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Much more powerful in 3.5, where salt was worth as much as silver for some reason. And it was a trade good, meaning it's worth the same right next to the ocean where salt is plentiful as it is far away from it when there's no trading route available.
If you really want to make this powerful, presumably if there's more water there you just destroy some of it, so destroy only the hydroxide ions and make a Coulomb explosion with the power of an antimatter bomb.
A 9th level casting of the spell could create up to about 112.5gp if we go with the 3.5e economy(which doesn't have this spell, anyways), or only just over 1gp going off the 5e economy(it takes about 4 gallons of seawater per lb of salt, and you can purify 90 gallons casting at 9th level).
It's really not that good. Sure if you're level 20 and use all of your spell slots on it it's a decent sum of gold... but you're also level 20. Go rob a bank or something.
The real LPT is to remove water from cider to make an intensely apple flavored spirit without muting its flavors with heat.
Then sell the liquor to nobles and inflated prices without ever revealing the production method
I wonder how calvados retains it's apple flavour, I've never really thought about this beyond once being told that distilling mead is pretty pointless because the spirit would have lost almost all flavour.
Salt was very valuable back in the day, helps preserve food, and is the only spice you could probably get your hands on. Add to that it being a magic component, and it would be even more valuable.
Get Alchemy Jug. Or 2 levels of Artificer and an infusion.
Generate 10 gallons of saltwater per day from Jug.
Get the salt out of that for the cost of 1 level 1 spell slot.Profit? Apparently 2.5 pounds of salt based on another comment here.
Which is worth 12.5 cp. Or you could get 3 cups of acid and fill 6 vials (worth 1 gp each) and get 150 gp worth of acid. Sell that for 75 gp because it's not a trade good like salt, and you still made a profit of 69 gp. Nice.
Yes the acid route is considerably quicker.
Although in practice, so can the "I want 4 Galllons of the average stock of beer from the royal dwarvish Court."