Alchemy Factory has left Early Access

09/08/2026

«I forgot that eating was a thing from focusing too hard. Great weight loss game».

On 8 September the factory game Alchemy Factory left Early Access on Steam and shipped its full version. There are already more than two thousand reviews, about 89% of them positive. We read the recent reviews and wrote up what people praise about the lines and where they still get stuck.

About the game

The hero runs a tiny alchemy shop. He buys wood and ore, sends them along belts into furnaces and cauldrons, and puts potions, jewelry and relics on the counter. Customers walk in on their own and sometimes leave an order. A belt here is a track that carries items from one machine to the next by itself. The workshop is small and three-dimensional: beams, floors, pipes, not a base the size of a planet. You can play with a friend or a group. It looks like medieval alchemy. What you actually do is run a factory behind the counter.

What pulls

The lines.
People praise the act of putting a chain together: machine, belt, cauldron, belt again, and at the end a potion that already rolls onto the shelf. Counting ratios, squeezing a flow into a tight gap, watching the line finally move. For a lot of them that is the game, not the scenery around it.
Time.
They sat down for an evening and came to eight hours later. They forgot to eat, slept through work, could not cut off "one more belt". That is not a polite nod to pacing. It is a complaint about hours that went missing.
Scale.
The factory is toy-sized: tiny machines, beams, floors, assembled like a device on a table, not a base on an open map. Anyone who likes compact builds and counting every square stays for that.
The shop.
Make it, put it out, sell it, buy raw materials with the take. Customers and orders keep the loop alive: the line matters because the goods go somewhere, instead of piling up in a chest.
Blueprints.
A stretch of line can be copied and saved from the very start, not halfway through. They like building a fiddly cluster of machines once and stamping it after that, instead of laying every belt by hand.
The look.
A medieval workshop, furnaces, pipes, the sound of machines. Even people who already hate the keys still put the look among the things they like: the factory is pleasant to look at.
Together.
Running lines with two or a group is more fun: one person fixes a flow, the other runs to the shop. For some that is a reason to stay, not only a solo evening at the desk.

What snags

The keys.
The controls feel alien on the first evening: to tear a building down you do not select it and hit the usual delete key, you hit a special one first, then drag a box. The tutorial says one thing, the game does another. A stair labelled "to the second floor" can dump you below the join between floors. Until it clicks, you wrestle the menus more than the factory.
Belts going up.
On the floor, flows still come together. Vertically the belts cannot do the same job: split and merge like on the ground, you cannot, the workaround is long. There is no proper one-button mirror for a blueprint. (fixed in the 1.0 patch: after a split and a merge, one belt got almost nothing)
No room.
The workshop lot is small. Shift a piece of line and a pile of logs and junk dumps on the floor, and it will not all fit in your pockets. The bar at the bottom of the screen holds every building in the game, so finding the one you want takes ages. The compact scale people praise is the same thing that chokes them.
Customers.
The shop others love as a loop is called dull here: someone walks up, buys, leaves, no talk. By the midgame, counter money stops being a reason to play. Anyone who wanted to stand at the till more than they laid belts writes that the till quickly turns into background noise.
Not alchemy.
The name is cauldrons and potions. The job is a factory. There is little experimenting and a lot of production chains. Anyone who wanted a lab gets a plant with a shop sign on it.
Bugs.
The game will not start, cauldrons sit dead in half the builds, co-op tutorials only see one player. This is not one broken PC. Those reports are still in the recent reviews.
By hand.
Parts of the factory never let go: a portal that buys raw materials suddenly has no silver, the line stops, and nothing tells you. Flax on the plots has to be replanted again and again before bandages start moving. A daily summary pops over the whole screen. Anyone who wanted to switch the plant on and walk away will not find much of that here.

What landed in 1.0

The full version added wagons on rails: they haul more than a belt, they are harder to lay, and you can ride those rails yourself to inspect the factory. There are drinks from a barrel, a fountain that picks its own throw target, a portal for customers from distant cities, and a path so shoppers can actually reach the upper floors, which means the shop can be several storeys. Reputation from customer comments is gone; shop recognition sits in its place. They fixed belts that, after a split and a merge, left one path almost empty. The post says nothing about crashes on launch or silent cauldrons.

How the full version turned out

Alchemy Factory left Early Access as the same factory behind a shop that people sat with until morning. The lines, the compact builds, the blueprints and selling potions still hold, and almost nobody complains about the look. The keys, the cramped space, the silent customers and the bits you cannot leave unsupervised have not gone anywhere. Wagons, extra shop floors and the splitter fix are the full version, not a promise. Launch crashes and silent cauldrons are not in that announcement, and the recent reviews still mention them.