Grain alchohol buff

[qualicabyss]

Currently making alcohol with grain has no realistic purpose, as it is pointlessly nerfed at every single stage of the alchohol making process

1. Satiety
With fruit alcohol you need 1 liter of fruit juice, or 3.2 fruit, equaling 640, 256, 188, or 124 satiety depending on which fruit and only breadfruit gets the 640
With grain alcohol you need 5 flour, equaling 1500 or 1650 satiety (when turned to bread), this is over twice as bad as breadfruit, and nearly 6 times as bad as most other fruit!

2. Spoilage
The main reason to make fruit alcohol is increasing how long it can keep, the longest lasting fruit lasts 40 days, alcohol lasts 140 days.
Grains and flour last 180, which is longer, you are spending all that satiety to spoil faster than before (and get stored in a less efficient manner)

3. Spacetime
With fruit alcohol you turn 50 fruit juice to 50 alcohol in 7-14 days with one barrel.
With grain alcohol you turn 50 flour and 50 water to 10 alcohol in 14 days with one barrel, a fifth the throughput and always the longer duration.

4. Distillation
Fruit alcohol distills at a 10:1 ratio, while grain alcohol has a 20:1 ratio, half the output and double the time (honey mead also has a 20:1 output but you're not making that anyway, honey already doesn't spoil)

5. Nutrition
Maybe after all this you're thinking its at least useful if you want to store something with grain nutrition forever... nope! Distilled alcohol doesn't provide any nutrition , so after burning 30,000 grain satiety on your single liter of ale you'll find that its identical in all but name to the fruit brandy that cost only 2560


While point 2 and 5 are here mostly just to emphasize how bad grain alcohols are, I do think points 1, 3, and 4 should be fixed. With a 1:1 ratio of grain to alcohol grain alcohols are still less satiety effective compared to fruit alcohols (except breadfruit) but become something you might reasonably make, if only so you don't have to make it into bread. This would fix half of point three as well, after just reducing the duration it takes to ferment and making the distillation ratio a universal 10:1 grain alcohols would be much more reasonable to make, reducing that insane 30,000 satiety per liter down to a more reasonable 3000. (maybe breadfruit should also produce more juice)

[Rainbow Fresh]

When put into raw numbers like it really does sound bad. To be honest I didn't even know nor bother checking if grain alcohols existed though it does make sense they do. So I do agree that some part of this formula should probably be tweaked atleast a little bit. As you mentioned probably at point 1, 3 or 4.

That said, however, I don't think it's that world ending-ly bad or critical for a few reasons you inadvertently brought up in passing along with other realism-based considerations.

First off, the gameplay implications. The question is what is the point of alcohol? No matter if fruit wine or grain beer, it's not a good food source. Trying to survive solely off of that is an unnecessary hardcore challenge. And considering there is no need to drink in the game yet, alcohol brings nothing to the table that isn't cosmetic/for immersion purposes. If the first-best counter-argument is going to be "But it's the only way to store fruit long-term"; No, it isn't. As you said, alcohol has no nutrition. So your long-term stored fruit does nothing for your fruit nutrition in winter. Yes, non-distilled alcohol still lasts basically forever while retaining it's fruit origin but: Secondly, you already brought up honey. Honey is native forever fruit nutrition with no extra effort required. So storing fruit as wine is not actually achieving anything unique or new. And one can argue for personal preference on what is easier - mass cultivation of fruiting bushes for endless wine or mass cultivation of bees for infinite honey. You also said honey mead, despite falling in the same category of an abysmal 20:1 distillation ratio, is fine solely because "nobody would ever bother" as honey itself is already a forever food. Wouldn't the same argument then be true for all alcohol? Honey is forever fruit so why would you bother with fruit wine? Grain lasts basically forever by itself stored properly due to the lowest spoilage rate in clay vessels, so why would anyone bother making beer? The singular remaining purpose could be Aqua Vitae for the best healing item in the game; at which point the effort and lost nutrition value doesn't matter as you just process leftover scraps into non-perishable healing items. Also consider that horrible rate of grain-to-alcohol nutrition doesn't matter because by the time a player considers making especially grain-based alcohol they get an entire cellar full of grain per harvest; stuff they could never eat all before it spoils.

