Every name is a text file

There is no clever format here. Every potion name, every shelf title and every bottle word in Alchemess is a line in a plain text file. You can open them in Notepad. We are not going to pretend that took engineering.

What it means is that the shop is yours to rewrite.

Rename all 260 potions. Retitle all 26 shelves. Change the vessel words, so your shop stocks Draughts and Cordials instead of Elixirs and Tonics. Drop the folder in, toggle it on in the menu, and every label in the room is printed with your words on the same parchment, with the same drop cap and the same watermark.

Translation was the real reason

The game ships in English, German, French, Russian, Japanese, Simplified Chinese, Thai and Portuguese. That is eight languages, and it is not all of them.

If your language is not on that list, the entire shop is still available to you — it just needs someone to type it. The files are the same files we used, and a community translation loads exactly the way the official ones do. No patch, no build, no waiting for us.

The Label Maker

Editing 260 names in a text editor is a chore, and the thing you actually want while writing a joke is to see it printed.

So there is a Label Maker, in the browser, free, no game required. You type a name and the label renders as it will look in the shop: the parchment, the watermark, the vermillion initial, the line breaks. When you are done, it hands you a mod folder.

It is also, quietly, the best way to find out whether your joke works. A name that reads well in a text field very often falls apart once it is set in two lines on a small oval label — and now you find that out in a second rather than after a build.

What we would like to see

Honestly: shops that are not about potions.

Twenty-six shelves and 2,080 slots is a filing system. It could be a record collection, a seed library, a chemist’s, a museum store room. If someone builds a shop of 260 hand-written wines sorted by region, we would very much like to see it.