Trouble Brewing

This is a safe activity. If you die here, you will not lose any of your items, including those stored inside an Item Retrieval Service (deathbank). Warning: It is still dangerous for Hardcore group iron players.

Trouble Brewing
Released								4 July 2006 (Update)
Type								Minigame
Members								Yes
Location								Mos Le'Harmless
League region								Morytania✓
Participants								2+
Skills								Cooking, Woodcutting, Firemaking, Crafting, Agility, Strength
Reward currency								Pieces of eight
Tutorial								No
Music								Distillery Hilarity, Trouble Brewing
Map

Trouble Brewing is a minigame that takes place on the east side of the pirate island of Mos Le'Harmless. The main goal of the game is to make as much rum as you can as fast as possible. To do this, there are a number of tasks that must be done, from gathering ingredients to taking care of the boilers.

To access the minigame, you must have completed the Cabin Fever quest and have at least 40 Cooking. It is also recommended to bring weight-reducing clothing, a m'speak amulet (not necessary after completion of Monkey Madness II), and a good woodcutting axe (though a bronze axe can be obtained inside the minigame).

Completing a game of Trouble Brewing is a medium task for the Morytania achievement diary. You do not need to win the game or gain any pieces of eight to complete the task.

• Red or blue rum to teleport to Trouble Brewing
• Teleport using Minigame Teleport, either through any spellbook or the Grouping interface, by selecting Trouble Brewing. Requires completion of Cabin Fever and 40 Cooking.
• Use a Mos le'harmless teleport scroll, then run east
• Teleport to Harmony Island and talk to Brother Tranquility to transport to Mos Le'Harmless, then run east

The following official world below is assigned to Trouble Brewing:

World	Location	Members	Activity
304	Germany	1	Trouble Brewing

To enter the lobby for either team, you cannot have any followers, items in your inventory, or anything equipped in the head slot. Items can be deposited at the bank chest near Honest Jimmy. The official Trouble Brewing world is world 304.

With all necessary items banked, you now need to talk to someone to enter a waiting room. There are three options: San Fan will sign you to the blue team, Fancy Dan will sign you to the red team, and Honest Jimmy will sign you to whichever team currently has fewest members. Only one player on each team is required to start a game. Each game is 20 minutes long, with an interval of 3 minutes between games.

The method of joining a game partway through is different for each waiting room:

• For the eastern (blue) waiting room, players will automatically join the game at the 10 minute mark.
• For the western (red) waiting room, players are prompted to join via a dialogue box at 1 minute intervals.

On each world after the game servers are restarted, this behaviour reverses, with players being able to join blue every minute while only being able to join red at the 10 minute mark. This fixes itself after enough matches of Trouble Brewing are played on that world.

If a game is joined at precisely the 10 minute mark (via either waiting room) the player will receive only half the normal pieces of eight at the end of the game. Therefore, if wishing to join a game partway and receive full pieces of eight you should enter the red team's waiting room and select the dialogue prompt, but not at the 10 minute mark.

The interface has several different icons on it. Along the top is amounts of ingredients. The number will be green if there is enough for another batch of rum. The icons are as follows, from left to right:

The first three are the three boilers. They must each have at least 3 logs in them and must be lit to keep rum production going, and can fit 10 maximum.

• Bitternut. Each bottle of rum requires 1 Bitternut.
• Sweetgrubs. Each bottle of rum requires 1 Sweetgrubs.
• Bucket of water. Each bottle of rum requires 5 buckets of normal water.
• Bowl of blue water or bowl of red water depending on which team the player is in. Each bottle of rum requires 3 bowls of coloured water.
• Scrapey bark. Each bottle of rum requires 1 Scrapey bark.

Production status. When this is flashing green, there is a finished bottle of rum that must be placed in the crate before the arrival of the next bottle pushes it off and breaks it. If the indicator turns red and stays red, the current bottle of rum will be destroyed by the next bottle of rum should it not be packaged quickly. The next bottle will come shortly if a bottle of rum is in production.

