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chocmerc

Beverages, Refreshments, Whatever You Call It, Lets Talk Drinks!

7 posts in this topic

Hello all :)I wanted to throw into the ring my various ideas about drinks.  The goal of this post is to outline the many drink concepts I have swirling around my head, codify them, discuss possible implementations, and put it all together in a nice package for people to read and discuss.  I'm sure the fantastic TFC developers have considered beverages in complete and already have their ideas, but whats the harm in throwing some ideas out there.  This is mainly to inspire discussion from the community :)

 

Drinks are an important part of life for most of us, though there is quite a variety of drinks around the world.  There are many categories of drinks, all with their fans and critics; Alcoholic drinks, non-alcoholic drinks referred to as soft drinks by some, brewed beverages such as coffee and tea, et al.  I plan to touch on the categories named here, and throw in my two cents as to the possible uses of them, and implementations.

 

_________________________________________________________________________ | A Quick Overview | _______________________________________________________

 

Currently, Steve has a rather narrow selection of beverages to enjoy at the moment in my opinion.  He is limited to water(which has its uses, and is an important part of survival), alcohol(which also has its uses, though as a drink its primarily for relaxation), and Milk(which isn't drinkable at the moment if memory serves).  Primarily focusing on water and alcohol, they both serve a purpose and have a function.  Without water, you dehydrate, which leads to moving slowly.  Good incentive to keep your thirst quenched.  Alcohol gives various buffs and debuffs (or outright kills you if you decide to over-indulge) and gives a pleasant swirling effect to your screen.  There are a plethora of beverages that the mods can devote their development time on, and everyone has their favorites, but I do not simply want to see beverages added that don't bring anything new.  I feel that each beverage should be evaluated on its potential believable benefits rather than just adding drinks for its own sake.

 

  The beverages I will be focusing on will be from a handful of drink categories;

 

Soft Drinks:  This term is loosely used to reference a specific subset, specifically non carbonated non alcoholic beverages.

 

Brewed: Mainly Coffee and Tea, what most people would think of as a brewed beverage.

 

Alcoholic: some would say we already have enough diversity within this category of beverages, but I have a different approach to try.

 

_________________________________________________________________________ | Soft Drinks | ___________________________________________________________

 

For most, when you think of Soft drinks, you think of carbonated drinks like soda.  Sadly there is no carbonated water in TFC at present, so I use the term loosely to refer to various mixtures involving fruit juices.  Some could argue hot springs could be harboring carbonated water of a sort, but that is a different discussion, right now I want to discuss non alcoholic non carbonated beverages.

 

We have fruit, so why do we not have fruit juices you may be asking?  In my mind, it's a simple matter of what benefit would be reap from having fruit juices?  Thinking upon this, I wondered what believable benefit could be gotten from drinking fruit juices.  First thing that popped into my head was nutrition.  Having yourself a nice tall glass of OJ? (Orange Juice, not the football player!) Surely I would receive some nutritional benefit similar to eating the orange itself you might wonder.  That was my go to solution, until I happened to peruse the forums and found kitty mentioning that the developers were trying to limit the amount of nutritional benefits you can get from food, for good reason.  

 

When you juice a fruit, you end up losing a good bit of mass in the conversion, things like fiber, pulp, seeds, etc.  It is unlikely that converting 160 oz of fruit to 80 or even 40 oz and keeping the same nutritional content would be balanced, as now eating the fruit is sub-par, why do that when you can chug juice all day.  With that in mind, I toyed around with the idea of having fruit juices improve food saturation, slowing the rate at which you become hungry.  A possible solution, but it could have strange implications and didn't feel entirely believable or impactful to me.  Another idea I thought about was adding potion effects into the mix, things like speed boosts, temporary max health increase, temporary absorption.  In the end, I leave these questions for the community to decide, while I continue to wrack my brain for possible solutions to this problem.

 

In any event, Here are some ideas for soft drinks.

