Build a real alchemical practice — from a hotplate in a shed.
You're eighteen, the marks were good, and there's no plan. A late-night rabbit hole leads you to a living tradition. So you build a lab from scrap and start fumbling through real procedures — and slowly begin to suspect that what you're doing actually works.
Reveal Trailer
Not a fantasy. A practice.
No robes, no spellbooks, no quill-and-candle aesthetic. Salmethic is set in the contemporary, real world — real cities, real internet, real money, real time pressure. The alchemy is depicted as a living tradition, drawn from lived experience: spagyrics, plant work, mineral work. Real results that could plausibly be reached, never "spells that work because the game says so."
A slice of life
Brew tinctures, but also balance the bills, work the day job, and navigate a skeptical family. The mundane isn't filler — it's the foundation the Work is built on.
Layered for everyone
A complete, satisfying alchemy sim on the surface. A thinky game of patterns and discovery underneath. And, for those who recognise it, an authentic depiction of a real tradition.
The lane is empty
Potion Craft owns cozy-medieval; Cultist Simulator owns occult-abstract. Nobody sits where Salmethic sits: modern, grounded, occult-as-living-practice.
The simulation is real.
Temperature is its axis.
The science underneath the game is modelled, not faked — heat transfer, phase change, kinetics, energy and mass balance, running on real math and real physical constants.
Every operation is, at bottom, the controlled application of heat. A new substance is a row of real constants — boiling point, specific and latent heat, density — not a new special case. Boil your flask dry and you lose the batch; hold a clean cut and the quality climbs. Gamification is a thin, honest layer over the physics, never a substitute for it.
Eight operations. One unbroken thread.
Grow or buy a herb, then take it the whole way: separate its three principles — Mercury, Sulphur, Salt — and reunite them into a finished tincture. Every step rides the same real physics.
DistillationSpiritus · the Mercury
Boil a liquid and catch its vapour. Water purifies; a fermented wash climbs to spirit.
CalcinationCinis · to ash
Burn a dried material in fierce heat down to its pale mineral ash.
DissolutionSolutio · the leach
Leach the soluble salts out of the ash into a clear lixivium.
CoagulationSal · the Salt
Drive off the water and crystallise the purified salt back out.
FermentationPutrefactio
A sugar must turns, over real days, into a fermentable wash — temperature-banded.
MacerationSulphur · the soul
Steep dried herb in spirit to draw the essence into a deep tincture.
StrainingSeparatio
Part the rich extract from the spent marc — which feeds the Salt branch.
RecombinationConiunctio
Reunite spirit, extract and salt into a graded Spagyric Tincture.
The shed, the garden, the cellar — and the phone in your pocket.
The lab keeps working when you don't.
In-game time runs at three times the clock. A twelve-hour fermentation is four real hours — whether you're playing, at work, or asleep. The simulation continues offline, up to a cap, then waits for you with a "while you were away."
Most operations have an attention window: be present to end the heat, decant, or seal — or the batch fails. The phone in your pocket tells you when the retort needs you. Long work claims your weekend mornings; short work fits a weeknight. The Work happens at the pace it happens; you meet it where you can.
A game built to hold up — and to earn your trust.
We're playing the long game: a project people talk about years from now, not a flash. Here's what that means in practice — and what it rules out.
No microtransactions, ever
No loot boxes, no battle pass, no "skip the work" purchases. You buy the game once. The Great Work is earned, never bought.
No power fantasy
You don't become a wizard who dominates others. The power is interior and quiet — and the world's reaction to your success is itself a check on it.
Authentic, and safe
Operation names, ingredients and stages are real; the physics is physically real where simulated. Dangerous procedural detail is stylised — referenced, never instructed.
Shipped in the open
A polished vertical slice now, expanded through Early Access toward 1.0 — the proven path that Stardew, RimWorld and Vintage Story all took. The roadmap is public and the changelog is honest.
From a shed lab to the Great Work.
The Demo
The spagyric loop, end to end — grow, distil, ferment, recombine, sell. Playable today on desktop.
Steam Early Access
The vertical slice in players' hands. Real feedback, real revenue, informing the rest.
The full Arc 1
More spaces, the full operation set, the acetate path, and the climax: philosophic mercury.
Mobile · Arc 2
The companion phone on your real phone. Then the Stone itself — as a sequel or expansion.
The demo is free. Begin the Work.
Native builds for desktop, hand-built and signed locally — no launcher, no account, no telemetry.
The wider release.
Steam
Early Access
Wishlist soonApp Stores
iOS & Android companion
In developmentKickstarter
Back the full Arc 1
Planned"You are either ready for it or not. You only get to choose yes or no, and give it your best. The outcomes are not yours to decide." — the practice that informs the game