Copperhead Road: Moonshine, homebrew and other refreshments

[Comrade Crimson]

Now, I was thinking. While we got our good old friend Jacky Dan in the game with the whiskey bottles, obviously this is all going to be drunk up eventually. (most likely by me.)

I'd like to see the addition of MORE types of booze, with different types of effects.

 

Given I worked in the liqour industry at one point or another and have dealt with various aspects of it, we could simplify it to this (while also keeping it realistic.)

 

Moonshine, Spirits, Wine and Beers/Ales.

 

Our standard whiskey in game will act for our spirits, which includes Vodka, cognac, rye, whiskeys and rums, etc.

 

Moonshine obviously being THE most potent alcoholic drink of them all with beers being the lowest. It'd take a fair few cans or bottles of beer to get to the point where your completely wasted, the hard drinker and light drinker perks sustaining and applying where needed, while wine would need less, spirits get you drunk faster due to their higher alcohol percentage and moonshine... well a single serving of that will screw you up.

 

I'd also like to see the exploration of and potential growing and distilling of home made booze- home brewing is common even today for a fair many folk and distilling moonshine has historical relevancy and impact within much of North America, ESPECIALLY Kentucky.

 

Survivors would without a doubt be growing their own crops to be making into booze, as growing grain and other crop for beer and other alcoholic beverages has been one of THE oldest agricultural practices in the world, and nearly every continent on the globe has had some sort of alcoholic beverage to some degree. Whether it was ancient Mesopotamians and Egyptians brewing their own beers, Africans with palm wine, Romans and their wine, British and their ales, Russians and their Vodka, Japan and it's Saki, or even the Aztecs with their cactus beer... only place I have no knowledge of any native booze production is Australia... but you get my point.

 

It'd be lovely to see. Hell, can even combine this with the weed mod for greater selection of consumable psychoactives and mind altering substances. Weed ain't my forte but I understand folks who appreciate it.

 

Not that Project Zomboid needs to be filled with drugs and stuff mind you, but stuff like this makes sense and is realistic for survivors to carry out with.

[Jose420]

More types of beer and wines can be fine to the game and change the algorithm to more realistic methods for the alchol , the medicine etc but the dev Will do this when they go to the 1.0 i think...

[Rathlord]

I like the general idea of this, though brewing beer is a pretty complicated process for people who haven't done it before (which is a fairly small amount of the population, relevant to the whole) so I'm not sure if I'm all for crafting your own beer. It can also be quite deadly if you do it wrong, which I'm sure you know if you're in the industry.

[Comrade Crimson]

Well here is my suggestion on the stats:

Moonshine stats= 1/4 or 1/2 will get you completely drunk with normal stats... light drinkers will get screwed at 1/4 and the effects last longer.

Moonshine stat wise also doubles painkiller effects, gives more happiness, quenches the same amount of thirst but obviously it makes you more drunk, and for FAR longer. (Would be really easy to get alcohol poisoning with this one too if thats ever implemented.)

 

Spirits are roughly the same, a full bottle or 1/2 perhaps for all of the spirits (including whiskey bottles we find ingame.)

Wine gives you -30 thirst per, same amount of happiness as spirits, takes 2 bottles to get you drunk. 1 bottle and 1/2 or 1/4 if your a light drinker.

 

Beer bottles or cans give -10 thirst per, 5+ happiness. It takes 6-8 beers to get drunk for normal, 3-6 if you are light.

As for hard drinkers, more or less do the same adjustments taken for light drinkers but reverse it, so like a light drinker with beer needs 3 cans? 3 more cans then normal is needed for a hard drinker.

 

As for painkilling, with the exception of moonshine once you are DRUNK you get the painkiller bonus.

 

As for implementing the growing process- and you are indeed right Rathlord, you need to measure it out properly and be acute with the distilling processes and make sure when you are brewing it you are doing it safely. ESPECIALLY with Moonshine... Moonshine is NOT easy to make, good moonshine that is.

 

But the same can be said for cooking too, undercook something and well, you could risk diseases, same with fires, or handling firearms for that matter. Not everyone in the population can handle a firearm properly, even in the United States and Canada. Goes for any skill really, trapping needs practice too.

 

So, here's my quota on it- add a skill called Brewing, and it'll also tie into the Farming skill.