 

Lemonade:  I cant tell you how many times I have tried to deliver the age old saying about lemons, but every time I was stymied by the lack of lemonade in TFC.  Jokes aside, most people wouldn't countenance eating raw lemons, the fruit is mainly utilized mixed into food and drinks to most of us.  The simplest route to implement this would be crushing the lemon for its juice, whether it be by hammer, hand, or what have you.  lemon juice + sugar + water, and you have lemonade.  This method would be barbaric and cruel to the poor lemons though, so I would suggest the implementation of a new item, the Reamer. A simple tool made from wood, fired clay, or knapped stone, it would humanely juice the lemon, and it would be easier on Steve.  I can only imagine him coming home from a vicious battle and trying to juice a lemon by hand, it would be almost unbearable getting lemon juice in wounds, scratches, or cuts D;.  

 

Various fruit juices:  Of the food available to us, I believe the best candidates for juicing are oranges, tomatoes, apples, cranberries, and plums.  these all have a good water content that make them suitable for juicing.  There are other foods that we juice today, but they are typically pulverized and macerated to obtain their juices, and couldn't be reamed by hand to produce said juices.  As for berries, I would recommend they be put into a generic berry juice, either by themselves or mixed, so as not to create a ridiculous pool of dubious juices like strawberry juice.

 

That is all I have to say about soft drinks, these will come up later as basic units for other beverages.

 

 

_______________________________________________________________ | Brewed Beverages | ____________________________________________________________________

 

Brewed beverages are another of the popular drinks around the world, tea and coffee having worldwide appeal and mass consumption.  This section will involve adding several new mechanics and will be more complex than the previous section.

 

Lets start with tea, shall we?  Tea goes back a long time, earliest records show tea being consumed as far back as the tenth century BC in China.  But enough history, most of us know tea, and how great it is.  to add it to TFC, we are going to need to add new items and mechanics to give it justice.  Starting off, we will need to implement a tea bush.  Tea bushes are typically grown in tropical or subtropical climates, require at least 50 inches of rainfall a year, and prefer acidic soils.  It takes 3 years for a new plant to be ready for harvesting, and in harvesting, only the top 1-2 inches are plucked.  It can be harvested every 7-15 days during its growing season.  The slower they grow, the better the flavor.  Implementation of this would involve creating the tea plant, mimicking the characteristics mentioned, and then harvesting by hand.  I feel the best method would be to allow us to right click to harvest every few days to collect tea leaves, while leaving the bush intact.  Unfortunately, I do not know if the devs plan to bring that feature back, as it has been removed from tomatoes and other plants.  

 

(disclaimer: the following is based on traditional small volume methods, and isn't a perfect step by step process or perfectly accurate representation of actual tea making)

Once harvested, depending on the type of tea.  For this thread, i'm going to stick to black, oolong, and green tea.  Black tea is laid out in the sun to wilt, losing some of its water content, and activating enzymes to help break down the leaf and produce tannins.  Next, the leaves are bruised and shredded, breaking open cell walls for the enzymes to oxidize them.  After oxidation, they are heated to dry them to a specified water content, thus finishing the tea.  Green tea has a slightly different method, where instead of wilting them in the sun, the tea leaves are blasted with heat / steam to stop the wilting process.  they are then dried immediately with no oxidation allowed.  Oolong is a half step between black and green, wilted, bruised/shredded, but only partially oxidized.

 

In game, I can see the implementation working something similar to this.  Using a woven reed mat or a large cloth blanket, sun wilting the leaves, crushing the leaves in a quern, leaving them out to oxidize on that same mat/cloth, and then drying them somewhere warm.  For green tea, it would simply be harvested, then dried.

 

Now to move on to coffee.  Coffee does not have as long a history as tea, the first credible accounts of coffee being drank in the middle east around the 15th century by monks.  There are two major types of coffee in the world, Robusta and Arabica.  Arabica is considered the better flavored of the two, as Robusta is bitter, but has a great body(just like my wife! haha! no plz stahp).  To keep it short, ill move on to processing.

