Brewing, Explained
A sakagura is a Japanese sake brewery - and ours is open to everyone. Grow the barley, fruit and herbs, cook or mix them in a cauldron, bottle the result, distil it in a copper Steam Still and age it in a sake cask, and a drink with up to five stars comes out. This page explains everything from zero - no mods, no downloads, no brewing knowledge required. The wiki stays your quick reference.
Start here
The big idea, in one paragraph
A drink on Iekcorbar is a recipe you followed. Every bottle remembers what went into it and what you did to it: the ingredients, the minutes it spent in the cauldron, how often it was distilled, how many years it aged and in which wood. When it is done, the server compares that story to every recipe it knows and grades you - up to five gold stars for a perfect match, a cloudy "Murky Brew" if you went off on your own. There are no hidden stats and no menus of numbers: the bottle itself tells you what it is and what step comes next.
The three rules
- Real minutes, real time. Cooking, distilling and ageing run on the wall clock - a cask keeps working while you sleep.
- The recipe is the score. Deviate in ingredients, times, runs or wood and quality drops - gradually, not suddenly.
- The bottle is the manual. Right-click anything for its status; every unfinished bottle names its next step.
Heard the word "Brewery"? The old server ran a plugin called Brewery with barrels and a GUI distillery. The Sakagura replaces it: the same hobby, rebuilt for us from scratch on vanilla blocks, with our own recipes, our still and our casks - and it pairs with the Kitchen and Steamworks. Nobody ever needs to install anything.
Step one
The cauldron: where every drink starts
Put a cauldron down and right-click it with a water bucket. Now it is either an oven or a cold kettle - and that choice is the whole machine: heat underneath cooks, no heat mixes. Every recipe's first step says which one it wants.
| Setup | Mode | Used by |
|---|---|---|
| Fire, lava, magma, campfire or a lit furnace below | Cook | sake, shochu, whiskey, wine, absinthe... |
| Nothing below (cold) | Mix | umeshu, chuhai, sangria, mugicha... |
Throwing things in
one at a time
Right-click the cauldron with each ingredient - one per click, up to 64 in the pot. Flowers, fruit, sugar, rice, even a milk bucket. The cauldron must be full of water before it accepts anything.
Watching it work
empty hand = truth
Right-click with an empty hand and the cauldron tells you what is inside and how long it has been cooking or mixing. Particles give it away too: bubbles and steam mean cooking, calm water means mixing.
Take the water out (bucket, or letting it run dry) and the brew is gone - plan a little before bottling.
Step two
Bottling: the clock starts in the glass
When the time feels right, right-click with a glass bottle - one cauldron fills three bottles - and the brew's entire history travels with the glass. Every bottle now speaks:
A work in progress
"Unfinished ..."
A grey name means the recipe is not done: the lore line tells you the exact next step - "Next: distill it (2x)" or "age it 3 years in cherry". You never lose track.
A finished drink
with a star rating
Once every step has happened, the bottle gets its name, colour, stars and effects right there in the tooltip - no guessing whether it turned out well.
The murky one
"Murky Brew"
A drink that matches no recipe - wrong ingredients, wildly wrong times - turns murky. One sip makes you see things. It is how you learn.
Step three (some recipes)
The Steam Still: distilling made visible
Spirits like Shochu, Whiskey and the copper-casked Steam Whisky get distilled before (or instead of) ageing. Distilling happens in a machine you can actually build: the Steam Still - a copper boiler on legs, built around an ordinary barrel.
Crafting the still
barrel · 2 iron · blaze powder · glowstone
One shapeless craft: a barrel, two iron ingots, blaze powder and a glowstone dust together in any order. Place it and heat it from below like a cauldron - fire, lava, a campfire or a lit furnace.
Running a batch
one glowstone per run · 20 s
Put bottles inside, add glowstone dust and make sure there is heat below. Every 20 seconds the still spends one dust and gives the bottles inside (up to three stacks at a time) one distill run. Right-click the still to see what it is doing.
Line it up
The still is a real container: hoppers feed bottles in and take them out. A conveyor from the cauldron into the heated still, and the next one in line, is a distillery in the old sense of the word - no redstone clocks, no explosions.
Step four (some recipes)
Sake casks: patience in ten woods
Many drinks round off in wood. A cask is a crafted barrel - ten kinds, from the honest oak to the lacquered copper cask - and it ages what is put inside in real time, even while you are offline. Twenty minutes is one year. Whiskey wants eighteen; umeshu is happy with three.
The usual suspects
oak · spruce · birch · jungle · acacia
Six planks around two iron nuggets, one wood per cask. Recipes name the wood they want.
Fancy woods
cherry · mangrove · bamboo · dark oak
Same shape, different flavour. Cherry casks are famous for the Sakura Liqueur.
The copper cask
steampunk, and it matters
Copper ingots and iron. A few recipes - Steam Whisky among them - specifically ask for it.
- A bottle in a cask keeps ageing while the cask sits unloaded - when it comes out, the years are simply there.
- Hoppers work with casks too (they even age the bottles passing through).
- Wrong-but-familiar woods (oak instead of dark oak) still count, just a little less.
