This page documents what is known about incense making so far. To begin a batch of incense in a Scent Lab, you need 20 cactus sap and 4 charcoal. Incense is created in batches of 20 and may be burnt one at a time in an Incense Holder. If you are in range of a burning incense holder (~50 coords?), you may catch a whiff of scent and you will gain +1 to one stat and -1 to another, depending on the incense. While making the incense in the lab, you may sample it for scent with no loss. Incense has a quality (ranging from 0 to approximately 600), a fragrance (Flowers, Jasmine, etc), an adjective (invigorating, giddy, etc) with a positive stat boost and a negative stat. An example is "incense:quality 348 Flowers, guilty endurance with a hint of forgetfulness".
Every time you start a batch in a lab, you get a different starting point (restricted to a range of possible scents, attributes, etc - see below). You can add herbs, resin and Rose of Ra Petals to adjust characteristics of the incense. The fundamental fragrance (Myrrh, Flowers, Cloves, etc.) does not seem to change with addition of resin, and neither does the adjective (invigorating, relaxing, giddy, guilty, etc). However quality and stats affected may change. Herbs appear to affect the fragrance. By elimination, etals may affect the adjective (giddy, guilty, etc + positive stat).
My experiments have shown the fundamental fragrance can change as well as the descriptive of the positive change with herb additions (an maybe resin as well). I changed a 140 quality-flower-guilty-percept to a 400 quality-Myrrh-giddy-Dex adding many different herbs and resin types to try and gain quality. The method was a simple "keep doing what works until it doesn't" technique. If an item added quality, I kept adding 1 of that item till the positive quality addition stopped or reversed. I used very common herbs tiny clover lemondrop mountain mint Common basil and a few common resins. Total additives for that 20 incense were almost 80. Not very cost effective IMO unless 400 Quality is valueable.
Using the same ingredient more than once changes the quality each time it is used. In multiple tests, an ingredient that made a large increase in quality the first time it was added made successively smaller increases each time it was added, until it went to no change, and then started decreasing the quality with further additions. Some additions will begin by decreasing the quality before increasing it again and other times they will only decrease it. Once an incense reaches quality 0 (useless), it appears impossible to raise the quality again.
Resins appear to alter just the stats affected by the incense. See Resins for detailed tests.
| Resins | str | dex | end | spd | con | foc | per | quality | scent |
| Anaxi | - | + | |||||||
| Ash Palm | |||||||||
| Bottle Tree | - | + | |||||||
| Bramble Hedge | |||||||||
| Butterleaf Tree | - | + | |||||||
| Cerulean Blue | - | + | |||||||
| Cinnar | |||||||||
| Chakkanut Tree | |||||||||
| Coconut Palm | + | - | |||||||
| Cricklewood | |||||||||
| Delta Palm | |||||||||
| Feather Tree | |||||||||
| Fern Palm | + | - | |||||||
| Folded Birch | |||||||||
| Giant Cricklewood | |||||||||
| Hawthorn | - | + | |||||||
| Kaeshra | |||||||||
| Mini Palmetto | |||||||||
| Miniature Fern Palm | - | + | |||||||
| Monkey Palm | |||||||||
| Orrorin | |||||||||
| Passam | - | + | |||||||
| Pratyeka Tree | + | - | |||||||
| Ranyahn | |||||||||
| Razor Palm | |||||||||
| Royal Palm | |||||||||
| Savaka | |||||||||
| Spindle Tree | |||||||||
| Stout Palm | |||||||||
| Tapacae Miralis | |||||||||
| Towering Palm | + | - | |||||||
| Umbrella Palm | |||||||||
| Windriver |
Herbs seem to alter the fragrance - you may need multiple additions, which can be expensive in terms of herbs and quality. See Herbs for detailed tests.
No idea, it's horribly expensive to test ;) Maybe affects the adjective to the positive stat? See Petals for detailed tests.