Suffering workflow

[pickupsticks]

I've been enjoying my first Suffering play-through. Just hit day 100, and am at the position where I could make the Philosopher's Stone if I sat down and brewed the last two fiddly potions that I need.
I've gotten the grotto and a couple of crystal seeds, and probably around 80% of the plant and mushroom seeds.
Moon salt, yes. Sun salt, not yet - currently saving up.

My daily workflow looks something like the below. Was just wondering whether this is similar for you, or if you are doing things differently - if so, please share, and tell me why :)

Start of the day: garden care.
Harvest everything.
Potionise everything except the fungus on the tree, and then harvest everything again.
This means about 50 wild growth potions.
Fungus on the tree, I have plenty of, and I'm lazy, so I'll not bother potionising everything.
Check for any new seeds harvested for critical things.
Check for supplies running low on anything, and replant as needed.
Water everything.
Crystals: currently I've got two different crystals growing, so tend to those, and hope to get some seeds.

Brew stuff
Brewing gets us XP, which can be spent to upgrade our sale price.
So we want to brew as much as we can, as early as we can.
I've got my recipe book organised in order of price, so I'll begin at the highest sale price item, and work my way down, brewing as much as I can down to "brew 3 batches" so as not to completely exhaust my supplies of ingredients.
I'll go about halfway down my list of recipes, until things stop being super profitable.
I'll skip over things which use ingredients I'm not growing yet (there are a few of those still!) or that use salts, as I've not crunched the numbers yet on whether it's economically viable to start bulk-selling things which need salts. Honestly, with the salty skill upgrades, it probably is viable. So maybe I should be less cautious.

Shop time
Serve customers, handle merchants.
I'll try to meet every customer request if I can. I have the "satisfied customers increases tomorrow's sale prices" perk levelled up, so turning people away is a Bad Thing. Even if I only give you a cheapo potion that meets your needs, I'll try to do that - I'll skip stuff that needs to be 50%+ on ingredients that I don't grow locally yet (which is most crystals, and a couple of odd bits and bobs) or that are just too damn difficult to manage with the salts and supplies that I have available. Mostly though, the mandatory requirements on every order are really fun, and I love brewing stuff to order.
For the merchants, I'll sell whatever potions I have to them, and maybe brew some more if needed, to get all their cash. As mentioned above, "doing stuff" gets me XP, so it's better to brew and sell now, rather than sit on the supplies and then brew stuff to offset the sale price when trying to unlock stuff. Getting the XP earlier means that I can upgrade my sale price to customers, and reap the benefits from that right away.
I'm just about at the point now where I can start buying ingredients - I had been picking up "2 of everything, if it's on sale" to have some extra stuff on hand on top of what I am growing locally for emergency potion situations or greedy add a little... requests. But I'm just about set up well enough now that I can start buying ingredients if they are on sale, with the intent to actually use them. But not too many of them.

End of the day, alchemy machine work
I've explored the maps enough that I don't need to do that now.
I still have a couple of potions to make for recipes for the machine.
I'll try and do one of those each day, while I'm waiting to build up enough cash to unlock the next items I need for the alchemist's path progression. Sun Salt is 120K, so I'll need 60K on hand to be able to snag it if I haggle it down... hopefully the next time the guy visits, I'll be ready. So there's no rush to progress with the Philosopher's Stone, one per day is fine.

Recipe upgrades
If I've unlocked any new ingredients, then I'll have a look at my recipes and see what I can do differently or optimise.
I still can't afford loads of paper, so I'm not saving alternate recipes on different bases, or using single ingredients, or anything like that... once I'm done with all the salts and stuff, I'll probably end up over-stuffing my book.
Looking forward to future updates to the game where we can have different books to organise things differently :)

But anyway.
That's pretty much how things are going at the moment for me.
I'm enjoying making bespoke recipes for people, while I slowly accrue cash for the next unlock.
I've even sold some of my "incompatible effects" potions to people recently, which was very satisfying. You're actually going to give me money for a frosty healing potion!? OK, cool. Don't apply it anywhere sensitive. One down, five to go.

