Hints, the Encyclopedia and the Five Hidden Items in Little Alchemy 2

Little Alchemy 2 keeps its own notes. Most people never open them, then get stuck around 200 items and start pasting recipes from a wiki. The tools inside the game are quicker.

The encyclopedia

The book icon on the left opens a page for every item you have found. Each page shows the item's description, every combination that makes it and, once you have used it, every item it has made. The game sorts items into three kinds. An item that still has results you have not found is where your next discoveries are. An exhausted item is one whose every result you already have. A final item makes nothing at all — around 180 of the 720 are final: fireworks, sushi, the black hole, the lighthouse. Tap a final item on the workspace and it hides itself into the encyclopedia — the game's own tutorial tells you so the first time — and exhausted items can be hidden from the library too, so the list stays short. The encyclopedia is where you check which is which.

How hints work

The light bulb picks an item you can already make from things in your library and shows one of its ingredients, then the second after a short wait. On Poki the second half is paid for with a rewarded ad; on this site the hint simply completes. Hints never point at an item you cannot make yet, so a hint that names something you have never heard of is a sign that a counter unlock has happened.

Items with no recipe

Nine items are handed to you by progress instead of by mixing. Metal at 50 discoveries, Time at 100, Big, Science and Philosophy at 150, Container at 300. Three more — Light, Motion and Small — unlock once you have found five items from a short list each (for Light: things like sun, sky, lightning and fire). Big and Small also have recipes through philosophy (planet + philosophy, pebble + philosophy), and they are the multipliers of the game: pond + big is a lake, lake + small is a pond, and the same works for land, rock and plant sizes.

The five hidden items

Five items are not counted in the 720 and never appear in the encyclopedia until you make them. From the game's own data:

• Doge — dog + internet, or dog + computer.
• The One Ring — ring + volcano, or ring + magic.
• Ninja Turtle — turtle + ninja (ninja is human + shuriken).
• Nessie — lake + legend, or lake + story.
• Yeti — mountain + story, or glacier + story.

Story is human + campfire, and legend is story + time or story + story, so the two myths are close together. For the internet you need a hacker (human + glasses, glasses being glass + glass), then tool + hacker is a computer and computer + computer is the internet. A dog is a wolf plus domestication, a farmer or a farm.

Saving and resetting

Progress is stored in the browser you play in. Settings has a reset that wipes everything; there is no confirmation beyond the button, so keep the encyclopedia count in mind before you press it. Playing in a private window starts you from four items every time.