Schedule 1 Ingredients

Every ingredient carries two things

A base effect, which it adds when nothing gets in the way. And a set of transformation rules, each one a conditional replacement: if a specific effect is already in the mix, swap it for something else.

The rules resolve first. The base effect is added afterwards, and only if the mix still has room under its eight-effect ceiling.

This is the part most players work out too late. Adding an ingredient to a mix is not the same operation as adding it to an empty product, because the rules only fire when they find a target.

Two questions are worth asking about any ingredient: what it gives you on an empty product, and what it converts when something is already there. Those are different answers, and the second is usually where the money is. Step through a mix one ingredient at a time in the Mix Explorer to see exactly which rule fired, and why.

Price tells you almost nothing about usefulness

The 114 rules are spread very unevenly across the 16 ingredients.

Gasoline costs $5 and reshapes a mix 11 different ways. Horse Semen costs $9 and does it 4 ways. Price tracks unlock rank, not power - the cheap early ingredients are among the most useful reshaping tools in the game, and they stay useful at the top rank.

The unlock schedule

4 ingredients are available immediately, and the rest arrive one rank at a time.

• By end of Street Rat

  4

  ingredients

• By end of Hoodlum

  8

  ingredients

• By end of Peddler

  13

  ingredients

• By end of Hustler

  16

  ingredients

Worth knowing before you try a recipe you found online: most posted recipes assume all 16. If one does not work for you, check the unlock rank of each ingredient before assuming the recipe is wrong.