Curious what y'all do each day, and what your priorities are at the moment.

[fractalgem]

I'm on day 98 suffering, was finally able to afford the philosopher's salt recipe...so i'm basically going to be on day 98 for a while and gradually swing by and do one of the super crazy philosopher's salt recipes.
I skipped buying wine entirely. Put off buying sun salt until after I'd made the philosopher's stone.

now i don't even fertilize my plants anymore (except maybe thunder thistle and stickreed, go through a looooot of those; thunder thistle is good for more pure-item no-salt recipes than you might expect. Weirdly not so much rainbow shroom because i've gotten it so late and none of my recipes depend on it. )

[pickupsticks]

I'm still growing loads and loads of Shadow Chanterelle each day, because it was one of my earlier seed acquisitions, and so many of my recipes rely on it. I've not gotten a thunder thistle seed yet!

The wine base is so much fun, I love the mechanics for how it works.
Now that I actually have access to a couple of different crystals and some salts, it's more useful, but even before that, it was a lot of fun. And it gives flexibility for some of the "all around the houses" type alchemy machine items, which would be a pain to do with a water base.

I love the mandatory requirements which include a base type, and being forced to do things with wine is a fun challenge.
"Do try the wine", as they say.


I've not unlocked the "under the shop" store room yet, but I'm managing OK with just a few shelves in the shop so far.
Shelves have non-recipe-book potions on them, and weird stuff that I'm trying to shift. Everything else can sit in my inventory, and I'll use directional sorting to find things as needed, or just brew stuff to order for the more demanding requests.
Now that I'm done exploring the maps, there aren't many "odd combination" potions to put on the shelves to sell, unless I make a mistake whilst trying to brew something else.

[OutsideTheNormalMoralConstraints]

There's a bunch of things you can skip here. You don't need potions of fertilization on anything except brand new plants, or even a second type of any plant (and in the end, you only have room for multiples of crystals and a few plants that require odd locations of you want all the ingredients). You don't need to make extra potions, just do the more customer requests then roll a new day for more requests, XP will keep flooding in.

[pickupsticks]

Oh absolutely, there are tons of things that I could skip, if I just wanted to be making potions and gaining XP all day.

My focus at the moment (which might change later) has been to gain cash as quickly as possible so that I can unlock the salt recipes as soon as I can (because that will add extra flexibility to how I can make potions, and I will enjoy being able to do different things when I am hand-brewing a bespoke potion to meet a complex request).

By using fertilisation potions, I am able to grow more ingredients each day, which allows me to do other things on top of just brewing the potions to meet the customer requests.
Bulk brewing potions gains XP when brewing them, and also XP and cash when selling them to the merchants, which can immediately be put into the infinite % boost upgrade, increasing the amount of cash I get from every single customer sale.
If I was just doing the customer requests only, then yes, XP will keep flooding in - but slower, and without the cash to go along with it.

I've been pushing to unlock the new things from the 2.0 update to see what they are like (spoiler alert: they are really fun) so just trundling along slowly doing all the same things that I'd already done in the previous version probably wouldn't have been as much fun for me, which is why I haven't been skipping the things that could be ignored.

Just for interest: progress for me has looked something like this. As you can see, it's been fairly unhurried. I've only been buying things when they are on discount.

Day 53: alchemy machine repair purchased
Day 53: Nigredo created
Day 54: first seeds for the garden - Shadow Chanterelle + Weirdshroom
Day 74: pond expansion. I have several differnt plants and shrooms growing now.
Day 74: Void Salt created
Day 79: cave expansion
Day 82: Albedo created
Day 87: spellbloom seed purchased for the first time, at last
Day 90: Citrinitus created
Day 93: wine base purchased
Day 94: Moon Salt created
Day 98: grotto unlock. Two different crystal seeds planted.
Day 99: Rubedo created
Day 104: Philospher's Stone created
Day 106: sun salt recipe purchased
Day 106: Sun Salt created

And that's where are are at the moment, day 107 onwards.
I hit popularity level 15 some time around day 102 I think.
The first 25 days or so I was serving evil customers, but that's turned around now, and I hit 100 on the morality scale a few days ago. I might try and get back to 0 if I can, to increase the variety of requests. But I want to get the last two salts unlocked before I start deliberately turning people away.

