Greetings, Alchemists!
We’re pleased to share with you today that the 2.0.2 “Hotfix” Patch for Potion Craft is now here. This planned hotfix ended up not being quite as ‘hot’ as we’d initially intended, as we had a few more things to fix than we’d originally thought (sorry!). We’ve fixed the most crucial bugs and issues, and tweaked the balance a bit – so if you’ve already finished a playthrough on Suffering difficulty, it might be time to do it again for even more of a challenge (don’t really do that, Suffering difficulty is not recommended for anyone!).
We’ve also added some cool Steam Community Items, like cards, avatars, backgrounds, and more – keep reading to find out more!
Of course, we’re still working on lots of other fresh content for Potion Craft, too – head to the end of the post to learn more about that.
Patch Notes
Balance
Customers are now a bit more reasonable with their additional requirements:
Sometimes they asked for impossible potions with incompatible additional requirements like Wine Base + No Salt + Tier 3 effect that needs turning on Wine Map. This led to cases where you couldn’t serve a customer on harder difficulties, where additional requirements are mandatory.
We like how customers are being know-it-alls, unbearable and picky sometimes, but we still want to keep every potion theoretically possible (even if it’s a Fable-Bismuth-only concoction with 5 effects!)
Crystal Grotto can now be purchased much earlier (in Chapter 4 instead of Chapter 5). Your Crystal Seeds will be happy!
Fixed Seeds prices:
Phantom Skirt Seed price was too high.
Plague Stibnite Seed price was too low.
Selling potions directly to merchants is now less effective. It will now be a bit harder to grind money by selling many potions to merchants:
Price multiplier 25% → 20% (without talents)
Price multiplier 37.5% → 30% (with 2/2 levels of “Selling Potions to Merchants” talent)
Difficulties balance tweaks:
You get less harvest from garden plants on harder difficulties.
You get less experience on harder difficulties.
NPC “price profitability” multiplier is changed for Grandmaster difficulty.
Using Wild Growth and Stone Skin potions on plants to accelerate growth is now restricted to one potion per plant per day even for growing (not adult) plants. There will be now a little bit less fertilizing and little bit more reason to get Quick Growth talents.
Difficulties Balance (or “More Suffering”)
We collected your feedback on harder difficulties and adjusted the balance accordingly.
Grandmaster. Grandmaster difficulty seemed a bit greedy on gold, but at the same time it felt that there’s too much profit from the garden plants, so we tweaked both parameters a bit. We also give now less experience, so it’s a bit more challenging to get new talent points:
Price profitability: 25% → 40% (now easier to get gold)
Amount of ingredients when harvested from garden plants: 100% → 50% (less free ingredients)
Amount of experience gained: 100% → 75% (slower levelupping)
Suffering. Suffering difficulty is terrible and annoying. But it turned out that it’s not enough! Garden was a bit too overpowered on this difficulty, and it was pretty easy to grind all the levels to get all the necessary Talents:
Amount of ingredients when harvested from garden plants: 100% → 25% (much less free ingredients)
Amount of experience gained: 100% → 50% (slower levelupping)
Because of the new difficulty multiplier some garden talents now may not give any effect unless you upgrade it several times (you will see it in the tooltip).
Also note that selling potions to merchants is nerfed (see Balance section for more), so it will be a bit harder to gain gold, especially on harder difficulties.
Don’t forget that Suffering Difficulty is still not recommended for anyone, and now even more not recommended for anyone than before. Please don’t play it – you will suffer (even more now with the new patch).
Quality of Life and Accessibility (or “We listened”)
Autosave is now automatically created when you quit the game or start a new game.
You can now disable sparkle effects in “Settings / Accessibility Settings / Disable sparkle effects”. This option can be useful for photosensitive players and players who hate sparkles.
Plants in the Garden are now more compact – they can be placed a bit closer to each other. You can now fit all 58 types of different plants (and even more!) in the Garden, so you don’t have to choose the outcast that didn’t fit the Garden before. You’ll probably have to do some rearranging, but it’s worth it!
Potion Bases can now be selected through tabs on the Alchemy Map. Those tabs work as Recipe Book tabs – you can move them around and even put them on the left side of the Map. Old method also works – click on the current tab to see the selection menu with the names of Potion Bases.
