Beer

Beer is a beverage product that provides a small amount nutrition and recreation, as well as inebriating the user providing a mix of bonuses and maluses based on how intoxicated the pawn becomes. While not very nutritionally effective, its main use is to improve a colonist's mood to prevent mental breaks. However, overuse may lead to inebriation and possible alcohol addiction. The default drug policy setting is both for addicted and for joy.

One beer provides 0.08 nutrition and 17% recreation. The first beer will give a +10 mood boost for almost 5 hours, but additional beers have varying additional effects, positive and negative (see table below).

It can also be used as a somewhat ineffectual melee weapon, doing less DPS than a club or even a lump of wood, but still more than a normal human fist. Conveniently, the beer is not lost after using it as a weapon.

Acquisition

Beer is produced in three steps, with a recommended related (but optional) fourth:

Step 1) Plant hops, which is an easy task and can be done without Research (min Plants Skill 3).

Step 2) Construction of a brewery (Research required), to process 25 hops for 5 units of wort. This task that requires a cook to perform the action, another relatively easy task assuming the colony has enough meals to divert the cook* to other purposes.

Repeating this five times, using a total of 125 hops for 25 wort, is optimal for 1 full barrel of beer (see next).
For factors contributing to the speed of this process, see Drug Cooking Speed

(* Wort has no quality and cannot give food poisoning, so an untrained "cook" can safely be assigned the job, so long as they have "Cook" enabled in the Work tab. They'll be slower to finish this step, but there will be no difference in the end product.)

Step 3) Place up to 25 units of wort into a fermenting barrel for 6 days. Partial loads of wort are possible but less efficient. There is no "skill" involved here, the work to get the wort from the kitchen/stockpile to the barrel is part of the Haul job. Each wort is converted to 1 beer.

Colonist taking beer out of fermenting barrel, ready for consumption.

After 6 days, you have your beer! It's no longer "alive" so it can be stored anywhere regardless of temperature or indoors/outdoors; it will never rot, unlike most other "food" or drugs.

Step 4) Optional: Set your Drug Policy for beer drinking under the "Assign" menu, so your entire colony isn't drunk for the next raid.

Critical temperature

The process of brewing involves a living organism, so difficulty can increase greatly depending on your biome's weather conditions. Avoiding delays or failure requires following temperature requirements:

Temperature	Effect
7 °C – 32 °C (44.6 °F – 89.6 °F)	Ideal fermenting temperature range
-1 °C – 7 °C (30.2 °F – 44.6 °F)	temporarily halts fermentation process, process continues when ideal temperature restored
> 32 °C (89.6 °F) < -1 °C (30.2 °F)	freezing or "too hot" is fatal to the brewing process, all product is lost, all the previous work wasted

The inspect pane will indicate 'Overheating' or 'Freezing' followed by a percentage rising up to 100%. It increases by 0.001% per 1 °C (1.8 °F) outside the safe temperature range each tick. This status is halted when safe temperate is restored, but it is not reset - if the temperature is unsafe again, it will pick up where it left off. If it reaches 100% the conntents of the barrel is 'ruined by temperature' and no beer can be made out of it will even if the safe temperature range is restored again.

Because the "fatal" range is unforgiving even for a moment, it's recommended to keep your temperatures well within the "ideal" range and have a separate, emergency power/temperature system so that an open door or short-term power loss will not cause the loss of the batch. Double-walling your brewery to insulate from extreme temperatures, and/or installing a long* entry hall/room as an "air lock" with doors at each end is not a bad idea. Also, when planning the location of your brewing, be aware that a kitchen will often be quite warm, as active stoves produce excess heat.

(* 6 tiles long gives time for the first door to shut before your colonist opens the next, so that your brewery is not exposed to "outside" temperatures. Autodoors would shorten this required length.)

Production math

Don't worry, we'll walk you through it...

25 hops makes 5 wort
A single fermenting barrel can hold up to 25 wort
1 wort = 1 beer

That means that 125 hops = 25 wort = 1 full barrel = 25 beer.

Fermentation takes 6 days
1 pawn can drink 1 beer/day without risk of addiction

1 full barrel, run once/7 days (allowing 1 day for hauling and re-filling), is enough for "25 pawn-days" of beer.

