Alchemy grabs adjacent pile value instead of underneath

[blackrazor]

Of all the bugs I posted on the sourceforge bugtracker some weeks ago (before I discovered this forum), this one is probably the most important. Players on Metalforge currently think their alchemy spell "failed", when really this is the problem:

Alchemy (3rd lvl summoning spell, type "invoke alchemy"): Non-additive results with the range is an issue

This 3rd level summoning spell, Alchemy, grabs all items in the nine tiles at range 0 to 1 from the character, and turns them into approximately 20% of their value in gold nuggets.

The problem is that it does so in non-additive fashion! More than once now, I have "lost" a pile of valuable goodies, because it was adjacent to a piece of furniture (table, chair, etc.). The nearby furniture got dragged into the alchemy spell, and its value replaced the value of the pile I was alching, basically giving zero value.

My band-aid fix has been to double-check that all nearby furniture and also "nearly invisible" (on my screen anyways) arrow droppings have been accounted for before alching. I try to alch in truly open places, away from flowers, mushrooms, trees, rubble, bones, boulders, and other bits of seemingly harmless scenery.

A much better, more robust fix would limit alchemy's range to 0, so you can affect only the pile of goodies that is in the one tile directly under you.