting gift by certain denizens whose influence on their land is too great to be removed even in death (Hemera, Athena/Minerva, George Washington, Mobster Kingpin, Napoelon, Joe, anyone else whose role on their land is quite extensive and goes beyond being a mere problematic dick unless the land is dead, unsalvageable, or denizenly influence is no longer necessary to keep things running neatly with consorts and underlings such as if they are all dead due to a critical lack of prototypings), this tree, when planted, gradually repairs outstanding denizen damage and other land damages on the celestial body in question as long as there is no Denizen or if there is it is most certainly NOT going around fucking everything up again, and serves as an organizational banner for everybody (though consorts and underlings interpret denizenly will differently resulting in conflict as they did when the denizen was still alive whether they were running criminal operations like Mobster Kingpin or are just unable to make everyone get that they don't want infighting so they can go take over others but both parties see the other as the aggressor and the denizen can't clarify enough like with Napoleon and George Washington), and usually manages to postpone session decay via its ability to draw power from denizens in other, still-alive sessions to continue its work long enough for the Horrorterrors to waltz into the place and take it over and make it a new squiddle campfire zone after much hacking.
This tree is the only easy (read: does not involve having your Rage and Heart player scream and shiny-edit every last grain of sand back into functional verdancy, with your Might player absolutely nuking the Sand with so much Might you'd think the place was drowning in Chaos Dunk spam or something) way to remove the Sand berserk trigger or make a dead land sort of alive again due to its ability to override land scripts and fix verdancy errors. While your denizen will destroy the tree immediately if it's on your land because they are very clear on the whole no-cheating thing, if the Hoard is deployed/didn't exist in the first place (i.e. you killed your denizen or are a Space Cadet) it can seriously clean up a lot of land-related glitches. It is basically Denizen-powered bugfixing for the planet in question, and can be used to render a heavily damaged Battlefield functional within a reasonable amount of time if the Reckoning really burned down the place, so it can be copied and used to clean up the place.