make distilling less awful

[RainRain 591]

this isn't about the skillgain, it sucks that it gives no skill but as retro told me it's not intended for skill- that's fine

but for god's sake make it less awful. Still quality doesn't seem to impact burn length nor distilled quantity over a duration, making it a pain in the ass to distill any decent amount of alcohol.
 

Above, the whisky is one full run of distilling, the moonshine is a full run -~.2kg as we were drinking from them as it was distilling.

It's bad enough that mead and wine are awful for getting drunk (requiring something like 8kg to get drunk as opposed to less than 1kg for moonshine), but the fact distilling is such an annoying task makes it all the worse

either up the rate that stills distill, up the duration they burn- or base either off the still quality pls and ty

[Demonix 79]

Paging madnath to a beverages thread...

 

But I will try to answer this from memory, as my brewhouses and coal piles were often mistaken for mass gatherings of lava spiders on the surface...

 

Quality of the still DOES NOT affect burn time appreciably, though it is not something I actively measured so i cant be sure.  I know that I got 2 to 2.2 kg of distillate per burn cycle

Rarity of the still SHIFTS the affinity by +1, +2, or +3

Quality of the output is NOT affected by the quality of the still

Skill gain from distilling is going to depend on the difficulty of the liquor you are attempting to distill.

Quality of the end product affects the affinity timer AND how potent it is, requiring less to get drunk.

 

The best method I've found to distill mass quantities is to make multiple stills and place them in a circle - this part can be a bit of a pain, but you can fit 20 stills in a circle in a 2x2-ish area.  The circle part becomes important later.

Once you have set up your still circles, you will need to mark each quarter of your circle with a wooden sign.  I normally labeled them with the number of the still they were in front of, so 1, 6, 11, and 16.

Place a large crate in the middle of circle to store wood scrap.

 

Now that setup is done, on to the method:

make sure you have enough kindling to light all the stills, as well as enough fuel for a full burn (20kg of woodscrap/still - hence the large crate)

Light all the stills in order and when you come back to the first one, fuel all the stills.

 

Now you can go do something else for a couple of hours, but you should check back periodically and refuel them when you get the appropriate low fuel message.

 

Keep in mind that the condenser can only hold 10kg of product, so you're going to want to be sure to pick up product for storage and aging to increase its quality.

 

And that's it.  I used to run 80 stills at once and the passive skill gain while they were working was pretty nice, but its a big chore to set them all up and keep checking on them to make sure they dont go out.

 

a burn of 3 rotations (initial lighting and two refuels) would yield  6kg of product per still, or 120kg for the entire circle - enough to fill 2.5 small barrels.

 

 

[Sovos 220]

9 minutes ago, Demonix said:

80 stills at once

This entire guide illustrates how bad distilling is. A 20L distiller takes about two hours to process everything inside; I know wurm is all about things taking forever but this makes even less sense when time in game is orders of magnitude faster than time in real life. It'd be the equivalent of distilling something for days at a time, which is absurd.

[Eleraan 351]

I did calculations once a long time ago on distilling rates. Was xan at the time and stills suffer from lag a ton. Once went 3 days without a drop. But takes about 100 hours to do a barrel. Ql of still doesnt seem effect skill or distill ql that i could find using 20+ stills staggered in ql from 70 to 5ql.  Distilled booze was normally around the ql of the input. Never checked to see if ql was skill locked.

 

Burn time is affected by ql but mostly by less than or greater than 70ql on the still. Results in about 30 mins difference. 

 

Rare stills burn considerably longer ie a 50ql rare burns as long as a 70 and a 70 rare has maybe 30 mins on a 70 normal.

 

You can get skill ticks from a still... just not often. At 91 skill i can get .01 if i burn 21 stills 8+ hours or atleast enough for the skill tracker to show .01 so .0055 atleast.

 

 

[Demonix 79]

each distillation action by the still does a skill check based on the person who filled it, much like cooking.  QL of each output is dependent on success or failure, so it tends to average out anyway to be at or near your bev skill.

 

Also, to address sovos;  OP's complaint was about the amount of time it takes to distill an appreciable amount of booze;  I simply offered the solution I found while playing to his problem.  Considering that I liked blacksmithing and wanted to get all three rarities of stills, I had no issue with making a total of 80 stills (and managed to get a rare and supreme still in the bargain, widening the affinity skill ranges for liquors).

 

The underlying issue is with beverages itself - it takes a lot of work and time to produce an inferior affinity product and some products produce far less bang for the buck.  For example,  a .01 measure of q40 triple hops beer has an affinity that lasts 70(1m10s) seconds, with a .20 measure of the same beer has a duration of 2249(37m28s) seconds.  To compare, the same quality of rum lasts 192 (3m12s) seconds and 6000 (100m) with the same respective measures.   This is due to the complexity of assembling the product at all stages;  its why pizzas are the most sought after food because you can make them incredibly complex to get the affinity you want so you can get much higher affinity timers and much more product.  The only advantage beverages have is their portability and the ability to stop all decay on them in the case of beers and wines by storing in a sealed container.

 

There are other issues with beverages I found, but the underlying take away from the data i managed to collect is that beverages need different affinity timing rules than food to account for the time it takes to create, ferment and/or distill them as well as adding additional beverages to cover the skill 'dead zone' i found where certain skill affinities will not be available given the current list of beverages.  This dead zone is different for each player based on their initial affinity setup.

 

I never calculated this skill dead zone exactly, so if any devs are interested let me know and I'll do so.  I still have all my info because madnath still uses this spreadsheet.

Edited October 5, 2020 by Demonix

[Pandalet 1,848]

Actually, beverages never quite got the range of possibilities that food did.  If you happen to have the data to show where there's a gap in achievable skills reasonably easily, I'd be interested in that.

 

Feel free to contact me directly, if that's easier.