Alchemy Combine: Idle Elements

Alchemy Combine is an idle alchemy game in which you combine elements in a cauldron to find out what they make. You start with six basic elements that never run out: Fire, Water, Earth, Air, Life and Mind. Tap a few to pour them in and press Combine. If the set matches one of more than 1,400 hidden recipes, a new element appears and the recipe goes into your recipe book; if it matches nothing, the ingredients are used up. More than 1,000 elements wait in the tree, from Steam and Volcano to Dragons, Cities, Planets and the Philosopher's Stone.

The order you pour things in never matters, but the amount sometimes does: ten Water make a Pond. Other recipes need instruments, and you craft each one by discovering its recipe; it starts working once you have opened enough recipes for its blueprint, between 25 and 175. There is a second Cauldron that brews alongside the first, a Big Cauldron that combines up to five elements, a Distiller that splits elements back into their parts, a Reactor where a failed mix costs nothing but every mix takes five times as long, and a Scaling Beam that slowly grows a few elements into a bigger one, such as three Dunes into a Desert.

The idle part is Combine ×N, which repeats a mix as many times as you set. The instruments keep brewing while you switch between them or close the game, and when you come back, every brew that would have finished in the meantime is done at once, up to 3,000, with a list of what was made. If you allow notifications, the game tells you when a long brew is done, when a daily hint arrives and when new tasks are waiting. They stay off until you say yes.

Some help is built in. The Replicator is there from the start: put in one element you have made and get two to four back, ten times a day. After 20 failed mixes you get a Crystal Ball, which keeps only the ingredients of a pour that belong to a recipe you haven't opened. Up to three tasks a day ask you to brew ingredients for recipes you are close to opening, and pay in Gift Boxes. The Help book keeps every hint you have seen, and the recipe book has a map of every element you have found, arranged by how many steps it is from the basics. Two late elements, Order and Chaos, never run out once you make them. 33 achievements follow your progress, and five of them hand you an instrument's blueprint.

The alchemy lab is drawn as a 3D room unless you pick the Flat or Framed look, in one of six themes: Classic, Light, Dark and three made for color blindness (red–green, blue–yellow and high contrast). The interface scales from 80% to 130%. Turn a phone or tablet sideways and the instrument and your ingredients sit side by side; on a foldable, the two panes split along the fold.

Alchemy Combine costs nothing to download, runs on Android 8.0 or later, and speaks English, Spanish, Brazilian Portuguese, German, French, Italian and Russian; you can change the language inside the game. Its only ads are short videos you choose in Free rewards, for Gift Boxes, more Replicator brews, an ingredient hint or 20 minutes of faster brewing, and none plays unless you tap Watch. Google AdMob serves those videos, and in the EEA, the UK and Switzerland Google's consent form comes up before the first one. The Alchemist's Pass is a one-time purchase, not a subscription: 30 Replicator brews and three ingredient hints a day without videos, and brewing twice as fast for good; RevenueCat handles buying and restoring it. Gift Boxes are never sold. Firebase collects usage statistics and crash reports. There is no account, your progress stays on your device, and mixing and discovering need no connection.