Little Bubbling: a guide to brewing, selling and staying out of the cells

Updated 18 October 2026

Great-Aunt Minnie has left you the back room of the Leaky Ladle, her old pot and a few coins under the floorboards. The rest is up to you: grow, brew, bottle and sell, without the Crown's Excise ever seeing you do it. This guide covers the whole loop, from the first sprig of moonmint to a town full of regulars.

Play Little Bubbling

Who are you?: making a brewer, with sliders for figure, height and build and choices of skin, hair, beard and face. — Little Bubbling on SyphonGames.

The first day

Minnie's letters lead you through the story. Let yourself into the Back Room behind the Leaky Ladle and have a word with Fergus, the landlord. Then, at Gubbins & Daughter on the square, buy Moonmint seeds (12 crowns), a bag of Garden Loam (8) and a watering can (18). Fill a pot with soil, plant a seed, fill the can at any pump or well and water it. You start with 420 crowns.

Time runs at one game minute to a real second, so a day lasts 24 real minutes. Plants take 10 to 20 game hours to grow, and a watering lasts eight. At four in the morning the clock waits until everyone has gone to bed; sleep shows the day's takings, deals and harvests, and you wake at seven.

Growing herbs

Moonmint (10 hours, 8 sprigs, Refreshing): the forgiving beginner's herb.
Sunpetal (12 hours, 7 sprigs, Invigorating), from rank 2.
Glowcap (14 hours, 9 sprigs, Glowing), a mushroom, from rank 3.
Dreamroot (16 hours, 7 sprigs, Dreamy), from rank 5.
Fireblossom (20 hours, 14 petals, Phoenix-fire), from rank 8, for the Phoenix Elixir.

Better soil gives more from each pot: Garden Loam lasts one harvest, Rich Compost two and Wizard's Humus three, each better than the last. Bonemeal raises the quality of a harvest, a Quickening Draught makes a plant grow half again as fast, Pixie Dust gives more sprigs, and a Sunstone Lamp speeds up every plant near it by about a third.

From sprigs to potions

Every potion starts as an essence made at a station, and each station has its own short minigame:

Steeping Kettle: five fresh sprigs and a can of water make five doses of tonic essence.
Mixing Table (from rank 2): stir a mixer into essence to change its effects, up to ten doses at a time.
Bottling Bench: essence into vials (one dose each) or flasks (five). Load the bench, then pour: tip the flask, which keeps running after you let go, and stop each of the five vials in its gold band. Perfect pours chain into a combo.
Reagent Bench and Athanor (from rank 4): Brimstone, Vitriol and Glimmerdust, in that order, make a Starsalt slurry, and the athanor bakes it into a slab while you keep the heat in the gold. A Crystal Mallet breaks the slab into shards.
Copper Cauldron and Alembic Still (from rank 7): twenty Fireblossom petals and a flask of lamp oil simmer into Phoenix paste, and the still distils it into ten doses of elixir. Mind the temperature.

Every batch leaves slag behind, and a station full of it stops until it is cleaned. The Workshop page on your Pocket Slate shows every station at work, the same for everyone in a shared town.

Mixing: what makes a potion valuable

A potion's price starts from its line (a Herbal Tonic is worth 34 crowns a dose, Starsalt 78 and Phoenix Elixir 155) and rises with every effect it carries, up to eight. Each mixer adds one effect of its own, but first it transforms effects already in the brew, and that is the puzzle: many of the best effects cannot be added directly, only made from the right effect with the right mixer. A few to start with:

Ember Pepper turns Glowing into Phoenix-fire.
Sugar Lump, or Glowworm Jelly, turns Owl-eyed into Starstruck.
Iron Filings turn Sparkling into Lucky and Moonlit into Timeless.
Pixie Chalk turns Bouncy into Weightless.

Some effects are odd rather than valuable (Hiccups, Drowsy, Pungent, Grumpy, Bushy-bearded and a few more) and add little to the price, but the right mixer turns them into something better: Honeycomb makes Hiccups Soothing and Grumpy Giggly, and Mint Sprig makes Drowsy Clear-headed. Weightless, Phoenix-fire and Volatile are restricted: they are among the most valuable effects, and the ones the Crown cares about most.