So if there is no immediate gameplay reason to ever make alcohol, at all, the reason why people might still want to do it is the immersion and variety side of things. Many other discussions already talked about the lack of food options, in general and especially when talking about which food is "good" because the house pie always wins. Variety itself just exists and doesn't care about what is easier or harder to make and the immersion aspect is usually fueled by things being realistic/believable. Most points here are - don't know about the input requirement though, am no brewer.
Spoilage: Makes sense. Grains are so long-lasting because they are dry and hardy. Soak them, ground, in water and let them "rot control-ably" and they will spoil sooner. Only further distillation which removes the water content (hotpot for any form of unwanted life) and leaves more heavily concentrated alcohol makes it last longer.
Distillation: Realistically grain-based beers have a lower alcohol content than fruit-based wines. Therefor it takes alot more to distill out the same amount of alcohol with the same concentration.
Nutrition: Also makes sense as the origin of the alcohol is distilled away with pure, high concentration alcohol remaining.
Satiety: While frequent beer consumption is something to consider when trying to diet as beer does have notable calories which only go away when going with alcohol-free beers instead, living off of beer alone for your daily requirements is a bad idea for several reasons - liver failure being certainly up there. So it makes sense that alcohol would be a bad food compared to the meals you could have easily made out of the ingredients.

 

So tl;dr alcohol is nothing more than a vanity item for people interested in it, as such it doesn't matter too badly that it is unbalanced in a "bad, useless" way in terms of food discussion. Especially since most of these limitations are atleast grounded in believable realism far enough to make sense. However, it should still be tweaked a bit if only to make these vanity options truly equally appealing and accessible.

[Demoncyborg]

personally, I feel like grain is the alcohol option for people who play without much fruit access (or have already eaten/fermented all of their stores). it can be grown for a huge part of the year (depending on where you live.) with more chances to harvest than fruit. and on top of that you can end up growing it even faster with better soil and fertilizer

i always thought it felt alright with how much grain used to overproduce, but I haven't played for an extended time since the reduced grain output update dropped, so i'm not certain on how much more difficult or later in the game that kind of setup ends up now.

 

so, realistically you're not wrong, it has some very diminishing returns, and seemingly no 'realistic purpose' for the average singleplaying gamer, but you could say that about.. a million other things in this game too. why does meteoric iron even exist, and is harder to find, when steel is better? why are there so many types of every food, and such a complex system to cook them when you can EASILY survive on hefty onion stew and flax porridge? wtf is even the point of mushrooms if they're so low satiety? why would they even add psychedelic mushrooms? why can you catch butterflies? none of those have any 'true' purpose either, other than making the game have more juice. 

i play exclusively multiplayer. grain alcohol to me, is what I spend my time doing in winter (when i finished pressing all the fruit finally.). if it wasn't so hard to make, it wouldn't feel so special putting it out on the table every winter for my friends. it's a special treat of excess!

[MKMoose]

10 hours ago, Rainbow Fresh said:

Nutrition: Also makes sense as the origin of the alcohol is distilled away with pure, high concentration alcohol remaining.

Note that distilled fruit alcohols do have fruit nutrition. Dunno where I got that idea.

Either way, realistically, alcohol shouldn't really have any meaningful nutrition, not even beer and wine. The fact that in-game lighter drinks do have nutrition is already a stretch, so letting distilled alcohol have it as well arguably wouldn't be unreasonable - it's distilled at a 10:1 or 20:1 ratio anyways, so it's a very poor investment in that regard. Granted, there's concerns about unspoilable nutrition, but I'm honestly not sure that I even care - if you're able to make alcohol in meaningful quantities, you're not having food problems either way.

 

5 hours ago, Demoncyborg said:

why would they even add psychedelic mushrooms?

This one is actually a great example of how not to add things for the sake of it. It harms the game due to photosensitivity concerns, which VS has been routinely ignoring and which have to then be fixed by mods.

If the visual effects were at least interesting or fun, ideally with hallucinogenic effects making the player see things which aren't there - but no, it's just nauseating distortion and a hideous overlay.

 

What I would personally love to see for alcohol is:

• proper kegs, barrels and glass bottles,
• fancy glassware and mugs,
• benefits for aging.

Even if it doesn't have much practical purpose, an interesting and fun vanity can still be a great gameplay addition - this is largely a parallel to cheese, which is fairly expensive and for most purposes kind of useless but its production process is perhaps the coolest of all foods in the game.

That said, I do think that it's generally preferable to push for various features to be more useful and distinctive in their own ways. Food variety is somewhat incentivized through nutrition, but still you can easily get full benefits with only four food items and milk. Mushrooms are just worse than vegetables, with no meaningful quality that makes them interesting - they can't even be processed or used for any unique dishes. Fruiting bushes are currently pretty much just worse than fruit trees, and generally foods in the same food category often have these imbalances which leave one strictly optimal. Cheese is nice, but it's also very inefficient, and fresh milk can be obtained year-round. Fruit alcohol can at least be argued to be a method of fruit preservation (though not an exceptionally useful one), whereas grain alcohol is impressively inefficient and not useful for preservation.

