Alchemy Factory Dispatch Portal & Contracts Guide

What a dispatch portal is

Added at the Early Access launch (“Dispatch Portal: Automatically batch sells goods based on purchase contracts”), it is the third of the four income sources guides list: shop sales, mailbox quests, dispatch, and minting coins from materials. You belt finished goods into the portal; it pays wholesale against a contract negotiated with the trade guild, whether or not any customer wanted them.

For early and mid-game money the tips videos are unanimous: “You’ll eventually get this purchaser contract to make bandages. This makes quite a bit of cash… especially kind of passively.” Build the bandage line off to the side, feed the portal, and route the coins back into the main money belt.

Contracts and the Negotiation skill

The March 2026 skill guide gives the numbers:

• Every point of Negotiation increases the quantity you can sell per purchase contract by 25%, on all contracts.
• Bandages default to 800 per day; 12 points lifts that to 3,200.
• The bonus keeps growing at 25% per point beyond 12, with no other effects.
• The guide’s own play: dispatch is often its primary income, with contracts for bandages, gloom spores, pocket watches and fertile catalyst named as the reliable high-profit ones, “even without spending any points on the negotiation skill.”

Version 1.0 “reworked shop sales upgrades and removed purchase contract upgrades. These bonuses have been integrated into the Shop Recognition system.” The skill numbers above were recorded before that change; check the in-game tooltip on a 1.0 save.

The Gloomspore Sample quest

The next contract after bandages arrives through a quest that triggers on volume. From the Steam board: “I believe it takes 2,000 bandages to be dispatched before Gloomspore Sample quest shows up… It probably only shows up the next morning after you’ve sent enough too.” The original poster, dispatching 500 a day for twenty days without seeing it, eventually found that a co-op partner had already turned it in and the second portal showed the new contract.

So: if you are past 2,000 bandages and nothing appears, check whether the quest was completed by someone else, and build a second portal to see what contracts are actually available.

Why dispatch beats the shop early

The skill guide’s reasoning for putting the first points into Customer Management rather than Sales Ability is that early on “you have so little to sell that the sales ability skill doesn’t feel that impactful yet.” Dispatch has the same shape: it scales with how much you can produce, not with how many customers wander in, and a bandage line needs only flax, thread and the assembler chain you already built for rope.

The Trends data behind this page is worth noting too: “alchemy factory dispatch portal” was the one breakout query for the game in the three months to September 2026, which suggests the 1.0 contract change sent a lot of people looking.

Sources: Demo-to-EA notes (11 December 2025); Uglarvisk, “Mastering the Alchemy Factory Skill Tree” (17 March 2026, transcript) and “Maximize Profits with Dispatch Portals” (transcript); Timm Plays Games, 50 tips (5 January 2026, transcript); Steam Discussions “gloomspore quest glitch?” (24 August 2026); 1.0 Patch Notes.