Reminder - in all my tutorials, green text can be skipped by modding vets, and red text can be skipped by beginners. These are side notes meant to clarify something I imagine certain readers will have questions on, and if they are not targeted at your skill level, you can skip them or ignore them if they are over your head or seem obvious.
Let's start by talking about how the Brewery system works, and how you can experience it yourself.
If you haven't seen the Sim Settlements 2 Brewery yet, you can gain access to it via console command by building a 2x2 Industrial Plot, and then in console selecting the plot and running:
cf testBuildingPlan XX020192 3 -1 None None (Replace the XX with the load order of SS2.esm)
The actual way to gain access to the Brewery through normal play is to unlock the Mark 1 Beacons and use one in one of the brewery locations of the Commonwealth, such as Beantown Brewery, which will trigger a Location Discovery unlock when the caravan returns with that beacon.
Inside you will find a cooking pot, which allows you to create a Mash. At the top of the stairs, you should find an activator for the Boiler. Selecting this will walk you through the process, which involves:
The boiler will accept literally anything from the Aid tab: foods, liquids, chems, etc, but for the mash step it will only accept an item flagged as a Mash. At the time of this writing, that includes Corn Mash, Razorgrain Mash, and Tato Mash.
Once you add something for each of these steps, you will be told to close the container, and that the Brewmaster will move the wort to the fermentation tank the next day. After 24 hours, you will be able to start another batch, 3 days after that a 6-pack of the final beer will be complete and placed in the Beer Crate on the large table for you to take.
Once the player finishes adding all ingredients and closes the boiler. The system will search for a recipe that matches the most used ingredients. For example, if the player used a Corn Mash, Thistle for bitterness, Mutfruit for flavor, Fancy Lad Snack Cakes for aroma, and threw in a Stimpak for something extra, but no recipe matched those exact ingredients - it would try to find one where at least 4 ingredients matched, then if that failed, 3 ingredients, etc. The reason this works is that some recipes have less than the full 5 ingredients the player can add.
As a fallback, we have a recipe in place for each of the mashes with no other required ingredients to ensure a beer will always be brewed. As a rule, the system will always lean towards recipes the player has not yet brewed first so that if two recipes overlap, the player will at least get to see each once and unlock it for purchase at Bars.
In reality, the order of the ingredients is not important, this was done for flavor (pun intended) so the system felt more immersive. Apologies if this is disappointing to learn, but this method of faking it allowed for us to more easily support dynamic recipes and the existing container UI easily.
In the end, the only downside to the order not mattering is players who attempt to experiment with the order will figure out the ruse. There are still infinite possible beer recipes anyway, thanks to the fact that we can invent new ingredients, so long as we give the player easy access to acquiring them.
A timer is started after the recipe is chosen. The first timer is for 24 in-game hours and prevents access to the boiler to simulate the Wort being created. Next a 72 in-game hour timer is started to simulate the fermentation time. Each Brewery can have 3 fermentation timers running at once. Obviously 72 hours isn't a realistic fermentation time, but we're trying to balance fun for the player here.
Once a fermentation timer is complete, several things happen:
To start you need to think about what you want your beer to do. In general, each beer provides some minor stat boosts, as well as a bit of healing. On occasion, we also introduced some beers with extremely unique and sometimes powerful effects.
Understanding the magic effect system is beyond the scope of this tutorial, so I'd recommend simply experiementing to see what's possible by looking at other potions to see how they work, make copies, and tinker with the numbers and effects and see how they work when you consume them in-game.
Once you've decided what your beer is going to do (and figured out how to implement it!), you'll next have to decide what ingredients it will require. This is your opportunity to do some game balancing, as if you created a particularly powerful effect, you can use rarer or more expensive ingredients. Your recipe will consist of a mash and between 1 and 4 additional ingredients from the Aid tab of your pipboy (you can find these items in the CK under Magic > Potion).
In SS2.esm, there are a number of items in the Magic > Potion items with the prefix kgSIM_. These should NOT be used in your recipes. Most of those items are either quest items or from our medicine system which has not yet been implemented for Sim Settlements 2.
It's very likely we will arrange for the ingredients designed for the future (or past if you played SS1) medicine system to be used in the Brewery as well, so keep an eye on patch notes announcing the medicine system's return or an update to this document removing this warning!
In addition, you should probably avoid using other beers from the Brewery system as required ingredients, unless your goal is to make an extremely rare recipe, as not only does it take a long time to brew these beers, but depending on the number of recipes the player has installed, it might become impossible to brew a recipe again due to the potential overlapping of recipes.
Technically, you can create your own Mashes, though I'll leave that for advanced users to figure out as it's not advised without some serious thought about the user experience.
The Brewery system is designed to encourage experimentation, and if you don't have a wide range of recipes for a particular Mash, the player will receive the same beer over and over and become discouraged from engaging in the system further.
Now that you've figured out your beer and ingredients, it's time to set it up for the Brewery system!
If you aren't sure where to being, start by duplicating BeerBottleStandard01 under Magic > Potion, which will give you a nice average beer that will meet player expectations. Even if you just use that but rename it (and possibly give it a custom label if that's in your wheelhouse), you've at least created something new to discover that will be balanced.
The recipe uses the game's book system, so anything you can do with a book record is possible here - such as changing the background texture and model, including images, text formatting etc. See the Creationkit.com section on books for details about different ways you can style this record.
You don't even have to follow the exact format for the Book Text portion, this is just the format we use for the base mod, and what player's will be used to. Feel free to get creative, just be certain the player can look at your note and understand what mash and ingredients to use, as the purpose of these is allow the player to attempt to rebrew the beer later if they like.
Now that you have your beers and recipes are ready, it's time to inject them into the Brewery system.
If this is your first time working on an addon, or you haven't created addon configuration data yet, check out this tutorial).
If you're not interested in this, and you just came for the Beer Recipes, you're done and can move on! Otherwise, this guide will show you the items required to make your Brewery building functional.
This portion will assume you have already gone through the tutorials for making a building plan, and are simply looking to know what Stage Item Spawns you need for a fully functional Brewery.
Rather than this being a step by step tutorial, it will outline each of the items you need to include and what they do. You can easily duplicate any of these records and change the model field to have them work functionally while matching the design of your building.
As long as you have those 4 items in your building plan's stage items, SS2 will take care of the rest. No need to worry about order, or special scripting.
If you want your Brewery to also produce Beer for the Commercial/Industrial tie-in like our Brewery, you need to do the following:
Now, not only will player's be able to play with the Brewery system, but your Brewery will actually provide the same system gameplay effects as the SS2 Brewery!
To test in game, build yourself a Brewery (see In-Game subsection near top of this guide), and try putting in your Mash and ingredients in the boiler. After that, you can use the console command passtime 24 which will make it to the fermentation phase, then passtime 72 to finish the fermentation. You must do it in 2 phases or the script to start the fermentation timer will never occur.
Don't use the passtime command in a busy settlement, it will cause a large number of SS2 scripts to pile up and likely crash your game. In general, it's not recommended to use passtime with larger than 2 digit numbers.