You don’t need to loot all that much for alchemy, mat requirements are ‘steep’ only for the first craft, after that you can refresh all consumables with one dose of alcohol. You do however have to track down some of those rare components, most of which come from bounties and such. I think some can even be missed if you take certain paths in quests and spare your targets. I’m not sure how I circumvented that, it was either with a mod or CDP added a merchant that sold those mutagens, I honestly don’t remember.