The left side has the repair status of your team's equipment. If this shows a number, it means that something has been sabotaged by the other team. From top to bottom, these show the status of the hoppers, the pipes between boilers, and the bridges between islands.

In the lower right of the screen is the scoreboard and time left in a match. Each bottle of rum is worth one point.

The ground floor has the three boilers (where you put logs) and the pipes that can be sabotaged. The workbench nearby supplies you with any tools you might need to play the game, and the larger workbench next to it can be used to craft repair parts in case you run out. There is also the Log Store which starts off with 75 logs in it and can be added to, and next to it is a kettle that coloured flowers are put in to make bowls of coloured water. Just outside is a pump for water and a patch of coloured flowers of the other team.

On the top floor are the hoppers. This is where all the ingredients are placed. In the image above, they are labeled with the ingredients.

Producing coloured water is an important task, as coloured water is necessary for both rum production and gathering bitternuts. To gather coloured water, the player must run all the way to the other team's base. A patch of the flowers grows just outside it. Flowers can be picked until the player has five in their inventory. A player can hold more than five flowers in their inventory by trading with teammates. Once the flowers have been gathered, they must be placed in the kettle located in the player's base. The kettle can hold up to ten flowers at a time before it is full.

After there are flowers in the kettle, you can use a bowl to get the coloured water back out. Put it in the hopper upstairs or use it for gathering bitternuts (see below).

There are three boilers on the ground floor of your base. To light them, you must place one log in it, then use a tinderbox to light it. Once started, more wood can be added. There must be at least three logs in each boiler to make rum, and they can hold up to a maximum ten. Unlike the ingredients, the supply of wood in the boilers will continue to decline even when rum isn't being produced. Signs in front of the boilers identify what number it is.

Water can be easily obtained from the water pumps outside each team's base. After filling your buckets, take them upstairs and place them in the corresponding hopper. If the pump has been sabotaged, you must either fix it or go to the watering hole on the middle island, but this one won't automatically fill all your buckets.

For those who just want pieces of eight, this is a fast and effective way of getting a lot of them, but it's also a very common task, so it will often have been done already and won't do much good for the team.

A rarely needed task since the supply of logs in the store is sufficient to begin with, but should the supply dwindle due to sabotage or griefers, you can cut many of the jungle trees and scrapey trees down and resupply the log store.

Around the area are mounds of dirt that sweetgrubs live in. To lure them out, you have to use raw meat on the mound. You can get an unlimited supply from the table in your base. If you succeed, you'll get some sweetgrubs.

When attempting to draw out some sweetgrubs from a mound, there is a 1/5 chance that the mound will empty out and collapse.^[1] Players will have to find another mound or wait for it to fill again.

If the mound does not collapse after the player uses their meat on it, there is a further 1/5 chance that a swarm of sweetflies will be drawn out instead. The sweetflies will continue to attack the player until they run away, as they cannot be attacked in retaliation. No one can gather more sweetgrubs from the mound while there are still sweetflies present.

There are a number of scrapey trees around the area that can be cut down, yielding scrapey tree logs. The logs must be fletched with a knife to obtain scrapey bark, which then must be put into the corresponding hopper.

There is a low (1/50)^[2] chance while removing the bark from the scrapey logs that you will become diseased for 4 disease damage.

In order to gather Bitternuts, you must first get a few bowls of coloured water. Then, go to one of the islands and catch a monkey. Dye the monkey with the water to mark it as being on your team, then use it on the Bitternut tree. The monkey will skitter up the tree and, after a little while, will toss you a nut. If another monkey is in the tree already, they will first fight and the winning monkey will get the nut. You will only be able to carry 2 Bitternuts in your inventory and attempting to gather more will cause you to waste your coloured monkey. Attempting to drop a Bitternut, gather a 3rd Bitternut, and picking up the dropped Bitternut will result in a message not allowing you to pick it up.