Currently cannot grow the following items:
Phantom Skirt
Rainbow Cap
Grave Truffle
Mageberry
Poopshroom
Whirlweed
Terrorbud
Thunder Thistle
(although I have a small stock of all of these, for special occasions)

I am growing the following crystals:
Blood Ruby (5)
Cloud Crystal (2)
Frost Sapphire (2)
Fire Citrine (1)
I have one or two each of most of the other crystals just in case I need them for anything exciting.

Skill-wise, I'm level 324.
I have 182 points into "+1% sale price"
Nothing in Good Potion Seller, Irrepresible Seller, or Charisma.
7 points in slow haggling down, because I have slow reactions. That keeps it challenging to try and avoid missing anything and tanking the rep gain, although I guess that doesn't really matter any more.
Nothing in the get-ingredients-back-if-you-fail skills.
Nothing in the quick growth skills. These might be more useful if there was a regrowth period after each harvest, instead of being able to harvest every day. I'd love to see something like that which makes the gardening need a bit more thought and planning ahead.
Resetting the talents has remained prohibitively expensive, so I'm stuck with what I've got for now, including 8 points in visibility.
I don't want to spend 32300 gold on a reset, thank you very much :) Not until I've got the last couple of salts unlocked at least.
Life Salt sells for 120k (so I'll need 60k available to haggle for it) and I've only got 43k in the bank at the moment. Which is one of the reasons why I am growing plants and brewing/selling in bulk, in addition to meeting all the customer requests that I can each day.
Maybe when I've got the salts in the bag, I'll respec stuff.

I'm quite pleased that I still don't have all the ingredients yet.
Unlocking the new ones later on will mean that I can revisit and improve my recipes again, which is always enjoyable. It's a nice way to keep things fresh, even this deep into a playthrough.

Oh, and I've not unlocked the under the shop room yet, but I have splashed out on a few shelves and a couple of knick-knacks for decoration. So it's not just all about the money, haha.

Recipe book has 94 pages at the moment. One of which is blank.
5 substances, 3 salts.
4 "getting to the outer ring" intermediate waypoint potions.
The rest, potions for sales. I don't have any "not brewed yet" recipes saved any more (to easily to weak/strong versions), as I didn't have enough paper for that.
Plenty of mixed effects potions.
Maybe a dozen potions where I have more than one recipe saved using different ingredients.
I've got everything arranged in order of value, so I can work down the list from top to bottom brewing the most profitable stuff, when I'm trying to take all the cash from any given merchant. Not leaving myself short of supplies to meet the customer demands has been a problem to handle a couple of times, but I'm getting better at that now.

Anyway.
Not sure whether all this will be of any interest to anybody, but oh well.
Still plenty of life left in this for me. I expect I'll stop with the fertiliser and bulk brewing, once I've got the last salts unlocked, and settle down into just doing customer requests. I'm really enjoying the more complex mandatory request combos that are showing up, including base requirements. Although I have bumped into a few "this base, strong this effect, no salts" items which are literally impossible. Only one of two of those so far though. Customers, what can you do with 'em.

[Ohm is Futile]

I'm glad I didn't pick Suffering personally. I played the game a lot before the update and found the later stages grindy. I ended up picking Grandmaster instead.

My workflow is similar, except I've taken to turning away customers quite regularly. Anything that requires me to make a one-off potion that I'll likely never brew again gets turned away. I turn away asks for weak potions too. Basically, I've gone industrial mode. I love optimizing recipes either for sheer quantity of ingredients or number of ingredients, but I can't justify the sheer amount of real time making one-offs.

That said, there are quite a few customers with requests that can be fulfilled with different effects. Making hybrid potions for them is fun enough for me and it can be very useful since they'll pay significantly more for those potions. For example, "the headache that keeps me awake" customers will pay quite well for potions of healing + sleep, Battlemages like healing + magic potions, etc.

