The Homebrewer’s Bible does not contain the recipe for unfermented vinegar…
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Hmmm, is it auto learned then? I remember having it, and didn’t have any wine books
I think you can also have it by starting with cooking 2 or 3
Nah I have cooking 5.
Did you start with cooking 5?
As Tamior said, some recipes are unlocked by starting with the skill at a certain level. It makes for very interesting play-styles if you run an illiterate character since it’s the only way to get some of the book learned recipes without a book.
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Ah starting with, I missed that bit, thank you!
I would laugh myself silly if one recipe to make yeast was to have a male character “tea bag” certain items andlet nature do its thing. xD
So am I correct in concluding that there is no way to make yeast/alcohol/vinegar in an “inna woods” playthrough now? (By which I mean, playing in a wilderness-only world with no modern buildings and no access to modern materials - so nowhere to find yeast or alcohol.) I used to rely on fruit wine but yes, it seems I can’t anymore. I have a sourdough starter which certainly contains yeast but the game won’t let me use that to brew alcohol of course. This feels bananas since yeast is literally everywhere. I guess I can just cheat in a single yeast item to represent yeast in the air for my first batch of wine… I hate having to do that but not having access to yeast/alcohol cuts off a lot of things that I realistically should have access to. Fingers crossed a way to get yeast in the wild gets added soon.
EDIT: Just realized you can use fruit juice to make vinegar, which I do have access to. Yay!
EDIT2: Okay, I just fermented the vinegar but it didn’t create any yeast. 
Does “no modern buildings and no access to modern materials” include moonshine stills? Because they can and do spawn with bags of yeast.
I am playing on a map with no towns or buildings at all. Occasionally a cabin still spawns despite my best efforts but they do not have moonshine stills that I’ve ever seen and even the cabins are few and far between. I also set a rule for myself that I wouldn’t touch anything in the cabins unless the game mechanics game me no other option, since I had intended a world with no buildings at all and it feels like cheating.
Honestly it feels like there should be a simple way to get yeast without finding it pre-processed, because it’s so easy to do in real life, but if there isn’t one at the moment I’ll just wish a single piece in to represent the yeast I supposedly should have gotten from making the vinegar, I guess, and it should be easy from there, assuming you still get more yeast as a byproduct of brewing.
Moonshine stills are usually found on forest trails or at swamp shacks, I believe.
Yeah my world doesn’t have either of those as far as I’m aware.
I’m not even aware of a reasonable way to ‘manufacture’ yeast in the wild. You’d basically have to put out a nutritional medium for it, then hope that the wild yeast out there (there is a LOT of it) gets inside the culture in significant quantities, without anything else making the mixture unusuable. Modern yeast manufacturing is all about reproducing existing cultures. Even the process of grabbing wild strains of yeast involves identifying a good, viable yeast cell under a microscope and then introducing it to a feeding culture. I don’t think microscopes and reasonably sterile environments are abundant in the wild.
Unfortunately, if you decide to throw the game settings to such an extreme, some resources are just not going to be available. Gonna have to settle for flatbreads.
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We can actually buy yeast starters and more specifically shelf stable yeast here in Australia, so I assume it’s something that would at least be available from grocery stores in the early days post-cataclysm. I could work on adding such to the game, is there any reason this wouldn’t make sense?
It makes perfect sense. I’m pretty sure I’ve looted yeast from stores before. But it doesn’t solve the case of a game where you’ve explicitly set the spawns to prevent any buildings or towns from spawning.
Actually it is perfectly possible to get yeast from the wild for whatever your specific need is. Beer and wine were originally brewed by letting the juice sit out exposed to the air for a long time until some wild yeast got in there. There are still a few modern breweries which use this method to brew commercial beer like Cantillon and Wild Beer. Beer has existed longer than bread - and certainly since long before we had modern processes for isolating yeast. Making alcohol is something you can do by accident, not something that requires a chemistry set.
The main reason we use commercial yeast now is simplicity and time saving. We don’t have to wait for the yeast to arrive and multiply, we just dump it in from a package. But in terms of realism, there’s no reason we couldn’t ferment alcohol without commercial yeast in the game, it should just take longer. There’s already sourdough in-game: you make a starter with flour and water and let it sit for a while, then you can use it to make bread. Something similar could be done for alcohol.
In fact, I suppose my real issue isn’t that I can’t get “yeast” as an item, it’s that you can’t brew alcohol (and other recipes that rely on it) without the yeast item. It may be time for me to learn how to mod in some recipes based on the sourdough starter to make wine starters, beer starters, cider starters, etc. (although I think the devs had mentioned planning to add something like this at some point in the future anyway).
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There’s a recipe for 'Sealed Yeast Culture" that just requires some flour and sugar and a jar. It’s a cousin to the sourdough starter.
I highly recommend sourdough starter if you don’t have yeast and want to make bread (it’s better than bread!). It’s very easy, and you can just make 5-10 jars of the stuff and have it hang around forever.