Ways of Alchemy · published · build 21022770
Hey alchemists! Our first content update is here. It adds Cooking — a new way to support your characters with hearty meals — and Pathkeys, which make exploration feel more narrative and better tied to your overall progress.
Whether you’re just starting or coming back after finishing the current content, this update gives you new reasons to revisit early locations, experiment with ingredients and push further into the unknown.
If you have a moment, please consider leaving a Steam review — it’s one of the most important things for the future of the project and for how visible the game is to other players.
Cooking is tied to early exploration and can be unlocked in any run:
Find Blueprints as you progress: you’ll now find the first Cooking Station Blueprint (Campfire) in Forest Edge, and three further upgrades in Forest near the City, Hills behind the River and the Singing Valleys. Step by step, they turn a simple campfire into a full kitchen.
Works with existing saves: if you already have a deep save, you don’t need to start over — just clear each of these locations one more time to claim the new Blueprints.
Start cooking right away: once you build your first Cooking Station, you can immediately roast Meat or Roots into simple Homefood — your first step towards proper meals.
Cooking adds a new layer to your everyday life and is designed to be more approachable than alchemy.
What you can do with Cooking:
Turn ingredients into proper meals: at any Cooking Station, Roots and Meat can be turned into Homefood. It has higher satiety than the same ingredients separately and helps your characters stay fed.
Create stews and soups from the second upgrade: starting from Cooking Station II (Field Kitchen), you can mix two ingredients or add a liquid as a secondary component to create combined dishes — for example, Roots + Meat for a stew, or Meat + Water (or another liquid) for a soup.
Experiment with spices at the third upgrade: at Cooking Station III (Cozy Kitchen), you can add extra ingredients as spices to chase higher-tier dishes. If you load a meal with enough of the properties it “cares about”, it turns into a stronger, upgraded version of that dish.
Get buffs, not just satiety: Homefood can be fed to characters; besides restoring hunger, it grants a Homefood buff that boosts some of their parameters for a limited time. When the timer runs out, the bonuses cleanly disappear.
Keep buff behavior predictable: eating another Homefood replaces the previous buff instead of stacking in strange ways.
Avoid harsh starvation penalties when you prepare well: starving characters will now first try to find Homefood. If they succeed, they eat it without penalties and get the buff’s effect in full.
Compared to alchemical experiments, Cooking does not require mastering specific Pillars and does not have non-working combinations: within the Cooking rules, your ingredient choices always produce a dish, and higher-tier kitchens give you room to optimize and experiment.
Turnip, Ginseng and Mandrake now count as Roots, making them natural candidates for cooked meals.
Animal Corpse, Carrion of Cold-Blooded Creature and Remains of the Curse now count as Meat, so they can also go into your recipes.
Combined dishes calculate their food value from the ingredients you put in, multiplying their base food values so that more complex recipes feel properly rewarding.
Exploration is now driven by Pathkeys — magical objects tied to specific places — and is better connected to your overall progress.
Pathkeys instead of maps in locations: where you previously found maps of new locations, you’ll now discover Pathkeys — magical objects linked to the essence of the location where you picked them up.
Decode them in the Library: Pathkeys can be researched in the Library, requiring a specific potion and a certain Library level.
Get both access and power: finishing Pathkey research grants you the map of a new location and several cards of influence, making exploration feel more story-driven and useful for your progress.
High-tier influence without relying on luck: the Pathkey that leads to the Shores of the World Ending now reliably gives a high-tier influence card, so you no longer have to depend on luck to bring your ritual circle to its maximum level.
This is a new gameplay layer, and your experience matters a lot. If you’d like to help us test things more thoroughly, in one of your runs please try to:
Acquire the Blueprints for the new Cooking Station, craft all its levels and build your full kitchen chain.
Cook different kinds of Homefood (simple roasted Meat/Roots, stews, soups, spiced high-tier dishes).
Feed these dishes to your characters and see how they behave in longer runs.
While doing this, please pay special attention to:
Hunger behavior: characters should get hungry and be fed in a predictable way, without strange edge cases.
Buffs from Homefood: buffs should apply correctly, expire when their timer runs out and disappear completely afterward.
Buff overwriting: eating new Homefood should replace the old buff, not stack or leave remnants.
Starvation logic: starving characters should try to find Homefood first, eat it without penalties if it’s available and receive the full buff.
If something feels off, we’ll be very grateful for bug reports. You can use our report form (where you can also attach your save) or share your findings on Steam Discussions and in our Discord.
Thank you again for playing and for coming back to try the Cooking update. We hope this makes your alchemists’ lives warmer, safer and tastier — and that Pathkeys make exploration feel more meaningful.
If you’re having a good time with the game and this update, we’d really appreciate a short Steam review — it helps us grow and plan future development. Thank you, alchemists!