Alchemistry
Alchemistry is a crafting puzzle played at an apothecary. Completing a round of alchemistry finishes one hour of labor on a product currently in the apothecary queue. Alchemistry loosely borrows its mechanics from Popcap's Rocket Mania.
Contents
[hide]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. Next to the rat you can find a move counter, which starts at 75 and counts down to zero — at which point the most valuable bottle breaks. The counter has no effect on scoring.
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 bottle). These bottles hold valuable clears which you should aim to fill first. Bottles, once filled, will sometimes show one, two, or three stars in their slot at the bottom of the screen. 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 the instances of a color in a bottle. The "Quicksilver" piece (with an image of a "Q") can be routed through to create a new grey-colored bulb on the next turn. This color can be used as any of the six colors, thus making it extremely valuable.
Scoring
You are scored on the value of the bottles you completely fill.[1][2]
- Secondary colors are more valuable than primaries. The secondary formed from the two outer colors is slightly more valuable than the others.
- Filling more than one bottle of the same color at a time grants an increasing bonus the more you can manage.
- Filling more than one bottle of different colors grants an increasing multiplier the more you can manage.
- 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 score penalty for breaking bottles.
How To Play Well
Use as many colours as possible every fill, even if you only get one bottle of each color.
To score an incredible, you need to average approximately 2 stars per filled bottle. To get 2-star bottles, you need to, on the average, get good 3-color fills (ones using secondary colors, bonus coins, etc.). To get 3-star bottles, you need to get some 4-color fills.
Puzzle Ranks
Certain combinations generate messages.
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 count includes any multifill bottles multiple times. It is possible to get more than 11 this way, but it is still Voodoo.
Different Colors in Bottles
- 2 - Double Double!
- 3 - Toil & Trouble!
- 4 - Fire Burn!
- 5 - Cauldron Bubble!
- 6 - Wicked!
- 7 - Transmutation!
