Your first session: buy land → harvest → first potion → first furnace → iron ingot → automatic cashier → research pipeline. That is the tutorial loop plus the two unlocks that turn the game into an automation game.
Day one — the tutorial loop
- Buy your first plot — “The Alchemist’s Path I” (98.4%).
- Harvest a crop — “You reap what you sow.” (87.9%). Plant something that feeds the potion chain.
- Produce a Healing Potion — the “First Potion!” moment (76.6%); connects production → research → shop.
- Place a Stone Furnace — “Fire It Up!” (75.6%); smelting starts here.
- Produce an Iron Ingot — “Iron Age” (74.5%); iron carries the tech tree.
Day two — automate the shop
- Research and place the Automatic Cashier (69.3%) — checkout runs itself and frees your attention for factory planning.
- Research Pipeline (58.5%) — pipes move liquids and solve belt spaghetti early.
- Expand to a second plot before bottlenecks appear; land is the cheapest real-estate unlock.
Week one — the automation pivot
- Balance inputs and outputs: an overflowing input buffer hides a starving machine downstream.
- Build multi-level: 1.0 supports multi-story shops — customers navigate upper floors (hotfix-tested).
- Use the Workbench for non-production devices in 1.0 — see Where is the Workbench?.
- Start researching toward steel (29.0% reach it): steel fuels the mid-game.
Traps to skip
Items now sell at the price they have when the customer picks them up (official 1.0 change). Don’t dump goods “while the price is good” — stock quality and customer flow matter more.
- Chasing every research node — in 1.0 the tree is production-focused; non-production devices come from the Workbench. Research what you will actually build.
- Copying Early Access layouts — recipes and balance changed at 1.0; blueprint makers may be stale.
- Ignoring commissions — “Fidelity to the Quests” (30 random quests, 15.6%) shows quest demand is common; commissions convert idle stock into coins.
Where to go next
- Research order — what the unlock-rate data says about the best sequence.
- How the Cauldron works — the signature machine, explained.
- 1.0 systems — Wagon System, Grand Portal and Shop Recognition.
Milestone order and achievement percentages: OFFICIAL. Research costs and craft times: PENDING until 1.0-verified.
Independent fan reference for Alchemy Factory. Game data refers to the current official 1.0 build (Steam, PC). Field-level evidence is flagged on each page with OFFICIAL / OBSERVED / COMMUNITY badges; amounts shown without a badge come from the official 1.0 patch notes or store descriptions.