Distilling

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Revision as of 01:09, 12 August 2006 by Pirateking13 (talk | contribs) (→‎Scoring)
A typical distilling puzzle

Distilling is the fine art of turning sugar cane, wood, and iron into rum. It is free to play on Tuesdays.

There are three types of rum in the YPP world - swill, grog and fine rum. The distilling puzzle is used to make all of them, plus hemp oil and mugs.

In the distilling puzzle, you have three main types of balls (white, brown, and black) which represent parts of the mixture you are distilling into rum. There are also orange spices and, if you waste any of the white pieces, burnt white pieces are added.

Pieces are arranged into columns which periodically move one place to the right across the screen, the right-most column either going up into the rum or down into the furnace, and new pieces appearing on the left. Whether the right-most column goes up or down is determined by the number of white versus black pieces in the column; if the whites (including burnt whites) equal or outnumber the blacks, it goes up. If a column contains only brown pieces, it will also go up.

One burnt piece is created for every two white pieces that are wasted, i.e. sent down to the furnace. Sending the first white piece downwards will not generate any burnt pieces. However, if you send down one more white piece during the game, even if that second piece is in a different column, one burnt piece will immediately appear in the new column. This pattern continues through the game: the third white piece sent down generates no burnt pieces, the fourth white piece sent down generates one burnt piece, etc., etc.

Two pieces can be swapped with one another if there is a link between them. At first glance the links may appear to be random, but well defined rules determine exactly when pieces can be swapped: white swaps upward with black, and downward with brown; brown swaps upward with white and downwards with black, and black completes the pattern by swapping upward with brown and downward with white. Spice pieces do not swap. Burnt white pieces work just like regular white ones, but they prevent a score of Crystal Clear for that column.

Scoring

Your score is determined only by the contents of the columns that are sent up, with a small penalty for wasted spice pieces. White pieces score the highest, followed by browns, and black pieces are the worst to send up. If a column contains no black pieces but some browns, it scores moderately well and is described as 'Smooooooth'. If a column consists of white pieces only, it scores highly and is described as 'Crystal Clear'. Spices further increase the value of a column.

The quality and progress of the rum being produced is represented by the container on top of the board. The more brown and black pieces that go up, the darker the liquid becomes; if only white pieces are sent up, the liquid will be clear (hence the name for columns of pure white). When twelve columns have been sent upwards, the liquid reaches the top and the puzzle ends.

It is possible to improve your score even further by sending up consecutive, rather than separate, pure white columns. The more crystals clear rows sent consecutively, the higher the score.

The quality of the labor you produce (basic, skilled, or expert) depends on how your score compares to the scores of others that have played the puzzle. Different distillery products require different quantities and qualities of labor.

CC^12

Getting two Crystal Clears in a row is called a 'Crystal Clear^2', which players abbreviate to CC^2. Since the game immediately ends after the twelfth row goes into the rum, the longest possible Crystal Clear chain is a CC^12. While getting a CC^12 takes considerable speed and dexterity in moving the pieces, as well as the ability to make strategic decisions quickly, there are many distillers who achieve CC^12 games regularly. Aiming still higher, some are able to build CC^13 and beyond, but the puzzle still ends after CC^12 and so this does not improve your ranking or score. On the other hand, obtaining a CC^12 in a faster time will improve your ranking more than a slow CC^12, even though the score for an individual game is the same no matter what speed it is completed in.

Goals and strategy

The key to improving at distilling is to set oneself suitable goals. Initially, one should only attempt to ensure that no white pieces are wasted and no black pieces sent up, by assembling columns consisting only of white and brown. As one becomes more familiar with the way in which pieces swap, one can move on to attempting to create columns of pure white, incorporating spice pieces where possible.

Only having reached this stage is it useful to attempt to construct consecutive crystal clear columns. Initially, whites on the far right of the board can be used to make a single crystal clear, and this will buy some time with which one can attempt to make consecutive CCs with the rest of the board. Once you start to construct CC^2s and CC^3s, the practice of dragging pieces rather than click-swapping them will start to become both necessary and more intuitive. It should become clear that the best way to construct a long string is to initially shift white pieces to the left, then when your block of white approaches the final column, start shifting the newly generated white pieces to the right to add on to your white block. At this point one must keep an eye on the furnace in order to avoid attempting to build a final crystal clear column when there is not enough time to do so.

As one's abilities improve, so the number of consecutive crystal clears you are able to construct increases, until you are sending up the 12 columns in just two groups, perhaps a CC^4 followed by a CC^8. With practice, one can gradually increase the number of consecutive crystal clears sent in the first group, until you reach the key point of sending up two CC^6s.

Moving on from this point towards the eventual goal of achieving a CC^12 is extremely challenging, and it is only at this point that the many expert distilling videos (see links below) will prove instructive.

Immovable Pieces

The algorithm used to determine where spices are placed has no sanity test and will, on occasion, create non-spice pieces that are completely surrounded by spice pieces and/or the top/bottom edge of the board. Such pieces are completely immobile and such pieces may make earning an Incredible score during that round impossible.

Highly competitive distillers may practice distilling in distilleries that have no orders to get around this game design flaw. If you quit a labor puzzle midway, the cancelled attempt does not count against your puzzle standing. If you quit a labor puzzle in a store that has orders, you and the store lose a labour hour. By playing in a store with no orders, you can cancel any poorly generated distilling boards without wasting your labor hours or slowing down a distillery's orders. It should be noted that due to the way experience is taken into account when calculating one's ranking, it may be inadvisable to abandon a puzzle just because it is not going quite as well as you would like.

Control Issues and Technical Issues

  • On slower computers, the piece swapping animations are less smooth which makes it harder to move pieces at maximum speed.
  • The top right hand corner displays the distilling shop/stall scene during the puzzle. Activity in the scene, especially players entering the scene, may cause the distilling game to lag slightly, making the controls slightly erratic.
  • The game can be controlled in two ways. One can click on one piece and then click on an adjacent piece to swap those pieces. Experts rarely, if ever, use this method as it is extremely slow. One can also drag a piece and the game will continue to move the selected piece as long as one drags it over pieces that create legal swap moves. Problems can occur if you accidentally click on a piece that you do not intend to move--after a misclick, it can be difficult to drag another piece as the game expects to make a swap move with the first piece.
  • A common beginner mistake is to make drag attempts that are too fast or too sloppy, which either move much faster than the pieces can swap or accidentally go over pieces that the currently selected piece cannot swap with. In such cases, the game stops moving the selected piece, even if there is a legal swap path from the selected piece to the current mouse position. Another common beginner mistake is to drag the selected piece too far and make an unintended swap. This can cause strategic problems as no swap is directly reversible. Learning how to make precise dragging movements is part of the distilling game and these types of mistakes can be reduced with practice.
  • Originally the game contained a bug that would booch the linking of a piece that was being dragged as the columns are shifting to the right; the piece would no longer be movable, and it would be necessary to perform other swaps nearby to fix this. The bug has been fixed for the most part, but does still occur very occasionally.

External/Other Links

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