Alchemy Plans | Patreon Weekly #82

Hey Patrons, Happy Holidays!

I’ve been taking it a bit easy this week, and so don’t have a lot to report in terms of v0.9.2 plans. So, I thought I’d shift gears a bit and talk about something that will be coming a bit later: improvements to alchemy!

What’s Wrong with Alchemy?

My original plan was for alchemy to add cool new mechanics based on consumable items, and easy ways to recycle consumable items you don’t want. The system sort of does this currently but has a lot of holes. The system is complex, only marginally helps with recycling items, and a majority of its produce is overly situational or just plain underpowered.

I think that the biggest source of these problems right now is alchemical energy.

Currently alchemical energy is a mostly static resource that the game just gives you as you find alchemy rooms. Because players will want to use it up, energy does a decent job of encouraging players to try out alchemy, but otherwise it utterly fails at its role. There is often more than enough energy for the player to craft what they want, and so mostly it ends up just adding complexity, rather than improving alchemy in any meaningful way.

How am I changing Alchemical Energy?

I think the best way to address this is to make a crucial change to energy that would make it a much more important part of the system: Recipes now use energy instead of seeds/stones, The energy that alchemy pots start with is massively reduced, but more energy can be generated by sacrificing potions, scrolls, seeds, and runestones.

This repositions energy as the core resource for alchemy. It would become a primary driving force both for the cost of recipes and for recycling consumables. Crucially, this would also be a lot more flexible than the current system, as once an item is turned into energy it could be used on anything.

Naturally, the next question is what happens to the existing recipes that involve items like seeds, stones, and catalysts? These recipes originally included these items as an attempt to get the player recycling, but if energy is changed in this way that is no longer needed. This is a part of the design I haven’t fully worked out yet. Swapping the seed/stone cost on many recipes is easy, but catalysts have some value in their own right, and so I may not want to totally remove them. There’s also the question of how the alchemy UI will be changed to accommodate all of this.

My current rough plan is to keep hammering out the details while working on talents, and then implement this change in v0.9.4, after the talent system is finished. In the meantime though, I’d love to hear whether you guys think this would be an improvement to the alchemy system!