Fermentor

The Fermentor is the heart of the brewery and the only station in the game with a working hydrometer. Sugar goes in, yeast eats it, alcohol comes out, and the gauge on the side tells you how far along it is.

You build a batch like a recipe: solids, liquids, and one of six yeast strains — regular, ancient, beer, saké, spirit and wine. They are not interchangeable. Each converts sugar to alcohol at its own rate, so the same honey and water gives a different strength and a different leftover sugar depending on which you pitch. Spirit yeast is the greedy one; ancient reaches higher ceilings from less.

You need at least fifty units of liquid, and a mash counts as a liquid — so you can add at most eight of them.

The hydrometer is real brewing. It reads specific gravity, which falls as the yeast eats sugar. Note your original gravity, read the current one, and the difference times about 135 is your ABV. There is a Test button if you would rather be told.

There is no timer, and that is the trap. A fermentation runs for as long as you leave it — days, weeks. Past its maximum alcohol the yeast keeps eating, and it stops paying you in alcohol and starts paying you in poison. Leave it long enough that the sugar runs out and the good stats go negative too: a drink that makes you hungrier and sicker than before you drank it. Which is a fine thing to make on purpose and a miserable thing to make by accident.

For the same reason, do not leave a public fermentor set to public. A player can start a week-long batch and lock the station; the owner's only recourse is a reset, which destroys their ingredients. Set it to colony or group, and as a player never start a long batch on somebody else's.