 

Coffee beans and berries are de-fleshed, and the seeds are left in the sun on screens to ferment, followed by drying on the screens, making Green Coffee.  As many of you are aware, there are some variations to this, most notably kopi luwak, which has the coffee berries / seeds being fed to Asian palm civets, who then excrete out the seeds, which are collected and sold for large sums of money.  I know dunks aversion to coding excrement, but it would be neat to have that process, only using creepers instead.  That will give the coffee some real POW!  talk about an EXPLOSION of flavor! (I'll let myself out now).  All jokes aside, next comes the roasting.  

 

Roasting is a deceptively difficult affair, requiring an experienced roast master to acquire proper coffee flavors, but its simple for translating into TFC.  Simply roast green coffee to the desired darkness.  After roasting, all that is required is grinding the bean to powder, and then you have your coffee, ready for brewing.

 

I've saved mentioning Implementation ideas for last here, since they will be similar for both tea and coffee.  The best way I see it happening is through the introduction of a kettle or pot with which we can bring water to a boil.  A pot would have more uses to it, you can find plenty of threads asking for pots to make stews or soups, etc.  With that said, it would almost feel like a missed opportunity to not include a tea kettle for one reason, its distinctive whistle.  Hearing a recognizable sound in a game, like a tea kettle whistle, gives me a better sense of immersion, and when it's done right it can downright give me thrills of excitement, but i'm weird like that.  With a method to boil water, we can produce the end result, tea and coffee.  Throw the leaves / powder in the pot / kettle or pour a cup and steep leaves /powder in that.  Of course, what is tea and coffee without a nice ceramic (porcelain) cup with floral designs?  Another missed opportunity I am sure.

 

____________________________________________________________________________| Alcohol |___________________________________________________________________ 

Rather than try to justify more types of alcohol, my suggestions will be more in line with mixed drinks and cocktails.  This ties in with my earlier section about fruit juices, as a large portion of mixed drinks are mixed with fruit juices.  I don't think i have to bother with coming up with any mixed drink/cocktail ideas, i'm sure the community and/or dev team can think of plenty on their own.  The purpose they would serve would be mirrored in what the fruit juices will end up doing.  Slight bumps to Nutrition and/or food saturation with your alcohol buffs would be splendid, or whatever else the community comes up with :)

 

And with that out of the way, I want to talk about an egregious oversight, the lack of wine in TFC.  I am here to give out my take on bringing wine to the game.  Wine is a drink produced from the fermentation of grapes or other fruits.  Wine has an incredible diversity, but for the purposes of this thread, I will keep things simple.  Grapes / fruits are harvested from the fields, taken to where they will be fermented and processed.  for simplicity, I will only discuss white and red wines, of the non sparkling variety.  Red wines are fermented with the skins and pulp of the grapes / fruit, white wine is fermented from fruit juice that is pressed from said grapes/fruits, there is no skin - juice interaction for white wines.  the wine is fermented for one to two weeks, allowing wild or packaged yeast to convert the sugars to alcohol.  after fermentation, juices are allowed to empty and collect in a holding tank, and the remaining must(grape skins) is pressed, this liquid is taken to a different tank, and kept separate from the free run juice.  At the winemakers discretion, these two are blended to achieve the target flavor profile.  After this, both wines can be barrel aged, or blended and finished off.  

