Alchemy Factory

I've tracked a lot of factory-automation launches, and most of them aim for the sky: sprawling planet maps, rocket science, enemy waves to justify the grind. Alchemy Factory does the opposite. D5 Copperhead puts you inside a medieval workshop, first-person, where your conveyor belts, crushers, cauldrons, athanors, and distillation rigs are things you physically walk between. The scale is tight by design, and that constraint turns out to be the game's strongest argument for itself. You are not building a city. You are building a factory you can actually see end-to-end, which means every routing decision is legible and every throughput bottleneck is findable without consulting an external spreadsheet. The core loop runs across three interconnected systems: raw material processing, automated production, and retail management. You harvest herbs and minerals, feed them into increasingly elaborate production chains - simple two-step crushes early on, multi-stage refinement through advanced athanors and cauldrons later - and sell the output through a storefront where daily commissions and customer demand drive what you need to produce. The economic tension is real: overstock ties up gold in idle inventory, but understocking loses commission payouts. The gold economy is particularly clever because currency flows through the same physical systems as your goods, making financial pressure feel spatial rather than abstract. Research unlocks new recipes across potion making, metallurgy, and jewelry crafting, each demanding you rethink your floor plan. The blueprint system is available from the start, which smart newcomers should use aggressively. For strategy players worried this is too casual: it is not. Early-game money is tight enough that bad production ratios genuinely punish you, and the mid-game transition from manual selling to full automation requires the kind of throughput planning that will feel familiar to anyone who has color-coded a Factorio build order. The progression does slow in the mid tiers, and some players report the upgrade unlock timing feels slightly delayed - you will do more manual shop floor work than you want before auto-vendor systems come online. The conveyor belt UI also has rough edges; rerouting existing belts can fight you, and multi-floor visibility once scaffolding stacks up is a known pain point the developers are actively patching. Multiplayer co-op is functional but has seen some reported instability, so treat it as a bonus rather than a selling point until further updates land. What keeps the Steam rating sitting at 91 percent positive across over 1,100 reviews is the feedback loop. Every optimization you make is immediately visible in a factory you can walk through, which closes the gap between decision and reward faster than any top-down automation game manages. The developers at D5 Copperhead are responsive - they reworked the entire athanor recipe set and introduced a catalyst system post-launch based on community input, and a rail system offering higher transport capacity than conveyor belts is on the public roadmap. Early Access is estimated at 6 to 12 months, with a sandbox mode and UI redesign also planned. For automation newcomers, this is arguably the most approachable entry point in the genre right now. For veterans, the human scale and the alchemy theme give it a distinct identity that Satisfactory and Factorio do not replicate. Go in knowing it is unfinished, plan your production lines carefully, and do not neglect the commission board. Diego, Scout Team

Valve rates this game Steam Deck Playable. Runs flawlessly on Linux out of the box. Based on 17 ProtonDB community reports.

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