Alchemy Factory Money Guide: Bank Portal & Income

The exchange rate

From the official FAQ: “You can freely exchange copper coins, silver coins, and gold coins at the Bank Portal with no fees. Exchange rate: 1 Gold Coin = 100 Silver Coins = 100,000 Copper Coins.”

The Bank Portal is built like any portal: one Portal Sigil from the shop plus wood, unlocked at level 4 with portal technology. Coins go in on a belt; you choose which denomination comes out and the stack size, up to 50, which is the stack limit for coins on a conveyor. A tips video’s setup: everything into the portal set to gold, a buffer box for the gold, then a second exchanger sorting it into 50-stacks of silver for the money belt.

The “Copper Coins” thread on the Steam board is the question every new player asks: coins do not change denomination on their own. Either belt them through a Bank Portal or, as one reply notes, smelt copper coins in a kiln.

Two costs to know: a coin used as a cauldron ingredient locks roughly 5,000 of that coin inside the device, “which can get pretty expensive when you’re using silver or gold”; and the Automatic Cashier’s storage was raised from 5,000 to 50,000 coins in January 2026, so a register overflows far less than early guides warn.

The four income sources

From the March 2026 skill guide:

1. Shop profit. Customers buy from shelves. Before 1.0 the 0-100 satisfaction score decided whether advanced customers came for expensive goods; since 1.0 that is the Shop Recognition licence system.
2. Mailbox profit. Main story quests, vendor side quests, and daily quests in three tiers: random quests at 130% of market price, bulk orders at 160%, urgent requests at 200%.
3. Dispatch profit. Wholesale sales against purchase contracts; see dispatch portals.
4. Alchemy profit. Crafting coins directly from materials. The guide mentions it and moves on; the 1M Copper Coins achievement (“Inflation? What’s that?”, 5.4%) shows plenty of players do it.

The rough order of magnitude through a run, from the tips video: shop sales first, then quests, then dispatch contracts, then potions, and finally relics, which were making that player “about 10,000 to 20,000 gold a day” from Mercuries plus the rest of the shop.

The skills that move each source

• Sales Ability: 12 points took shop profit to 170% and customer purchase quantity to 400% in Early Access; beyond 12, only +10% profit per point. Customers still rarely buy more than about 200 of one item a day, which makes daily production easy to plan.
• Customer Management: raises quest rewards and adds one extra daily quest per four points, so 12 points means four random quests a day. Save before the day ends and reload to reroll if you dislike the set (the guide calls it save scumming and leaves the choice to you).
• Negotiation: +25% contract volume per point.

The guide’s ordering: Customer Management first, because early income is quests; switch to Sales Ability around the end of tier 5 when the shop is full; Negotiation if dispatch becomes your main line. Version 1.0 removed the separate shop-sales and purchase-contract upgrades and moved those bonuses into Shop Recognition, so expect the 1.0 skill panel to differ from these notes.

Money on belts

Every floor needs a money line for purchase portals, and the rule from the tips video is to set the Bank Portal’s output stack to what the floor actually consumes: one stack of one silver ran an entire early warehouse. Coin stacks cap at 50 per belt slot. Storage boxes move items at roughly 960 a minute, about four times a maxed belt, so a box can replace a belt on a money line as long as you accept that it holds a float.

Sources: Alchemy Factory FAQ (13 December 2025), questions 9 to 11; Uglarvisk, “Mastering the Alchemy Factory Skill Tree” (17 March 2026, transcript); Timm Plays Games, 50 tips (5 January 2026, transcript); Steam Discussions “Copper Coins” (2 September 2026); v0.4.2.3924 notes (13 January 2026); 1.0 Patch Notes.