Alchemy Factory Walkthrough — The Order to Unlock Everything

Alchemy Factory has no story campaign, so a walkthrough here means the order you unlock things rather than a sequence of chapters. The reliable route runs through a handful of early unlocks, then a cauldron bootstrap, then scaling sales and logistics. This page lays out that order using the community guide, the Codex and the official Steam description, so you always know which milestone comes next.

What a Walkthrough Means Here

Because progression is driven by the tech tree and main quests, every published route organises advice by phase instead of chapter. That is also why guides disagree about timing and agree about order: the early objectives are the same handful of unlocks in every version, and the cauldron is the pivot point in every version.

Phase	Milestone that ends it	What it gives you
Early game	Bandage wholesale saturated	Passive income that replaces manual shopkeeping
Midgame	Tech tree finished	A cauldron-based economy that compresses chains
Late game	Negotiation and sales scaled	Storefront and quest revenue on top of wholesale
Endgame	Gold dust chain running	Wealth generation that does not depend on traffic

The Phase Order That Works

Start by finishing the minimal set of unlocks rather than building a beautiful shop. The guide is blunt that the early game is a grind and that overbuilding before the unlocks wastes effort, because you will rebuild once portals and wholesale are available. Then pivot hard to the cauldron: tech up to it, blueprint cauldron chains, and spend upgrade points on fertilizer efficiency instead of spreading them.

Step	Action	Reason
1	Unlock the cash register	Ends manual customer checkout
2	Unlock the Nursery	Makes plant inputs renewable
3	Unlock purchase and dispatch portals	Enables real logistics
4	Unlock bandage wholesale	Turns production into passive income
5	Tech up to the cauldron	Compresses almost every production chain
6	Max fertilizer efficiency	Makes every cauldron recipe cheap
7	Add sales and negotiation	Scales income once production is solved

• Do not decorate or overbuild before the early unlocks are done.
• Blueprint bandage production and repeat it until wholesale is saturated.
• Move to the cauldron before building long conventional chains.
• Keep buying fertilizer efficiency until at least 200%, ideally 300%.

Levels 1 to 4 and the 1.0 Launch

The community blueprint guide names Levels 1 to 4 as the early window and frames that stage as being about stability, repeatability and reusable building blocks rather than optimisation. It identifies repeated rebuilding, poor layout reuse and inconsistent production flow as the usual blockers — all of which the phase order above avoids by delaying commitment until the unlocks are in.

Alchemy Factory 1.0 shipped on 7 September 2026 at $17.99 on Windows and delivered the Early Access roadmap's major features: the Grand Portal, the Wagon Logistics System, a rebuilt Reputation System and revamped shopkeeping. In practice that means the long-term walkthrough continues past the cauldron into logistics and reputation rather than stopping at optimisation.

• Levels 1 to 4: prioritise stability and reusable layouts.
• 1.0 additions: Grand Portal, Wagon Logistics, Reputation, shopkeeping.
• Long-term: expand the factory, grow the shop and build reputation.
• Co-op: the Steam page supports online and LAN co-op plus a dedicated server.

Exact tech-tree unlock order, level thresholds and Grand Portal costs are not documented yet, so treat them as to confirm. For the cauldron step in detail, see cauldron recipes, and for the upgrade points, see the upgrade guide.