Fermentation and Aging — Player Wiki

An add-on for Grims Crops. It adds hops, a still for distilling, and a cask for ageing.

None of this exists without the add-on installed. Buy Hop Seeds from the Crops Store while the expansion is installed.

Hops

Hops is the eighth crop. It grows, waters and harvests exactly like the other seven — the base plugin handles all of that. What the add-on does is make it exist.

• Hop seeds come from the Store only — natural hops drops are disabled by default; servers can enable them
• Plant on farmland or Planting Soil, water it and harvest when mature

Hops is the only crop that makes ale and beer.

If the add-on is ever removed, hops disappears from the Store and from seed drops — but anything already planted stays in the ground, keeps its growth, and starts again the moment the add-on comes back. Your crop is never destroyed.

The two machines

The still turns crops into raw spirits, ale and beer. The cask ages spirits into something better.

Ale and beer never age — they are finished the moment they leave the still.

The still

Building it

Three wide and one deep. The run column stands two blocks from the boiler column, with one open column between them, and a third cut copper slab bridges the top over that gap:

              the boiler column      the gap           the run column
   top        cut copper slab        cut copper slab   cut copper slab
   upper      copper block           (empty)           copper block
   middle     copper block (boiler)  (empty)           copper bars
   bottom     campfire or fire       (anything)        copper block (output)

Every block in it is vanilla. Nothing is crafted, and there is no cauldron.

• The boiler is the copper block standing on the fire. Water and crops go in through its menu.
• The heat is a lit campfire, a lit soul campfire, or open fire, directly underneath.
• The four copper blocks — the boiler, the one on it, the one over the copper bars and the output —

are any vanilla copper block: plain, cut or chiselled, at any oxidation stage, waxed or not. They need not match. You supply them; there is no recipe.

• The output is the copper block under the copper bars. The bottles come out of its menu.
• The middle slab is the only part of the gap that belongs to the still. The three cells under it

are not checked — breaking a block there does nothing.

There is no lever and no valve. A brew starts when you press Start in the boiler's menu, and stops when it finishes or the fire goes out.

Stopping a brew destroys it. There is no pause button or repair grace period. If the fire goes out or any part of the still is broken while a brew is running, you lose the water and crops it took and get nothing back, and the Start button goes back to Start. Start a brew only when you can leave it alone for the minute per bucket it needs.

Is there a build order? No.

Place the blocks in any order you like. There is no last block, and the sign is optional.

This is the opposite of the cask, so it is worth being clear about. A still is not registered when you finish building it — it is checked the moment you right-click it. The plugin walks the structure from the boiler outwards, and if everything is there, the still exists from that click.

A [still] sign is the other way in, and the only one that tells you what is wrong — see below.

That also means:

• You never need to break and replace anything to "trigger" it.
• You can rebuild, move or repair a still freely. Right-click it again and it re-checks.
• Only the boiler and the output open the still. Right-clicking a top copper block, a slab or the

bars does nothing at all — that is deliberate, so you can still build against them. Crouch with a block in hand to build against the boiler or the output too. An axe or honeycomb scrapes or waxes them instead of opening the menu, when there is something to scrape or wax.

If the still will not open

Right-clicking a still with something wrong tells you nothing. The click just falls through and no menu appears. To be told what is wrong, write a [still] sign — see below.

Work down this list — it is in the order things usually go wrong:

1. Are you clicking the right block? Only the boiler (the copper block on the fire) and the output

(the copper block under the bars) open a menu. The first time, the boiler has to stand on a campfire or fire (lit or not) for a click to open it; a [still] sign works without one.

1. Is every copper piece present? Four full copper blocks — the boiler, one on it, one over the

bars and one under them — copper bars two blocks from the boiler, and three cut copper slabs across the top. A cut copper slab, a grate or an old cauldron in a copper block's place will not do.

1. Are the two columns two blocks apart? Three wide and one deep, with one open column between

them — not touching and not diagonal.

1. Are you crouching with a block in hand, or holding an axe or honeycomb? Those build against,

scrape or wax the copper instead of opening the still.

The fire is deliberately not on this list. A still with no fire still opens; Start simply tells you to light it.

