The Idea of a Custom brew for the brewery plugin is a great idea and allows us to bring our own ideas into the world around us as well as develop our cultures with drinks like Wyck's Flametongue, Styl Stout and Kuren Sake. This allows us to have a much more deep game-play experience and a memorable impact on the world around us.

Sounds great. right?

It isn't.

The problem starts at how they are implemented by the staff. When you donate for a brew you give them a Color and a Name, they then base the recipe of the brew by what you give them and then they add it to the game. What the staff base the recipe off is known only to them. This being the Ingredients used, Number of ingredients, boil time, woodtype, whether or not it is, just boiled, aged , distilled or aged and distilled. After they have decided what the recipe will be they tell no one and keep the recipe secret. We have no idea how they come up with the number of ingredients. No idea on the correct boil time.

"That doesn't seem bad. You can just discover it on your own."

Wrong again.

When brewing a drink there are a few things to keep in mind.

1 .Type of Ingredients

Meaning what things you put in the cauldron(Wheat, Potatoes, seeds. etc)

2 . Number of ingredients

How much of that previous ingredient you put in

3 . Boil time

How long the ingredients boil in the cauldron. Measured in minutes

4 . Processing

A brew can be processed in 4 ways. A brew could just be taken out of the Cauldron, it could also be Aged in a Variety of Barrels, Or Distilled in a brewing stand, and It could also be both aged and distilled.

5 . Quality and Exactness.

Every brew has 3 Different Qualities [Bad|Normal|Perfect] these are defined by how close you came to the recipe on the plugin. Did you add the right amount of ingredients? Did you Boil it for the correct time? Did you Distill it? Did you age it, In which wood type, for how long?

With the things I just laid out in mind. If you do any of these the wrong way the brew is ruined. One too many ingredients? Ruined. Wrong barrel size/type? Ruined. Didn't boil it long enough or boiled too long? Even if you mess up by a minute it is still ruined.

The problem lies with the way the plugin functions, you are given very little grey area to mess up when you brew something.

Here are the facts about the plugin.

There are 26 possible ingredients you can use. The amount of them you can use is unlimited. The amount of time you can boil something is unlimited. 12 types of barrels 2 for every woodtype.

In the Vanilla Plugin there are 10 brews. The ammont of ingredients ranges from 2-15 and the boil time ranges from 2-15 minutes.

For every ingredient there would be 2028 possible recipes. This means that there are 52728 possible recipes.

EDIT:Forgot a variable. It is fixed now

And out of that 52728 only 21 are actually real.

My point is that the system in place for the brews simply is not working and needs to be changed.

How about we get more transparency on how you think of the recipe and what parameters you follow, or perhaps you could give the recipe to the donor? or hide it somewhere on the map?

TL;DR: The current system is broken as it is nearly impossible to find a donor brew.