About the Game
Your grandfather's new auto-sorting spell backfired.
Every potion in the apothecary tipped off its shelf. Every finished potion unravelled back into raw essence, and the loose colors pooled together in one enormous pile in the middle of the lab.
He chuckled. "Ah, it does that sometimes." Then he pulled on his coat for the annual Alchemists Gathering and asked you to mind the place while he is away.
He'll be gone about a month. There is no rush at all.
Two puzzles
Every potion needs two things done to it.
Decant. Pour the scrambled liquids from bottle to bottle until each one holds a single pure color. If you have ever played a water-sort puzzle, your hands already know this part.
Shelve. Carry the finished potion across the lab to the shelf it belongs on. Color gets you to the right wall. The sigil on its label picks the exact shelf.
You can only levitate a few bottles at a time, so the two puzzles compete for the same hands. Pour greedily and you have nothing free to carry with. Carry too much and you have nothing free to pour into. Deciding what to hold is the game.
One laboratory. 4,160 potions.
A gothic stone rotunda, two floors, tall arched windows and warm afternoon light. 52 shelved sections across thirteen families of potion.
Every one of the 4,160 potions is in that pile from the moment you start. Nothing respawns, nothing refills, nothing quietly re-stirs itself behind your back. The mess only ever gets smaller.
The room is the progress bar. The floor clears. The shelves fill and light up. A dark, dusty laboratory slowly becomes a glowing apothecary.
Relaxing is the whole point
No timers. No pressure. No penalties. No fail state. There is nothing here you can lose.
Warm window light, a quiet score, and the sound of glass and liquid. Put a potion on the wrong shelf and nothing scolds you. No buzzer, no shake, nothing taken away. Set a bottle down mid-pour, walk off, and come back next week to exactly where you left it.
Skills make the work easier. They never make it disappear.
Sorting earns XP, XP earns levels, and every level buys a skill point. There are 47 of them, across a board of 24 nodes.
A wider hand. A longer reach. Deeper buffers to work into, and sight that pulls a workable set out of the pile.
What none of them do is play for you. Nothing pours, carries or shelves on your behalf, and nothing sits on a cooldown. You get better tools and a bigger workspace. The satisfying part stays yours.
Three numbers, counted all the way down
52 sections. 364 shelf rows. 4,160 potions.
The game keeps all three counters and you can switch them on or off. No hidden progress and no rounding. Every potion you finish and shelve moves a number you can watch.
The lab is done when the pile is gone and all 52 cabinets are full. A finite game with a real ending, not a loop that farms you.
Features
Two interlocking puzzles: water-sort decanting and tidy-up shelving
4,160 potions across 52 sections and 364 shelf rows, in one continuous laboratory of 2 floors
No fail state, no timers, no penalties
A 24-node skill board that hands you better tools and never plays for you
Full input rebinding, an FOV slider, and a HUD you can switch off
Autosaves after every pour and every placement
Unlike the free mobile versions of this genre: buy it once. No ads, no energy timers, no shop, no dark patterns.
Screenshots
8 images
Version Information
Steam Patch Notes
Official update history
- Full labs run smoother. The frame rate no longer falls as much as your shelves fill up, most of all with the whole room in view. Nothing looks different.
- Labs that don't add up get put right. In rare cases, like a crash or power cut in the middle of a pour, a lab could end up with too little of one color and too much of another, and then it could never be finished. The game now counts the liquid every time a lab loads and fixes it by itself: missing liquid goes into empty beakers, the ones in your hand first, and extra liquid comes out of the Essence Separator, the vats or the beakers. Labeled potions are never touched.
- The save move from 1.3.2 is safer. A power cut or computer crash right after your save moved to your account's own folder could blank some of the moved files. Now every copy is on the disk before the game starts using it.
- Quicker pours into the Essence Separator. A bottle now pours its top color in one quick go, 0.7 seconds at most, instead of taking longer the more of that color it holds.
