Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[newbonomicon]

Dwarf Fortress has two liquids that flow, water and magma. I am here to propose a third: Swill.

In the same way dwarves can create a pond with buckets of water, they would be able to make a swill with barrels or other containers of alcohol. It would behave like water, with the difference that dwarves who drink it wouldn't get an unhappy thought from drinking water, or at least get a less severe one. It could be gathered in buckets or used as the source for a well, and would have a lower priority than proper booze, but a higher priority than water, in terms of what thirsty dwarves would choose to drink. However, the most important feature is that it would flow, and could be pumped, as if it was water. Players could create artificial rivers of booze, or even boozefalls, in their fortresses. Ponder that concept for a moment, and try to tell me this isn't the dwarven thing to do.

Don't let me down, Toady. Give me my rivers of booze.

[knutor]

I'd want swill, to be a randomly appearance from fountains in aligned regions only.  Or a rain type.  Raining Swill, it might even be included in the oneday not far from now, mug fix.  One of the best Rogues RPG games in history, NetHack, had really elaborate fountains.  Quaffing from them did all kinds of world ending things to your character, not just intoxication.  This is a good idea.  I'm afraid however, that the realists will shoot it down as they have a hard time with fantasy topics like this.  Heres hoping they don't!  Good suggestion.  DF needs way more quaffing.  Sincerely, Knutor

[sockless]

In before Kohaku and Footkerchief.

Adding more fluids to the game has been suggested often before, regardless of the proposed fluids, there are a lot of problems associated with adding extra fluids and their interactions.

I do like the idea of swill as a form of booze though.

[GreatWyrmGold]

Praytell, what exactly is "swill?" I most often see or hear the term used to describe alcohol of a poor quality; we have river spirits and the like for that now.

River spirits are the ones brewed from muck roots, right?

[dizzyelk]

Praytell, what exactly is "swill?" I most often see or hear the term used to describe alcohol of a poor quality; we have river spirits and the like for that now.

River spirits are the ones brewed from muck roots, right?

I'm guessing he means it like grog, where you mix booze and water together...

[GreatWyrmGold]

Ah.
You make grog by mixing water and alcohol?

Swill sounds like something for desperate times. That could be...interesting, at least.

[Itsdavyjones]

That and swill will extend your booze supplies.

[newbonomicon]

The name "swill" came to mind when pondering the fact that it would inevitably have to be made of multiple types of booze mixed together in a large, pond-like zone. Obviously, it would be unrealistic for this to produce anything but the lowest quality swill, but if the only alternative is water, it's clearly the better choice.

And yes, assuming each barrel would fill the swill about as much as a bucket of water fills a pond, it would easily reduce the space your booze stockpile takes up.

[weenog]

Armok help you if you put anything that foams in your boozefall.  You'd have a drowning hazard that can climb z-levels.

So what kind of proof are we talking here?  if this stuff gets used as an alternative water source, is cleaning a wound with it more or less likely to result in infection?

[newbonomicon]

I'd say real water should probably still be required for medical purposes. If cleaning wounds with it is made an option, I can't really say what it would do, since the most advanced medical procedure I know is how to put a band-aid on.

[Itsdavyjones]

Armok help you if you put anything that foams in your boozefall.  You'd have a drowning hazard that can climb z-levels.

So what kind of proof are we talking here?  if this stuff gets used as an alternative water source, is cleaning a wound with it more or less likely to result in infection?

If anything,it would work better then water because it can kill some bacteria, not all due to low alcohol content (got the from my father who works in the medical industry)

[Corai]

This exists already in a way, reclaim a old fort. The booze may be spilt over and running.

[Starver]

Multininjaed, so probably repeating someone or other.

Ah.
You make grog by mixing water and alcohol?

It's not so much an attempt to extend alcohol by watering it down, but more in order to extend the water.  Or at least disguise how foul the might be.  The details depend very much on the navy concerned, though, and the point in history.

[quite]Swill sounds like something for desperate times. That could be...interesting, at least.[/quote]'Swill' is generally a mix, of some kind.  'Pig Swill' (or pigswill, or pigs' swill?) is a mix of scrap food/liquid, but bar-swill/whatever-the-spelling-you-prefer means to me the sort of thing you get from dregs of the overspill tray underneath the taps.  In a modern-day pub, they'd get shot for serving the stuff.  Back in the old days, no doubt it was served as cheap alternative, to those that wanted it/couldn't afford anything else.  And I know for certain that it was in the ingredients of the war-time swill (along with whatever other foodstuffs fell below even war-time standards) fed to the pig often jointly looked after by a community.  A small part of it.  Drunk pigs were no fun to control.

Anyway, history lesson (or at least circumstances as I know of them) over.

DF-wise, I don't know how swill could be produced[1], but if it existed I would have imagined that it would prevent the alcohol-withdrawal symptoms, but still give bad thoughts approaching that of having to drink water.

Grog is easier to imagine.  Eke's out the alcohol (similar effects to those just suggested, for slightly different reasons) when supplies are low.

As a new form of environmentally-flowing liquid, the arguments against that are already mentioned, but in standard liquid-carrying vessels (of the various kinds), well, maybe.  But perhaps pick either swill or grog.

[1] The only way I can think of is that barrels maybe have an odd number of units of alcohol in them, but dwarves drink an even number of units.  The final unit at the bottom of the barrel can only be added to other barrel-remainders.

[Mrhappyface]

Isn't grog just rum with lemon juice to stave off vitamin C deficiency?

[Starver]

IIRC, when it was specifically rum-based (which it wasn't always) it was rum added to water, with lemon (or other citrus) juice also added to help with the palatability.

It just happened to also stave off scurvey, the actual causal link being discovered later on.  But, like I said, it would depend on whose navy you were talking about and the time-period involved as to what grog actually popularly consists of.


(Off-topic: more or less sunrise, from the looks of things, and if I can find a high-enough hill, nearby, I might be able to punch through the cloud-layer and get a half-decent view of the end of the Transit...)