The Mixing Calculator tells you what a recipe is worth. The Effect Finder tells you how to reach a given effect. Neither answers the question most players actually have: what is the best thing I can make right now?
That is what the Recipe Optimizer does. You don't name effects and you don't build anything by hand - you tell it which products and ingredients you have unlocked, and it searches the mixes you can actually make, ranked by what you care about.
How the search works
With no target effect to aim at, every mix is a candidate, and there are far too many to check: sixteen ingredients over eight steps is around four billion orderings. Checking them all is not an option.
So the optimizer explores in waves. At each step it builds every mix one ingredient further, then keeps only the most promising couple of thousand and drops the rest. That keeps the search to about a second while still reaching the deep, high-value recipes.
This is why Optimize for changes the results, not just their order. It decides which branches survive each wave. A search optimized for cost keeps the cheap branches alive and finds a mix costing $2; the same search optimized for sell price throws those away early, and the cheapest thing it ever reports costs far more.
Because it prunes, the optimizer is not exhaustive - a mediocre mix at step three that would have become brilliant at step seven can be cut along the way. What it returns is reliably strong, and every recipe is real: prices, costs and effects come from the same rules as the Mixing Calculator.
Using the optimizer
Set your rank first. The Unlocked at shortcuts pick exactly the ingredients available at that point in the game - seven at Street Rat, thirteen at Hoodlum, all sixteen from Peddler onwards. A perfect recipe you cannot buy the ingredients for is worth nothing.
Then choose what you are optimizing for. Profit is the default and suits most players. Margin favours return on spend, and it can be extreme: the highest-margin mix in the game is a single Cuke on Cocaine at 9,050%, though it only makes $181. Cost finds the cheapest thing worth selling when you are short on cash.
The ingredient range decides how deep the search goes. Longer mixes make more money - the best eight-ingredient recipe sells for $729 with $45 of ingredients - but they take longer to produce in-game, so the shortest recipe that clears your target is often the better one.
Sort by, above the results, only reorders what came back. Use it to look at the same batch from another angle without running the search again.