[pickupsticks]

I was one of those people who hit the popularity requirement way before I'd finished making the salts and stuff, before the update. It didn't really feel grindy for me because I was just playing to play, and enjoying the mechanics of brewing.
Suffering suits me pretty well for my "I'm going to be playing for a long time and don't want to progress too fast" approach. I suspect that if I'd gone with Grandmaster I would have reached the point where I've got so much money that it's no longer a factor in decision making a lot earlier, and that takes one piece out of the puzzle.
Obviously this won't be fun for a lot of people, but I'm glad the option is there.

Those one-off potions that take time and don't pay much are actually fun, so I don't mind the time spent and the inefficiency. I'll save what I can if I've got the paper to do so, as the one-offs are still sale-able to merchants - so I'll try to brew them using odd ingredient combinations (so as not to cross with my "main" potions) or using just one or two ingredients if I can, to make them slightly more likely to actually meet a requirement in future.

It's good to see that there are several different viable choices for "how to optimise stuff" that people could take, and that they can all be enjoyable in different ways. The future version when we get to have multiple books for recipes is going to be awesome.

Still waiting to offload my last couple of "incompatible stuff + frost" potions from the shelf of shame onto people who are foolish enough to buy them. Shifted a couple the other day, which was very satisfying!

[Ohm is Futile]

Originally posted by pickupsticks:

I was one of those people who hit the popularity requirement way before I'd finished making the salts and stuff, before the update. It didn't really feel grindy for me because I was just playing to play, and enjoying the mechanics of brewing.
Suffering suits me pretty well for my "I'm going to be playing for a long time and don't want to progress too fast" approach. I suspect that if I'd gone with Grandmaster I would have reached the point where I've got so much money that it's no longer a factor in decision making a lot earlier, and that takes one piece out of the puzzle.
Obviously this won't be fun for a lot of people, but I'm glad the option is there.

I dunno, I'm progressing differently given my approach, but I haven't quite hit a place where money is irrelevant yet. If anything, you've hit that point faster than I did from all the brewing you've done and XP you've collected as a result.

Even on Grandmaster, seeds, recipes, alchemy machine equipment, and garden plots are all so expensive. I've bought practically no ingredient and I still have to choose between new seeds, enchanted paper, and recipes.

I'm actually concerned my popularity is progressing too quickly even though I'm turning away like 20% of customers. More and more are asking for things I've just unlocked with the oil map or that are really annoying to get with the water map.

At least, I'm not as concerned about the grind to get max popularity for the achievement now. The new skills help a lot.

[pickupsticks]

Yeah, the new skills are great.
I realised pretty early that I wasn't going to be able to buy ingredients (or pretty much of anything else!) so I lent into the skills to max out the amount I could harvest from the garden, and to push up the amount of cash from sales.
I didn't start bulk brewing things until a couple of weeks in though, as I was trying to meet all the customer demands and also exploring the maps, so I was always short of supplies.

I did buy "so that I have two of everything, if it's on sale" for the ingredients when I could. but I never really used any of them for anything until much later, when I made a few potions with witch mushrooms just because it would have been too fiddly to do with the ingredients that I was growing locally.
I wasn't able to buy a useful amount of paper for ages as well, so I was juggling which six or so recipes I actually kept saved, and which were brew by hand every time - and keeping one spare piece of paper so that I could convert one of my "saved before boiling" recipes into a "level 3 and finished" saved recipe which could be used to bulk brew.
So that was a fun juggling act, while it lasted.
I still can't afford to buy more paper unless it's on sale at the moment :)

I think that the "every customer request has at least one mandatory requirement" is probably the thing that has been the most engaging.
Given that I'm trying not to turn people away (as that hurts rep, and hurts chaining the incremental bonus on tomorrow's prices from customers served today) the extra requirements being mandatory means that I've ended up doing more unusual things, whereas before I might have just kicked the customer out if it was too much of a hassle.

