Lifeways: Cacao

<h2><strong>Overview</strong></h2> <hr /> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>Lifeways: Cacao is a mod for those who want a more nuanced, detailed, historical, and overall&nbsp;<em>interesting</em> way of growing cacao and making chocolate in Vintage Story!</p> <p>This mod is still in relatively early development, so there aren't that many features as of yet - but oh boy do I have big plans!</p> <h2><strong>Current Features</strong></h2> <hr /> <p>&nbsp;</p> <ul> <li>Grow Cacao trees! Instead of fruit, they give you cacao pods, which must be cracked open to reveal the treasure inside!</li> <li>Make use of cacao mucilage! The sweet pulp that surrounds the beans can be used like any other fruit! In fact, cacao was originally domesticated for the pulp, not the beans - they only figured out how to make chocolate from the beans centuries later!</li> <li>Ferment cacao beans! By putting the beans in a barrel with mucilage, you can ferment them, giving them a much longer shelf-life and much better nutrition!</li> <li>Obtain cacao nibs! Craft dried, fermented beans with a hammer to smash them and obtain the nibs, which make a great topping in porridge or meat stews.</li> <li>Make cacao paste - pure chocolate! Grind the nibs in a Wet Mill to obtain liquid cacao paste, which can be formed into tablets for consumption or use in meals!</li> <li>Separate cacao paste into cacao butter and cacao butter! Using the Broma Process, you can extract pure cacao butter from cacao paste, leaving behind dry cacao powder!</li> <li>Make Dark Chocolate! By mixing cacao paste with pure cacao butter and honey, you can form a sweeter variety of chocolate!</li> </ul> <h2><strong>Future Plans (in order)</strong></h2> <hr /> <p>&nbsp;</p> <ul> <li>Make drinkable chocolate elixirs like the Mayans and Aztecs did!</li> <li>Milk and White chocolate!</li> <li>Use cacao powder to make chocolate breads and pastries, as well as modern-style chocolate milk!</li> <li>With A Culinary Artillery and Expanded Foods, make more complex chocolates with multiple ingredients!</li> </ul> <h2><strong>Compatibilities</strong></h2> <hr /> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>As of right now, there are no explicit mod compatibilities for Lifeways: Cacao, but they will be coming in future updates. It shouldn't interfere with other mods much, regardless.</p> <h2><strong>Contributors</strong></h2> <hr /> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>Thanks to Fuego Fish for the cacao mucilage and cacao pod models and textures!</p> <h2><strong>FAQ</strong></h2> <hr /> <p>&nbsp;</p> <div class="spoiler"> <div class="spoiler-toggle">Why does chocolate give protein nutrition?</div> <div class="spoiler-text"> <p>I've noticed that most mods that add cacao and chocolate to the game give it "Fruit" nutrition, as befitting something sweet and sugary. But cacao beans aren't sweet and sugary - they're bitter, savory, and a little bit sour (they're quite acidic, without processing to remove the acids). And they're mostly composed of proteins and fats, like legumes (e.g. the peanuts and soybeans already in the vanilla game).</p> <p>Most modern chocolate products have sugar added, which accounts for pretty much the entirety of the sweetness you find in modern chocolate. It's a good complement to the actual flavor of cacao, but it isn't part of that actual flavor of cacao.</p> </div> </div> <div class="spoiler"> <div class="spoiler-toggle">Why can't you grind cacao into chocolate using the quern?</div> <div class="spoiler-text"> <p>There's three reasons why I don't just have you grind cacao nibs in the quern to produce cacao mass (which is the same thing as 100% cacao chocolate). One is on realism grounds, one has to do with technical limitations of the quern's implementation, and one is about gameplay:</p> <ul> <li><strong>Realism:</strong> The in-game quern is based on medieval European millstones which were not actually designed to process wet ingredients (or oily things like cacao, which grind into paste rather than powder). If you tried to grind cacao beans in one, it wouldn't really work - the paste would gum up the mill channels and nothing would actually flow out of the quern.</li> <li><strong>Technical Limitations:</strong> While the quern can be made to output liquids, it's really quite buggy. You can't transfer it to a bucket normally, and you can end up with liquids, outside of a container, just sitting in your inventory.</li> <li><strong>Gameplay:&nbsp;</strong>The quern only allows a single ingredient when grinding! You'd have to mix the ingredients for chocolate together separately, which wouldn't be very immersive through the crafting grid and is incredibly awkward through the cooking pot.</li> </ul> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>So, I'm currently working on a "Wet Mill" block that will accept multiple-ingredient recipes and deposit liquids in a bucket (as the fruit press does), the model for which will probably be based off Mexican designs for grinding wet nixtamalized corn into masa (which were also used for cacao grinding, prior to the invention of the melangeur). Should have applications outside this mod, like making horchata and atole! Drinking chocolates will come first, though.</p> </div> </div> <p>&nbsp;</p>