Cheese Curdling Reform

[Big Bad]

So far the only way to curdle milk is to barrel it with a pickled vegetable. As halite is sometimes a ridiculously scarce resource(thus locking the ability to preserve our milk to good geography), I believe there should be a few alternatives.

Fruit Juice - Since a common starter for curdling is to add an acidic fruit juice like lemon, I think juices from specifically acidic fruits(like orange, cranberry, and pineapple).

Rennet - The acid required for the digestion of milk in the fourth stomach of grazing animals– this is traditionally collected from the interior of a calf's stomach. Beginning with first generation livestock, juvenile sheep and goat will drop rennet when butchered. Purely for gameplay balancing, the rennet from a single juvenile animal should provide plenty of rennet for multiple cheese wheels since it's a lot more costly to your farm to sacrifice a lil guy than to discover a salt mine or crush some berries.

I think these two new options for curdling will make cheese more accessible for us dairy farmers.

[Thorfinn]

The cranberry thing would be trivial to add. Just add a barrel recipe to use, say, 10 cranberries instead of your 1 pickled vegetable. (The file you are looking for is "curdledmilk.json," located at ".\assets\survival\recipes\barrel\cheesemaking". The specific line is

		{ type: "item", code: "pickledvegetable-*", name: "pickledvegetable", quantity: 1, allowedVariants: ["carrot", "onion", "parsnip", "pumpkin", "turnip", "cabbage", 

Just copy/paste the existing recipe, change the pickled veggie to whatever a cranberry is called, and change the quantity to however many cranberries you think it should take.)

Rennet is a bit more difficult, as you are describing it. You would need to create something called "rennet", then add it to the drops of kids/calves of 1st Gen or higher. I don't think the game currently distinguishes between wild and domesticated drops, so you would need to probably change things so pregnant females give birth to a new entity called "goat-kid-domesticated" so you can give them the additional drop. Otherwise, you could make it quite a bit easier on yourself by giving a "rennet" drop to all kids/calves.

[EDIT]

Oh, not sure whether it's as obvious as I think it is, but you would also get rid of the bit about "allowed variants" on the pickled vegetable line. Either that or you could use that to add other fruits to your recipe base. Though until things stabilize, I think I'd probably add separate recipes for lemons, limes, kumquats, etc.

Also, if you wanted to more or less keep the current progression intact (gated behind barrels/full Copper) you could probably substitute cranberry mash for cranberries. Yes, technically, you are gated behind the copper saw anyway, but there are many mods that add earlier boards, or even add barrels that do not require boards, and there are traders that have barrels you can use, so this just guarantees least beyond copper bar.

Edited April 25, 2025 by Thorfinn