Explanation
Welcome to my new fermentation and brewing guide my fellow Going Medieval fans. I am going to give you specific information on how these gameplay mechanics and relevant workbenches work since Update #4. This will include info on all the stimulant, drink and food production which requires specific temperature ranges and conditions to be crafted successfully.
If you would rather watch then read you can follow my video guide linked here:
You will learn how to make wine, cheese, beer and similar drinks as fast as the game allows using a combination of differently designed rooms, temperature modifying items and construction materials. The whole reason to have stimulants in your settlement is to satisfy your settlers thirst, remove negative and gain positive mood modifiers which help get settlers into a joyful mood.
This guide will touch on many other connected mechanics like structural stability, settler skill requirements, animals, building designs, so I would advise taking a look at my previous guides on these specific subjects on this playlist:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLRYGjguAn0CF9g2QAQz0qSRDZph6r8bUt
There you will also find my previous guide on brewing which is still relevant if you play on Going Medieval’s other game version called Legacy, meaning gameplay up to Update #4.
Workstation & Recipe Info
I think it is best that we start, and then go forward in the same progression you follow in your own playthroughs. This means that your first interaction with fermentation is once you unlock the relevant tech for this mechanic in the tech tree. Once unlocked it adds the fermentation station to your building menu.
It should be constructed undercover and inside a room to boost its production efficiency but it is not required for any specialized rooms nor does it get a bonus inside of them.
At this station you can craft three different items: curdling milk, fruit juice and mash.
Each requires exactly 20 inputs for one production cycle. Obviously Milk for curdling milk, redcurrants and apples for fruit juice while cabbage, barley, beet, carrots, as well as redcurrants and apples and even vegetable root for just regular mash.
Since using milk for curdling milk to produce cheese requires animals to get the initial milk from, and you don’t have this when starting out, I will leave this section for last.
Fermenting Fruit Juice & Mash
As for Fermenting fruit juice and mash, these you can produce early on, especially with redcurrants on a valley map. Do note that there is no cooking skill level requirement for these items, but you do have to have cooking enabled as a job for the settler who will work on this fermenting station.
After that initial production process you get a barrel of fruit juice or mash depending on your recipe selection and inputs, but do note that if you only use redcurrant for a mash recipe, you will get actual fruit juice.
This item now goes into the fermenting process which is highly temperature dependent and whose final result can be rough vine, vinegar or dubious booze.
Dubious booze is what you get from fermenting vegetables and can be distilled, but we will get to that.
Optimal Temperature C,F
As I explained, the exact length and success of the fermentation process depends on the conditions in which a barrel of fruit juice or mash is kept, mainly the temperature.
If you don’t know, there are two ways to check room temperature. The first is to just hover your mouse over a floor tile belonging to that room and look up here in the right corner of the screen.
The second way is to select an object inside this room, then click on the room type name in its info card.
After some experimentation, I have concluded that the optimal room temperature for fermenting fruit juice and mash into rough vine or Dubious booze is between 5 and 10 degrees Celsius
or 41 to 50 degrees Fahrenheit.
At this temperature a barrel of fruit juice will turn into rough vine in about three in-game days, while mash will turn into dubious booze. If the temperature goes above 10,11 degrees Celsius or 50 plus degrees Fahrenheit the whole process will slow down up to three times and even stop completely.
It can even spoil and turn into vinegar, which you can currently only use for making Pickled Vegetables.
If the temperature drops below 5 degrees Celsius or 41 degrees Fahrenheit, the fermentation process again stops.
Aged(fine) Wine & Mood Bonus
Both rough vine and dubious booze can be drunk but give no mood modifiers, beyond clearing the negative one of not having any drinks. To actually get a positive mood modifier you have to keep rough vine fermenting for another 30 days, at the same temperature of 5-10 degrees Celsius and 40-50 degrees Fahrenheit.
Some players reported best results with a smaller span, up to 7 degrees Celsius, but I didn’t see this happen. Important tip here is to set those piles of rough vine as forbidden, so your settlers don’t drink them while they are fermenting.
At the end of this process you get fine wine which gives settlers a plus two positive mood modifier when they drink it. Dubious booze on the other hand doesn't ferment further.
Fermenting Room Setup
Now obviously when you first unlock this tech and start fermenting fruit juice or mash you are in the early game and presumably don’t have much or anything dug underground. That means you need an above ground room in which to store these fermenting barrels.
Since the default game starts in spring, and summer comes fast, the temperature requirement of just 5-10 degrees Celsius or 41 to 50 degrees Fahrenheit is really hard to maintain.
Only for the first few days will you have low enough temperature to get the fermentation going, even outside, during some parts of the day. Constructing a medium sized room is not too much of an effort, be that limestone on mountain maps, or clay or wood on valley maps. But keeping the optimal indoor temperature will be a challenge.