Bug Fixes
KeyNotFoundException error is now fixed (yaaaaay!):
Saves that didn’t load because of this error now should load fine as well.
The error happened if you pressed the Right Mouse Button on the room navigation button, which skipped one room and bugged if it ended up in a locked room (like Pond or Grotto before buying the room).
Right Mouse Button now works as Left Mouse Button with room navigation buttons.
Watering can now won’t disappear if thrown from the inventory in specific cases and is protected from going out of bounds of the room:
All your lost watering cans are now found and returned – don’t forget you can buy even more watering cans and store them whenever you want in your shop, so visitors know you are wealthy and can afford as many watering cans as you like!
Fixed an error that happens when you try to load the save where the item is stuck in the locked room (for instance if the Watering Can in the Pond before unlocking the pond).
Fixed a rare bug with furniture placement that caused saves to break. Saves should now work fine.
GUIs (dialogue window, trade window, haggling window) now have hover priority over items behind it (like Potions on Shelves).
Recipe Book button collider now should work correctly and won’t gain size error (which caused clicking Recipe Book instead of hovered button near it).
Text reaction to a potion that uses any base other than a particular base (e.g. Oil) is now correct.
Fixed bug/exploit that led to creation of potion without any ingredients (sorry!). Old exploited recipes with no ingredients won’t be removed – you can keep them as trophies :)
Price tags in the trade menu now have the correct size.
Fixed issue caused by using touch screen.
Save/load during the Tutorial will now work correctly and won’t soft-lock the player.
Fixed text for Nord’s fourth potion order when he returned for the second time. Text was for the third order instead of the fourth one, which confused some players and misguided them if they didn’t complete the request on the first visit.
Fixed a bug that led to falling ingredients inside the mortar through the mortar.
Many text and localization issues are fixed.
Fixed visual bug with sparkles.
Fixed visual bug with numbers in the Right Panel.
Aaaaand many-many-many other bugs were fixed on the way. Let’s hope we fixed more than created new ones :)
Secret stuff
Developer mode debug button that adds ingredients now adds 100 instead of 10. Very important one.
Important notes
If you’re not seeing the updates, please ensure you’re not using Steam Betas by opting out so you are in the Default Branch. To do this, navigate to Potion Craft in your Steam library, then click the cog on the far right of the page (or Right Click on Potion Craft in Library), and select ‘Properties…’ from the dropdown menu that appears. You should now see a pop-up window with ‘Betas’ on the left-hand-side of the screen. Select this section, then ensure the dropdown menu next to ‘Beta Participation’ is set to ‘None’. If this doesn’t help, restart Steam – this will help to fetch the update faster.
If you are playing with mods, please make sure to remove all mods before updating the game. If you’ve used any mods, the game can break, and we won’t be able to help with such problems. If you encounter any errors, please make sure you didn’t use any mods (even if it was once and a long time ago) before sending a bug report.
Steam Community Items
We’ve now got a bunch of new Steam Community Items for you to enjoy! Here’s the full list of everything that you can now get through playing Potion Craft (trading cards) or buying for points in the Potion Craft Points Shop:
15 trading cards
11 profile backgrounds (10 still, 1 animated)
10 emoticons
4 animated avatars
6 animated avatar frames
4 animated mini-profile backgrounds
7 stickers
6 tiers of a badge
Shall we take a closer look at some of them?
What is in development right now?
We know this patch doesn’t feel as meaty as some of our previous ones, and might not be exactly what you were expecting, but the team is hard at work on a lot of new stuff at the moment – with this patch being just one of them (and not the biggest!): there’s a lot more to come from Potion Craft, including a large (maybe you’d even call it ‘Monstrous’) Update 3.0, which we’ll be showing you Parts of in our upcoming Devlogs.
We’ve already put a lot of work into new features and content, and we are very excited to finally show you some of it and see your thoughts and feedback – just give us some time and enjoy the Patch and new Steam Community Items so far, and we’ll be back with some Devlogs in a jiffy.
We also know that a lot of our Console players are concerned about the 2.0 update and when it will become available for you. We appreciate your patience on this and we are working on it – here’s some more information for Console players.
