The Fermentor is the heart of the brewery and the only station in SL Colonies with a working hydrometer. Sugar goes in, yeast eats it, alcohol comes out — and the gauge on the side tells you honestly how far along it is.
Building a batch
Craft through the in-world HUD, or the web page version on the meter website if the HUD gives your machine trouble. Either way the layout is the same: solids top left, liquids bottom left, your recipe book along the top, and microorganisms — the yeasts — top right.
You need at least 50 units of liquid before a craft button appears. A mash counts as a liquid, which is why you can add at most eight mashes to one batch.
Six yeasts, and they are not interchangeable
regular · ancient · beer · saké · spirit · wine
Each converts sugar to alcohol at its own rate, so the same honey and water gives a different result depending on what you pitch:
- Spirit yeast is the greedy converter — the highest alcohol from a given sugar.
- Ancient yeast reaches a higher ceiling from less material, which matters when the ingredients are expensive.
- Wine yeast sits between them and leaves more sugar behind.
Watch the leftover sugar as well as the alcohol. Adding more honey once you have hit your ceiling is just waste — find the point where the alcohol stops climbing and stop there.
The hydrometer is real brewing
The gauge reads specific gravity, which falls as the yeast eats sugar.
Note your original gravity when you start. Read the current gravity later. Then:
(OG − CG) × ~135 = your alcohol percentage
If you have brewed in real life, that formula will look familiar. If you have not, there is a Test button that simply tells you.
One quirk: the needle maxes out at 1.20. A batch above that pins the gauge — that is a limit of the dial, not a bug, and the numbers in chat are still right.
There is no timer, and that is the trap
A fermentation runs as long as you leave it. Days. Weeks. There is nothing to stop it.
Past its maximum alcohol, the yeast does not stop — it keeps eating sugar, and it stops paying you in alcohol and starts paying you in poison. Leave it longer still, until the sugar is gone entirely, and the beneficial stats go negative too: a drink that leaves you hungrier and sicker than before you touched it.
Which is a fine thing to make on purpose and a miserable thing to make by accident.
Do not leave a public fermentor public
This is the owner’s warning and it is a real one.
Because there is no timer, a player can start a week-long batch on your station and lock it for a week. Your only recourse is a reset, and a reset destroys their ingredients.
- As an owner: set it to colony or group.
- As a player: never start a long batch on somebody else’s public station. A day at most, then come back and finish it — or expect to lose everything you put in.
Finishing
Hit Finish and you are shown the alcohol content and asked to name and describe your brew. That name is yours; the recipe goes into your book, and from then on you craft it from the blue menu rather than the HUD.
A recipe you have already invented always takes the same time it took the first time, and the hydrometer does not apply — it is only meaningful while you are discovering something.