If you wear a monkeyspeak amulet (not required after completing Monkey Madness II), you can alter the strategy used. You can choose to either make the monkey angry by taunting it, or caution him. By making him angry, he'll be more inclined to get up the tree as fast as possible and start pelting you with bitternuts, speeding up the time before you get a nut. If you tell him to be careful, he'll take a little bit longer, but will be more aware of other monkeys and will be more likely to win in a confrontation. If you are the only one at the tree, you can send one monkey up with option three (careful) and immediately use a second monkey with option one (angry) to get two bitternuts faster.

Sabotage can destroy the other team's rum making facilities and make it harder for them to gather ingredients. While this will create a nuisance for the opposing team, it is an intended game mechanic. However, there is no benefit to sabotaging, as whether you win or lose does not affect your rewards. If you decide to sabotage the other team, you need a torch and a tinderbox. You can only carry one torch at a time.

With a lit torch, you can go to the other team's base and set things on fire. To do so, use the torch on what you want to sabotage. You'll either succeed, which results in 50 Firemaking experience, or fail. Regardless of outcome, the torch has a 1/3 chance to be "burned up" and removed from your inventory.^[3] Although it is possible for players to hold multiple torches in their inventory at the same time by trading with other players, this does not make it easier to sabotage. When a torch burns up, all other torches (whether lit or not) in the player's inventory will be removed along with it.

You can only sabotage objects on the opposing team's side. Similarly, you can only extinguish or repair objects on your own team's side. The objects you can burn are:

• Hoppers - Prevents the other team from adding ingredients or the ingredients to be added to the rum, though it won't damage anything already inside.
• Pipes - Halts rum production. Extinguished pipes in their first of three burn states do not appear to impede rum production.
• Pump - Forces water gatherers to go to the middle island for water.
• Trees - Prevents the tree from being cut down and makes players go farther for resources. This neither rewards any experience for setting on fire, nor for extinguishing.
• Bridges - Makes players go around or use the much slower jumping stones to get around. This is a double-edged sword, though, since it also makes it much harder for flower-gatherers on your team to get to the other team's base. You can only burn bridges on the opposing team's side.

The chance to successfully burn an object scales with your Firemaking level^[4]:

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If something is set on fire, it must be extinguished with a bucket of water. If not, it will eventually burn itself out, but you'll need more supplies to fix it afterwards. Once the fire is out, you can use the appropriate repair item to fix it. Pipes and pumps use pipe sections, hoppers use lumber patches, and bridges use bridge sections. Depending on how long they were on fire for, it will take up to 3 items to make the repair.

You can also use the pump near the boilers on the ground floor to gather pressure in the boilers. To do this, you must have over 50% run energy, and takes 10% each pump. It can hold up to 10 pumps worth of pressure. The reason to do this is defensive. When someone is trying to sabotage your boilers, you can right click the pump and select the vent option. By doing this, a burst of steam will run through the pipes and deal damage depending on how much pressure is in the boilers (dealing 10 damage at full pressure). This will put out any fires currently burning and cause damage to opposing team members standing near a damaged section of pipe. If they die, they will return to their base with no loss of items. However, while it does put the fires out, it will damage the broken pipes further, taking the same amount of pipe sections to repair as if you'd let the fire run its course.

Another defensive course is to resupply the repair items. You can do this by taking logs and using them on the workbench in your base to make repair items. You can either use them to make repairs yourself, or use them on the table to resupply it. However, it is rarely necessary to have to do so, and should not be done preemptively as so to not waste logs.

When everything has been completed, a bottle of 'Rum' will roll out the end of the line. It must be collected and placed in the crate, or it will be broken when the next bottle arrives (or after about 34 seconds if another bottle is not brewing). In order to be able to collect the 'Rum', though, you must have contributed ingredients towards its production. For example, each Bitternut contributed will allow the player to collect one rum, and each 5 buckets of water contributed will allow the player to collect one rum. However, unlike other ingredients, up to 10 buckets of water may be deducted from the contribution count. For example, depositing 25 buckets of water at the start of the game will allow you to be eligible to collect the next three bottles of rum, with the first two bottles deducting 10 water from the tally, and the last bottle deducting 5.