Quality multiplies the lot, from Sludge (70% of the price) through Murky, Clear and Fine to Radiant (132%). Better soil and Bonemeal raise it, and anything a kettle, still or mixing table finishes under the northern lights gains a grade.

Customers and deals

Nobody buys from a stranger. Win customers over with free samples. At first only Fergus's friends (Wilf, Barnaby and Tom) will try one; after that, anyone with a friend who buys from you or thinks well of you. The Customers page on the Slate shows who has heard of you, and through whom.

Customers then write on the Slate asking for a deal: a price, a place and a time. You can accept or make one counter-offer, and they remember being kept waiting. A deal can be met when asked, in the evening, late, or in the small hours between midnight and four, which pay 45% more. A regular who has run out may come looking for you in the street instead. Every dose visibly does something to whoever drinks it: sparkles, petals, soap bubbles, floating, or a magnificent beard for an hour.

The Excise

Eight Excise officers walk the town by day and by night. They notice what they can see and hear: a vial in your hand, a deal, running, a lit lantern, and anyone out after the nine o'clock curfew bell. A mark over an officer's head fills as they grow suspicious and turns red when they come for you, at a run. Walk off once you are told to stop and it becomes a chase; duck through a door and they wait outside it.

A stop gives you a choice: turn out your pockets, talk your way out, pay an "emergency licensing fee", or run. A search takes anything unlicensed and any cash over 5,000 crowns, and a fine follows. A big haul, a fine you cannot pay or being caught in a chase means arrest: a cell in the Excise House until seven the next morning (three hours if it happens by day), shared with a cellmate who may have a story, a tip or a recipe secret to trade.

So keep your coin safe in the Royal Bank on the square, which takes up to 10,000 crowns a week. A Deep Satchel from the tailor (from rank 3) has hidden pockets that a search is less likely to find. When constables appear on the bridges, a district is running hot; give it time to cool.

After dark

Wild glowcaps light up at the foot of ten old trees from nine at night until five, two to four sprigs a patch, once a night.
Moll Duckett keeps a lantern-lit pitch at the south end of the Wharf Bridge from ten until four. She buys bottled potions at six-tenths of their worth, and sells rare seeds and imports at any rank, for a price.
Seventeen night owls take deliveries until half past midnight, and pay a quarter more after nine.
Rare nights, about one a week. A meteor shower leaves Star Shards where the stars came down, a strange light in the sky leaves Odd Spores in a field, and the northern lights raise the grade of whatever your stations finish under them. Now and then there is even an eclipse at noon. Shards and spores are rare mixers, and the only ones that add Starstruck and Weightless directly.

Around town

The notice boards on the square and in the Puddles carry two small jobs each morning: something to fetch, or a parcel to carry across town. The poster pays, warms to you and will try a sample.
Sootkin, Minnie's cat, keeps the Back Room doorstep. A tin of sardines a day for three days and she is yours: she follows you, waits at doors and hisses when an officer comes close.
The Bubbling Gazette at dawn has yesterday's headlines, the day's weather and a word about tonight's sky.

Growing the business

Experience raises your rank, eleven of them from Kettle Scrubber to Legend of Little Bubbling, and every rank opens new seeds, mixers and stations in the shops. Money buys help. Staff (herbalists, brewers, bottlers, porters and cleaners) each need a cot and are paid at the end of every day. Businesses at the Guildhall, from Mrs Soapwell's Washhouse at 7,500 crowns to the Gilded Teacup at 58,000, turn your takings into banked coin. Minnie's sixteen letters lead you to her debt and the Royal Charter.

Playing with friends

Up to four brewers can share a town: one opens it and the others join with its code. The town runs in the host's browser, and if the host leaves, a friend's copy takes over. The Slate shows friends' answers under their names, and their sales and deals as news. There is no typed chat, only gestures and set phrases (T waves or calls out). The night ends when everyone is in bed, and a brewer still up four real minutes after the rest nods off and is helped home.

Controls

WASD to walk, Shift to run, C to sneak, Space to jump and the mouse to look. E talks, opens doors and uses whatever you are looking at; left click uses what is in your hand, and 1 to 9 or the mouse wheel pick from your pockets. Tab opens the Pocket Slate, M the map, F lights your lantern and R turns furniture before you set it down. A gamepad works too, and on a phone, held sideways, a stick moves you and buttons do the rest.

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