Bewitchment Brew Effects: What Each One Actually Does
The cauldron's 48 brewing recipes produce effects with no vanilla equivalent. This guide covers what they do and which ones scale with potion strength.
Effects that scale with intensity
Most brews get stronger with a stronger potion, and the mod is specific about how:
- Hardening adds a flat armour bonus, proportional to strength; Corrosion is its mirror and removes a flat amount
- Deafened reduces sound further at higher intensity
- Deflection returns arrows to the shooter, and they travel faster the stronger the effect
- Disjunction teleports the target within a radius that grows with intensity
- Webbed places temporary cobwebs around the target across a widening radius
- Leeching heals more at higher intensity, but does nothing if you have Strength, Regeneration or Resistance
- Sinking makes the target drop faster, especially in water or while flying
- Purity weakens harmful statuses, more per level
One that ignores intensity entirely
Climbing lets the affected scale walls like a spider, and the mod states plainly that intensity does not change it. That makes it one of the few brews where a weak potion is as good as a strong one — worth knowing before spending better ingredients on it.
Effects that change the rules
Several do something no potion normally can:
- Ethereal — the target can take no damage and deal none either
- Gills — replaces lungs with gills, so the target can breathe only underwater
- Polymorph — changes the player's form into a target
- Enchanted — normal attacks become magic and pass through armour, but the damage drops sharply in exchange
- Volatility — the target explodes when hit, which consumes the effect
- Thorns — anything that damages the user takes damage back
Gills is the clearest example of a brew being a weapon as much as a tool: given to someone else it is a drowning sentence, not a gift.
The magical-energy effects
Three interact with the mod's internal energy buffer rather than with health:
- Invigorating fills the buffer by a flat amount, more at higher intensity
- Inhibited blocks the buffer entirely, so items needing magical energy stop working
- Magic Sponge reduces incoming magic damage and refills the buffer in proportion to what it absorbed
Effects that move other effects around
Theft steals positive effects from nearby entities and applies them to you. Synchronized does the reverse, spreading your effects to those nearby. The two are explicitly incompatible, so a build has to choose.
Reversing anything
A brew made from a demon horn inverts positive effects into their negative counterparts. That turns any beneficial potion in your inventory into an attack, which is the mod's most flexible offensive option.
Where they are made
All of this runs through the Cauldron Brewing category at 48 recipes — the largest bespoke system in a mod whose other categories are 25 rituals, 13 curses, 7 incense and 6 oils.
Covers the mod's in-game guide topics: