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 1 hour ago1 hr 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 12 hours ago12 hr 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...