Drinking and Addiction
A thrown vessel is only half of what a fluid can do. Every vessel is also ingestible — any fluid is drinkable, with wildly different consequences. Hooch is a buzz, piss is an illness, chemfuel is a poisoning, milk just feeds you, and liquid luciferium is a death sentence. For several substances the drink is the real weapon and the throw is only humiliation until then.
Vessels are ingestible
Every vessel carries an ingestible block:
<ingestible>
<foodType>Fluid</foodType>
<preferability>NeverForNutrition</preferability> <!-- won't drink it unprompted -->
<baseIngestTicks>240</baseIngestTicks>
<ingestCommandString>Drink {0}</ingestCommandString>
</ingestible>
NeverForNutrition is the important flag: a pawn will not wander over and swig their own piss
grenade to fill their belly. Drinking is something you order (right-click → Drink), or something a
prisoner does with smuggled contraband, or a trick you play by leaving something drinkable where a
desperate pawn will take it. What swallowing does is decided at drink time from the runtime contents,
not the def — a "piss jar" that actually holds hooch gets you drunk.
You swallow the whole blend
PostIngested walks the vessel's blend and applies each constituent's drink effect, scaled by its
share (see Vessels and Substances). A cocktail lands every ingredient at once:
For each substance at fraction f:
| Effect | Rule |
|---|---|
| Body hediff | AdjustSeverity(drinkHediff, drinkHediffSeverity × f) |
| Memory | gain drinkThought — but only if f ≥ 0.2 (a single drop is not worth remembering) |
| Nutrition | food += nutrition × f, clamped to the food bar |
| Addiction | rolled — see below |
A drop of hooch in a jar of piss barely warms you; a jar that is mostly hooch gets you drunk and sick, because you also swallowed the piss. Ratios decide the dose, in both directions.
What each drink does (full potency, full jar)
| Drink | Effect | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| milk | +nutrition, no downside | the benign one — it just feeds you |
| blood | +nutrition, revulsion memory | food for a sanguophage, "drank something vile" for anyone else |
| hooch / beer | alcohol high (0.16) | a buzz that can, sometimes, become a habit |
| wort | alcohol high (0.05) | mild — it is unfermented beer |
| fermented urine | food poisoning (0.35) + revulsion | an illness and a memory you cannot rinse away |
| vomit | food poisoning (0.30) + revulsion | vile and easy to source |
| chemfuel | toxic buildup (0.20) + revulsion | a slow poisoning |
| liquid luciferium | luciferium high (0.30) + revulsion + near-certain addiction | catastrophic — see below |
| water / earwax / toenails | nothing (water) / a revulsion memory only | no body effect |
The addiction roll, scaled by disposition
Every fluid can hook the drinker; the rarity is the point. The per-drink chance is:
chance = addictionRarity × fraction × Lerp(0.5, 4.0, disposition)
addictionRarityis the substance's base hook chance (see Substance Catalogue). Hooch 0.03, beer 0.025, wort 0.01, luciferium 1.0; most fluids 0 (they never hook anyone).fractionis the substance's share of what was drunk — a splash rolls at a splash's odds.dispositionis the drinker's 0..1 propensity, and it swings the chance across an 8× range: a content pawn multiplies by 0.5, a despairing one by 4.0. A despairing pawn addicts to what a content one shrugs off — the same merged propensity engine that decides who fills a vessel and who throws it.
If the roll wins and the drinker is not already addicted, the substance's addictionChemical is applied
via its real vanilla addictionHediff — so a hooch/beer habit is a vanilla Alcohol addiction, and
vanilla runs it from there.
The odds in practice
| Drink | Content pawn (disp ≈ 0) | Despairing pawn (disp ≈ 1) |
|---|---|---|
| Full jar of hooch (0.03) | ~1.5% | ~12% |
| Full jar of beer (0.025) | ~1.25% | ~10% |
| Full jar of wort (0.01) | ~0.5% | ~4% |
| Full jar of liquid luciferium (1.0) | ~50% | always (chance ≥ 1) |
| A 20% splash of luciferium in a cocktail | ~10% | ~80% |
Liquid luciferium is the extreme the model is built to express. At rarity 1.0 the roll all but always hooks a full jar, and even a minority share of it in a cocktail is a coin-flip-or-worse. Mapped to the real Luciferium chemical, that becomes vanilla's permanent, lethal-to-stop dependency: slip a pawn a jar and you have handed them a life sentence, which is exactly why it is the rarest, worst thing a vessel can hold.
Playing with the drink axis
- Interrogation / persuasion: a jar of hooch is a cheap way to buy a prisoner's mood — at a small, disposition-scaled risk of creating an alcoholic you now have to manage.
- Sabotage: leave a jar of chemfuel or fermented urine where a raider or a wandering prisoner will drink it. The poisoning and the food-poisoning land immediately; the memory sticks for days.
- Cruelty made mechanical: a jar of luciferium is the single nastiest thing you can do to a pawn short of killing them — and unlike killing them, it keeps working.
- Watch the merged disposition. With Institution: Contraband installed, the disposition read is the suite's full nature × nurture — so how you treat a prisoner directly changes how easily the same drink hooks them. A mistreated, despairing captive is far more addictable than a well-kept one.
Foul Play is part of the Institution suite — one install with a checkbox per layer (Core, Contraband, Policing, Corrections, Gangs, Ward) about what an institution does to the people inside it. It bridges to the Contraband layer when Institution is installed.