- Essence Separator handles are easier to aim at. The spot you aim at is bigger and stays in place while the lever swings.
- Finished potions come to your hand. Take one off a shelf of its own cabinet and it now goes to your hand if there's room, not the apron, so Ringed Labels can show which potions that cabinet is still missing.
- One hidden achievement is easier to get. What took three hours now takes one.
Thanks for the feedback! 🧪
- Ringed Labels now also marks finished potions missing from their cabinet, like a finished bottle left on a shelf by a vat or filed in the wrong cabinet.
- Highlight: bottles where the color you're looking for is buried under other colors now get a thin outline instead of a faint glow, so they're easy to tell apart from bottles that have it on top.
Thanks for the feedback! 🧪
Thanks to everyone who reported it and helped test! 🧪
Heads-up: this update doesn't include the late-game improvements yet. Those are coming in the next one, most likely 1.4.0.
Skills
- Highlight reaches the whole lab. Every rank now lights the nearest matching bottles anywhere in the lab, the ones in view first, instead of only the ones close by.
- Ringed Labels replaces Highlight IV. Select a potion, and a ring shows through walls around the labels of up to 6 unfinished potions that belong in its cabinet but stand somewhere else. The rings fade in and out as your selection changes. Already had Highlight IV? You now have Ringed Labels. (thanks, Tashdacat, von Boomslang and Casper!)
- Buried colors. With Highlight I and III, up to 6 bottles that hold the color you need under a different color get a faint highlight. (thanks, Tashdacat and Feral Rat!)
- Golden Highlight picks the right empties. When a gold set needs empty bottles, it now lights ones with matching labels, even farther away, so each color can end up in its own potion instead of a beaker or the wrong bottle. (thanks, Schweisser and Sscary!)
Settings and controls
- HAND ON THE LEFT in Settings > Game Settings > HUD moves your hand to the bottom left and the apron to the bottom right. (thanks, Mary | RockAngelx3!)
- SELECT ON PICK UP in Settings > Controls > Pouring is on by default. Turn it off, and picking up a bottle keeps your current selection, in both pour modes. (thanks, Major Lag and sati-r / mblfa!)
- F pours into vats too. In the DIRECT pour mode, F (or the middle mouse button) now pours into a vat, just like E. (thanks, von Boomslang and ElNico56!)
- New players start with HELD POTION INFO on: a small tag over your selected bottle with its name. Already playing? Your setting stays as it is, in Settings > Game Settings > HUD. (thanks, Frostfeather!)
Other changes
- The cat keeps you company. When it comes to sit by you, it now stays (often napping) while you work nearby, instead of walking in front of you every half minute. Walk away and it may follow you, as before. (thanks, Adelaida!)
Fixes
- Keyboard and mouse work again while a controller is plugged in. A controller whose stick drifts a little at rest could take control back many times a second. Now it takes over only when you press a button or push a stick. (thanks, sPiii!)
- Golden Highlight no longer lights new bottles while you hang a gold set on the Essence Separator. They could mix into the set and leave a color in the loop or a bottle half full. (thanks, Schweisser and Poro!)
- Japanese: beakers are now called フラスコ (flask) instead of ビーカー, since the game's beakers are conical flasks. (thanks, Owl.Marionette!)
Keep the ideas coming in the discussions and on our Discord! 🧪
Current Release
Build 26438255
Uploaded Nov 06, 2026
System Requirements
How to Install
A Place for Every Potion.exe to play
Troubleshooting tips
• Run Redist/_CommonRedist installers if game won't start
• Add folder to Windows Defender exclusions
• Run as administrator
Download
Direct link available
Needed when extracting (WinRAR / 7-Zip) — not a site login.
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Download A Place for Every Potion for PC with a direct link or via torrent. Get the full version of A Place for Every Potion for free. A Place for Every Potion is a Casual released by CubeQuad Games.