- Opening a cask shows its bottles mid-ageing; the lore says "Ageing in a cask...".
How you are graded
Quality: 40 / 25 / 15 / 20
When every step of a recipe has been done, the server grades how closely your brew followed it. Four things are scored, each with a tolerance that shrinks on harder recipes:
| Axis | Weight | What it looks at |
|---|---|---|
| Ingredients | 40 % | the right things, in the right amounts - extras cost you |
| Time | 25 % | how many real minutes it cooked or mixed |
| Distill runs | 15 % | exactly the number the recipe wants (if any) |
| Age + wood | 20 % | years in a cask, and the wood it was made of (if any) |
The total becomes one of ten quality points - shown as up to five stars - and picks the drink's name (poor / normal / good band), its effects, and even how harsh the hangover is. Harder recipes demand a steadier hand: the same sloppiness costs more on an 8 than on a 2.
Quality playground - how many stars would you get?
Daiginjo Sake
15% alcohol · difficulty 6/10
Five stars. The sake master nods.
Same maths as the live plugin: ingredients 40% (perfect here), time 25%, distill runs 15%, ageing + wood 20%. Wrong-but-familiar cask woods count for 75%; a finished brew below 30% turns Murky.
Tip: you can check any finished drink's exact recipe and steps again later with /zukan (or the recipe book), and the calculator above plays by exactly the numbers the plugin uses.
Where drinks are grown
The garden: eleven crops worth drinking
Every crop here exists because a recipe asked for it. They grow on ordinary farmland in three stages; berry bushes and dwarf fruit trees regrow after picking, barley and ginger are dug up and replanted. And when you explore, keep your eyes open: wild patches grow ripened bushes from the first day, in the biomes each plant likes.
Barley
shochu, ale and the famous Steam Whisky
Hops
bitter and fresh Hop Ale
Grapes
proper Red Wine straight from your vine
Ume Plums
the sweet-tart Umeshu plum wine
Yuzu
sparkling Chuhai and bright Ramune
Peaches
blushing Momo Sake
Cherries
Sakura Liqueur that smells of spring
Strawberries
Berry Wine and fresh eating
Blueberries
forest-y Berry Wine
Juniper Berries
botanical Juniper Gin
Ginger
the kick in Amazake and gin
Seeds come from the fruit itself - one fruit in a crafting grid makes a couple of seeds (barley, strawberries, blueberries, juniper and ginger plant straight from the harvest).
With a little respect
Effects, and what alcohol does
A good drink gives real effects - speed, strength, regeneration, night vision, luck - and better quality makes the good effects stronger and the rough ones milder. But alcohol is a debt:
- Drunkenness piles up with every glass (check yourself with
/brew drunk) and fades slowly. - Tipsy: the ground sways and you stumble. Drunker: your chat slurs. Worse: you lose your lunch.
- At the limit you pass out and wake up at your spawn point with a hangover - slowness, weakness and a splitting head.
- Weak drinks barely register; a five-star Advocaat hits differently than a murky one. Quality is also self-care.
Two friends sneaking next to each other with drinks in hand will cheers - "Kanpai!" is worth a toast on its own. Pace yourself.
Put it together
Your first brew & the road onward
Nigori Sake in ten minutes
- Find barley (wild patches in plains and meadows) or steamed rice from the Kitchen.
- Place a cauldron, right-click it full of water, throw in 5 rice + 2 sugar - one click each.
- Put a block with fire or lava underneath and let it cook 6 minutes (empty-hand right-click to check).
- Right-click with a glass bottle: out comes Nigori Sake - three stars and up if your time was honest.
- Taste it somewhere safe. Cloudy sake is meant to be drunk with friends, not discovered alone at dawn.
The road onward, in order of stars
- Umeshu - your first mix, your first cherry-cask age, and a beautiful drink.
- Shochu - meet the Steam Still: two honest distillations.
- Red Wine & Hop Ale - a garden vineyard and a hop field, four years in oak.
- Whiskey - ten minutes of cooking, two runs, eighteen years in spruce. Patience pays.
- Steam Whisky - the copper cask; the showpiece every brewer builds toward.
- Then run a still line for the whole town, or become the best Absinthe brewer on the server. (You have been warned about the Absinthe.)
When it misbehaves
FAQ & good to know
- The still does nothing. It needs all three: bottles and a glowstone dust inside, heat directly below, and 20 seconds. Right-click it - the action bar says exactly what is missing.
- My drink says "Unfinished" forever. It is not finished: the lore names the missing step, and the still or cask will tell you when it is done.
- Two identical bottles will not stack. Different history in the glass means different item. Brewed together, they do stack - so batch your runs.
- Do casks keep ageing while offline? Yes - that is the point. Twenty minutes of real time is one year.
- Can I break a cauldron I forgot about? Right-click an empty hand anywhere: the action bar always reports the truth about what is inside.
- Does it work with the other plugins? It is grown from them: the Kitchen supplies steamed rice and tea, Steamworks plates shine on the still, and every recipe is readable in /zukan, the recipe book and the recipes page.
Numbers on this page match the live plugin (Sakagura 0.2.8). Exact times are always shown in-game: right-click anything, or use /zukan.