Hey, lovely that you enjoy it 💚
"Break the strands", do you mean the plants minigame where you cut the dotted branches? Or the essence minigame with the glowing wisps floating around?
The grinder has two parts: First you break an ingredient ball (the ingredient you put in), it splits up into all its effects. So a 3x Healing, 2x Cure, 1x Confusion ingredient would split into 6 balls. You can either crush the effect balls (with some speed, but careful angle) against the mortar edge to destroy them. Or you push them down and out to collect them for your end result.
The best way to use it is to make 9x powders, so you put in some ingredients with 3x of what you want, like 3x Healing, destroy all other effects they might have and you get a 9x Healing powder. Some players go crazy with that, if you put three of those into a brew you already get 27x Healing on a single potion. Plus the various skills and buffs you can add it can go as high as 39x Healing (roughly, I probably forgot something again) :)
And then you buy the Merchant buffs (blue faction) and could sell a potion for up to 800 gold at once. But that's really min-maxing and not necessary at all.
Let me know what other minigame you have an issue with, maybe I need to improve the tutorial!
