Alchemy

Studying comes first

The Laboratory won’t accept an ingredient you haven’t studied at the Study Table. Unstudied items are missing from the ingredient picker altogether, and their tooltip reads “Runes: ???”. The one exception is the 19 alchemy powders, which start out as studied.

How a study works

1. Place an item from your backpack on the Study Table. You keep the item.
2. Pay the cost in Science, plus Faith for some items. Science is stored in the table.
3. Work the table until the study finishes. It pays out tech points, typically somewhere between 10 and 150, and the result window lists the item’s runes.

Every item can be studied a single time. All organs of one kind share a study, as do all star grades of a given crop or drink.

Getting Science

Science comes from decomposing paper and science kits at the Study Table, which does consume them:

Item	Science
Clean Paper	1
Science Kit I	30
Science Kit II, from Writing Tools I (80 green, 80 blue)	60

Higher Book writing mastery makes each swing at the Study Table do more (Mastery explains).

Making a mix

At a Laboratory (a Laboratory I has two slots):

1. Choose ingredients. Each slot takes something from your backpack or from open storage in the room, and you can repeat an ingredient across slots.
2. Stay at 5 or under. No colour can exceed 5; the list hides anything that would break that.
3. Look at the result. When the runes match a product, it shows beside the flask. A question mark is a product you haven’t discovered; brewing it anyway is exactly how you discover it.
4. Flasks. One flask is spent per mix, and it must come from the Flask shelf in the room; backpack flasks don’t count. An Alchemy Flasks I placed on the shelf turns into 5 flasks, an Alchemy Flasks II into 10.
5. Finish it. Work the Laboratory until done. The product falls to the floor, you receive tech points equal to its runes, and the Alchemist inspiration ticks up.

Every product you’ve discovered is recorded in the Folio with its rune target. It doesn’t record which ingredients you used.

The Alchemy Workbench is designed to repeat mixes for you: each exact combination you’ve brewed at the Laboratory turns into one of its recipes, and a zombie can operate it. The problem is that no technology, quest or script ever unlocks its building recipe, so with the data as it is, you can’t build it.

Your first laboratory

Alchemy unlocks when you ask the Plague Doctor how Dream Dust is made. The lab in the Abandoned Tower is already furnished with a Laboratory I, a Flask shelf, a Folio and the Study Table. Its chest contains one sheet of paper, a Science Kit I, three Alchemy Flasks I, and three water and three blood.

Budget that Science. The chest’s 31 points are all you’ll have for some time. Water plus blood gives Dream Dust (1 green + 1 blue), and each costs 1 Science to study, so do those two first and be careful with the rest. A reliable supply arrives later through Writing Supplies (10 red, 5 blue), which unlocks paper and Science Kits.

Each ingredient has a fixed number of red, green and blue runes. Put one, two or three of them in the laboratory and the runes are summed colour by colour; that sum alone picks the product.

Although the game files spell out 6,960 individual combinations, they all follow from that single sum, over 70 ingredients and 29 products. Using the rune table below, you can derive any recipe on your own, even ones nobody has written down.

We verified this both ways. Every one of the 6,960 listed combinations matches the rune sum of its ingredients, and generating all one-to-three-ingredient mixes from the rule reproduces exactly those 6,960. Each product has its own unique rune total.