This guide is for maximize profit and game advancement through the abuse of cauldrons and fertilizer. These advanced techniques to get the most profit and advance as fast as possible. Early Game: The Sprint to Automation The goal of the early game is to reach full automation asap. You will be manually stocking shelfs, grabbing refills materials and and checking out customers constantly and it is a grind! The best policy is to not overbuild and focus on the raw minimum to reach the following objectives: Unlock the cash register Unlock the Nursery Unlock the purchase portal and dispatch portal Unlock the bandage wholesale he game truly takes off once you have Bandage Wholesales. The profit from wholesaling far outstrips the potential of the storefront and provides easier passive income than managing customer happiness or quests. You can save a lot of headache by focusing strictly on wholesaling for income through the mid-game. Eventually, you may want to re-integrate the shop and quests to maximize revenue, but doing so too early will only slow your tech tree progression. The early game ends when you have fully saturated the wholesale of bandages. Use blueprints to repeat simple bandage production until you reach this point. Focus your upgrades on Fertilizer only. Wholesale profit margins depend heavily on fertilizer costs; these upgrades are the "secret technique" for a dominant mid-game. Midgame Progression The goal of midgame is to bootstrap to cauldrons asap. Your first bronze production line will be highly inefficient but that is okay. The cauldron is the key to everything. First let me explain how the cauldron works. Every item in the game has a secret cauldron value that is use to exchange three different items for an approximately equivalent item value. Not all items can be made by cauldron but most can and the cauldron production complexity is far simpler and faster than any normal production path. You can make more stuff in less space with less effort through cauldrons than any other method. However, cauldrons come with a cost. The item values are only approximately on par with the production costs of making the item with some items being more expensive to make via cauldron and others being much cheaper to make via cauldron. The cost efficiency of cauldrons versus normal production varies typically from 50% better to 200% worse. This is why fertilizer upgrades are the only upgrade you want to invest in. With fertilizer upgrades, you can make plant byproducts insanely cheap. The game does not care where your cauldron points come from as long as you do not repeat items in the cauldron. If you are making items from fertilizer only that cost 1/3 or 1/4 of the normal production cost from plant materials, you can cauldron mix them for advance materials at a fraction of the normal production costs. Imagine making Lapus Lazuli on mass with as just a dozen cauldrons from flax, sage, redcurrant and lavendar with only a 1/3 the production costs of traditional production. This is how you get rich quick. So you midgame goals are in order: Tech up fast to the cauldron Blueprint cauldron production to create cascading value additions for every more valuable outputs Turn the cauldron outputs in whatever other parts you need to invest into more wholesale production (gloom shrooms etc.) and tech upgrades Always invest tech into fertilizer efficiency. If you must for quality of life, some points into conveyor speed and wholesale negotiation are fairly helpful but I advise waiting until you reach at least 200% Fertilizer efficiency and possibly 300% before diversification. Again, ignore wasting time on the shop for now. Building out every nicknak the public wants is low profit and time consuming. Focus on the tech progression and leveraging those cauldrons to make every better items. Finally, a word to the wise on future proofing your builds: Leave space at the front for a future shop to be build and build around it with the intent that eventually you will want to sell there. Use catapult and cannons as much as possible for medium to long distance transport. Conveyors will slow you game down a lot in the late game (they hit your CPU very hard when built on mass), but catapults and cannons are procedurally simpler for your CPU to handle. The GPU is not the bottleneck for late game builds in my experience but I do have a moderately high end PC that is a few years old so take that into account. Consider building vertically with intention. Most of the game is spent running back and forth to gather supplies. To minimize this effort, I build a central staircase or shroom elevator in the middle of my base and I use a central hub blueprint of lift conveyors to transport the common build materials like planks, gears, etc. up every floor as I go. This way, I easily have access to all the materials I need at each floor pushing ever upwards. Avoid borg cube blueprints. Its a beginner temptation to turn every blueprints into a solid featureless block but don't. Aside from looking ugly, this make debugging production problems harder and mystifies your logistics for when you come back later and have forgotten what that mystery box originally did. Covering up the build does not save rendering either so instead, build blueprints for maximum openness and transparency. Future you will thank you later. Midgame ends when you have fully unlocked the tech tree, which with cauldron based economy and no store front to manage, you will do very quickly. Endgame: The endless quest for wealth Well, now you have all the tech, so what next? Money. More and more money. If you have been diligent in focusing on the three pillars of midgame progression, you should have ~300% fertilizer efficiency, cauldrons for everything and maxed out wholesale of most items. Now is time to start upgrading the negotiation upgrades and expanding your revenue base into shops and quests too. Similarly, with negotiation upgrades, wholesale selling is far more lucrative and valuable than the store front and less of a headache than fulfilling quests, but since we are greedy capitalists and want all the money, I say go ahead and spend some time making every item to feed those revenue sources also, but don't waste upgrades on them. They have better return on investment than wholesales but their their market share is a fraction of what can be achieved with just four points in negotiation upgrades and they aren't worth investing in if you want to maximize profits. This is especially so since the cauldron/fertilizer abuse makes production costs much smaller to begin with. A few points in logistics for faster conveyors or fuel for cheaper fuel can be nice quality of life, but with the magic of cauldrons, you don't need it. Ignore all that noise about negotiation wholesale, stores, and quests. That is for the chumps. The real alchemist doesn't make money by being a captain of industry. A real alchemist makes the money literally. Let me tell you a secret, you can cauldron up gold dust! Yes, you can turn spin cheap flax into gold. This is why fertilizer upgrades are truly king. No need to worry about getting foot traffic from customer reputation, no need to upgrade negotiation to raise the cap on wholesale production, no need to to run around collecting quest items. Just make the gold in you magic pot! Here is a production chain for you: Pure Gold Dust Crucibles into a Gold Ingot which processors into a gold coin. To get pure gold dust, use the following cauldron recipes: Adamant + Resonant Catalyst + Gold Dust = Pure Gold Dust Flax + Crude Gold Dust + Resonant Catalyst= Adamant Flax + Lapis Lazuli + Fertile Catalyst= Resonant Catalyst Flax + Lapis Lazuli + Adamant= Gold Dust Flax + Fertile Catalyst + Crude Crystal = Crude Gold Dust Gentian+ Crude Crystal+ Crude Gold Dust= Lapis Lazuli Lavender + Gentian + Fairy Dust= Fertile Catalyst Chamomile + Gentian + Chamomile Powder= Crude Crystal Gentian + Impure Silver Powder + Vitality Essence= Fairy Dust Gentian + Dull Shard+ Vitality Essence = Impure Silver Powder Gentian + Gentian Powder + Topaz = Dull Shard Gentian + Gentian Powder + Gentian Nectar = Topaz Chamomile + Gentian + Gentian Powder = Vitality Essence With that chain, gold is made from a handful of flax, gentian, lavender, and chamomile. Cheap fertilizer makes this recipe very powerful indeed. With one cauldron per recipe above, the overall production chain is quite compact and modular. The main bottle neck is the pure gold dust cauldron which can produce at 2.2 gold per minute. I doubt this is even close to the most efficient cauldron production of gold either but I will leave that to the comment section to find the best path to gold. Finally, what to do with all that money, Build stacks of gold storage boxes. Push it all back into academic resources? Personally, I built a looped waterfall of gold coins pouring down from the top of my buildings tower to the street level below. You do you though! Enjoy the riches and profit!