Potion Permit (PC)
Dec. 2nd, 2025 10:38 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chuckroThe latest Stardew-like I’ve played; this one has you as an alchemist from the big city who comes to provide modern medical care to a small town. You have the usual loops of going into dangerous areas to get materials and giving gifts to win the love of the townsfolk; but instead of a farm you have a clinic and need to play minigames to diagnose and cure people who come in. The central mechanic is making medicine out of materials with your alchemy pot, where each ingredient is a tetrad and each recipe is a shape—you can make the same potion out of a variety of ingredients, so long as they fit. This is very quest-driven; upgrading friendship with each villager to the next level will require a quest from them, which might just be watching a cutscene or might be a big fetch quest. You need to also do quests to upgrade your standing in the village, which in turn lets you unlock new areas for better materials.
You can get absolutely loaded down with quests if you hit a friendship level with a bunch of people at the same time that you open up a new area or it’s a Monday and the town hall questboard refreshes—but then you might have to sit on some of those for weeks of in-game time because each new area requires nested layers of quests and some friendship quests require endgame materials. Also, quests might get delayed because you can’t figure out where NPCs have gotten off to (nobody ever seems to hang around their own house!) or because someone involved in it is sick and sleeping in your clinic. (Also, many quests require finding the NPC but then they’ll teleport you somewhere else for a scene...and won’t be there after, so you need to go find them again if you have a second quest to turn in.) Fortunately, only the town hall quests expire and there aren’t any seasons or date-specific events, so if you get overwhelmed you can just farm materials and cure patients for a couple of days—everything else will wait.
The materials-gathering is in a “danger zone”, but the combat isn’t particularly hard and the penalty for being knocked out is just sleeping in the next day. A few enemies require you use a specific tool on them (scythe, axe or hammer) but most are vulnerable to everything and just have a simple attack pattern and don’t even deal contact damage. Running out of stamina doesn’t knock you out, for that matter, it just makes you unable to use your tools to fight or gather. (Making potions, fishing, and running around the town cost no stamina.) You run out of stamina relatively quickly, but you can use the bathhouse for free for a full refresh once a day, so the “nothing but foraging” day is feasible even without buying or cooking food.
It’s a nice change of pace that there’s zero randomness with materials or monsters: They always refresh in the same location and same number every day, so you know exactly how many days of foraging each quest will take. I was constantly short of money, wood and stone: Everything from the blacksmith and the furniture shop cost all three, often in annoyingly high amounts. Money is a particular issue, as many of the options for getting it are limited in availability (town hall quests are only once a week) or don’t scale (the three part-time work minigames give a flat 125 gold, which is great when you need 500 but less so when the next upgrade cost 3,500). People pay you to cure them, but that’s only when they get sick, and you only average 4 patients a week. If you want money fast, you basically have to gather common materials and grind them into potions to sell. The part-time work minigames really should have had upgraded versions.
Also annoying is that the fishing minigame gives you white, pink or blue meat, but all fish (regardless of size or difficulty) give 1 meat and there’s an early friendship quest that requires 20. Upgrading your fishing skill opens new areas with harder fish but doesn’t change the earlier sections; and there’s no achievement or in-game benefit to catching all the fish. The achievements are also a weird collection: There isn’t one for 100% friendship, getting all the fish, making all the potions, or anything like that. There are, however, achievements for failing to cure a patient and failing to cure 10 patients (so getting 100% completion requires you to deliberately be bad at the game); and ones for grinding more plants, rocks and trees than you’d ever need to complete the game. Given that the end of the main plot is reviving the aloe/max town trust and the “end condition” for the game is maxing friendship with all the characters, I’m kinda surprised neither of those are achievements.
As noted, there’s basically no farming (you can unlock planter boxes for an exorbitant sum from the craftsman and then unlock each seed individually from the rangers; it’s easier to just gather them daily) and there’s only one animal to raise: You have a pet dog from the very beginning, who has a friendship meter that rises when you pet him and feed him treats. If you max friendship with him, he’ll start digging up cooking ingredients and worms for fishing.
(I also found it entertaining that Moonbury, a town of two dozen people, has no school and no general store, but has three police officers and a guy whose only job is graveyard keeper. The craftsman and clothing shop seem to only cater to locals. From the clues that come up in the various events it seems like, economically-speaking, the blacksmiths are keeping the entire town afloat.)
There is a “museum”, but you autocomplete it as you go through the main quest and revive plants that had been endangered in the area. I actually didn’t realize I was filling it until it was full.
You can date your choice of one villager after you max their friendship and give them a special item, but then they’re just your significant other forever and that’s that. As is common for the genre, your chemist is never explicitly gendered in the dialogue and all romance options are available to everyone. (I went with the barmaid who was also my very first friend in the town.) Interestingly, doing quests for villagers doesn’t raise their friendship level; they have special quests to unlock each tier, but doing other quests or curing them generally gives “moon cloves” which you can give as gifts, instead. I suppose that’s a useful game conceit so you can cure someone you’re maxed with and transfer the goodwill to someone else. Also, as a random side note: I read that apparently Runeheart the blacksmith wasn’t originally a romance option, and that absolutely blows my mind because how on earth could you exist on the internet in 2022 and not know that everybody wants the buff, extremely-competent craftswoman?
