Just be careful who you sell poisons to...
Potion Craft entered Early Access on Steam in September 2021. The 1.0 release version was released in December 2022.
This game includes the following tropes:
- Achievement System: Notifications pop up when certain things are achieved, like buying a replacement Alchemy Machine or hitting the Reputation Cap.
- Anti-Frustration Features: Salts do not count as ingredients for customer requests that want no more than X type(s) of ingredients in the potion. This makes it possible to brew strong potions that use only a single ingredient type to fulfil the request.
- Awesome, but Impractical:
- Hard and Very Hard difficulty Haggling. They allow you to squeeze more coins from customers and merchants, up to six thousand in some cases, but careless mistakes can send it all down the drain and put you in an even worse position. Unlocking both talents also cost a whopping 15 points, enough to raise the other 3 talent trees for 2-3 levels each. The changelog for the 1.0 version mentions making it noticeably easier in response to feedback.
- Philosopher's Salt. It automatically draws and rotates the potion towards the nearest not-yet-used effect on the map and rotates the bottle to match - but to craft it, you need 12 customized five-effects potions and the Philosopher's Stone, which is an item you get after a long and arduous chain of crafting. The rotation can be done with lower-tier salts and by the time you get halfway to the Philosopher's Stone you'll have enough ingredients and control over them to push your potion in any direction you want.
- Bad Powers, Good People: Even players trying for 100% reputation will find it useful to keep destructive potions around. Aphrodisiacs can be used to spice up marriages and Unproblematic Prostitution, hallucination-inducing potions inspire the local Mad Artist, rage potions can let meek people grow a spine on the spot, poisons serve as excellent fumigation tools, and so on. The one exception is the Potion of Necromancy, which no good NPC wants to buy - but it can be used for creating the legendary alchemy ingredients.
- Bragging Rights Reward: Before Philosopher's Salt was added, the Philosopher's Stone did nothing more than act as a pretty paperweight.
- Cap: Reputation maxes out on the positive axis at +100.
- Card-Carrying Villain: Many of the shadier clients will openly declare their intent to kill their spouses, steal things, etc. It's justified in that NPC conversations are such a brief part of the game that it wouldn't be fair to the player otherwise.
- Color-Coded for Your Convenience: Each type of ingredient has a color that matches its element.
- Air ingredients are white
- Magic ingredients are purple
- Water ingredients are blue
- Life ingredients are green
- Earth ingredients are brown
- Death ingredients are a sickly yellow-green
- Fire ingredients are orange
- Explosion ingredients are red
- Dungeon Bypass: Minerals/crystals bought from the Miner will teleport your potion on the Alchemy map, letting you bypass bones easily. They're especially useful for getting Necromancy.
- Element No. 5: And six, seven and eight; when the sorting compass was added in 1.0, the diagonal directions had sub-elements assigned to them. Northeast is Magic, Southeast is Life, Southwest is Death and Northwest is Explosion.
- Evil Pays Better: While even good-natured people can offer high prices, it's usually the vilest people who pay the most. Necromancy in particular sells for a ludicrous 2370 gold without any modifiers and is only ever used by evil people.
- Flower Motifs: As you might expect, the herb-gatherer is a lovely young maiden, and the mushroom-seller a quirky old hermit.
- Love Potion: NPCs may request a Potion of Charm. As of 1.0, it's treated as neutral in most cases unless the requester is an obvious creep.
- Natural Elements: The most basic ingredients are themed after fire, air, water, and earth. On the recipe map, Air takes you North, Water takes you East, Earth takes you South and Fire takes you West.
- Magic Map: The recipe map shows where recipes are, but not what a recipe is for until the player has crafted it for the first time. Much of the gameplay involves charting optimal 'routes' across the map based on the ingredients you have available.
- Our Dwarves Are All the Same: The Miner merchant has all the hallmarks of one; besides his occupation, he's also visibly shorter than other clients & merchants, sports a magnificent beard and speaks in short, blunt sentences.
- Potion-Brewing Mechanic: The game's primary mechanic. Each ingredient moves the marker on the diagram in a specific relative direction, and heating the brew in certain spots will turn it into a potion.
- Reed Richards Is Useless: Averted. Magic potions are both cool and used for cool purposes, like supercharging weapons, rejuvenating crops, and healing injuries. The townsfolk recognise this and will pay you a fair price for your wares.
- Shout-Out:
- One of the clients is a monster hunter strongly resembling Geralt, who says he will "toss a coin" to you if you sell him the potion he's looking for.
- Goldthorn herb looks exactly like the one found in World of Warcraft.
- The Moon Salt reagent is not to be confused with Moon Sugar.
- One of the icons for your potion label is the Hypnotoad.
- One of The Miner's potion request dialogues mentions excavating a cave that's "guarded by a bug. A huge one with a shell like stone."
- The achievement for brewing a strong potion for the first time is called "I need only your strongest potions!".
- Too Awesome to Use: Rainbow Cap is a mushroom whose path is an ellipsis going around a few times, making it rather versatile — but it's a rare and expensive ingredient. Its description even spells that out.
- Fable Bismuth even more so. It has the same path as a Rainbow Cap but is a square spiral instead of a circle spiral, AND lets you dodge bones by teleporting around them. You'll rarely ever see more than three in a seller's inventory.
- Worth It: Crystallization mistakes result in a useless but iridescently coloured spiral, which the player keeps as an ornament. The item description declares it to be "worth it".
