How Cauldrons Work: A Quick Guide

Cauldrons have been around since 2011, and the knowledge was rusty at best. After much testing with Syrian, Kaya, Aelis(I believe), and Truth Speaker, we managed to document a bunch of bugs that prevented us from making anything. It now seems to let us produce the items! We will be slowly going through each cauldron item and confirming its working as designed.

What a cauldron is: A cauldron is a device that runs on heat and follows a recipe. You carry the recipe out through chat. The teapot, cake tin and the various stills and vats all work this way. You need the cauldron, fuel for it, the recipe (an instruction book) and the ingredients.

Step by step guide:

1. Fuel it. Load heat into the cauldron, usually from a heat jar, plus whatever the device itself burns. The teapot takes 16k heat, 3 water and 1 branch. One load lasts across several recipes until the heat runs out.

2. Have the recipe there. Someone in the room needs the instruction book in their inventory. Since the 2022 update the cauldron lists which recipes are available in the area.

3. Start it in chat. Say the recipe's start phrase, for example "Let's brew some tea."

4. Provide the ingredients. Say "I will provide the [item]" for each one, one per countdown cycle. Promised items get an [in use] tag and are taken when the recipe finishes, even if you've traded them away in the meantime. So don't buy anything marked [in use].

5. Say the steps. Someone says each step in chat, in order, and the holder moves the cauldron on to the next stage. For tea the steps are: Spread the leaves over the teapot's base. Add some water. Boil the water. Pour the hot water into the teapot. Wait for five minutes. Serve up the tea.

6. Collect. The holder finishes the process and the result lands in their inventory.

What happens when the heat runs out

• If heat drops below what the recipe needs, nothing is lost.

• If heat hits zero, the device's own fuel is used up and so are any recipe items you've loaded.

Solo or group? Cauldrons were designed for groups. The holder couldn't provide ingredients or give themselves the steps, so you needed at least one other person. Since 2022 some recipes can be done solo, but each recipe decides that.

Tips

• Bring extra heat. Running out partway through costs you the fuel and the ingredients you've loaded.

• If a cauldron's status screen breaks your chat, clearing the scene text fixes it.

• A general-purpose cauldron, one that will follow any instruction book, can stand in for most of the specialized stations.

Questions or corrections welcome, especially if any of this has changed recently.

— Seigheart

Edited Friday at 02:03 PM3 days by Seigheart

most important tip:

the cauldron listens to only the LAST line in the chat. if someone talks right after an instruction, send the instruction again, because it missed it. this is probably a bug, but it's been like this forever.

Edited Friday at 03:20 AM3 days by Syrian

Quick question, how are we supposed to figure out the start words? Intuition? 🙂

12 minutes ago, Nep said:

Quick question, how are we supposed to figure out the start words? Intuition? 🙂

probably...at least for the new ones...

There is a pattern...

Solo recipes seem boring to me, what fun is brewing poison if you're not forced to share the moment with a friend.

9 hours ago, Kaya said:

Solo recipes seem boring to me, what fun is brewing poison if you're not forced to share the moment with a friend.

Solo cauldrons just make them items and remove the uniqueness of the cauldron. I can see why you feel that way.

They are just items.

I would like to see more powerful items require teamwork. Things that actually affect the game. Not just processing resources

I've personally always enjoyed the teamwork aspect of it. Even for something relatively small like cake or tea it's a nice way to get to know someone. It's also a fun trust exercise, as the person sacrificing the resources is not the same as the person who gets the reward. I've never seen anyone abuse this, but just that fact that you could helps build some trust.

For some things it does feel a little silly, and there a normal combiner would probably suffice.

There are however a couple items that would work great for teamwork. Most notable toxic extract and poison. The added difficulty would justify a far stronger poison effect, but also leaves a small risk of betrayal.

1 hour ago, Kaya said:

I've personally always enjoyed the teamwork aspect of it. Even for something relatively small like cake or tea it's a nice way to get to know someone. It's also a fun trust exercise, as the person sacrificing the resources is not the same as the person who gets the reward. I've never seen anyone abuse this, but just that fact that you could helps build some trust.

For some things it does feel a little silly, and there a normal combiner would probably suffice.

There are however a couple items that would work great for teamwork. Most notable toxic extract and poison. The added difficulty would justify a far stronger poison effect, but also leaves a small risk of betrayal.

I don't really see any reasoning for them being solo apart from "I don't like teamwork" which seems to defeat the point of the cauldron aspect. Which is fine, I like to be antisocial at times too, but it's a bit like making gathering items work when depleting, it defeats the point of the concept of "teamwork cauldrons"

Maybe there should be a bonus for having multiple people use it? Make more items perhaps?