Edited August 31 by MKMoose

[LadyWYT]

55 minutes ago, MKMoose said:

What I would personally love to see for alcohol is:

• proper kegs, barrels and glass bottles,
• fancy glassware and mugs,
• benefits for aging.

Even if it doesn't have much practical purpose, an interesting and fun vanity can still be a great gameplay addition - this is largely a parallel to cheese, which is fairly expensive and for most purposes kind of useless but its production process is perhaps the coolest of all foods in the game.

I'd like to see this too, as well as see kumiss/airag added to the game. There was a mod for it, but I'm not sure it works anymore, which is a very sad thing.

In any case though, I know there's a handful of mods that cover these features as well, and they're quite popular. I don't know what benefits aging liquor could hold though...maybe it can temporarily grant a small buff or two when consumed? The SlowTox mod is very useful for this reason, since it gives practical purpose to alcohol consumption in general. It also smooths out the drunken effects to something more believable, rather than letting the player go from sober to roaring drunk in the span of about two seconds.

As for grain alcohol itself...eh, it's inefficient to make, but I think that's okay. I think it's more ideal to have large fields of grain as a requirement for its production, rather than allow the player to make barrels full of the stuff with one little grain patch. Obviously, if the player is intent on min-maxing, they aren't going to bother with grain alcohol to start with, but it's a nice little option to have for variety.

[qualicabyss]

9 hours ago, Rainbow Fresh said:

If the first-best counter-argument is going to be "But it's the only way to store fruit long-term"; No, it isn't. As you said, alcohol has no nutrition. So your long-term stored fruit does nothing for your fruit nutrition in winter. Yes, non-distilled alcohol still lasts basically forever while retaining it's fruit origin but: Secondly, you already brought up honey. Honey is native forever fruit nutrition with no extra effort required.

You disproved the first half of this on your own, "non-distilled alcohol still lasts basically forever while retaining it's fruit origin"
I didn't know honey was considered a fruit tbh, but getting honey in mass amounts is harder than getting insane amounts of fruit, and then converting it into alcohol when it gets old.

 

9 hours ago, Rainbow Fresh said:

Grain lasts basically forever by itself stored properly due to the lowest spoilage rate in clay vessels, so why would anyone bother making beer?

People already don't bother making beer, this just makes it not be ludicrously expensive for no reason, now its reasonably expensive for some reason.

 

10 hours ago, Rainbow Fresh said:

The singular remaining purpose could be Aqua Vitae for the best healing item in the game; at which point the effort and lost nutrition value doesn't matter as you just process leftover scraps into non-perishable healing items. Also consider that horrible rate of grain-to-alcohol nutrition doesn't matter because by the time a player considers making especially grain-based alcohol they get an entire cellar full of grain per harvest; stuff they could never eat all before it spoils.

64 fruit (5,120 satiety) turns into one aqua vitae. It takes 200 grain (60,000 satiety), for that same aqua vitae.
Things should not be balanced around an end game player with infinite food.

3 hours ago, MKMoose said:

Note that distilled fruit alcohols do have fruit nutrition. Realistically, I'm pretty sure that no alcohol should have any meaningful nutrition - likely not even beer and wine.

I checked it and they do not, fermented fruit and grain alcohols do, distilled do not

[SnapJelly]

In general I agree with this, I find there's currently not really a reason to make grain alcohol other than roleplay reasons but I haven't really been able to come up with a method that I think would be satisfying and give more purpose to it.

The best thing I could imagine is having something that you specifically need grain based alcohol to make but what exactly that would be I have no clue, best Idea I had was introducing barm(yeast) to the game to be skimmed off beer the way it was done in history to give a bunus to bread somehow? But all of that is just me spitballing and would also only have beer be a sideproduct.

[Facethief]

I think alcohol would be a more credible option if:

1) dough required yeast/leavening for full satiety

2) alcohol production had a byproduct of a leavening agent (yeast)

not really a complete set of ideas, but the point is there.

[Rainbow Fresh]

13 hours ago, qualicabyss said:

You disproved the first half of this on your own, "non-distilled alcohol still lasts basically forever while retaining it's fruit origin"

There has been another thread with a very heated, very pointless endless discussion about the difference between "basically forever" and "forever". For some people, having something last 20 in-game years is still not enough and only something that doesn't even have a perish timer is. Distilled alcohol is the only version that does not have a perish timer at all and is, as such, truly long term storable. No matter that most people will not even reach year 20. But it loses the nutrition buff so it's a choice of one or the other whereas honey outclasses fruit wine in both - having no perish timer and counting as fruit nutrition.

13 hours ago, qualicabyss said:

but getting honey in mass amounts is harder than getting insane amounts of fruit, and then converting it into alcohol when it gets old.

