Potion Craft: Alchemist Simulator | Overview, Gameplay & Impressions (2021 EARLY ACCESS)

Haiti team and welcome back to the channel and welcome to potioncraft so we’ve covered this a little bit in previous uh beta builds or pre-release prologue something like that but she’s coming out into early access in fact it’s probably out by the time this video goes up it’s slated for the 21st so

Potion craft let’s continue because i’ve been playing a little bit since i’m in a pre-release build um i’ve been eagerly anticipating this game i’ve quite enjoyed following the um the sort of progress of it um what is potion crap well maybe you know you’re new to the channel you’ve never seen

This before that’s quite possible at the at the core of it is this screen that we’re playing on where we we basically make custom potions you can see i’ve got some ingredients here and mousing over them does all sorts of cool stuff i’ve got some potions on the shelf we’ve also

Got over here the way to make new potions we can also change like what sort of bottle they’re in and their label and i think their coloring and all that as well look at that so there’s quite a lot of cool stuff however is that a kangaroo however they um they do

Sort of auto populate a lot of them anyway so i suppose in the late game as you get more complicated potions for example i’ve got a combination poison and healing potion why i don’t know because i wanted to because i’m curious but um you can probably make some pretty interesting

Combinations before we get into that i’ll just show you the other screens up here is sort of where you save your game and go to sleep to cycle to a new day over here is like a garden where you can grab ingredients but mine’s empty because i’m halfway through a day over

Here are sort of customers that come to your shop front that you can sell them potions that they request and down here is sort of the end game area that we’ve been sort of anticipating but it is very much end game you need to negotiate with uh traveling traders to

Buy bits and pieces you can see that’s how it’s supposed to look when it’s built and over here you can make like legendary uh different potions and that sort of stuff but you can see we’ve got the potion for this first one here so it does have a

Bit more of a long tail if you did play any of the previous builds so let’s get into the core of the game ultimately you want to make potion combinations with your various tools here to explore this almost sphere grid uh you know final fantasy 10 style uh all these little

Books give you xp and the green ones give you daily xp um so they reset each day in fact you have a leveling up tree over here that you can change that on if you level up here for example why this increases your view radius this increases the uh the

Experience of what is this more daily bonuses that give experience which are the green books appear on the map we could also augment the trading to make it more profitable and there is a haggling mini game also that you can engage with so the there’s a sort of

Standard fear for an upgrade tree it’s nothing super duper where you know you don’t get extra abilities or anything like that unlocked it’s a few percentages here and there so you know i guess it’s it’s serviceable is probably what you would say right what’s going on here water

New potion bases may be purchased from merchants that’s cool because we’ve got water here anyway so let me show you let’s actually let’s talk to this bloke and we’ll see if we can figure out his potion what’s going on here thought it’d stop him by a potion for our battle mate

She’s been complaining recently these magic powers have waned uh well look at this i actually have a mana potion sitting here that i’ve already built so might as well just plonk that there look at this this potion was due but i would pay more for something of higher grade hmm maybe

Let’s step up to the challenge so this potion of mana is uh so you can see weak potion of healing this potion of matter is level two actually you can see the little roman numerals on it frost two healing one potion right so let’s attempt to make a mana potion three now

These little uh these these are the different sort of potions you can make there’s a fire one there a healing one the mana one is up here now these are all hidden and question marked until you actually make one so this is just stuff that i’ve done progressing on my new

Save but you can see how far out this map seems to go so there’s all sorts of crazy stuff out there that we haven’t seen yet um so what we ultimately want to do is make this little bauble thing travel all the way up to there and we do

That by using our ingredients so what have we got here um let’s see oh yeah wind bloom will start getting us you know wind bloom might be a great place to start now you can see it’s got sort of two parts the dark one and the light one the dark one

Is raw wind blue so if we just grab this and plonk it in the pot it’ll uh it’ll allow enable us to go to that black x but if we put it in the mortar and pestle and give it a little bit of a grind you can see we can push the path

Out because we’re basically making a more concentrated uh substance so we’ll plop that in there and then we’ll give this a little stir and it’ll drive along the path which is very cool now what do we need we need something well actually water bloom might be just

The ticket actually if we hit these if you go too far into the skull and bones you are you will actually get your potion deleted um so we don’t want that at all so they’re not really viable a lot of them aren’t viable because we’re too close

Water blooms can do the job just fine and you know what let’s make that more concentrated as well okay perfect perfect i’ll give that a little bit of a bloody stir all right now i don’t know if i want to go into that i think i’m not even sure what that

Whirlpool does but for the sake of this example we’re not going in there we could oh look at that that’s actually perfect that is really good which mushroom so we’re going to i must have bought that bot from a traveling trader you can see i’ve got different amounts of different ingredients

We’re going to plonk that in we’re going to go full velocity all the way up and what i’m going to show you you can zoom the map in let me change it now what you can see it’s easy to see here you see how there’s a line to the

