Ah I see. I don't see the downside of not being able to use that potion anymore, since brewing it costs a lot ingredients etc, and with the introduction of different routes you wouldn't need to go through all that trouble to get the same effect. For people who have these potions I would give compensation for their effort, or offer a period of time to use these before the feature of different routes would be implemented, but there's still another solution if you want to keep these potions.

You can keep some of the rare items in the first path, but as opposed to the common items, they are even rarer to find when you let your pet stroll outside the house. Letting your pet go into the woods can increase the odds of finding more rare items, but will decrease the odds of finding common items. Having your pet hoard wherever their nose will bring them will have a very high increase for rare items, and a high decrease for common items.

So it'll become, and this again is just a suggestion, these odds can be tweaked to everyone's liking:

- Lap around the house: 70% chance of finding common items, 30% chance of finding rare items
- Into the woods: 50% chance of finding common items, 50% chance of finding rare items
- Anywhere the wind blows: 30% chance of finding common items, 70% chance of finding rare items

As for the instant return potions, they'll still be useful for when you want to hoard for super rare items and the like. The waiting time won't be gone, it'll just be balanced out over the path you let your pet take. A stroll around the house won't take long to recover from, but going for a full hike will definitely keep the waiting time a part of the game.

Hopefully I cleared that up for now!