Ethanol Changes

[mintyphresh]

Ethanol! We all love it. Or do we...?

Despite having about 112 reagents in the "alcoholic" section of the code, ethanol isn't very useful to the crew. And that's OK! It's a solid RP element, fun to goof around with on Classic, and in high doses or with moonshine/bojacks it can be an effective poison. But uh, at least in my experience tending bar on RP4, players rarely like to enjoy a boozy drink on the job. Maybe that's just a symptom of people not playing characters that like to be buzzed at work, but I think there's some mechanical motivations behind this as well. Let's take a look at some numbers.

Depletion Rate
Ethanol (not the boozy drinks, but Ethanol itself) has a depletion rate of 0.05, which means that every two seconds one twentieth of a unit is removed from your body. This... is incredibly low, the same rate as Black Powder and Sea-4. The only two chemicals in the game lower than this are Space Ricin and Enzymatic Leftovers (from Booster Enzyme), and even poisons designed to last a long time in the body like cyanide have a depletion rate of double that-- 0.1. This makes drinking an alcoholic drink a huge commitment; getting 25 units in you means that (unless you take charcoal) you'll be at least a little boozed for 16 minutes. But, really, alcohol only has effects for 7 of those. During that time you'll be slurring speech, stumbling, burping, mumbling, and generally unpleasant to be around.

Admittedly, this problem has a simple fix in-game; assuming all of the drink has already metabolized into ethanol, a single unit of charcoal can purge 41 units of ethanol. A full bottle of Lime-aid can purge 400! But, well, personally, I don't like having to take an errand to grab a soda because my character's too drunk to function after a reasonable amount of drink. And because the drink takes time to metabolize (about 5 seconds per unit) and the depletion rate of antihol is so high, I have to WAIT and remember to take the treatment until after a majority of the stuff has metabolized.

alch_strength possible code error
But surely it's not so easy to get that much in you, right? It says right in the code that "ethanol depletes slower but is formed in smaller quantities." It, uh, well, let's look at the numbers, assuming the reagent is always in you from the first sip, and that ethanol depletes as it metabolizes... (As I found in my testing, these numbers will vary very slightly due to lag reduction code!)

• 50u of beer, the third-lowest ABV reagent in the game, will leave you with 2.55 units of ethanol - 5.1% ABV
  
• 10u of old fashioned will leave you with 6.3 units - 63% ABV
  
• 15u of tequila will leave you with 20.95 units - 140% ABV
  

These seem sort of reasonable... until you get to Tequila. You're telling me Tequila has a 140% ABV?! Certain comments in the code lead me to think this is a mistake, too...

alch_strength = 0.4 //uses white wine since no brandy in game, but piscos are usually 35-50% alch by volume

With an alch_strength of 0.4 this means that a pisco sour will add 0.4 units of ethanol every tick... but this drink depletes from the body at a rate of 0.4 units per tick. So instead of a 40% ABV, like the comment suggests was intended, we get a 100% ABV. This means that most drinks are probably around 2.5x stronger than they were intended to be, since most alcoholic drinks deplete at a rate of 0.4 units per tick.

Slow Metabolism
I've seen (and unknowingly spread) some misinformation on this trait. The ONLY thing it does is halve the depletion rate of all reagents. It doesn't do anything to scale its effects, which is crazy good for things like medical chems, blood replacers, stimulants, and restoring thirst from drinks. As a balancing factor, though, this also applies to poisons, sedatives, and (you guessed it!) drinks metabolizing into alcohol. Essentially, this makes your character into a total lightweight. Compared to the section above...

• 50u of beer will leave you with 11.275 units; a 442% increase from normal metabolism
  
• 10u of old fashioned will leave you with 13.775 units; a 219% increase
  
• 15u of tequila will leave you with 43.15 units; a 210% increase
  

It's certainly interesting to note how much more of an effect it had on beer, whose potency was tempered before by the depletion rate of ethanol.

Addiction
This is the big one. One of the mechanics I've seen the most disdain for. And, uh, I don't know how it works. I'm looking at the code right now and I couldn't tell you at all how it works. Please help

Fixes to discuss
Depletion Rate:

• Possibly increase depletion rate from 0.05 to 0.1. This would have notable balancing effects for poisons like Bo Jack Daniels and Moonshine, but 0.05 does seem a little low...
  
• Rework Antihol. Having it with a much lower depletion rate alongside a less potent purging effect would prevent the problem of needing to remember to take it.
  

Alch_strength:

• Go through all the reagents with a defined alch_strength and ensure they have reasonable ABVs (with exceptions for things like Moonshine and Bo Jack Daniels, as well as reagents that are obviously supposed to have unreasonable levels of alcohol like Rum and Coke). Probably going to PR this myself.
  

Slow Metabolism:

• Possible QoL change to how this interacts with reagents that decay into other reagents? Perhaps changing only alcohols, though the majority of decay chems are food chems and probably shouldn't be much more poisonous to slowmeta characters.
  

Addiction:

• I call upon your aid, codenerds. Everyone hates this but I couldn't get any numbers to explain why. It seems to have a relatively low addiction chance according to the wiki. Is it really as bad as everyone makes it out to be?
  

[LeahTheTech]

Since alch_strength is such a specific var you could probably just multiply it by the depletion rate of the drink and adjust from there, it would make more sense to be able to define alcohol strength by percentage irrespective of depletion rate.

[mintyphresh]

Since alch_strength is such a specific var you could probably just multiply it by the depletion rate of the drink and adjust from there, it would make more sense to be able to define alcohol strength by percentage irrespective of depletion rate.

it hurts me to not just have it be a direct variable but I get it

[Cal]

I pretty much agree with all of this, booze is hilariously debilitating. it's rough for rp and funny for classic

[Lord_earthfire]

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).

As a bartender, i even struggle getting my customers remotly drunk because once you start mixing custom drinks with juices and all, people hardly consume alcohol if you don't take the really strong stuff (e.g. suicider, murdini)

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.

Now, i wouldn't mind having the depletion rate of alcohol to be increased. I agree that it lasts very long for RP-purposes. But from the alcohol strenght, i personally think the pure alcohol types are fine or could even take a little bump.

[TDHooligan]

you can also make antihol deplete alcoholic reagents really easily as they all have the same parent.

i'm happy to take a shot at doing the ABV overhaul, too. 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

[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

[mintyphresh]

The PR for changing the alch_strength behavior is now up (#15065). TDHooligan, I do need some guidance on the antihol purging suggestion you made; it's an idea I'm interested in but the code required is a little out of my league.

Aw, shit, I forgot to do the depletion rate change so that beer and stuff still gets you drunk. Off to the code mines I go...

[Frank_Stein]

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

I feel like this is an underlying cause behind some of the weirdness. A unit really isn't defined that well across the various containers that are supposed to hold them. I'd guess a lot of stuff is balanced around syringes and beakers, but those are equal in unit size to shot glasses and standard drinking glasses. 

I assume the drinking glass is a 16 Oz Pint, or 473mL, so 50 units or 500mL makes sense in terms of rounding up, but shot glasses can hold anywhere between 1 oz (29.57 mL) to 3 oz (88.72 mL) of liquid and syringes don't typically go above more than a few mL

A 1u to 10mL conversion would mean syringes were holding 150mL. Here's a 60mL syringe for comparison
Spoiler!

[mintyphresh]

A 1u to 10mL conversion would mean syringes were holding 150mL. Here's a 60mL syringe for comparison
Spoiler!

OH MY GOD. that's hilarious. Yeah, realism isn't really a HUGE concern for this PR, yeah, but man this is hilarious to see, I love this silly game. Thanks for sharing