 

You grow various crops as you would, grain crops, potatoes, hops, grapes, etc. of which you can ferment/use to distill alcoholic beverages. There can even be skillbooks on it or when NPC's come about you can learn the skill from them- or there could very well be a new profession called a Brewer or something. (Or as a joke, have unemployed get the bonus )

 

The distilling process can be handled a bit like how farming is where a person unless experienced may not know the conditions of the crops they are growing, and with distilling it could be translated they may not know the conditions of the brew when going through the process.

 

But sipping small samples, drinking booze in general and also doing the obvious work to brew your own helps garner experience. And there may be a chance if you drink too much of a deadly batch you can get alcohol poisoning and such. Plus it can give unhappiness because it may taste like yak piss, I've had the misfortune to have had bad homebrews in the past...

[Pravus]

I actually created a script recently that spawned cans of light beer and half used cases of beer(with random amounts of cans remaining inside).  I was thinking about making it an addition to the next release of RKFmod but ended up scrapping the idea when I couldn't find a way to manipulate the level of drunkenness consuming individual items awards.

 

Essentially, my light beer cans were getting characters as drunk as downing a full bottle of whiskey, lol.  If I can ever find a way to modify the amount of drunkenness individual items give to a player, I'd totally be up for creating a mod that adds different types of alcoholic beverage.

 

 

btw, for anyone else interested in attempting a mod along these lines, check out this thread: http://theindiestone.com/forums/index.php/topic/10076-unused-and-unfinished-custom-mod-resources-available-for-use/#entry132036

The first post contains custom made world sprites for a constructable moonshine still available for anyone who wants to use it.  The resources are from a mod I started working on that would allow the creation of moonshine but never finished.  The resources are now free-for-all to use as seen fit!

[Rathlord]

I'm not sure cooking and brewing can really be compared. Cooking is a basic survival skill, and pretty much everyone can cut open a chicken breast to make sure it's not pink (which is pretty much the most dangerous piece of food normal people deal with on a day to day basis, and even then the risk is minimal). Everyone knows the exact process of how to cook- maybe not to cook well, or tastily, but you can make sure things aren't raw with common sense.

 

The same can't be said for brewing, though. I know the general idea- I've even known several people who did it (and had some), but it's not something I would ever figure out on my own without some kind of guide or resource.

 

Just my 2 cents.

[Comrade Crimson]

I'm not sure cooking and brewing can really be compared. Cooking is a basic survival skill, and pretty much everyone can cut open a chicken breast to make sure it's not pink (which is pretty much the most dangerous piece of food normal people deal with on a day to day basis, and even then the risk is minimal). Everyone knows the exact process of how to cook- maybe not to cook well, or tastily, but you can make sure things aren't raw with common sense.

 

The same can't be said for brewing, though. I know the general idea- I've even known several people who did it (and had some), but it's not something I would ever figure out on my own without some kind of guide or resource.

 

Just my 2 cents.

 

Of course, but the same goes for trapping really- not everyone is going to design a successful trap off the bat, and not everyone knows how to take care of plants properly. I only mention cooking as there is indeed some risk involved and not everyone's a pro chef-

And not everyone knows how to construct and build things either.

But like any skill you can learn it. And trying your hand at brewing even if you only got the basic idea is one way to learn it, and I think this would be a great idea to add.

 

Maybe to reflect the lack of knowledge your first brew is probably going to be garbage homebrew or something like that which tastes like yak piss, and that is all you can make until you reach your first level. As you progress, like construction you get access to a wider variety of booze you can make.

 

Oh, and just so you folks are aware of standard alcoholic percentages per drink- if you didn't know already,

 

Spirits are typically 40% Alcoholic content, Wine is anywhere from 12-15% normally but can exceed it slightly (15% for simplicity) and beers range from 5-9% on a standard basis, 5 being the common.

Moonshine I don't really need to explain, it's typically over 60%, going to the 75 and post 80 mark.

 

 

As for how the distilleries work for moonshine and other booze to determine the safety of the drink, a process similar to cooking can kinda undergo gameplay wise.

 

If you let the still overheat other substances can get in the moonshine, which can lead to pollution of the brew which is dangerous to drink. And on the other hand if you don't distill it enough and get all the impurities out and what have you, you can have contaminants inside the booze and it can make your character sick as well and the quality of the brew will suffer.

