At the end of Chapter 5 and before the beginning of Chapter 6 in Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door, there’s a vignette with Princess Peach. During this, you’re asked by TEC to mix a potion to turn Peach invisible. It’s a puzzle, and like any puzzle, it’s possible to get stumped, so here’s how you do it.
First up, you need to grab all the beakers in the room. There are four of them, each a different color, and they’re all on the table. You don’t have to pick up and use them one at a time, so just grab them all and stuff them in your pocket.
Next, you have to figure out the pattern to place them in. There are notes around the room that will give you clues on how to arrange them. The most important ones say not to put the red potion on the right, and to keep two potions between red and green. Because there are only four spots, you know that green and red will be on the extreme sides, and if red can’t be on the right, that means it’s on the very left with green on the very right.
You need only one more clue after that, like the one that says place the blue potion next to the red. The leaves one spot that you set yellow into.
That means the pattern is:
Red->Blue->Yellow->Green
How to create the invisibility potion in Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door
Once you have the beakers set in Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door, it’s time to mix them. TEC will give you instructions. You start the machine, then the nozzle will go from one bottle to another. You need to press the button under the nozzle to fill the bottle.
The trick is here that the nozzle doesn’t just go from one bottle to the next, it sometimes moves back and forward. That doesn’t complicate things a whole lot. You’re given plenty of time to press each button, so just watch where the nozzle goes, step in front of it, and push the button.
The tricky part is where you need to let the mixture heat for exactly 30 seconds, then press the button to turn it off. While TEC uses the word “exactly,” it isn’t as strict as it sounds. You can be a few seconds late and it will still work.
However, there’s no in-game timer to watch. The machine supposedly beeps every second, and you could count in your head if you’re good at that sort of thing, but it’s easier just to use a stop watch. There is a very very high chance that your phone has a stopwatch. If not, there are sites with stopwatches available for free. That’s the power of the future; suddenly we all have stopwatches.
In any case, if you got the timing correct, the concoction will come out bright green. Any other color you’ll just want to dump and try again. Scratch that, you should drink any failures, as some of them have quite amusing effects. Regardless, you’ll be able to try again immediately, so don’t stress about it.
Once it’s done, Peach will turn invisible, but her clothes won’t. She has to take her clothes off, which sounds pretty relaxing right about now.