It takes 38 seconds for a bottle of rum to complete and an additional 2 seconds before it is interactable on the conveyor belt. If you have all the necessary ingredients for another bottle, it will not automatically start until about 34 seconds later. Depositing any resource or adding logs to the boiler after a bottle arrives will immediately start production on the next bottle, skipping the cooldown. Players who haven't contributed enough won't be able to see or collect it. Once the bottle has been placed in the crate, your team will get 1 point. A theoretical maximum of 30 rum can be brewed in a single round, however due to the time required to gather the ingredients and start the boilers, the realistic maximum is 29 rum.

Different actions performed during the game reward players with different types of experience rewards, as well as rewarding contribution points during the game. After each game, 10 pieces of eight are awarded per bottle of rum produced by the team, regardless of the contribution by the player. On top of that, up to 100 pieces of eight are awarded, based on the contribution points gained during the game. For players contributing ingredients other than buckets of water, there is also an experience reward of 100 Crafting experience, 250 Cooking experience, and 150 Firemaking experience, rewarded to the players who contributed at least one ingredient to the brewing process (3 bowls of red or blue water, or 1 of any other non-water ingredient).

Rum contribution reward
Level required					1 1 1
Crafting XP					100 xp
Cooking XP					250 xp
Firemaking XP					150 xp

Each resource you deposit into a hopper counts for 1 piece of eight at the end of a game. The maximum amount of pieces of eight you can receive from a single game through gathering resources is 100. Resources applies to all the things you can deposit into the hoppers, including buckets of water which are the fastest resource to deposit and take around 3–4 minutes to reach the maximum point count per game.

If you automatically joined at the half-way point in the game, any pieces of eight you earned will be halved (rounded down). The experience awarded at the end of the game is not changed when this happens, though.

The table below shows the immediate experience reward granted for performing certain actions in the game, along with the contribution points towards the pieces of eight and towards the experience reward at the end of the game.

Action	XP Reward	Contribution	Rum XP
Buckets of water added	None	1	0
Coloured water added	100	1	1/3
Sweetgrub obtained	40	N/A	N/A
Sweetgrub added	100	1	1
Scrapey tree bark obtained	50	N/A	N/A
Scrapey tree bark added	100	1	1
Bitternut obtained	50	N/A	N/A
Bitternut added	200	1	1
Log lit in boiler	100	1	0
Equipment sabotaged	50	1	0
Repair item created	12.5	N/A	N/A
Water Pump repaired	50	1	0
Other facility repaired	12.5	1	0
Burning object doused (other than trees)	50	1	0
Monkey captured	15 , 15	N/A	N/A
Boiler pressure increased	25	N/A	N/A

You can also talk to Honest Jimmy to use your pieces of eight and get some unique items such as naval clothing, pirate banners, the stuff (which increases the chance of getting a mature ale from personal brewing), and rum (acts as a consumable teleport to the Trouble Brewing area). It takes 39,590 points to purchase all items from the shop.

Item		Price sold at
	Blue naval shirt	1,000
	Blue tricorn hat	500
	Blue navy slacks	1,000
	Green naval shirt	1,000
	Green tricorn hat	500
	Green navy slacks	1,000
	Red naval shirt	1,000
	Red tricorn hat	500
	Red navy slacks	1,000
	Brown naval shirt	1,000
	Brown tricorn hat	500
	Brown navy slacks	1,000
	Black naval shirt	1,000
	Black tricorn hat	500
	Black navy slacks	1,000
	Purple naval shirt	1,000
	Purple tricorn hat	500
	Purple navy slacks	1,000
	Grey naval shirt	1,000
	Grey tricorn hat	500
	Grey navy slacks	1,000
	Cutthroat flag	2,000
	Gilded smile flag	2,000
	Bronze fist flag	3,000
	Lucky shot flag	4,000
	Treasure flag	5,000
	Phasmatys flag	6,000
	The stuff	50
	Rum (red)	20
	Rum (blue)	20
	Clue scroll (medium)	5,000

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