So, at that rate, 1 barrel every 7 days will support enough beer production for just over 3.5 pawns (25 beers / 7 days). If you rotated multiple barrels (see next), you'd get enough beer for 1/day for...

2 barrels: 7 colonists
3 barrels: 10 colonists
4 barrels: 14 colonists
5 barrels: 17 colonists
6 barrels: 21 colonists
7 barrels: 25 colonists

It would not be too hard to have everything in place and approach something just over 6 days/run, which, if maintained, would give you a production rate closer to 1 barrel = beer for 4 pawns.

Multiple barrels

If wort is added to a barrel that is already in the fermentation process, that process gets reset and starts over with the new amount, the full 6 days. Manipulating multiple barrels so they don't suffer this setback requires a small amount of detail work, but nothing too micro-managing. Wort is added from a stockpile to the "nearest" barrel, so multiple barrels require multiple small stockpiles.

Set up your barrels a few tiles apart from each other, and set up a small (3-5 tile) stockpile adjacent to them. Every tile in the stockpile has to be closer to its barrel than to any other barrel. Give each stockpile a separate, distinct name - maybe "barrel no. 1" or "beer north". A single tile of colored carpet could be used for "red beer"/"dark beer" etc - whatever works for you, just so you know which stockpile is with which barrel.

When ordering wort to be made, try to do it in batches of 5; 1 batch is 5 wort, each barrel holds 25 wort max, 5 batches is a full barrel. When setting the Bill, go into Details and specify which stockpile these 25 wort will be taken to. You can have multiple Bills up at once, even if they are all for "5 wort". Just make sure each one points to a different stockpile.

If the wort-making process is broken into different amounts, manually ordering the wort to be "merged" into a stack of 25 may help. Then wait, or order that to be hauled - and a new, full barrel is started.

Summary

Beer is a mood enhancing drug that has a variety of effects. These can be broken into effects that occur:

Instantaneously and one time upon using the drug.
While high on the drug.
While addicted to the drug.
While withdrawing from the drug.

Upon drinking

A pawn consuming beer will look for a place to sit in a twenty tile radius first, but will also drink it while standing if it doens't find one. Drinking a beer takes 0 ticks (0 secs). It has the following one time effects:

+17% Chemical recreation
+3.75% to +15% Alkohol high severity, depending on tolerance (see "Alkohol high" below)
+1.6% Tolerance severity, divided by body size (see "Tolerance" below)
If the pawn has 25% tolerance already:
- 3% to 15% Addiction chance (see "Addiction" below)
If the pawn has an addiction already:
- +90% Alkohol need (see "Addiction" below)
- −20% Addiction progress (see "Addiction" below)

Alkohol high

"Alcohol in the bloodstream. It makes people happy, but reduces capacities."
— Alkohol high description

Each beer increases the alkohol high severity by the following formula:

Increase in severity = 0.15 * (100 - (tolerance * 75 round 0))

Therefore with 0% tolerance the severity increases by 15%, with 100% tolerance by 3.75%. It decreases by 75% per day again, meaning that the high of a single dose lasts between 1.2 and 4.8 hours. The maximum severity of an alkohol high is 100% which is reached with 6.7 to 26.7 beer.

The alcohol high severity not only sets the length of the high but also affects the symptoms.

Level	Alcohol high severity	Mood	Pain	Consciousness	Moving	Social fight chance	Other effects
Warm	>0%	+10 ("I just feel a bit more relaxed after that drink. That's good.")	×90%	–	–	–	−2% Manipulation
Tipsy	>25%	+14 ("I'm a bit wobbly! And this is quite enjoyable.")	×80%	×90%	−5%	×2.5
Drunk	>40%	+20 ("I feel so uninhibited and unafraid! This is a great time!")	×50%	×65%	−10%	×4
Hammered	>70%	+26 ("Wooo! What's going on?")	×30%	×50%	−10%	×5
Blackout	>90%	–	×10%	max. 10%	–	–	Chemical damage (moderate): The chemical damage occurs on average every 10 days and affects the brain.