 

Having more experience and levels in your brewing skill helps prevent that and at higher levels of brewing, the chances of that happening and other things will be lessened. Just like how cooking helps out with food or carpentry with more buildings and their quality.

 

So it needs attention, just like food does in an oven or on a fire or else it burns... or worse. Mind I use these comparison's as analogies, not directly related processes.

[Rathlord]

The distinction I've always made for PZ has always been the difference between things that are "common sense" and things that aren't.

 

For instance, if a person didn't know how to cook- you could work out that things have to be heated up to be cooked, and thus you put your food in the fire. Sure, it might take some trial and error to get it not burnt and not raw, but it's something any half-intelligent human being could solve. The same is true of carpentry, basic crop growing, and even to a certain extent firearm use.

 

The same can't be said of things like brewing, smelting metals, or (literal) rocket science. These are things that had to be discovered over thousands of years because they aren't puzzles that can simply be looked at and figured out. Without foreknowledge of the process, it could take millennia for someone to discover these things.

 

Now, you could certainly argue that some people would already know how to do this and the knowledge could be spread, and that's probably a valid point, but I just don't know if it's enough to be worth including. I'm a stickler for realism, though, and that's certainly not the only valid frame of reference for PZ.

[Pravus]

 

I'm not sure cooking and brewing can really be compared. Cooking is a basic survival skill, and pretty much everyone can cut open a chicken breast to make sure it's not pink (which is pretty much the most dangerous piece of food normal people deal with on a day to day basis, and even then the risk is minimal). Everyone knows the exact process of how to cook- maybe not to cook well, or tastily, but you can make sure things aren't raw with common sense.

 

The same can't be said for brewing, though. I know the general idea- I've even known several people who did it (and had some), but it's not something I would ever figure out on my own without some kind of guide or resource.

 

Just my 2 cents.

 

Of course, but the same goes for trapping really- not everyone is going to design a successful trap off the bat, and not everyone knows how to take care of plants properly. I only mention cooking as there is indeed some risk involved and not everyone's a pro chef-

And not everyone knows how to construct and build things either.

But like any skill you can learn it. And trying your hand at brewing even if you only got the basic idea is one way to learn it, and I think this would be a great idea to add.

 

Maybe to reflect the lack of knowledge your first brew is probably going to be garbage homebrew or something like that which tastes like yak piss, and that is all you can make until you reach your first level. As you progress, like construction you get access to a wider variety of booze you can make.

 

 

I could easily see a system for making moonshine being added into the game.  It's relatively simple to distill and all the necessary ingredients are already available in game.  All you need to make corn mash for moonshine distilation is corn, sugar, yeast, and water.

 

Before I side-lined the moonshine still mod (and eventually gave up on it to work on other projects), I had a construction system to make a working still that was easy to assemble with some skill in carpentry.  All it required was a few cinderblocks, an empty 50-gallon drum, some coiled copper tubing, and a wooden rain barrel.  The cinderblocks were used to elevate the drum above a wood fire.  The mash was brewed in the 50-gallon drum.  Then the alcohol vapor would rise through the copper tubing as it coiled from the drum into the wooden rain barrel filled with water.  The water condensed the alcohol and the spirits could be collected in a bucket placed below the end of the copper tube (which protruded from the bottom of the rain barrel through a sealed hole).

 

I even took the proof into consideration.  Had I got the mod working I was planning for the first run of a batch to produce weak moonshine ( or "low proof" if you prefer).  Most first time distillers (and even professionals depending on the quality of the still and conditions surrounding the run) produce moonshine that's still mostly water on their first run.  If you take a weak batch of moonshine, however, and simply run it through the still a second (or even third) time the alcohol concentration increases as the water concentration decreases due to evaporation.  The whole process is remarkably simple really.

[Comrade Crimson]

Exactly, and as someone who's done moonshine distilling you typically want to do it a few runs to cure the brew of impurities and other contaminants to make it a better quality. The first batch is rarely safe/good to drink so you do it one to two more times.

 

 

The distinction I've always made for PZ has always been the difference between things that are "common sense" and things that aren't.

