I recently started playing this again when the 2.0 version came out which came with a bunch of new content and quality of life improvements. I think there is currently no better time to pick this up than now, the imrpovements are a huge benefit for the game and make it feel much smoother and enjoyable. Not that it was a bad game before but it feels now more... complete if that makes sense.

In Potion Craft you play as an alchemist who recently moved into an old house with a magical garden and a broken alchemy machine in the cellar. You decide to use your new home as a potion shop to sell potions to the townsfolk.
As you can guess, this game is all about potion crafting. But this game uses a unique way to create potions that you will never see in any other game and it's a really fun mechanic. Instead of adding ingredients for properties, you have a huge alchemy map that displays all the potions that you can craft. When you first start off most of the map will be unexplored and you have to move around it to find out the potion locations. You also have to brew a potion the first time to discover its effect. There are also hazard sections that will destroy the potion if you move into them and you can use whirlpools for short teleportations which can make navigating easier.
But how do you move on this map? With ingredients of course! Each ingredient has a specific direction and shape, when you add it to the cauldron you can stir it to move along the drafted path. Adding an ingredient as it is will only add half it's path to the map but you can crush it in your mortar to draw out the rest of the path. You can finetune this crushing process to the desired length, which is a nice feature. By adding multiple ingredients you will create your desired path to any of the potion outlines of the map, stir it until your potion moves to that spot. Touching the symbol is enough to craft the desired potion but if you stand in the exact spot you get a stronger effect which sells for more. To finetune your potion you don't have to get the exact path, you can add more water to the potion which will slowly slide it back to the starting position. By overshooting and putting it into a good position, you can slide it right where you need it. This is even easier done by zooming in and checking the map. If you look closely you see lines that show directly in which direction the center is and if you line the line of your potion up with the line of the potion effect, you can get precise results.
You also don't have to stop with just one effect you can move your potion around and have up to five different effects (although these effects are weaker since sronger effects count for three effects), which some customers might pay more for.
Your magical garden acts as source for your ingredients, you can pick herbs and mushrooms there and later you can buy new seeds for it. You can even expand it through a specific NPC which gives you more room for ingredients.
There are generally three types of ingredients, herbs, mushrooms and gems. Herbs and mushrooms are very similiar in design but mushrooms have often wackier paths that are harder to fit into your map. Gems on the other hand work completely different and are extremely expensive. They act as teleporters that teleport you to the end of their path instead of moving through the path, which makes them great to get around hazards. Some of the harder potions require gems or you won't get through the hazards.

Each day you will have a various amount of random customers that demand potions but often they don't say "I want a healing potion" or "I want a fire potion" and instead will give you a rough explanation of what they need. A customer might tell you for example that he wants to hunt an animal so you can give him a potion that makes him faster or a potion that puts the animal to sleep. Often it's obvious what they want but sometimes you have to guess and if you guess wrong too many times you will anger the custiomer and he will leave. If you figure out the correct potion they want, you can try to haggle with them to get more money but this can backfire and you get less money instead. Haggling is however very easy and the only reason I don't do it so often in late game is because it's repetitive.
Satisfied customers will boost your reputation which increases the amount of customers you get each day and also increases the base price of your potions. It also increases the inventory of merchants with a bigger chance of reduced prices for their wares. Merchants appear randomly among your customers each day (you never leave your potion shop) and there are merchants for herbs, mushrooms and gems. There are also merchants that sell seeds for your garden and one specific merchant sells you parts for your alchemy machine and magic paper. Magic paper can be used to write down recipes of your potions. This is a quality of life mechanic that allows you to recreate a potion without going through the entire creation process again. You start with a few magic pages to save your basic recipes but have to buy more later if you want to note down all the different effects. You can even use these recipes as base for a new potion if you want to add more effects to it and you can edit the design of the bottle for the potion which doesn't have any effect but can make it easier to identify potions in your inventory.

The alchemy machine is the end game mechanic of the game. It is used to craft very complex ingredients with the ultimate goal of creating the philosopher's stone. To create ingredients in the alchemy machien you have to feed it various potions. These new ingredients, called salts, can be used for some more advanced map movements. The void salt will erase parts of the path, which can make it easier to line up your path or remove mistakes without having to redo everything, the sun and moon salt can rotate your potion together with its path, so you can get into positions you normally wouldn't have. Even the philosopher's stone has a unique use in recipes but I won't spoil what it does.

The vusual artstyle of the game is very unqiue. The game looks like old medieval drawings thatyou would often found in books. It's certainly a bold choice for the art direction of your game. Similiar the music also sounds like old medieval music which complements the art style. A fitting choice for a medieval fantasy setting.

There are some negative aspects to the game however. The biggest issue is repetitiveness. There is no way to sugar coat it, the gameplay loop will get at some point repetitive. You will do the same tasks over and over, the most fun aspect of the game is exploring the map but once you know all the recipes you will just repeat the same steps, sell potions until you have enough gold to reach whatever goal you want to.
Another issues is how merchants appear. Because they come to you instead the other way around, you don't know which merchant will appear when. This could put you into a tough spot because you are missing key ingredients or you use all your gold on one merchant just for another more important merchant to appear later on the same day.
I wish there was more control on when which merchant appears or what stock the merchant offers. Sometimes they don't have the ingredients that you need, which is annoying.
Once you get a massive amount of different potions you also have trouble finding what you need because unlike for ingredients there are not filters for potions.

These are the only issues that I have with the game but I still enjoy playing it because it's such a nice chill game to relax with.

