Beer and Ale Revisited

The question of digital character sheets is kicking my ass. Modeling a character as a chunk of data: sure, no problem, I can do that in any language I care to use. The GUI part is all-new to me, but I have at least a stopgap solution for use with Python, the language I am currently coding in.

But the live-update part? That's trickier. I have an idea formulated which I'll code up soon, maybe later today, but for now it remains larval.

In the mean time, I can talk about what I did work on today. I fixed some issues with the pricing of alcoholic goods (so far: beer, ale, and rum) in my recipe system.

Previously, the recipes by which the prices for these goods were evaluated were written such that they were priced on the basis of the unit by which drinks are sold, such as the pint. However, this is not how production of such beverages actually works. They are turned out, not by the pint or by the gallon, but by the barrel. Since this is a game, I can stipulate that all barrels are alike, and that a barrel contains 30 gallons.

What I did today was rewrite the recipes as follows:

1. The basic beer/ale/rum recipes were rewritten to price each drink as brewed in a 30-gallon barrel (including the price of the barrel, of course.) The rum recipe was predicated on being priced by the half-pint, so I had to rewrite it completely for 30-gallon production; the others required only minor tweaks. Now, the reality of alcohol being brewed in large batches, instead of gallon by gallon, is made concrete in the recipe system.
2. The recipes which build on the one-barrel recipes, such as "by the tankard" (beer/ale sold to be drunk on the spot, without including the price of a vessel) and "by the bottle" (sold to-go, including the price of a glass bottle), were reconfigured to make use of the new by-the-barrel recipe. This means that now, the realities of a tavern proprietor purchasing a barrel and tapping it for his patrons, or of a brewer buying bottles and bottling his product, are made concrete in the specification of how by-the-tankard and by-the-bottle purchases are priced. These elements were not present before; they were papered over by simplification.

Aside from the fact that real manufacturing processes are more closely represented in the new calculations, the new recipes also lead to slightly more expensive drinks. Conceptually speaking, this is because the cost of the barrel of drink (and the labor needed to operate on it) is now factored into the cost of buying it in smaller units. Let's look at the old and new prices for ale side by side, for the city I had plugged in when making these edits.

Old prices:



New prices:



Not much an increase, granted. But that doesn't matter one bit. Getting it right -- or at least, getting it more right -- is what matters.