 

With such a simplistic rundown to work off of, the implementation of wine in TFC is rather open ended.  Of the things we would need to have a fairly authentic experience would be grapes, a press, and a non flammable drum to ferment in.  Amenities include wine bottles, wine glasses, filters, and a decant(er)ing machine(that's a wine joke :P).  Barrels can serve as storage, aging vessels, vessel for pressing, etc.  With the introduction of wine, I will be able to turn my nose up at those rival towns who make an inferior copy of my high class chardonnay and scoff at their efforts! :)

 
 

__________________________________________________________________| Concepts |_____________________________________________________________________________

 

Now that i have discussed those things, I wanted to throw a few concepts out there that I have been pondering for a short while.  One of which is a system similar to taste we have now, only applied to beverages.  Food and drink share a few desirable flavors, sweet, bitter, and sour,  but in my experiences I've never sought out a savory or salty beverage.  I would recommend that if a drink specific taste panel be set up, salty and savory would be replaced by body(mouth feel).  I suggest this creation to help give drinks a purpose, and to go along with my next suggestion, packaging food and drink together to create a sort of pairing bonus.  This pairing bonus would be for matching flavor profiles to your character on the food and in the drink, greatly improving the saturation bonus for your food.

 

Sorry for the wall of text, there is plenty of mistakes in it I am sure, but I hope to create some good discussion points in the community.  

Regards,

Chocmerc

Edited by chocmerc
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heheheh well you, asked for my harshest critique. unfortunately I don't have a harshest so ill just give you what I picked out.

 

You can drink milk.

 

Wouldn't the gases in hot springs taste unpleasant at least? 

 

Humanely juicing lemons. yes. Tarsaf would be proud my friend. 

 

tomato juice.. I know some people like it but all I can simply say is: ew.

 

Creepers - there would need to be a way to tame them to do that right? or at least pacify

 

give me thrills of excitement, but i'm weird like that

Aren't we all?

 

And with glasses ect, I mean, drinking out of a simple jug when your surrounded by redsteel-plated castles doesn't seem right does it? at least a simple metal water-bottle would be nice, glasses even better.

 

yep that's it.

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I like the idea of tea and/or coffee, and some basic fruit juices/lemonade.  I don't think we really need more alcohol, I'd rather have the time spent on other areas of the game that don't have as much depth.

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I thought the weight number on the tooltip already shows the edible parts? Like, 160 oz of lemon is 160 oz of all the watery parts and no skin? Then we'll just squish them on a (clean) quern and grind them. Put a barrel/vessel/a new block to hold cups/mugs/glasses/jars below the quern and there's your drink.

 

Also, alcohols should change taste over time.

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I think that beers already existing in TFC should replenish hunger given that beers do have calories in real life. I think that it would be fair to give 1-2 oz of grain as food per bucket of beer, given that it takes 4 oz of grain to create a beer(per bucket).

 

I also think that it would be a good idea to add complexity to the brewing process. In real life this is a summary of how beer is made:

 

1). Barley is roasted

2). Barley is combined with water and then heated to a specific temperature where it sits for an hour so the barley breaks down into simpler sugars. Then the solution is boiled.

3). Solution is chilled to room temperature

4). Yeast is added to solution and converts sugars into CO2 and alcohol.

5). After desired alcohol content is reached, a little sugar is added to the solution and then the solution is bottled.(the sugar is added so carbonation occurs in the bottles)

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Actually, I'm pretty sure non-alcoholic fruit juices would be difficult to get in a premodern world -- at least, they wouldn't stay non-alcoholic for very long; modern methods for preserving fruit juices just didn't exist yet. Non-alcoholic grape juice, for example, wasn't invented until the 1800s (by a teetotaler Methodist named Welch, incidentally, for use in religious services).

Edited by quasitonality
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Actually, I'm pretty sure non-alcoholic fruit juices would be difficult to get in a premodern world -- at least, they wouldn't stay non-alcoholic for very long; modern methods for preserving fruit juices just didn't exist yet. Non-alcoholic grape juice, for example, wasn't invented until the 1800s (by a teetotaler Methodist named Welch, incidentally, for use in religious services).

Thanks for sharing :)  I forgot about juice's penchant for fermenting without treatments.  Didnt know the bit about Welch though, neat tidbit :D

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