Under the Elm 0.5.0 - The Alchemy Bench, Before and After

The alchemy bench used to be a (fairly boring) menu. You'd pick a recipe from a grid, the game would check you had the ingredients, and you'd press Make. It worked, but it meant every remedy was really a shopping list - and knowing what a plant actually does never mattered once you had the list, which isn't exactly what I wanted to bring to you. Not in a game whose whole purpose is to teach!

So I've spent the past few weeks rebuilding it - along with everything else a rebuild of this magnitude touches - and I'm excited to share the new & improved Alchemy Bench!

Recipes are built from components now.

Her pages ask for what a remedy needs, not what goes in it - a cough remedy needs something soothing, a sleep draught needs something calming. Every plant and plant derivative now carries its own components, and any plant that carries the right ones will do. More than one answer works, and that was the whole point.

To learn what a plant carries, you'll need to see Wren.

Instead of testing whether you have the right ingredients for a recipe, her bench now reads plants - fresh, dried, distilled, you name it - and tells you exactly what conditions they'll cure, without using them up. What she reads for you is written into your half of the Field Guide so you can always refer back to it later.

Strong remedies need the right plant.

Stacking a few mild things can get you a good remedy, but never a strong one. For that you'll need to go find the plant that has it - which gives foraging a reason beyond just filling the basket.

How you prepare a plant matters.

Drying, brewing, steeping and fermenting each draw something different out of the same plant, so every station you build opens up new ingredients from things you already have.

Grandmother's own recipes still ask for her way.

The rarest remedies can only be made exactly as she wrote them, and her page shows you how.

The village asks differently, too.

Villagers leave letters describing what's wrong rather than naming a bottle, so whatever you make that helps will do. Every letter has its own thank-you note now, too, which makes it feel like a real interaction rather than a transaction.

Also new:

- New at Petra's: Hazelnut oil! Salves traditionally need a fat to set them in, and who better to provide it than our dear trader!

- You can make Oil too at your workbench once she's taught you the recipe: you'll find it on the new condensed Materials tab with ink & substrate.

- When you learn a recipe from a villager (or something else), it now arrives with a bit more fanfare.

- Bottles now have variable prices based on what's in them, and their labels show what they'll sell for.

- Fern is a bit more generous now. You give her all of the ingredients for a drying rack, so it made more sense for her to leave you with one upon completion.

- The harvest bar sits under your feet instead of across the bottom of the screen.

- A new studio splash when the game starts!

Also fixed: The game ran at half speed for a few seconds after clicking back into it

This one had a pretty substantial blast radius, and I think I caught everything, but as always, feedback goes straight to me - in game via Esc → Feedback, or in the discussions here if you hit anything weird!