So you want to be an expert intoxicologist, impressing everyone with your radical drinks while you sit back and engage in some very engaging bar RP? Here are some pro tips as well as some do’s and don’ts.
Basics Bartending
- The best and easiest tip to follow is always have the wiki open, both guide to food and drinks and chemical recipes pages. These tell you how to make all the drinks in game and are an invaluable tool for when someone asks for some wack shit.
- Use your shaker to concoct drinks, then transfer the finished product to a glass. The shaker has 100u of storage, over double that of a glass. If you make any drink that has a mixed drink subcomponent, this is necessary to not run out of space. As a neat side effect, it is spill proof!
- Add up the total number of ‘parts’ of a drink, then multiply that by 5 to see the final minimum volume required. For example, Anti-Freeze is listed as 2 parts vodka, 1 part cream, 1 part ice. (2+1+1)*5 = 20u thus you need at least 20u of space in the container to mix it. This isn’t 100% accurate due to some recipes working in 1u increments, but 99% of the time it works 100% of the time.
- Use the Hoochmaster in the back room to remove any impurities from your drinks. You just stick your shaker in there and click transfer on whatever reagent you need. I recommend swapping from transfer mode to delete mode and deleting what you transferred out to prevent any accidental chemical reactions in the future.
- Shift + Click to examine reagents in the container. Just use keybinds in general, but shift clicking saves a lot of time compared to right clicking.
- Drag the soda and booze dispenser menus off to the side and keep them open. When you walk away it will gray out since you can’t reach it, but the second you get within 1 tile again you can use the window.
If you do all of these, you will become a competent bartender, if not a mundane one. If you want to reach your highest power level, read on to the next section.
Advanced Bartending
- Get a chemical starter crate from cargo. It has 30u bottles of most chemical reagents which is more than enough for bartending. The easiest way to do this is flag down a cargo tech and offer to do the drink bounties in exchange for this $1000 crate. They’ll almost never turn you down. The reason we want this crate is so we don’t have to deal with running back and forth to a chemist to ask for any chemical reagents as often when you ask for sulphuric acid they think you’re a terrorist and will turn you down.
- Try and snag some rarer reagents, like universal enzyme from the chef/botany or a lizard tails for lizard wine. You would be surprised how often doctors are willing to clone a lizard crewmember just to harvest their tail on slow shifts.
- Use your All-In-One-Grinder to get reagents from the sheets of materials you can get from the service protolathe. What I like to do is snag an empty cardboard box, and grind reagents into the glass bottles you can dispense from the Booze-O-Mat then stuff them into the box. This leaves you with pure reagents available at the drop of a hat.
- Keep a zippo lighter in your person. Some advanced drinks require heating and you can spam click your mixer with the lighter to heat it. Don’t be afraid to over heat, as far as I know there are no explosive results for any drink that I am aware of and drinking a 10e23k drink doesn’t do any burn damage.
- Apids can craft honey for you if you hand them a glass of pure sugar. This isn’t too useful as it’s only used in mead and the Bee’s Knees, which apids go crazy over.
- Healing and buffing cocktails. There are plenty if you look at the wiki but here are a few: Lime Juice for toxin, Milk for brute, Cream for brute, Soy milk for brute, and Tea for toxin. Those are the easiest and chugging a 100u bottle of it is surprisingly effective even for heavy damage. The holy grail of restorative drinks are significantly harder to get however. They are: Bastion Bourbon for all damage types, Doctor’s Delight for a weaker Bastion Bourbon, Hearty Punch for all damage types on critted people, Nuka Cola for a speed boost, and Sarsaparillian Sunset for burn in moderation. There are others, most of which are job dependent.
- Selectively add impurities to your drink to enhance the flavor. When you sip something, you taste the ingredients in descending order of volume. You can use this to add some flavor text to your drinks. Unfortunately most people won’t notice you going the extra mile unless you call it out. Your beer goggles allow you to pre-emptively see what a drink would taste like if you examine it.
If you follow these tips, you can be an expert bartender slinging out crazy cocktails on the regular. But there is still more to be learned, some of which might get you in trouble if you apply them incorrectly.
Forbidden Knowledge
Don’t do any of these things as a non-antag as it will probably get you bwoinked.
- Mixing a Narsour and Rat’Vander cocktail together produces an explosion. This works both in grenades and by drinking, with grenades producing 1x1 spaced explosion with a full 50u of each in beakers.
- Shotgun darts are amazingly potent. If you can snag some, load them up with a drink deathmix. Look on the wiki for some drink effects as there are too many to list here, but Bacchus is always a good choice even if it acts slow, and Beepsky Smash is robust against non-security crewmembers. If you do get in a tussle with security, aim for the legs. Regular armor vests protect the head, security jackets protect the arms, but only the HOS coat protects the legs. If some shitter meta HOS has distributed their armor as sometimes happens, you’d best swap back to slugs or buckshot.
- The bandolier can hold an ungodly number of shotgun shells. If you think you’re going to have to robust some fools, load up on some buckshot or slugs at the cargo or science protolathe
- Sarsaparillian Sunset gives you fire breath alongside some hefty burn damage if you get more than 50u of it in your system. This means you have to chug it by being on help intent and aiming for your mouth. “THEORETICALLY” you could get risk-free fire breath by slurping down Plasma-Flood to heal burn faster than Sarsaparillian Sunset along with some pyroxadone for further healing when the Plasma-Flood sets you on fire. In practice, I haven’t been able to get this to work. Best way would be an accomplice with bluespace syringes and a rapid syringe gun to pump you full of your PEDs.
Conclusion
If you do even half of this, you will become a very good bartender very fast. And always remember, if someone round start comes running for a flask full of whatever healing powergame drink remember to spike it with some Bacchus. I’m looking at you, security mains, even though the practice has plummeted recently.