Clay walls and wood floors are very good insulators and will keep the heat out during summer days, but they can only do so up to a point. As outside temperature goes above 20 and even 30 degrees Celsius, meaning above 70 degrees Fahrenheit the indoor temperature will go far above 10 degrees Celsius or 50 degrees Fahrenheit and the fermentation process will slow down and even stop.
Windows Trick
If you haven’t managed to dig enough room underground for both food and fermenting barrels, something I have a special guide, https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLRYGjguAn0CF9g2QAQz0qSRDZph6r8bUt
you can try to use a kind of a hidden and even a bit of a broken gameplay mechanic.
Windows. Specifically open windows.
What you do is to switch practically all the walls of the fermenting room, with windows. Then you zoom in with your camera, double click one window, that selects all of them in your camera view, and click down at the bottom right to set them to be open.
This lowers the temperature in the room because the game works in such a way that an open window acts like a temperature switch, and its closed state let’s temperature go up, and its open state takes the temperature down. But it doesn’t actually let the air inside and outside mix.
Multiplay that temperature lowering quality by the number of windows you add, and voila, you have reduced the indoor temperature of your fermenting room.
Do note I can’t promise for how much longer this trick will stay like this and sooner or later developers will fix it. In case you need to ever increase the temperature to hit that optimal range for fermenting, close the windows or even construct a torch in the room.
Underground Fermenting Room
Now as you keep expanding and working on your settlement you will eventually have enough room underground for a special fermentation room.
This kind of an underground vine cellar has the main benefit of a much more stable temperature environment which you won’t be cooling with windows, insulating with clay or wood but at the utmost warm up with a torch in normal conditions or a brazier in the extreme case of a winter cold snap.
Digging out and building such underground rooms has been the subject of my Building guide as well as a Stability guide so I won’t go into those details here. https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLRYGjguAn0CF9g2QAQz0qSRDZph6r8bUt
The basics are a narrow corridor, digging out the room in a special narrow pattern which leaves pillars on corners intact and to which wooden beams will connect and provide structural stability.
Once finished, you add a stockpile in such a room and set the priority to be higher than the one on which you had the fermenting barrels up to that point, selecting of course all the fermenting food and drinks in the stockpile options.
I will now circle back to milk fermentation before going over to beer, ale and mead brewing.
(Milk) Cheese Fermentation
Fermenting milk starts at the fermentation station where one of your settlers brings 20 units of milk and goes through a short process on that station. Here you get a new item called curdling milk.
Now to get that raw milk in the first place you have to have domestic animals which can produce milk in a pen, and a settler with animal handling skill and animal husbandry job working on them. Currently the three milk giving animals are cows, sheep and goats.
To learn all the info about animals and how to domesticate them, build pens for them, feed them and get resources from them it’s best you check out two of my previous detailed guides on animals and Update #4 which introduced them. https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLRYGjguAn0CF9g2QAQz0qSRDZph6r8bUt
That Curdling milk item also needs to sit in a climate controlled room, with a temperature range of between 5 and 10 degrees Celsius or 41 to 50 degrees Fahrenheit.
If the temperature is optimal during that time it takes about three days to become cheese.
Again, the easiest way is to do this fermentation underground. Good tip is that cheese will keep fresh for a very long time and even has a good sales price with merchants.
Beer, Ale, Mead Fermentation
After playing a while longer you will have enough books to unlock the Brewing tech and with it the Brewing Station. This is where you can make Honey Mash which ferments into Mead, Ale Mash which ferments into Ale and with the addition of herbs to the same recipe you get potential beer.
Just like you needed a settler with the animal handling skill and an animal husbandry job for getting milk, again you need these to get honey from bees. This is what the item / workbench skep is for. It’s also unlocked at the tech tree, takes hay and wood to build, and has no inputs.
This is actually one of the easiest ways, at least in the current version of the game, to produce a good drink for your settlers. A bunch of skeps, high priority for the animal handling job and a lot of Honey Mash to ferment.
All three of these stimulants prepared at the Brewing Station for fermentation take about three days to be ready for consumption by your settlers.
at the standard optimal temperature range between 5 and 10 degrees Celsius or 41 to 50 degrees Fahrenheit.
(Alcohol) Spirit Distillery
Last workbench which has to do with alcohol is the Distillation Station and it too requires the use of the cooking job and skill. As an input you can use any of the fermented items, like Dubious Booze, ale, beer, any vine and so on, and it turns them into distilled alcohol.
This item can be used for production of advanced healing kits. If settlers drink distilled alcohol they get a bonus 4 positive mood modifier named drunk, and it also has high value with merchants.
As for Apple Cider it seems to be missing from the game at the moment, fermenting only apples doesn’t get you Cider but rough vine. My guess is the developers will fix this soon.
And that is everything you need to know about fermenting drinks and cheese in Going Medieval. If you have other subjects you want me to cover, tell me so in the comments. Thank you for reading and happy gaming.
Source: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2835996961
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