Thankyou so much! The suggestion to exclude held potions from the swap pool is a really good one - will definitely try and implement that for the next update.
I'm currently considering my options with persistent ingredients. I like them as a kind of alternate win-condition, but I agree that they're probably too much at the moment. In the case of spirals specifically I'm probably gonna' reduce their initial size since they're intended to function as more of a status effect than a significant obstruction anyway. I've also got more ingredients planned that would hopefully give players more options for dealing with them. None the less the potential for players to get stuck in an overfill loop is still something I'd like to address so persistent ingredients shrinking or having a 50-50 chance to be consumed when a potion backfires is probably something I'll look into.
Thanks again for playing!