Paint is mixed in a Pigment Laboratory, using eleven base ingredients and four catalysts. Paint mixing is person-specific; a recipe that works for one person will probably not work for another. Some combinations are non-reactive and will work for everyone, though will frequently be much more expensive than using a reactive mix (see non-reactive paint recipes).
Paint is used in some building construction costs, some research costs and for painting compounds.
The info following is taken from the T1 paint guide, though some effort has been made to merge it with available T2 info. Buyer beware.
Each color can be represented by three numbers, giving the intensity (from 0 to 255) of each of the three primary colors: red, green, and blue. This triple is called an RGB value. The RGB value of pure white is (255,255,255), black is (0,0,0), red is (255,0,0), and so forth.
There are 142 unique paint colors that can be produced. When you mix a paint that has a given RGB value, the color from the list that is closest to that RGB value will determine what color paint you have mixed. For instance, if you produce a paint with an RGB value of (250,4,0), the paint will be red.
There are eleven base ingredients, and each has a starting RGB value, listed below:
Note: these RGB values are direct from the T1 guide and are likely to have changed
| Ingredient | Short | Red | Green | Blue |
| Cabbage Juice | cj | 128 | 64 | 144 |
| Carrots | cr | 224 | 112 | 32 |
| Clay | cl | 128 | 96 | 32 |
| Copper | co | 64 | 192 | 192 |
| Dead Tongue | dt | 112 | 64 | 64 |
| Earth Light | el | 128 | 240 | 224 |
| Iron | io | 96 | 48 | 32 |
| Lead | lo | 80 | 80 | 96 |
| Red Sand | rs | 144 | 16 | 24 |
| Silver Powder | si | 16 | 16 | 32 |
| Toad Skin | ts | 48 | 96 | 48 |
When you mix two ingredients, their colors are averaged according to how much of each ingredient is present. For example, if you mix two iron and one dead tongue, the resulting RGB value will be:
io + io + dt
Red = ( 96 + 96 + 112 )/3 = 101
Green = ( 48 + 48 + 64 )/3 = 53
Blue = ( 32 + 32 + 64 )/3 = 43
This color (101,53,43) is closest to SaddleBrown, so that would be the color of the paint. However, you will be unable to remove this paint from the pigment lab, since you must have added a minimum of ten ingredients (not necessarily unique) in order for the paint to be concentrated enough to use.
Ingredients are normally added in .1 deben quantities (when making one deben of paint), so if your recipe calls for one addition of el, you are actually only using one tenth of an earthlight mushroom; the remainder of the mushroom is kept in the paint lab for future use. If the paint lab runs out of a given ingredient, it will try to take another unit from your inventory.
With the unlocking of Mass Production of Color, pigment labs became upgradable to make paint in batches of 10 or 100. The amount of ingredients used was also multipled by 10 or 100, so adding one el when aking a batch of 10 paint uses an entire earthlight, and uses 10 earthlights when making a batch of 100. You still have to add 10 ingredients to complete the batch of paint.
You may realize that it seems some colors, like white and black will be impossible; no mixture of the base ingredients will ever result in (0,0,0) or (255,255,255). However, there is a twist: some ingredients react with each other, to produce shift in one or more of the red, green or blue components of the color. For example, mixing together cabbage juice and copper will produce a different color that you might expect from the basic averaging. The magnitudes of these reactions for any given pair of ingredients are different for each person. The list of ingredients which react and their basic effect, however, is the same for everyone.
A crucial part of planned paint mixing is knowing your "reaction values", and how to apply them. See Paint Reaction Values for how to measure your reaction values.
The shift in the RGB values is constant for a given pair of ingredients, and is added on to the basic average. For instance, your cj-co reaction might be to increase the blue component by 36, leaving the red and green components untouched. It will always be the same, unaffected by how much cabbage juice or copper ore is present.
A reaction between two ingredients is order-dependant. The shift produced by cj, followed by co may be different than co followed by cj. Also, a reaction between any two ingredients will only take place once, regardless of ordering. So, if you add cj, co, cj, only the cj-co reaction will take place.
A reaction will occur whenever an ingredient is added to a mix containing ingredients it reacts with, and will react will all of those ingredients, subject to the above conditions. After five unique ingredients (reacting or otherwise) have been added, no further reactions will occur.
Finally, the reaction shifts are not included in the averaging when adding additional ingredients. So, to calculate the final RGB value of a given recipe, average together all the ingredients, then add all the accumulated reaction shifts. For example, if you have a recipe cj io co io rs cl cr cr cr cr cr, the final color value will be the averaged RGB value of all the ingredients, plus the shifts from the following reactions: cj-io, cj-co. Carrot does normally react with red sand, but that reaction doesn't take place because by the time carrot is added, there are already five unique ingredients in the mix.
In addition to the eleven base ingredients, there are four catalysts: lime, potash, saltpeter, and sulfur. These have no color of their own (and so don't affect the normal average mix), and do not count towards paint concentration. They do, however, react with other ingredients, in the same way ingredients react among themselves. Among the catalysts, sulfur and potash react with each other to produce yet another shift. The other catalyst combinations produce no reaction of their own. Catalysts do count towards the number of unique ingredients for reaction purposes.
When striving for a particular color, most mixers will check the RGB value on a color chart. Then compare that color to one of the 2-element averages to get a base mix. Then plan a catalyst / reaction strategy that gets you close, and begin experimenting.
Often an approximate guess and some follow-up tinkering will get you to a working recipe in a short while.
Once you have a color, don't settle for that one recipe. Most recipes can be tweaked using reactions to avoid costly ingredients like rare mushrooms, silver powder, or metals.
For the amount of paint you will need in your life, it may not be worthwhile for you to learn paint mixing. If that is the case, you will want to contact someone who does have a lot of recipes to mix your paint for you. You can probably track down someone easily enough, and the following painters have posted their recipe lists so that you can contact them for your painting needs (or get an idea of how to mix that color yourself).