How you know it is running: the Start button shows the drink, how many bottles, and the time left, and a thin plume of smoke rises off the top, with the odd coloured glint in it, and a crackle every few seconds. There is no lit texture.

The [still] sign

Write [still] on a wall sign stuck to the face of any of the still's four copper blocks.

• If the still is complete, [still] turns dark green on the sign and your action bar says

"Still ready — right-click the boiler to load it". The still is registered.

• If something is wrong, a red message in your action bar names exactly what, and the sign is

left as you typed it.

The messages, in the order the still is checked:

1. Put the [still] sign on one of the still's copper blocks
2. Put the still's other copper block two blocks over, one gap between
3. Put a copper block for the boiler under one of the copper blocks
4. Put a copper block directly on the boiler
5. Put copper bars two blocks from the boiler, under the other copper block
6. Put a copper block over the copper bars, two blocks from the boiler's
7. Put a copper block under the copper bars to catch the run
8. Put a cut copper slab over the gap between the copper blocks
9. Put a cut copper slab over the boiler's copper block
10. Put a cut copper slab over the other copper block

The sign is not part of the still. Breaking it does nothing to the still.

Running a brew

Right-click the boiler to open the still. It is a single chest:

   W C C C C C C C C      W  water — shows how many buckets are in, 0/6 to 6/6
   B C C C C C C C C      B  your empty buckets come back here
   . . . . S . . . .      C  sixteen crop slots    S  Start    .  filler

On a Bedrock phone or tablet it opens as Still — Mobile, with the same parts arranged for the seven-wide rows a touch screen shows. Only one of the two layouts can be open at a time.

1. Pour in water, one to six buckets. Click the water slot with a water bucket, or shift-click a

water bucket from your inventory. The empty bucket lands in the slot below; take it with a left, right or shift click. Poured too much? Click the water slot with an empty bucket to take one back. Each bucket is one level.

1. Put in crops, one kind only. A second kind is refused as you put it in.

| Put in | Get out | |---|---| | Corn | Raw Whisky | | Rice | Raw Sake | | Potato | Raw Vodka | | Hops | Ale or Beer | | Grapes | Refused — wine goes straight to a cask |

1. Press Start. The still boils off all its water and takes **one to three crops per

bucket** — six buckets need at least six crops and take up to eighteen. Anything over that stays in the slots for next time. If something is missing, Start tells you what.

A brew takes about a minute per bucket, so six buckets is roughly six minutes. While it runs you can already pour water and load crops for the next one.

Stay within a loaded area while brewing. The still counts server ticks only while its chunk is loaded. Leaving the area so it unloads pauses progress; it resumes when loaded again, with no offline catch-up. This differs from the cask, which ages while closed even offline. An extinguished fire or damaged still cancels the batch instead of pausing it.

Spirit yield: a clean still produces two bottles per crop consumed by default. For example, three corn make six Raw Whisky bottles. Oxidation reduces that count; hops use the strength-and-yield rules below.

Right-click the output to collect. It opens as a chest and only gives out — it is not storage.

The still takes 16 slots of crops and up to 6 buckets of water, and holds 27 slots of output. A cask is a full 27-slot chest.

If the still is broken, the crops still in it, the empty buckets and the bottles drop. The water does not — every bucket you poured already came back empty.

Hops, ale and beer

Hops are measured differently from everything else.

• One hop is two ordinary bottles.
• At least 1 hop per bucket of water, at most 3. Six buckets need 6 to start and take up to 18.
• Nine hops gives 12 to 18 bottles in a clean still; oxidation reduces the yield.

More hops per bucket means a better chance of a strong bottle:

A strong bottle costs more from the pool than an ordinary one, so strength is bought with count — all strong is twelve bottles, all ordinary is eighteen.

The water decides ale or beer. Three or more buckets make ale; one or two make beer.

Spirits never roll strong. Only hops go through the strength draw.

Copper oxidising is a mechanic, not a fault

The still grades four copper pieces — the copper block over the copper bars, the cut copper slabs over the two top copper blocks, and the copper bars. The boiler, the copper block on it, the output and the middle slab are not graded. The greener the four are, the less you get:

This applies to everything the still makes, spirits and ale alike.

