I know we have a few coffee and tea threads around here somewhere, but I don't feel like searching for them right at the moment.
Milk, fruit juices (pre-fermentation), and coffee and tea would be the only drinks really available (aside from water, naturally) that were not alcoholic, and most people drank watered down alcohol all the time historically, unless they were drinking tea. So really, there aren't all that many other kinds of drinks to add, and there isn't really much that they would add.
The only thing that would make this make sense would be adding that "drunk" syndrome.
However, now that I think about it, we could possibly add syndromes to all the alcohols that make different alcohols have different subtle effects - like an alcohol that makes you looser-tongued than other alcohols, or the like. Coffee and tea giving you more focus, and dwarves having to find a way to make an alcoholic tea to benefit from it.
Basically, the only way I could see this working well is if you focused on playing up the syndrome aspect.
Well, in the middle east, where the Islam forbid alchoholic drinks and most people were Islamitic, coffee became really popular really quickly. From the book on coffee that I have, they mention that it was usually drank as hot and dark as possible. Sometimes however, they would put herbs and spices in it. There was a special variation which was made from only the coffee berry which was called 'sultan's coffee'. There was also wine made from the coffee-berry, which they also just called coffee(or well, used the same word as they used for regular coffee).
Tea culture is really big in Asia. There's the regular green tea and white tea which is drunk throughout the most part of east-asia, but in India people drink black tea, sometimes with milk and spices resulting in masala chai.
In Europe IIRC, people drank herbal tea.
If anything, it would be a nice cultural alternative, especially great for groups that aren't allowed to drink alchohol.
Do note that if you start adding stimulating drinks, you open the way(modding) for other kinds of drugs. Hell, you're opening the way for food deficiencies and the like. Urist ate too much honey? Well say hello to a sugar-rushing dwarf. Urist eats too little veggies? Well, there goes his immune system. Urist has cave-adaption? Winter depression, anyone?(Though I'd imagine that Dwarves have a sufficiently different physiology to allow them to live in caves, and probably get their vitamine D from somewhere else)
Though, of course, that will require for Urist to try and eat a balanced diet as default AI. I doubt players are jumping to micromanage their dwarves so they'll eat veggies.
Author
Topic: Non-alcoholic drinks (Read 3234 times)