Not with new fruiting bush system in 1.22 as many people complained that they are just worse fruit trees now. So unless you always run around picking wild berry bushes it will take a year to grow a patch and then you only get one harvest per year. Meanwhile you can propagate several skeps from a single source in the first year and then harvest plenty of honey. Personal preference on what you'd rather prefer doing, for sure, but certainly not "harder" by any standard.

13 hours ago, qualicabyss said:

64 fruit (5,120 satiety) turns into one aqua vitae. It takes 200 grain (60,000 satiety), for that same aqua vitae.
Things should not be balanced around an end game player with infinite food.

Aqua Vitae is an end game resource so end game metrics apply. Especially since you can do just fine - so far in the game - without ever producing it as honey sulfur poultices are much more efficient. So if someone wants to specifically make Aqua Vitae for the sole sake of having made it they likely don't care about costs. If nothing else, the average player will also have a giant flax field much larger than their berry bush/tree plantation and since flax is such a bad grain, they're sitting on alot of the stuff unused to either feed their animals or process into something more useful like beer/Aqua Vitae.

Still not disagreeing that the number for grain based alcohol could be a tad lower, just saying that it still doesn't end the world.

[qualicabyss]

9 hours ago, Rainbow Fresh said:

There has been another thread with a very heated, very pointless endless discussion about the difference between "basically forever" and "forever". For some people, having something last 20 in-game years is still not enough and only something that doesn't even have a perish timer is. Distilled alcohol is the only version that does not have a perish timer at all and is, as such, truly long term storable. No matter that most people will not even reach year 20. But it loses the nutrition buff so it's a choice of one or the other whereas honey outclasses fruit wine in both - having no perish timer and counting as fruit nutrition.

You didn't say forever, you said long term, and further mentioned winter. Moreover this was about if fermented fruit was worth it as a storage method which you have completely missed.

[LadyWYT]

17 hours ago, Rainbow Fresh said:

If nothing else, the average player will also have a giant flax field much larger than their berry bush/tree plantation and since flax is such a bad grain, they're sitting on alot of the stuff unused to either feed their animals or process into something more useful like beer/Aqua Vitae.

Just making a note here, but flax is the one grain that can't be turned into alcohol. At least it couldn't the last time I tried. 

[qualicabyss]

It can't I realised this when I was nearly done with the original post and had to redo a few parts

[Rainbow Fresh]

14 hours ago, qualicabyss said:

You didn't say forever, you said long term, and further mentioned winter. Moreover this was about if fermented fruit was worth it as a storage method which you have completely missed.

I think you might need to read the whole thing in context again then. The original point was discussing if alcohol, fruit OR grain with focus on fruit because it is the easier, more likely used version, has any purpose/is worth making in light of whether grain alcohol being so much worse statistically is actually a big problem that needs immediate solving or not.

So analyzing the example on trial, fruit alcohol, my point was that it is equally just a "nice to have" optional vanity item. Fermented fruit alcohol still has fruit nutrition, but doesn't last forever. Distilled fruit alcohol lasts forever but has no longer has nutrition. Honey combines both without any additional preparation steps.

Yes, you *can* preserve fruit longer by turning it into alcohol - losing satiety in the process regardless. Which is opposite to grain, which loses shelf life when turned into a liquid. But that is because your average local berries lasts a whopping 2 days. 4 if it's Cranberry. Grain lasts nearly a year. And turning it into jam and sealing it in a crock pot is an alternative to preservation within the realm of necessity for which my gut feeling tells me it preserves, if not (like any other meal) enriches, the satiety. So fermented fruit alcohol isn't really a great storage option all things considered.

Alcohol, currently, is a nice to have for people who want to have it - for roleplay/immersion purposes or whatnot. And even if my Flax argument doesn't hold up, because grain lasts so incredibly long a player will eventually rack up unmanageable amounts of it which they might want to get rid of; and could turn into alcohol, either for a drink or to make aqua vitae. Is fruit better if you NEED a drink or aqua vitae? Yes. Is farming endless quantities of grain perceived easier than getting a big fruit farm going? I'd say also yes. Will people likely munch away on berries as they go because they are lazy and does this make them end up with even more grain to process? I sure am.

So, still - I agree grain alcohol's numbers could use a little tweaking. But it is also not a gamebreaking issue.

[SnapJelly]

6 hours ago, Rainbow Fresh said:

for which my gut feeling tells me it preserves, if not (like any other meal) enriches, the satiety. So fermented fruit alcohol isn't really a great storage option all things considered.

I believe jam does increase the satiety of the raw ingredients like other meals do but jam isn't all that filling as a meal in general.

Personally I like wine cuz you can store 8 bottles in a single slot, I haven't done the math but I think that's more nutrition per space.

And I also like color coding the bottles after I get a beehive kiln lol, but that's just me being extra