Wax freezes copper wherever you scraped it to. Waxing clean copper keeps a still at full yield forever; waxing green copper locks in the penalty.

A neglected still is a worse still, never a broken one — it always produces at least one bottle.

The cask

Building it

A 2×2×3 box lying on its side:

• Four planks in the middle slice
• Eight stairs, four on each end. Facing does not matter — build it so it looks right
• A fence beside one of the lower middle planks. This is the spigot
• A sign directly above the fence, reading [cask]

Wood types mix freely.

Build the box first. The sign goes on last. Writing [cask] is what creates the cask, and the check walks down from the sign into the box — so the box has to be there already. If you sign too early you are told what is missing, and right-clicking the sign afterwards will not retry. You have to type the sign again: edit it, or break it and place a new one.

If it fails you get one of these in your action bar, naming the nearest thing to what you just did:

When it registers, [cask] turns dark green on the sign. That is your receipt. Still white means it did not take.

A registered cask keeps working even if you later edit the sign text — it loses the sign as a handle, but the fence spigot still opens it, and the cask is not torn down over a typo.

Opening it

Right-click the [cask] sign, or right-click the fence spigot. Those two blocks are the only handles. The twelve planks and stairs that make up the body are ordinary blocks and do nothing when clicked — deliberately, so you can still build against your own cask.

If you are holding a block and crouching, that counts as placing it, not opening the cask.

Filling and ageing

Put spirits or wine in and close it. That is the whole mechanic:

• The clock only runs while the cask is closed. Open it to look and the clock stops. Close it

and it resumes.

• Ageing is real time. It runs while you are offline and while the server is down.
• Ageing never goes backwards. A bottle that reached a rung keeps it, even if you put it into a

brand new cask.

Each bottle shows how long it has spent in the cask.

These thresholds are total closed time: Old is reached at three hours total, not three hours after Aged. Server settings can change the default times.

Only spirits and wine age. Ale and beer are refused — the cask will not take them.

Wine skips the still entirely. Put grapes straight into a cask — but they are pressed when you close the lid, not when you drop them in. Grapes sitting in an open cask are still grapes and can be taken back out unchanged. Closing the cask turns them into Raw Wine, and that bottle's ageing clock starts from the moment of pressing.

Pressing converts each grape into one Raw Wine bottle. No water, empty bottle or still is needed. This cask wine is separate from the Stove’s Fine Wine recipe.

Breaking a cask

Break any of its fourteen blocks and it comes apart and drops everything inside. Contents drop at the rung they earned — a whisky three hours in comes out Old, not Raw. Nothing that spent real time ageing is ever handed back as though it had not.

The full drink list

Sixteen drinks.

Spirits — twelve

Each ladder has three rungs. Ageing happens in the cask.

Ladder	From	Raw	Aged	Old
Whisky	Corn, via the still	Raw Whisky	Aged Whisky	Old Whisky
Sake	Rice, via the still	Raw Sake	Aged Sake	Old Sake
Vodka	Potato, via the still	Raw Vodka	Aged Vodka	Old Vodka
Wine	Grapes, cask only	Raw Wine	Aged Wine	Old Wine

Ales — four

Straight from the still, never aged.

Drink	When
Beer	Hops with 1–2 buckets of water (default)
Strong Beer	as above, on a successful strength roll
Ale	Hops with 3–6 buckets of water (default)
Strong Ale	as above, on a successful strength roll

Troubleshooting

The still does nothing. Check in order: did you press Start, is the fire lit, is there water in the menu, are there at least as many crops as buckets, is every copper piece present — the far column's bottom block is a copper block, not a cauldron. A running still shows its countdown on the Start button and visibly smokes.

My grapes are refused. Correct. Wine never sees a still — put grapes in a cask.

Yields feel low. Check the copper. Four pieces are graded — the copper block over the bars, the slabs over the two top copper blocks and the bars — and a fully green still is at 55%.

The cask will not register. The sign goes on last, and re-typing the sign is the only retry.

The cask will not take my beer. Ale and beer do not age. Only spirits and wine.