Study Table

The Study Table sits underground beneath a tower at your base, on the left side past your house, and the gate above it wants two things you are unlikely to have together. Your church has nothing to do with it. That catches almost everyone out, because the game’s own technology tutorial sends you there by name.

Blue points represent your spiritual knowledge of the immaterial world. You’ll get your first blue point at the Study Table in the Church basement.

The technology tutorial, naming a room that does not exist

There is no such basement. Reaching the real table is a questline rather than a build, and once you are down there it becomes the fastest source of Technology Points in the game.

Where the Study Table actually is

Your base has two locked buildings and they are easy to confuse. The church stands on the right side of the base over by the graveyard, and you open it by restoring and decorating it for the Nun. The tower is a separate structure on the left, past your house and beside the garden.

Albert describes the place as a secret tower in an Inquisitor base, which is what it is. Its gate asks for the Inquisitor’s medallion you have carried since the prison at the start of the game, and a Secret Combination you do not have. The Plague Doctor holds that half.

Getting in

The chain starts with a fairy. The Head of the Village explains how to summon one only after the Good Fellow quest, and his answer sends you underground for Dream Dust, which means finding Albert.

Larry points you at a hatch in your house that you are fairly sure was not there a moment ago. Go down it, clear the blockage in the dungeon below, follow the footprints and knock on the door at the end. Albert has no interest in helping until the medallion comes up.

What follows is a stalemate rather than a trade. The gate needs a medallion and a combination, he holds one, you hold the other, and neither of you gets in alone.

To open the gate, you need… a medallion and a secret combination.

And as circumstance would have it… I possess the combination.

And I have the medallion. So…

Albert and the Graveyard Keeper, arriving at the obvious

You keep the medallion. His price is access, so open the prison bars, enter the Abandoned Tower, and then open the hatch in the floor so he can follow you down. That second hatch shares a room with the laboratory, which is why Albert turns up behind you rather than ahead of you.

Two hatches, then, and people mix them up constantly. One sits in your house and opens the dungeon, the other sits in the Alchemy Lab floor and lets the doctor in. That same room holds the Laboratory I bench you will be making Dream Dust on shortly.

Why there is a laboratory down there at all

The room was never built for you, and the game gets a joke out of that. Albert spends the entire chain angling to get into this tower, and the moment he is down the ladder the place disappoints him.

Where the sard are all the books?! Where’s the library?

Albert, on arrival

He wanted a library. What he found belongs to whichever Inquisitor held the tower before you: workbenches, a flask shelf, and the table you came for.

The coincidence suits him anyway, since Dream Dust can only be made in this sort of laboratory. He hands over the recipe along with his notes on basic alchemy, and those notes are the game’s alchemy tutorial. Our alchemy calculator picks up where they leave off.

On the way in he mentions a book with a screaming skull on the cover and asks you to keep an eye out for it. He means the Necronomicon, the single most valuable thing you can ever put on this table. No quest ever collects it from you on his behalf, so his request is pure flavor.

What studying does

Put an item on the table and it is consumed in exchange for technology points. There are 393 studies and every one of them pays exactly once, so the table rewards variety rather than repetition.

Work through all of them and you collect 5,105 red, 6,470 green and 5,385 blue. Blue has the widest coverage, offered by 263 studies against 221 for green and 167 for red, which makes the table the most reliable answer to a blue shortage.

Studying pays a second time in a way the point totals hide. Seventy items carry alchemical runes, and a study is what reveals them, so you learn what an ingredient does in a mixture before you waste it in one. Water carries one green rune, Cheese carries one of each color, and a Copper Nugget carries two red and one green.

Bring one of everything new you make. An item you have already studied is worth more sold than placed on the table a second time.

Where Science comes from

Every study is bought with Science, from 1 for the cheapest scraps up to 50 for the Necronomicon. Clearing the whole list of 393 costs 2,901 Science, which is the number that governs how fast you climb the tech tree.

Science has one source and it is this same table. The second action on it, Decompose, takes three items: Clean Paper returns 1, Science Kit I returns 30 and Science Kit II returns 60. Both kits are worth far more decomposed here than used for anything else.

The kits come off a Writing Desk three at a time. Science Kit I takes Alchemy Flasks I, five Clean Paper and one Ink; Science Kit II takes Alchemy Flasks II, a Blank Softcover Notebook and two Ink. At 60 Science per Kit II, studying everything works out at roughly 49 kits, which puts Ink and Clean Paper behind almost every blue point you will ever spend.

Faith is the table’s other meter, and 38 studies ask for it alongside the item itself, between 1 and 5 each for 75 in total. Beeswax and Honey are the dearest at 5 apiece. Both meters behave the way Fuel does in a furnace, drawn from the building rather than shopped for.

What is worth studying

The Necronomicon is the best study in the game at 300 blue, four times the next best blue study anywhere. That is more than most players earn in a whole session.

Getting hold of one owes nothing to luck. Gunter, the Astrologer in his tower at the port, opens the subject once you reach 20 reputation with him and hands the book over at 30, together with the Forbidden Knowledge achievement and the resurrection technology. Nothing in the game asks for it afterwards, so studying it costs you nothing later, whatever the achievement text implies.

You found the Necronomicon. Some books should stay buried.

Forbidden Knowledge, achievement description

After that the good returns concentrate in late tools and gear. Master Sword and Master Armor pay 150 and 40 each, the five steel tools pay 100 and 20 each, and the tier III potions pay 130 split across two colors. The Goldfish is the oddity, giving 50 of all three.

Can you build a second one?

There is a buildable Study Table costing 2x Wooden Plank and 3x Bronze Detail, flagged as needing an unlock. Nothing grants that unlock: no technology, no quest, no perk, no achievement.

Both buildable versions are also tied to the alchemy lab build area and raised from the lab’s own build menu, so even unlocked they would stand in the room you are already standing in. Taking one down refunds both planks.

Treat the table in the laboratory as the only one you get. If the unlock ever appears, the cost above is what it will ask for.