Alchemy Factory Guide — Early Game, Cauldrons, Fertilizer and Endgame

An Alchemy Factory guide is a progression plan rather than a story route, because the game has no campaign to walk through. You start with a small shop, automate production with conveyor belts, pipes and magical devices, then scale into a multi-level alchemy factory. The community consensus route runs in three phases — sprint to automation, bootstrap to cauldrons, then turn cheap plants into gold — and the 1.0 release added the systems you are ultimately building toward.

How This Guide Is Organised

The advice below is drawn from the community guide "Becoming the ultimate alchemist" and the Alchemy Factory Codex, cross-checked against the official Steam description. Treat the phase boundaries as decision points rather than timers: you move to the next phase when the listed unlocks are done, not when a clock says so.

Phase	Main goal	Where your attention goes
Early game	Reach full automation	Cash register, Nursery, portals, bandage wholesale
Midgame	Bootstrap to cauldrons	Tech up, blueprint cauldron chains
Late game	Scale income	Negotiation, wholesale, storefront and quests
Endgame	Maximise wealth	Cauldron gold production, minimal traffic management

Early Game: Sprint to Automation

The early game is a grind of manually stocking shelves, fetching refill materials and checking out customers, and the guide's core advice is not to overbuild while you are in it. Focus on the raw minimum needed to unlock the cash register, the Nursery, the purchase portal and dispatch portal, and bandage wholesale. The game changes once bandage wholesale is available, because wholesaling produces easier passive income than managing customer happiness or quests.

• Unlock the cash register to stop checking out customers by hand.
• Unlock the Nursery so plant inputs become sustainable.
• Unlock the purchase portal and dispatch portal for logistics.
• Unlock bandage wholesale, then saturate it with blueprinted bandage production.
• Put every early upgrade point into fertilizer, because wholesale margins depend on fertilizer cost.

Midgame: Cauldrons and Fertilizer

Every item in the game carries a hidden cauldron value, and the cauldron trades three different items for one of approximately equivalent value. That makes it faster and more compact than any normal production path, though the cost ratio swings from roughly 50% better to 200% worse depending on the item. The exploit is that the cauldron does not care where the value comes from as long as you do not repeat an item, so fertilizer upgrades let you feed it plant byproducts at a fraction of normal cost.

Midgame priority	Why
Tech up fast to the cauldron	It unlocks compressed production for almost everything
Blueprint cauldron production	Cascading chains add value at every step
Feed the cauldron from fertilizer	Plant byproducts cost a third or a quarter of normal materials
Keep buying fertilizer efficiency	It is the multiplier behind every cauldron recipe

A worked example from the guide: with roughly a dozen cauldrons fed by Flax, Sage, Redcurrant and Lavender, you can produce Lapis Lazuli at around a third of the traditional production cost. The guide's rule of thumb is to reach 200% fertilizer efficiency, and possibly 300%, before spending points on conveyor speed or negotiation.

Late Game and Endgame: Turning Flax into Gold

Once the tech tree is finished, the guide's late-game advice turns to scale and to transport. It recommends catapults and cannons over conveyors for medium and long distances, because mass conveyors hit the CPU hard while catapults and cannons are procedurally simpler. It also recommends building vertically with intent — a central staircase or shroom elevator plus a central hub blueprint of lift conveyors carrying planks and gears up each floor — and avoiding "borg cube" blueprints that hide what a build does.

The endgame chain it points at is explicit: cauldron recipes produce Pure Gold Dust, which goes into Crucibles, then a Gold Ingot, which processors turn into a gold coin. The documented Pure Gold Dust recipe is Adamant plus Resonant Catalyst plus Gold Dust. Rather than managing customer reputation or quest item runs, the guide's position is that this cauldron gold loop is the most efficient income in the game.

• Gold dust path: Adamant + Resonant Catalyst + Gold Dust = Pure Gold Dust.
• Then: Pure Gold Dust into Crucibles, Crucible output into Gold Ingot.
• Then: Gold Ingot into a processor for gold coins.
• Transport: catapults and cannons beat mass conveyors in the late game.

The 1.0 Systems You Are Progressing Toward

Alchemy Factory left Early Access with version 1.0 on 7 September 2026, priced at $17.99 on Windows. The Steam description lists the headline additions:

1.0 feature	What it changes
Grand Portal	A late-game structure in the full-release feature set
Wagon Logistics System	Long-distance transport and logistics
Rebuilt Reputation System	Shop reputation reworked for 1.0
Revamped shopkeeping	Sales and shop management updated

What Is Not Confirmed

Exact cauldron values shift between builds — the Codex snapshot used by the community calculator was taken during Early Access, so numbers may differ in 1.0. The precise unlock order of the tech tree, the exact cost of Grand Portal sigils, and per-item wholesale caps are not documented in the sources used here. For the recipe-level detail, see the cauldron recipes page, and for the upgrade tracks themselves, see the upgrade guide.