Scent to the origin to that we also have a line from our potion they’re just sort of overlapping at the moment now what we probably want to do is get them one to one overlapped if possible Pretty close and then if you use water solution it will walk your thing back along the line to origin so if you line them up and then sort of reverse like reverse parking you do this we’ll be able to bring the potion back in to the center there we go there’s two

There’s three perfect how good is that so that’s what exactly we want a tier three mana potion we get on the bellows here and we give that a pump and that’ll basically codify it now we can’t save the recipe because they’ve changed the build recipes are you used to be level

Gated or whatever you had almost infinite recipe pages your recipe book has x pages in it one might even do though potion of manner because i don’t know if you’re ever incentivized to go with a version of the potion like manna too right so we might just delete this recipe erase that recipe

And then we’ll go back and then we’ll save this recipe strong amount of potion right and obviously it’s going to use all the ingredients that we use there which were three things there but if we run out i’ve said we’re probably going to run out of those mushrooms in the future we

Probably won’t be able to build it so the recipe system i’m a bit hot and cold on right because ultimately there you probably want alternate ways to make the same potion the mana potion right you could make it so many different ways but you can only save one recipe and

We’ve only got six and the traveling salesman that sells those pages it’s really expensive so i mean maybe more in the late game but for the time being i’m still a little bit lukewarm on the way the recipe system works with the pages however you know if i want to look

At it from another angle if i just saved all the recipes and sold them all then i wouldn’t be engaging with the gameplay loop anymore would i so at least by limiting the the pages it does force me to brew a lot of the potions manually

Which i suppose is the heart of the game anyway we’ll finish that potion you can see now we’ve got it on our shelf it’s a little bit fatter than that stronger than that other mana potion let’s go back to that dude and chuck it on the scale he’s pretty happy about that excellent

This potion is perfect he’s going to give me 61 dollar reduce now we’ll haggle and the haggling is a sort of floating timed quick time event uh your mileage is going to vary with this i’m not actually a huge fan of it um i feel it’s it’s a little bit tacked on it

Doesn’t really seem to fit with the nature of this game but still you know i’ll show you it and you can make up your own mind um that’s if you enjoy something you still have to be critical of it you know that’s the that’s the best criticism it’s easy to be critical

Of something that you just hate right you just hate it from the sidelines but if you really enjoy something then your criticism of it i think holds much higher value so i like this game i do but for example the haggling system not a big fan all right so off we go

You hit that button you can see there’s a timer ticking down if you uh if you miss click it does not go your way anyway that’ll do 76 bucks so what did we get there was he was offering like 61 or something that’s not bad that’s not bad got a little bit

Extra off the top so that’s pretty cool a massive ant hill appeared near my house now ants are everywhere on the floor on the walls in the ceiling even in the food it’s unbearable i need something to get rid of those annoying bugs fast well he wants to what if i try

And give you this uh potion of healing and poison what do you reckon with that mate oh i don’t need this potion it’s effects are incompatible mate you’re not wrong i don’t know what i’m gonna do with that thing all right but he clearly wants a poison potion right now How strong now that’s the thing i was talking about generally speaking most of the customers have wanted a full strength potion right however what if we offer this bloke what have i got here oh i do have a strong it’s strong that is a strong potion you know what bugger

It here we go through this recipe i wouldn’t mind coming to a point where he’s like oh that’s a bit overkill isn’t it this potion is perfect right so he clearly doesn’t think that let’s haggle Um missing one of these sets you back significantly so honestly i’ve gotten to a point where i don’t even bother haggling like i’m doing it for the video but i just sell it straight away because i’d rather just zip over that entire bloody gameplay loop all together um Be a friend and give me a healing remedy of this on the stronger side some guys and i were escorting a trade caravan yesterday then we got attacked by bandits i was stabbed with a knife and fell out of the cart on the road i’m

Lucky to be alive now i need to recover and catch up with the caravan yeah right okay i got just the thing for you sir brew uh healing potion let’s go oh this potion’s perfect we’re just going to sell it bugger the haggling right off

Oh they say you know how to make potions reach popularity four there’s some potions here that it wants me to make as well this is part of a uh like a path i suppose you could say yeah and we get xp from oh look at this tier three potion i’m not even supposed

To be making them yet but but here i am i don’t know how much this will change over the course of early access uh what else we did cover the upgrade tree i said it’s not super i don’t find it that sexy these are sort of recipes your path

Manual is in development okay what else is here legendary recipes right now we’ve only got one of those this is all still a little bit vague to me but you can see here that’s saying like three hearts i suppose so that offers one hmm uh but the alchemy downstairs this machine needs fixing

So i guess that’s it for one day let’s go start a new day oh isn’t that cute game saves new day begins so you probably go out to your garden and pull up all your stuff kind of reminds me battle chef brigade another fantastic game but that’s more about cooking um