This is relatively short for the genre: You can finish the main quest in about 15 hours, depending on how much time you spend on friendship, and probably grind out 100% completion in about 25. I stopped at 20 hours with 73% achievements and more than 80% of the friendship events completed.
Overall: This was fun and a little change of pace in the cozy genre. Hunting down NPCs to turn in quest rewards can be a little irritating, the money-making loop is a little grindy, and the late-game Achievement selection is kinda weird; but overall it’s a fun time and a reasonable length.
You can get absolutely loaded down with quests if you hit a friendship level with a bunch of people at the same time that you open up a new area or it’s a Monday and the town hall questboard refreshes—but then you might have to sit on some of those for weeks of in-game time because each new area requires nested layers of quests and some friendship quests require endgame materials. Also, quests might get delayed because you can’t figure out where NPCs have gotten off to (nobody ever seems to hang around their own house!) or because someone involved in it is sick and sleeping in your clinic. (Also, many quests require finding the NPC but then they’ll teleport you somewhere else for a scene...and won’t be there after, so you need to go find them again if you have a second quest to turn in.) Fortunately, only the town hall quests expire and there aren’t any seasons or date-specific events, so if you get overwhelmed you can just farm materials and cure patients for a couple of days—everything else will wait.
The materials-gathering is in a “danger zone”, but the combat isn’t particularly hard and the penalty for being knocked out is just sleeping in the next day. A few enemies require you use a specific tool on them (scythe, axe or hammer) but most are vulnerable to everything and just have a simple attack pattern and don’t even deal contact damage. Running out of stamina doesn’t knock you out, for that matter, it just makes you unable to use your tools to fight or gather. (Making potions, fishing, and running around the town cost no stamina.) You run out of stamina relatively quickly, but you can use the bathhouse for free for a full refresh once a day, so the “nothing but foraging” day is feasible even without buying or cooking food.
It’s a nice change of pace that there’s zero randomness with materials or monsters: They always refresh in the same location and same number every day, so you know exactly how many days of foraging each quest will take. I was constantly short of money, wood and stone: Everything from the blacksmith and the furniture shop cost all three, often in annoyingly high amounts. Money is a particular issue, as many of the options for getting it are limited in availability (town hall quests are only once a week) or don’t scale (the three part-time work minigames give a flat 125 gold, which is great when you need 500 but less so when the next upgrade cost 3,500). People pay you to cure them, but that’s only when they get sick, and you only average 4 patients a week. If you want money fast, you basically have to gather common materials and grind them into potions to sell. The part-time work minigames really should have had upgraded versions.
Also annoying is that the fishing minigame gives you white, pink or blue meat, but all fish (regardless of size or difficulty) give 1 meat and there’s an early friendship quest that requires 20. Upgrading your fishing skill opens new areas with harder fish but doesn’t change the earlier sections; and there’s no achievement or in-game benefit to catching all the fish. The achievements are also a weird collection: There isn’t one for 100% friendship, getting all the fish, making all the potions, or anything like that. There are, however, achievements for failing to cure a patient and failing to cure 10 patients (so getting 100% completion requires you to deliberately be bad at the game); and ones for grinding more plants, rocks and trees than you’d ever need to complete the game. Given that the end of the main plot is reviving the aloe/max town trust and the “end condition” for the game is maxing friendship with all the characters, I’m kinda surprised neither of those are achievements.
As noted, there’s basically no farming (you can unlock planter boxes for an exorbitant sum from the craftsman and then unlock each seed individually from the rangers; it’s easier to just gather them daily) and there’s only one animal to raise: You have a pet dog from the very beginning, who has a friendship meter that rises when you pet him and feed him treats. If you max friendship with him, he’ll start digging up cooking ingredients and worms for fishing.
(I also found it entertaining that Moonbury, a town of two dozen people, has no school and no general store, but has three police officers and a guy whose only job is graveyard keeper. The craftsman and clothing shop seem to only cater to locals. From the clues that come up in the various events it seems like, economically-speaking, the blacksmiths are keeping the entire town afloat.)
There is a “museum”, but you autocomplete it as you go through the main quest and revive plants that had been endangered in the area. I actually didn’t realize I was filling it until it was full.
You can date your choice of one villager after you max their friendship and give them a special item, but then they’re just your significant other forever and that’s that. As is common for the genre, your chemist is never explicitly gendered in the dialogue and all romance options are available to everyone. (I went with the barmaid who was also my very first friend in the town.) Interestingly, doing quests for villagers doesn’t raise their friendship level; they have special quests to unlock each tier, but doing other quests or curing them generally gives “moon cloves” which you can give as gifts, instead. I suppose that’s a useful game conceit so you can cure someone you’re maxed with and transfer the goodwill to someone else. Also, as a random side note: I read that apparently Runeheart the blacksmith wasn’t originally a romance option, and that absolutely blows my mind because how on earth could you exist on the internet in 2022 and not know that everybody wants the buff, extremely-competent craftswoman?
This is relatively short for the genre: You can finish the main quest in about 15 hours, depending on how much time you spend on friendship, and probably grind out 100% completion in about 25. I stopped at 20 hours with 73% achievements and more than 80% of the friendship events completed.
Overall: This was fun and a little change of pace in the cozy genre. Hunting down NPCs to turn in quest rewards can be a little irritating, the money-making loop is a little grindy, and the late-game Achievement selection is kinda weird; but overall it’s a fun time and a reasonable length.
