Things We Wish We Knew Before Playing Alchemy Factory

Management and automation have always been two of the most popular genres in gaming, and Alchemy Factory encompasses them both perfectly. As soon as you load into a game, you start with nothing but a few basic recipes and a tutorial on how you can start crafting things, which doesn’t tell you a lot.

As an alchemist and a crafter, you have to figure out most of the things yourself, which can make it quite daunting to automate everything if you don’t know the right tools for each job, especially during the mid and late game. Thankfully, there are a few easy tips that you can follow to save yourself from that stress.

Sell Things That Aren’t Needed

As you go through the general tutorial of Alchemy Factory, you’ll soon be asked to open up your shop with a few basic items stocked up. There are many different types of materials in the game, but you can only sell a few of them. The items you can sell can be found in the goods section of the recipe book.

You can also identify sellable items by hovering your mouse over them in your inventory as well, since these will be the only items that show you their selling price. However, you can’t start selling these items as soon as you make them since you need to use them for early-game quests first.

Once both the above conditions are met, you usually don’t have much use for these items outside of crafting other furniture. Hence, you can start selling them in your store to earn some profit, which can be crucial for your growth since it’s usually recommended to avoid taking a loan.

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You Have To Multitask

One of the biggest mistakes you can make in this game is focusing on one objective at a time, which is also the main reason Alchemy Factory can get quite overwhelming. As long as you have a manual input in any task, you have to get back and pay attention to it every few seconds, even while you’re trying to figure out a new recipe.

For example, if you’re planting crops and making some rope, healing potions, or bandages for yourself, you’ll have to check on them regularly to see when they’ve grown and replant them instantly. Of course, much like everything else in the game, this issue also gets resolved with higher levels as you unlock automated farming.

You Can Rotate Your Conveyor Belt

In our experience, one of the main early game problems was the conveyor belt. While you do have some convenient options of both straight and sloped belts, the process to rotate them wasn’t the most obvious. The easiest way to do this is by holding the left mouse button while creating a conveyor belt and dragging it to the destination.

If you want to make multiple curves on the path, you can stop dragging it after each curve and start again. Holding in general while building things can be quite useful as it lets you place multiple items at once and even change the height of certain items like the Conveyor Lifter, which can be highly useful.

Don’t Be Scared Of Closing Your Shop

Whenever you level up in Alchemy Factory, you unlock an entire tier of new research nodes, including different building items and crafting recipes. During the early game, this isn’t quite as overwhelming since the items you unlock aren’t that complicated, though this quickly changes after level three.

From here, you unlock various new processes that you have to spend time figuring out as you wouldn’t want to place them randomly and have an issue later. To pay attention to the new mechanics, you can always close your shop for a bit or stock it with items that don’t go out of stock quickly.

Manage Your Builds From The Start

This game puts a lot of emphasis on the automation of all processes, which is also reflected in the time management. For example, your shop stays open throughout the day unless you close it, which means you won’t have a few hours at the end of each day where you can just refuel all your processes.

You’ll also have a lot more ongoing structures as you level up, which makes it very difficult to keep track of where you need to add logs, stone, or any other item. To avoid a lot of this hassle during the late game, it’s highly recommended to manage your builds from the start so that they’re largely automated.

Focus On Your Quests

You can see a mailbox outside your shop, right below the shop’s open/close sign, and this will sometimes have a special pop-up whenever you have a new quest. There are multiple types of quests in the game:

Apart from your shop, doing these quests will be your main way of earning money in the game, and it’s important to pay attention to them when you can.

Be Careful With Your Money

Talking about money, it’s also important to keep an eye on your current earnings and how much you’re spending on different tasks like research or buying raw material. You can see the money you currently have on the top right of your screen, though coins are also a physical commodity in your inventory.

This means that you can store some of them in a chest and the stored money won’t be displayed on your HUD. This can be used to start saving money bit by bit for a rainy day, but in general, you’d want to at least have 2,000-3,000 coins at all times since these can be used to buy seeds, ore, wood, and stone when you need them.

Sell A Variety Of Items In Your Store

Once you get to level three and beyond, you’ll have quite a wide range of items to sell. Some of these will have low selling prices like the wooden gears, while others will have a high price but less space on the shelf like the Mortar. Both of these types are important, and you should always sell a good variety of items in your store.

You can see your shop’s reputation on the right side of your level, which goes up if the customers find the things they’re looking for. If you have a wider range of items, the chances of your reputation going up increase, and so does the number of customers you get. Of course, this comes with the stress of having to keep all the items in stock.

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