Make alchemy recipes randomized per-game and consistent with a game, by doing the following:

• Initialize a N by N matrix at the start of the game, where N is the number of different potions in the game besides water. The matrix provides a lookup for what the constituent potion types in the appropriate rows mix to combine.
• Basic alchemy practices don’t consult the matrix, for instance, dipping a cursed potion into something always causes a blast, and dipping a potion into another of the same does nothing.
• Nonmagical potions are possibly excluded from the reagent set, the result set, or both. Most likely the reagent set if both source potions are nonmagical - it doesn’t make sense to mix nonmagical juice with booze and wind up with a magical potion of enlightenment. But it may also not make enough sense if combining two magical potions produces a nonmagical one.
• The number of entries for a given potion type in the matrix are proportionate to the generation frequency of that potion. So there may only be one specific combination of potions which produces polymorph, whereas many things produce sickness or fruit juice.
• Hardcoded rules like could be enforced on the matrix if need be, but it’s probably better if players don’t have an easy known path to mass produce full healing or gain ability.

This system gets rid of random alchemy results entirely, but does not necessarily get rid of the chance of an alchemic blast or failing and turning into water or evaporating. Possibly these could be removed, so that the player is incentivized to try and mix together as many potion types as they can to discover what they produce and find interesting combinations.

A list of known alchemy recipes could be added to the discoveries list so the player can use it as a reference.

If an artifact produces any kind of message which clearly identifies it, it should be automatically identified as such in the discoveries list as if it had been formally identified. (In practice, the artifact will be clearly named, as well, so this just saves the trouble of having to officially discover it.)

Your discoveries list is presented as a menu rather than a fixed list of every single thing you have discovered. The menu contains the subcategories that the current long list is organized into (weapons, scrolls, gems etc), which will let you view that subset of your discoveries. There’s also an option provided to view all the discoveries at once if you want to view that. Possibly this feature should be controlled by an option.

In the C call menu, allow \ to be entered as an alias for d, the discoveries list.

Anything the player touches or has seen the description of is added to the discoveries list with a blank type name (it hasn’t been named yet, but will be accessible on the list so the player knows they’ve seen it and can call it from the list at a later point).

Specifically, this should trigger whenever an object internally sets dknown to true.

When you are quoted a price for an unidentified item, it is automatically remembered on the discoveries list. (Not specified how this would interact with being quoted a different price by different shopkeepers, or being quoted both a buy and sell price for the same item, or whether this price should be stored as the object type-name or independently from it.)