As it is, customers get kicked if they ask for any added ingredient that I'm not growing locally, or occasionally if they ask for "one ingredient only" potions where I don't have the ingredients on hand to be able to do it (which has happened a couple of times) ...or if they ask for something which is impossible, of course.
But other than that, I've tried to fulfil every request.
It did take a couple of visits before I gifted the dwarf with his requested "all the protection effects" potion as I was waiting to unlock the oil base... but he's not a paying customer, so I'm not going to count that.

But anyway.
Hopefully someone considering whether or not they want to play on Suffering mode might read this, and find it helpful to get an idea of what it's like... or what it's like for me and my way of playing, at any rate. I know that some people on YouTube have been happily bulk brewing and turning customers away so that they can make cash early on, so I guess there are different approaches to how you could play.

Good luck with your customers, may their demands be reasonable, and their pockets be full.

[pickupsticks]

Un-haggled prices for Life Salt and Philosopher's Salt recipes are:

160K and 200K

So I have a little bit of saving up to do still, ha.
Might as well buy myself some more paper in the meantime.
I wonder how many days it will be until the alchemist returns.

Looks like a good few days of tinkering with my recipes to get some good, expensive potions that use novel ingredients.
I've made an inspiration plus levitation potion which sells for a good price. Will have to do some experiments and see whether I can come up with anything better using invisibility or anti-magic.

I'm not sure how economical it is to use my ever-expanding stock of crystals. Probably better to use them than not to use them, right?

[fractalgem]

Originally posted by pickupsticks:

Un-haggled prices for Life Salt and Philosopher's Salt recipes are:

160K and 200K

So I have a little bit of saving up to do still, ha.
Might as well buy myself some more paper in the meantime.
I wonder how many days it will be until the alchemist returns.

Looks like a good few days of tinkering with my recipes to get some good, expensive potions that use novel ingredients.
I've made an inspiration plus levitation potion which sells for a good price. Will have to do some experiments and see whether I can come up with anything better using invisibility or anti-magic.

I'm not sure how economical it is to use my ever-expanding stock of crystals. Probably better to use them than not to use them, right?

Definitely start using them in new recipes you make. They may give less per harvest but you don't have to water them, and sometimes using one will save 2-4 other ingredients.

I think only arcane crystal and up are worth selling to merchants as-is.

The BIGGEST advantage to crystals is they're realllly convenient for a lot of single ingredient+salt recipes (though the last step of getting them to tier 3 can be a paaain, but it's often either that or using even MORE salt trying to force single ingredient recipes around awkward bends)

[pickupsticks]

Progress update:

It's day 116 and I have just purchased the recipe for the Philosopher's Salt.
I brewed myself down to pretty much zero of most ingredients, in order to sell enough bulk potions on the day to be able to get it. I am now working through a fairly difficult day of customer requests when I'm out of most of my staple ingredients, which is a lot of fun.

No more bulk brewing and selling after today, I think. Things to pay for will be the cellar, furniture, paper, and seeds. All of which should be more than covered by normal selling activity, and I won't care if it takes a long time. So no need to worry about cash any more.

I had just finished optimising my substance recipes up to Rubedo, when I unlocked a couple more seeds. So I'll probably have another go at those again some time soon - but they're good enough for now.
Although I do need to make a decent necromancy potion.

Still not able to grow my own:
Phantom Skirt
Rainbow Cap
Grave Truffle

Crystals that I am collecting from my own grotto:
Blood Ruby (13)
Cloud Crystal (4)
Frost Sapphire (4)
Fire Citrine (1)
Earth Pyrite (2)
Arcane Crystal (1)

I figure that's enough crystals to put some points into the "get gold for harvesting crystals" skills, and see how much they bring in.

I'm quite happy with where things are at the moment.
I've got both of the later salts to make, so that's a few interesting potions to work through.
The customer demand potions are varied enough that they are fun to work on as well.
I'll probably re-organise my recipe book some time after that, it's all in price-order at the moment, which isn't the best for finding multi-effect potions when I need them. Until the later update to the game comes which will give us multiple books (which I'm really looking forward to!) I'll just have to use my brain to plan out a good system to organise things. Which again, will be fun - but there's no rush to do that.

I love this game :)