Ethanol Changes

[mintyphresh]

Keep in mind, 15u of tequila is like 1/3 of a bottle. It makes sense when you drink like a full glass of tequila to be absolutely wasted (shot glasses just have a unreasonable high volume, but that's alright).

...I'm not convinced that makes sense, let me run some numbers. Assuming that 1 units is around 10 mL (A large beaker being 1 liter makes sense, and a human has about 5 liters of blood in their bloodstream), the real-life equivalent of a 15u shotglass full of tequila would be 150mL (about half as much as a can of soda, fuck, that's like triple the normal volume of a shot). If we're using the real-life ABV of tequila of 40% ABV, that's 60mL of ethanol in there.


Though, uh, comparing spacemen to humans with numerical values is... hard to justify. Spacemen are VERY resistant to alcohol, and also absorb it much more readily. Blood alcohol content is measured in g/dL (grams of ethanol per deciliter of blood). For spacemen, they have 50 dL of blood, and begin to burp, stumble, and slur speech at 1.5dL of ethanol: with ethanol having a density of 80g/dL, that'd be a BAC of 2.40%. For comparison, Cleveland Clinic lists similar symptoms at 0.08% for real-life humans.
Symptom    | Space | Human | resistance of spacemen compared to humans
stumbling  | 2.40% | 0.08% | 30x
nausea     | 8.80% | 0.15% | 59x
alc. pois  | 16.0% | 0.40% | 40x

But! Let's go back to that point earlier about the tequila shot. Are spacemen also drinking more on average...? Reminder that we're using a 1u = 10mL conversion.
Drink               | Space | Human | volume of SS13 drink compared to Earth
bottle of beer      | 500mL | 350mL | 1.4x
shotglass           | 150mL | 50mL  | 3x
old-fash w/ 1/2 ice | 100mL | 60mL  | 1.7x

Wine glass 1/2 full | 150mL | 150mL | 1x

There's one more thing we didn't look at, though: Metabolic rates. First let's look at how fast ethanol gets into the system: This website claims that it takes between 1 and 2 hours for a drink to set in fully. Obviously, game time isn't equivalent to real-life time, so I'll be doing a conversion, assuming a 100-minute round is about equal to a 10-hour shift (so times moves 6x faster in-game vs IRL). This means that a real drink would take between 10 and 20 in-game minutes to set in fully. Given that most drinks are between 10 and 50 units, and have a depletion rate of 1 unit per 5 seconds, spacemen ACTUALLY take between 50 and 250 seconds to process a drink fully; so that's between 10x and 5x as fast.

In real life, a human liver can deal with about 14 grams of ethanol in the bloodstream per hour; In spacemen terms that's a depletion rate of about 0.001. But, assuming that a 100-minute shift is roughly equivalent to a real-life person's 10-hour shift (because NT WOULD do that...), it's closer to 0.006, which is about 10x less than the 0.05 depletion rate a spaceman actually has ingame.

TL;DR: So, as it stands right now (before any proposed changes), spacemen are about 45x more resistant to alcohol, but drinks have 2.5x more alcohol in them, they get drunk from it 7x as fast, get over it 10x as fast, and they get served... around 1.5x as much, assuming the bartender is careful and knows what size drinks you'd typically give people.

So, um, hm. It seems that spacemen actually have an EASIER time with alcohol than normal people do!


The thing is, though, that drunkenness lasting for a long time may still be something worth fixing, even though it's realistic. But, yup, definitely realistic for a person taking a triple-size shot of Tequila to get wasted.

And if you take slow metabolism, sorry, you have had it coming. It's a powergamer trait and a really sharp double edged sword. I play with that trait and alcohol with that is, in my opinion, completely fine.

That's absolutely fair. I suggested a QoL change simply because.. um... who's using french 75 as a poison? is it really important that players get toasted enough from two beers to stumble if they take the trait? It's possible that the answer is yes, but the only real legitimate reasons I can see for this are simplicity's sake and for RP purposes.

[...] i personally think the pure alcohol types are fine or could even take a little bump [in alcohol strength].

Can't agree with this. I really don't think drinks should be stronger than pure ethanol unless they're, like, Moonshine or Bojacks, or a tough mix like Suicider. If the current regime stays the best way to get someone drunk without those two is to mix all the drinks with 100% ABV or greater, resulting in a lightning-fast hit of alcohol that lingers for a long time. A 7-component shot like...

• rum
  
• vodka
  
• tequila
  
• Harlow
  
• Wellerman
  
• Horse's Neck
  
• Rum and Coke
  

Can put 21.96 units of ethanol in you in about 12 seconds. Imagine being a new player, trying out bartender, giving someone a pure ethanol shot to poison them... only for them to say that, eh, it was a bit WEAKER than the alcohol they're used to?

Now, i wouldn't mind having the depletion rate of alcohol to be increased. I agree that it lasts very long for RP-purposes.

I'm starting to gravitate towards this more as I do research into this! I have no clue what the balance implications of this would be. Will run numbers on how it'd look for recreational drinks later tonight.

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[quote pid="196041" dateline="1689885536"]
You can also make antihol deplete alcoholic reagents really easily as they all have the same parent.
[/quote]
Oh yeah. That should be done regardless of what other changes we make (though certain chems like moonshine should probably be exempt). I'll play around with the code and see what I can accomplish.

I think it is sane to up the depletion rate of most liquors so that we can kick down the ABV % and get people drunk just about as fast

I think the current rate of depletion for drink reagents is fine-ish...? If we're making antihol flush alcoholic reagents then there's no real need to convert to ethanol sooner, outside of keeping people who don't watch what they drink safe. But there's something I like about players not knowing exactly how drunk they're going to be until it hits them 30 seconds later. I have a working version of the code that correctly reduces ABV to normal values (code posted below, with the change underlined), the only thing stopping me from posting a PR is the fact that I'm also going through and checking that the update doesn't make any drinks that were at "normal" ABVs laughably weak (such as beer, which in this change would be unable to get you drunk without slow metabolism)

I suppose having the aforementioned "laughably weak" drinks decay faster would be a way to fix that too, huh? Wonder if that's a good fix.

on_mob_life(var/mob/M, var/mult = 1)
                if(!M) M = holder.my_atom
                M.reagents.add_reagent("ethanol", alch_strength * mult * depletion_rate) //Multiplying by depletion rate makes alch_strength describe ABV, with 1 being 100% ABV
                M.reagents.remove_reagent(src, 1 * mult)
                ..()
                return