I recently started playing this again when the 2.0 version came out which came with a bunch of new content and quality of life improvements. I think there is currently no better time to pick this up than now, the imrpovements are a huge benefit for the game and make it feel much smoother and enjoyable. Not that it was a bad game before but it feels now more... complete if that makes sense. In Potion Craft you play as an alchemist who recently moved into an old house with a magical garden and a broken alchemy machine in the cellar. You decide to use your new home as a potion shop to sell potions to the townsfolk. As you can guess, this game is all about potion crafting. But this game uses a unique way to create potions that you will never see in any other game and it's a really fun mechanic. Instead of adding ingredients for properties, you have a huge alchemy map that displays all the potions that you can craft. When you first start off most of the map will be unexplored and you have to move around it to find out the potion locations. You also have to brew a potion the first time to discover its effect. There are also hazard sections that will destroy the potion if you move into them and you can use whirlpools for short teleportations which can make navigating easier. But how do you move on this map? With ingredients of course! Each ingredient has a specific direction and shape, when you add it to the cauldron you can stir it to move along the drafted path. Adding an ingredient as it is will only add half it's path to the map but you can crush it in your mortar to draw out the rest of the path. You can finetune this crushing process to the desired length, which is a nice feature. By adding multiple ingredients you will create your desired path to any of the potion outlines of the map, stir it until your potion moves to that spot. Touching the symbol is enough to craft the desired potion but if you stand in the exact spot you get a stronger effect which sells for more. To finetune your potion you don't have to get the exact path, you can add more water to the potion which will slowly slide it back to the starting position. By overshooting and putting it into a good position, you can slide it right where you need it. This is even easier done by zooming in and checking the map. If you look closely you see lines that show directly in which direction the center is and if you line the line of your potion up with the line of the potion effect, you can get precise results. You also don't have to stop with just one effect you can move your potion around and have up to five different effects (although these effects are weaker since sronger effects count for three effects), which some customers might pay more for. Your magical garden acts as source for your ingredients, you can pick herbs and mushrooms there and later you can buy new seeds for it. You can even expand it through a specific NPC which gives you more room for ingredients. There are generally three types of ingredients, herbs, mushrooms and gems. Herbs and mushrooms are very similiar in design but mushrooms have often wackier paths that are harder to fit into your map. Gems on the other hand work completely different and are extremely expensive. They act as teleporters that teleport you to the end of their path instead of moving through the path, which makes them great to get around hazards. Some of the harder potions require gems or you won't get through the hazards. Each day you will have a various amount of random customers that demand potions but often they don't say "I want a healing potion" or "I want a fire potion" and instead will give you a rough explanation of what they need. A customer might tell you for example that he wants to hunt an animal so you can give him a potion that makes him faster or a potion that puts the animal to sleep. Often it's obvious what they want but sometimes you have to guess and if you guess wrong too many times you will anger the custiomer and he will leave. If you figure out the correct potion they want, you can try to haggle with them to get more money but this can backfire and you get less money instead. Haggling is however very easy and the only reason I don't do it so often in late game is because it's repetitive. Satisfied customers will boost your reputation which increases the amount of customers you get each day and also increases the base price of your potions. It also increases the inventory of merchants with a bigger chance of reduced prices for their wares. Merchants appear randomly among your customers each day (you never leave your potion shop) and there are merchants for herbs, mushrooms and gems. There are also merchants that sell seeds for your garden and one specific merchant sells you parts for your alchemy machine and magic paper. Magic paper can be used to write down recipes of your potions. This is a quality of life mechanic that allows you to recreate a potion without going through the entire creation process again. You start with a few magic pages to save your basic recipes but have to buy more later if you want to note down all the different effects. You can even use these recipes as base for a new potion if you want to add more effects to it and you can edit the design of the bottle for the potion which doesn't have any effect but can make it easier to identify potions in your inventory. The alchemy machine is the end game mechanic of the game. It is used to craft very complex ingredients with the ultimate goal of creating the philosopher's stone. To create ingredients in the alchemy machien you have to feed it various potions. These new ingredients, called salts, can be used for some more advanced map movements. The void salt will erase parts of the path, which can make it easier to line up your path or remove mistakes without having to redo everything, the sun and moon salt can rotate your potion together with its path, so you can get into positions you normally wouldn't have. Even the philosopher's stone has a unique use in recipes but I won't spoil what it does. The vusual artstyle of the game is very unqiue. The game looks like old medieval drawings thatyou would often found in books. It's certainly a bold choice for the art direction of your game. Similiar the music also sounds like old medieval music which complements the art style. A fitting choice for a medieval fantasy setting. There are some negative aspects to the game however. The biggest issue is repetitiveness. There is no way to sugar coat it, the gameplay loop will get at some point repetitive. You will do the same tasks over and over, the most fun aspect of the game is exploring the map but once you know all the recipes you will just repeat the same steps, sell potions until you have enough gold to reach whatever goal you want to. Another issues is how merchants appear. Because they come to you instead the other way around, you don't know which merchant will appear when. This could put you into a tough spot because you are missing key ingredients or you use all your gold on one merchant just for another more important merchant to appear later on the same day. I wish there was more control on when which merchant appears or what stock the merchant offers. Sometimes they don't have the ingredients that you need, which is annoying. Once you get a massive amount of different potions you also have trouble finding what you need because unlike for ingredients there are not filters for potions. These are the only issues that I have with the game but I still enjoy playing it because it's such a nice chill game to relax with.