THE ALMANAC

Inventoria is a discovery game. There are 121 elements arranged in tiers — six basic ones you can always buy, and 115 more that have to be invented by combining four existing elements in the Forge.

Nobody is told the recipes. The first player to feed the correct four ingredients into the Forge claims that element’s entire prize pool and their name goes on it forever. From that moment the recipe is public — anyone can look it up in the Grimoire and craft the element themselves, just without a prize attached.

So far 83 of 121 elements have been found. Everything above them is still unknown — including the single topmost element, Tier 9, which nobody has ever seen a recipe for.

Every element from Tier 1 upward is invented, not bought — and you won’t find its recipe written down anywhere in the game. Working out what goes into it is the whole point, so we’re not going to hand you the method.

One more thing you can rely on. The complete recipe book is known to exactly one person, and that person will never reveal it. It isn’t written down anywhere a recipe can be read out of — not by staff, not by a database, not by asking nicely. Hints, if they ever come, come by choice (see the prize pools section); a recipe becomes public by being discovered, and no other way.

Two things you can rely on, though: a recipe never changes once it exists, so nothing you figure out today stops being true tomorrow. And once someone claims a discovery, that combination becomes public knowledge forever — check the Grimoire to see everything found so far.

Beyond that, it’s yours to work out. Half the fun of Inventoria is spotting a pattern nobody else has noticed yet.

Every element belongs to a tier, Tier 0 through Tier 9. Tier 0 is always available to buy. Everything from Tier 1 up starts locked: nobody can buy it until somebody discovers it in the Forge.

The moment an element is discovered, it becomes available in the Marketplace at its tier’s fixed shop price, listed below — the same price for everyone, regardless of who’s buying or how many they want.

Every purchase you make — buying elements outright, or paying for ingredients you then feed into the Forge — funds the prize pools of every element that hasn’t been discovered yet. That funding isn’t spread evenly, and it isn’t fixed by tier either: money cascades like a waterfall, weighted heavily toward whichever tier is currently closest to being cracked (the frontier), with a smaller share trickling further up the tree the higher above the frontier a tier sits.

That remaining(T) term is what keeps a nearly-cleared tier fair: without it, a tier down to its last couple of undiscovered elements would keep drawing the same total cut it did when it was full, so each survivor’s prize would balloon far faster than it should. Weighting by how many elements are actually left corrects for that as a tier thins out (92% of what you spend flows straight through this formula into the pools above; the remaining 8% covers running costs, with some of that also set aside as seed money for future seasons of the game).

Each pool also has a ceiling: earlier tiers get a more generous multiplier, later tiers a tighter one, so once a pool is clearly worth chasing, further money passes onward instead of stacking up on one element forever. The single highest undiscovered tier in the game plays by a different rule entirely — it’s Inventoria’s jackpot, and rather than the ratio table above, it has its own flat ceiling: $25,000. A deliberate cap on the very top prize, not a balancing mechanic.

Tier 1 sits outside the cascade altogether. Rather than accumulate from purchases like every other tier, its pool is manually seeded by the game’s operators with a fixed, modest prize — that way new players always have an affordable, worthwhile first target to chase instead of waiting for one to build up from nothing. Tier 2 gets a smaller seed of the same kind at launch, so the first real hunting ground is never worth nothing either.

When the tree goes quiet. If discovery stalls and the Forge sits cold, the game’s operator reserves the right to intervene. We may top up the prize pools of undiscovered tiers from the house treasury: a straight injection of fresh motivation, always announced, never withdrawn once made. And we may let slip a hint — a riddle, a nudge, a suspiciously pointed piece of lore — toward recipes that have resisted too long. Whether, when, and how generously remains entirely at our discretion: pools never shrink, but how fast they grow can surprise you.

One thing the Marketplace deliberately keeps to itself: a tier’s prize figures stay sealed — shown as maturing in the vault, no number — until the tier directly below it has yielded its first discovery. The money is accruing the whole time; the Forge simply doesn’t show a purse until you’re close enough to reach for it. The jackpot is the one exception: the top of the tree always shows its cap.

When you discover an element, its entire pool is paid to you immediately and the pool resets to zero — the recipe becomes public knowledge from that point on, with no prize left for anyone who crafts it afterward. A failed attempt isn’t wasted money from the game’s perspective either: it already funded the pools the moment you bought the ingredients, whether or not the combination worked.

It’s worth being explicit about this: Inventoria is a game of deduction, not a lottery. There is no dice roll behind a Forge pull — the same four ingredients always produce the same result, forever. Winning is entirely about figuring out which four elements belong together before anyone else does.

It also isn’t realistically brute-forceable. The recipe rules mean the number of legal four-ingredient combinations at a tier grows enormously as the tree fills in below it — by the middle tiers there are comfortably millions of legal combinations to draw from, and every single attempt costs real materials. Trying them all mechanically would cost far more than any prize pool could ever pay out, long before you got close.

The way people actually win is by reading the tree: an element’s tier, its place among its neighbours, and its name are all real clues, once you know how to look. Cracking a recipe is closer to solving a riddle than searching a haystack — and working out how to read the clues is part of the game.