 

For instance, if a person didn't know how to cook- you could work out that things have to be heated up to be cooked, and thus you put your food in the fire. Sure, it might take some trial and error to get it not burnt and not raw, but it's something any half-intelligent human being could solve. The same is true of carpentry, basic crop growing, and even to a certain extent firearm use.

 

The same can't be said of things like brewing, smelting metals, or (literal) rocket science. These are things that had to be discovered over thousands of years because they aren't puzzles that can simply be looked at and figured out. Without foreknowledge of the process, it could take millennia for someone to discover these things.

 

Now, you could certainly argue that some people would already know how to do this and the knowledge could be spread, and that's probably a valid point, but I just don't know if it's enough to be worth including. I'm a stickler for realism, though, and that's certainly not the only valid frame of reference for PZ.

 

Not everyone knows how to farm off the bat, and I wouldn't say its common sense much either. That or trapping- not everyone knows how to design working traps. But people experiment, and with brewing its roughly about the same. There is already a built up knowledge of brewing given it first started near the moment human civilization started to farm some 10,000 to 12,000 years ago, the first found brewery being found at 6000 BCE at the very least.. and a fair number of the population of the United States and Canada do make homebrew, and they aren't really educated in stuff like that. It'll be the same story for a mechanics skill if cars are added down the road, I don't expect everyone off the street knowing how to repair a car or do vehicle maintenance, and so forth. But they can tinker and learn, read manuals and books, and other methods of educating themselves. And there is certainly material on brewing.

 

But the whole process ain't that hard, as explained by our friend above. It's not hard to make a homebrew or weak moonshine/low proof, but making good homebrew and moonshine... well that takes years to master. And this would reflect well in a game like zomboid.

[Viceroy]

I just want to add to this that I lived in a the Northern Cape here in South Africa, and the area has RAMPANT alcoholism due to my colonial forefathers shipping massive quantities of low-quality wine into the area and systematic payment and subjegation of the local populace (who does not have the resistance to alcohol we have.) So let's take the socio-economic position of an area that is essentially a desert, with very minimal educational capacity and history. Coupled with the majority of farm workers being alcoholics and raised by alcoholics. This creates a climate where the average person is very far below the average when it comes to the capacity intellectually and educationally to perform daily tasks. The base IQ of tested farm workers of that particular pursuasion tended to be around 80. Which is borderline...

 

Okay now that the curcumstances are listed and know, here comes my argument. You see, 'beer' as you know it would indeed stop existing after the world ended, but 'brewing' is not merely crystal clear golden bubbly beer. It is merely the fermentation of things. And when it comes down to it fermenting things is easy as hell, we have had cases where they would make 'beer' out of bread, berries, sugar, milk, animal feed and pretty much anything else they found or could feasibly ferment.

 

And what was used for this fermentation you may ask? Well plastic bags were used, and typically they would put the bags under metal plates in the sun to heat.

 

Did they die? Sometimes yes they did die, but out of a camp of 300 salt-pan workers you'd have maybe a death every month or so. Surely yes I can agree that there are dangers in making such things, and that normal people would avoid doing so, but I vehemently disagree that the average person can't figure it out and propose that should your character suffer from a trait such as alcoholism that they would indeed pursue such an alternative to get their 'fix' should other resources be depleted. (To their own detriment).

 

Now this is all without distillation or ANY formal education (literally nothing, not even primary school, most can't even read.), distillation increases the safety of the whole system (if you don't take into account over-use and death due to poisoning from the distilled product itself.) Distilling such a fermented concoction is trivial and what was sometimes seen is using a pressure cooker and a simple bit of thin tubing (hydraulics line in this case) they would repeatedly distill it until it is no longer what I'd call a rancid pukebowl. We actually tested some of it (well sent to be tested.) and it was deemed sterile. Remarkably but it was sterile, I would not have believed it myself,

 

So in summary, I do believe the average person could ferment things (or accidentally ferment things and pick up on it.) and I also believe that the vast majority of average people understand at least the basics of distillation. I'd like it to be a skill since I have very clearly seen people going from 'pukebowl' fermented shite to making clear as day alcohol over the course of a few months with no access whatsoever to the internet, books, reading capability, tutolage. Just time and trial and error. (with the odd bout of sickness yes indeed.)

 

So that is my angle on it anyway.

[syfy]