Assuming the beers are consumed all at once with initially 0% tolerance the different stages last the following times:

Beers Consumed	Time Warm (Hr)	Time Tipsy (Hr)	Time Drunk (Hr)	Time Hammered (Hr)	Time Blackout (Hr)
1	4.8	0	0	0	0
2	8	1.6	0	0	0
3	8	4.8	1.6	0	0
4	8	4.8	6.4	0	0
5	8	4.8	9.6	1.6	0
6	8	4.8	9.6	6.4	0
7	8	4.8	9.6	6.4	4.8

Hangover

Once a colonist reaches a drunk state, they will go through the hangover stages after their inebriation wears off. If a colonist drinks beer while hungover they will be both hungover and inebriated. Severity starts at 100% and decreases consistently to 0% over the course of a full day, however it isn't visible until after the alcohol effect is gone.

Label	Severity %	Mood	Side Effects
Hungover (pounding)	>40%	-12	Consciousness -18% Vomiting mtb 0.4 days
Hungover (strong)	>15%	-6	Consciousness -8%
Hungover (slight)	>0%	-3	Consciousness -3%

Addiction

Once a colonist develops Alcohol addiction, a new bar called "Alcohol" will appear in their "Needs" tab. The colonist will consume beer when the bar is low enough. Abstinence will cause the colonist to enter a withdrawal period that adds a negative thought with a -35 mood penalty which is necessary if intending to cure the addiction. Recovery can be monitored by checking the "Health" tab. Once withdrawal reaches 100%, the character will lose the addiction. It will take about 40 days to recover from an alchohol addiction, during which the colonist will have violent and frequent mental breaks.

Animals can also become addicted, and suffer the same negative health effects as humans.

Long-term Effects

When a pawn has a visible tolerance to Alcohol, they may develop Cirrhosis of the liver in a mean time of 60 in-game days (or 1 year), which permanently hinders their consciousness, blood filtration, and blood pumping - and the only way to cure Cirrhosis is to perform a liver transplant. Additionally, a Major or worse Carcinoma (with a minimum severity of 0.5) may develop in the liver in a mean time of 180 in-game days (3 years), again being fixable either via transplant, or removed by a skilled doctor. Animals cannot have transplants.

Chemical damage can occur in the brain while unconscious in a mean time of 10 days' spent blacked out, which reduces consciousness to 50%, significantly reducing performance. There is no way to perform brain surgery.

Attack table

Name	DPS^[1]	AP^[1]	Bottle (Blunt)					Neck (Poke)					Value [ExpandCollapse]
Name	DPS^[1]	AP^[1]	Dam.	Cool.	AP	DPS	Chance^[2]	Dam.	Cool.	AP	DPS	Chance^[2]	Value [ExpandCollapse]
Beer	4.5	13%	9	2s	13%	4.5	50%	9	2s	13%	4.5	50%	12

↑ ^1.0 ^1.1 Note: This is the actual base average derived from the melee verb system updated in 1.1.2610, it may sometimes disagree with the listed value in the in-game infobox. It may also change depending on the stats and the melee verbs available to the wielder
↑ ^2.0 ^2.1 Chance for attack to be selected, assuming only the weapon's attack verbs are considered. It may change depending on the melee verbs available to the wielder

Trivia

In real life, beer is brewed from malted barley/wheat, not hops. Hops are used in the brewing of beer to provide flavor and as a preservative.

Also unlike its RimWorld counterpart, real beer is typically not flammable as it does not have sufficient alcohol content. In fact, a bottle of beer being placed in a fire would be more likely to extinguish it when the bottle broke.

This, along with wood, is one of only two items that serves dual purposes as both a usable item and an improvised weapons.

Gallery

One beer
Stack of beer

Version history

0.9.722 - Possibly Added. Beer brewing, beer drinking, inebriated thoughts, ability impacts and hangovers added.
Beta 19/1.0 - Beer fermenting time 10 days -> 6 days. Buffed beer bottles slightly (~10%) above fists in terms of DPS. Alcohol loses hidden ‘buzzed’ stage;‘warm’ begins from 0 severity. Alcohol severity per day -1.0 -> 0.75, so it lasts longer. Alcohol mood gains all increase +2.

Drugs