Questaholic - August 2013

1. Requirements and Getting There

First off, seeing as this minigame is located on Mos Le'Harmless, you're gonna need to be able to get there. And for that, you need to complete the quest Cabin Fever, which will grant you transportation to Mos Le'Harmless via Bill Teach's ship. An alternative route is the fairy ring on the small island, which you can use after finishing Fairy Tale Part III, provided you fix the bridges.

2. Starting a Game

Here's where the hard part comes in. To begin a game of Trouble Brewing, each team must have a minimum of three players in the waiting area. And as it's dead content....this can strike as rather a problem. But if by miracle you do manage to find 5 other players in addition to yourself, congratualtions! You can now start a game of Trouble Brewing.

3. Ingredients

Ingredient 1: Buckets of Water
Each bottle of rum made requires 5 buckets of water. Four inventories worth of water buckets should be more than enough to last throughout the game. The water count should not need replenishing if all the buckets are added to the hopper (the hopper room is located UPSTAIRS at the base) immediately at the beginning of the game.

Ingredient 2: Coloured Water
This ingredient is quite tedious to collect but is often the fastest to run empty. First, flowers must be collected from the OPPOSITE team's base. For example, if you are on the red team, you will need to run across the water to the other team's base and collect the blue flowers located there. Each player can only hold 5 flowers at a time. To save time, a good method is to have two team mates collect flowers together (manly huh). One team member picks flowers then trades them to their team mate, and repeats until that team mate has a full inventory of flowers. They both run back to the base and add flowers to the KETTLE until it is full.
To draw coloured water from the kettle, you need to grab bowls from the supplies table in your base. Keep adding flowers to the kettle if you have any left over, and be mindful to run and collect more flowers if needed - remember, the coloured water runs out fast!

Once you have several bowls of coloured water, you have two options on how to use them. The first is to deposit them into the hopper for coloured water. 3 bowls are needed for each bottle of rum produced, so you'll need to add as many as you can!

The other use for coloured water is for colouring monkeys. These are used to obtain bitternuts, which is explained later in detail. It's a good idea to save 2 or 4 bowls of coloured water for monkeys and deposit the rest into the hopper.

Ingredient 3: Scrapey Bark
The bark is probably the easiest ingredient to obtain, besides water buckets. Simply run to one of the scrapey trees on the site (they normally lie to the sides of the base and on the islands where the bitternut trees are) and chop them for logs. After you have enough logs - around 8-10 all up, (1 bark is needed per bottle of rum) click the logs in your inventory to cut the scrapey bark off, then add it to the hoppers at the base.

Ingredient 4: Sweetgrubs
Similar to the scrapey bark with a few extra steps. To the sides of the base and on islands are sweetgrub mounds. To obtain the sweetgrubs, you first need to grab raw meat off of the supplies table - around half an inventory, depending on how much space you have. Then go to a sweetgrub mound and 'use' the raw meat on it. If you're lucky, you'll get a few catches of sweetgrubs. It doesn't take long for the sweetgrub mound to deplete and sometimes a swarm can appear out of it. If this happens, you will need to run and find a different sweetgrub mound to scavenge from. Again 1 lot of sweetgrubs is needed per bottle of rum, so 8-10 should suffice

Ingredient 5: Bitternuts
Considered to be the most complicated task. To collect bitternuts you will first need to carry two bowls of coloured water in your inventory. Next, head towards one of the islands and catch two monkeys. Use the bowls of coloured water on them to mark them with your team's colour (utterly pointless really, but hey....). Then use the coloured monkey on a bitternut tree to make it grab a bitternut and bring it back to you. You can only carry two bitternuts at once, so do this twice before heading to the base to place the nuts in the hopper. As 1 bitternut is required for each bottle of rum, 8-10 bitternuts should be enough to cover the round. This step can take some time, so it's a good idea to get well into it early so that you don't run short of bitternuts, delaying rum production.

4. Boilers

A good time time start tending to the boilers in when you have enough ingredients for at least one bottle of rum to be made (the number next to each ingredient should turn green). There are three boilers at your team's base that need to be filled with logs to start working. The logs can be taken from the log store in the base. To start up a boiler, use a log on it, then click the boiler to light it with a tinderbox. Each boiler needs to be filled with three logs for the rum production to work. However, as the log count for each boiler decreases over time (you can't burn the same logs forever!), new logs will need to be added. This is why it's wise to start working on boilers AFTER enough ingredients have been collected to produce rum. The maximum logs each boiler can hold is 10.

5. Sabotage

....let's not go there

6. Collecting Rum

Rum icon flashes. You go click the rum on conveyer belt.

No I'm totally kidding. Nex appears and you have to solo her before you can pick up the rum.

7. Rewards

At the end of the game you will get a small amount of experience based on the tasks you performed, and also some Pieces of Eight (poe). The amount of poe that you receive depends on the ingredients you collected and the amount of rum bottles successfully made as a team.

Basically:
1 bottle of rum = 2 Pieces of Eight
1 Ingredient = 1 Piece of Eight (up to 100 extra poe for the each ingredient you collected)

To be eligible for the rewards, for each bottle of rum you MUST have gathered at least:

- 1 bitternut
- 1 sweetgrubs
- 1 scrapey tree bark or
- 3 bowls of coloured water

In other words, don't bomb out and slack on water buckets the whole game.

Honest Jimmy's House of Stuff

This is the place where you can spend your Pieces of Eight. Talk to Honest Jimmy near the deposit box to see his store. He can sell you:

Naval outfits in a range of colours - including black!

Pirate flags!

As well as teleportation rum which can take you directly to Trouble Brewing and bags of 'The Stuff' which improves chances of brewing mature beverages.