Alchemistry

Click for larger view (90 kb).

Alchemistry is a crafting puzzle played at an apothecary. Completing a round of alchemistry finishes two hours of labor on a product currently in the apothecary queue. Alchemistry appears to loosely borrow its mechanics from Popcap's Rocket Mania.

Alchemistry is free to play one day a week.

Gameplay

The objective of alchemistry is to connect the colors in the bulbs at the top of the screen to the matching-colored bottles at the bottom of the screen.

Controls and Basic Gameplay

Alchemistry can be played with the mouse or arrow keys; the individual controls can be modified using the options screen. Use the mouse (or arrow keys) to select the piece you wish to rotate; a left mouse click (or S key) rotates the piece counterclockwise, while a right mouse click (or D key) rotates the piece clockwise. You can also use a mouse wheel if equipped to rotate either way. Hitting the "FILL" button (or the spacebar) causes all the paths you have connected to be filled. This option does not appear until at least one path goes to a bottle. A game is finished when all the bottle slots at the bottom of the screen (between "FILL" and the rat image) have been filled.

Mixing Colors

After a few games, you will be required to fill both primary and secondary colors. The secondary colors can be created as follows:

Mixing yellow and blue produces green.
Mixing blue and red produces purple.
Mixing red and yellow produces orange.
Mixing all three colors produces brown, which will never be needed.

Routing a color to a wrong bottle breaks the bottle, as shown in the right side of the above image. Broken bottles do not move from the conveyor belt, thus clogging a spot for the remainder of the game.

Bigger Bottles and Stars

If you find a bottle with more than one color, the bottom-most color is always filled first. After a particularly good fill, you might notice bottles gleaming (you can check by clicking on any of the bottles on the conveyor belt). The more gleams, the more valuable the bottle will be when it is filled completely. Once filled, the bottles will move to a slot on the bottom of the screen, where they will show zero, one, two, or three stars. The most valuable bottles have three stars.

Special Pieces

Three special pieces will occasionally pop up on your board. They are more likely to appear after a high-scoring fill.

The gold coin or "bonus piece" gives a slight scoring bonus when a color is routed through it.

The arrow icon, called the "multifill piece", is rare, but if routed through it fills all consecutive instances of a color in a bottle—as long as it is the bottom color. In the example at the top of the page, the two orange bottles could be multi-filled but the green on the right and the purple bottle on the left cannot be multifilled.

If a primary color is routed through the "Quicksilver" piece (with an image of a "Q"), one of the bulbs of that color will be filled with a new silver-grey color, instead of the routed color, on the next turn. This grayish fluid can be used as any of the six colors, thus making it extremely valuable. However, quicksilver only counts as one color in scoring. If you route a two-color combination (orange, purple, or green) through a quicksilver piece, one bulb of each of the two component colors will become a quicksilver bulb. Routing two separate colors through a quicksilver bonus (i.e. a red and a green) will also result in two bulbs of quicksilver.

The Quicksilver and multifill pieces can be used together provided that the color which needs to be multifilled was the next color to be filled regardless. This allows for a quick way to deal with multiple colors which need multifilling, without having to wait for more than one multifill piece.

Scoring

You are scored on the value of the bottles you completely fill.^[1]^[2] Time spent on the puzzle does not affect the score.

Secondary colors are more valuable than primaries. The secondary formed from the two outer colors is somewhat more valuable than the others.
Filling more than one bottle of the same color at a time grants an increasing bonus.
Filling more than one bottle of different colors grants an increasing multiplier.
All bonuses are applied to all bottles affected.
Bottles with multiple colors required are scored by the average of each, with a slight bonus for each. (An example with completely made-up numbers: a red, red, green bottle on which you got 6, 8, 14, your score would be the average of 6, 8+1 and 14+1, or 10)
High-scoring on the last bottles is not at all wasted.
Making a fill that doesn't clear bottles will not hurt your score.
There is a small score penalty for breaking bottles.

How To Play Well

Use as many colors as possible every fill, even if you only get one bottle of each color.

To score an incredible, you need to average approximately two stars per filled bottle (getting only two star bottles doesn't always score an incredible). To get two-star bottles, you need to, on the average, get good three-color fills (ones using secondary colors, bonus coins, etc.). To get three-star bottles, you need to get four-color or five-color fills. Use of the secondary formed from the outer bulbs is highly recommended to creating three-star bottles.

In order to use more colors, you typically need to make good use of crossing pieces. This is easier if you have more of them. A way to get more crossing pieces is to prune your puzzle before clicking Fill: Save crossing pieces and get rid of boring ones to allow room for more crossers to be generated. To do so, turn crossing pieces not used in your fill in some direction so that they do not have paint running through them. Turn unused single curve pieces so they DO have paint running through them (carefully, so as not to wreck anything else). Junction pieces with 3 or 4 connections are good to keep also.

How to Booch It

Alchemistry is one of those puzzles that is difficult to booch. However, breaking all the bottles will result in a booch. Filling bottles with brown will always result in a booch. And finally, filling colors one at a time will result in a nearly-booched score.

Puzzle Ranks

Certain combinations generate messages.

Booches

Breaking all the bottles will get you the message "Booched Brew", followed by a "booched" duty report.

Bottles Receiving Correct Color

2 - Double Bottle!
3 - Triple Bottle!
4 - Quadruple Bottle!
5 - Five Bottles!
6 - Bingo!
7 - Donkey!
8 - Vegas!
9 - Potent Potions!
10 - Witch Doctor!
11 - Voodoo!

Note that this counts each layer of a multifilled bottle as an individual bottle. It is possible to get more than 11 this way. The message is still Voodoo, although the text is considerably larger.

Different Colors in Bottles

2 - Double Double!
3 - Toil & Trouble!
4 - Fire Burn!
5 - Cauldron Bubble!
6 - Wicked!
7 - Transmutation!

Note that since there are only six colors (three primary, three secondary), the only way to get a Transmutation is to use Quicksilver.

End of Puzzle Glitch

Sometimes once you finish the alchemy puzzle the duty report doesn't show up and therefore the only way to finish is to forfeit the game, which you will recieve the same outcome as Booching the puzzle, producing only one hour of basic labour.

Pumpercloggs getting Glitched

Historical Notes

Alchemistry was introduced in release 2004-10-21. The move counter (which gave you 75 moves to fill bottles before the more valuable bottles broke) was removed in release 2010-03-09