I mean oh look at this the dwarf greetings i brought gifts from the mountains yeah what are you selling what is this frost sapphire do not lick holy heck okay cloud crystal not cheap but i’ll tell you what i’ll take that one for sure for sure don’t suppose you’re interested

In my poison potion i can’t seem to get rid of i’ll give you a mana potion level two and a frost two because i’m sort of in the business of making better potions um 126 bucks i don’t think we’d be able to haggle for that what is this as well

Right that’s cool this is this is changing things up a bit we’ll haggle though at this point there’s so much money on the line Oh wow all right we’ll get away with murder see how they’re getting smaller and smaller a miss click costs you though so you have to be there we go 83 bucks mate we’re gouging him let’s go see you later buddy uh who are you what are you selling my

Miner i dig make tunnels look for gifts from the mountain stones yeah cool i don’t remember you being in the previous version so that’s pretty cool that stone is going to get us a long way across the map hello i lost my flint somewhere and now

I can’t light a fire my husband is coming home with friends tonight and i need to cook them some dinner do you have anything to help me light a fire uh in the heart yeah right well i guess we could make you a fire potion Hmm so that’s only a tier one let’s see will she be happy with just a basic one i’ll buy this potion but i won’t pay very much all right okay that’s fine let’s see so it’s over there we could try and make a more intense version i’m curious about this bloody

Rock look at this it really makes it makes your bloody go doesn’t it but that’s all sort of in the way maybe we invest in this rock to explore alternate potions perhaps i’m not sure We probably want to go down a bit first yeah in fact we’ll go full intensity on this just going to sort of make a oh and i probably don’t put that in the pot Well oh yeah look at that oh i kind of thought it was going to go a long way actually it doesn’t seem to go that far it’s just busy you know what i mean very zig zaggy hmm hmm i might actually scrap this potion we’ll hold on to that stone that could be

Handy to have later on yeah no i’ve i’ve tricked myself into thinking it’s just it’s just doing more stuff um all right here we go what does she bloody want again she wanted to buy a potion okay so we could probably just dump a bunch of firebell in here What happens if i no i have to i have to put this in first We’ll go another one So what are you doing seems like that could play a bit of a part as well uh Well we’ve got another fire bell which is probably how i got the potion in the first place but you can see if i want to get that higher intensity i kind of need to get it up to here somewhere so let’s see what we can pull off That’s going to be cutting it very close but we’ll do it Like that is fine all right let’s get out there Get right in there have a squeeze Line those lines up [Laughter] maybe we’ll be able to pull this off hang on Oh you’re killing me damn it um hang on Hey what was that one going bloody around in a this now what is this just jam bloody mushroom in there Here we go Boom let’s go boys finish potion bloody try that on for size love oh this potion’s perfect haggle nah whatever okay what do you want good day i’m going on a long crusade suit what better support uh to support a fighting spirit than a flask of ale problem is the sun will

Heat up my flask i think if i add a drop of frost potion to it it will stay cold i don’t know about that man putting bloody antifreeze in your food but uh each to this own right so he wants a frost potion i believe

I have made one you know what let’s just give him a crappy one oh we leveled up isn’t that cool you can have that whatever uh cost one i’m not that worried one of my own business flower pot fell on my head big bump in my head now what can i rub

On it to make it go away you have a poison healing potion no you don’t want that do you no i mean why would you why would you right my head feels better but now i’m dying of poison let’s just give him oh yeah here we go Perfect yeah i thought so ah this dude’s gonna sell me some mushrooms yes look at these ones on cheap i want them and what else have we got Do we have i don’t seem to have one of them I mean maybe i’ll just buy them all on the cheap you know just get all the cheap ones and he’s going to gouge me for them is he i bug you maybe we’ll buy these ones because they’re reasonable all right we’ll haggle Nice all right in dialogue maybe this livestock got into the habit of eating vegetables out of my garden i’ve tried chasing them off want to spice my vegetables up with something so what’s put poison in your vegetables yeah okay so anyway you get the idea of

The loop there is obviously a bit more to it in the sort of end game but you know we’re not going to be able to cover this i’ll probably do a follow-up episode we could do some streaming or something like that you know if we play through it uh your mileage

Will vary you know obviously i’ve kind of laid out the core loop even when they introduce more interesting end game stuff at the end of the day what i’ve just shown you is what this game is you know so it’s pretty i don’t want to say basic

But uh it definitely knows what it is you know what i mean and it’s taking that smaller bite of the pie so um yeah let me know what you reckon that this might be just the just the thing for you i like it um in the past people have this has been

Fairly well received on the channel as well so i think there’s an audience out there for this sort of game it is fun you know it is kind of light um but uh but i want i wonder if you play this for a good couple of hours

Do you hit your ceiling do you you’re okay i’m sick of the grind sort of thing i guess it depends on how you feel about grinding in games anyway anyway look i think that’s plenty enough we’ve covered this game and put it on your radar it

Should be out today or tomorrow um go and check it out otherwise i might just leave it there for the time being and i’ll catch you guys on the next one You