[Mod][XCL] [0.25.9] Last Call

[AthenaWilliams]

[XCL] [0.25.9] Last Call

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The bartender at The Broken Drum has a problem he is tired of having. Everybody who walks into his bar has been to the Electric Pickle, and they have all seen what that robot behind the club's counter can do, and now they come to him on a Tuesday night asking for a Stardust Jive with actual stars floating in it. He pours beer. He pours whisky. He has been pouring whisky since before that place had planning permission. So they wait, and then they order a beer they did not want, and next Friday they go to the Pickle instead.
 

He is not going to learn them. He opens at four and locks up at two. But if somebody walked in already knowing how, that he would pay for.
 

• Getting the job
  • Talk to the bartender at the bar and he will tell you what is wrong with his week. His name is Sal, and he mentions it roughly forty seconds after he starts complaining.
  • Offer to learn and he will point you at the online courses. Four hours of a man in a waistcoat calling you chef, sold on your home computer for $150, and it is the last hour that matters: ten drinks, ten build orders, and the reason the order matters at all.
  • Come back and tell him and you do not get to tell him, you get to show him. He puts a shaker on the counter, folds his arms, and has you build one in front of him. He hires you either way, because he is desperate, but he does drink it.
  • Bartending becomes an evening activity. Sal hires you in whichever body you walk in with and has no opinion about it.
• Building the drink
  • Ten cocktails, and they are the Electric Pickle's own menu. Every ingredient list is the base game's, lifted out of the barbot's dialogue, which is exactly why the Drum's regulars keep asking for them.
  • The order ticket is not a recipe card. It is what you remember, and it is only as reliable as you are. At Mixology 1 almost none of it is in the right order and you are working from instinct; at 10 it reads true from top to bottom.
  • Pour by clicking the bottles, in sequence, against the clock. Everything has to go in. In the right order it layers and it is the drink. In the wrong order it is the same ingredients and everybody at the bar can taste the difference even if not one of them could tell you what it is.
  • Reach for the wrong bottle and you tip the shaker out and start again, and it costs you seconds. Do it three times and that one is not happening.
  • The correct build order is shown once the drink is resolved, so you learn the ten recipes by working, not by grinding.
  • Mixology is a real trainable skill from 1 to 10, registered the way Cooking and the rest are, and it sits with them on your stats screen.
• The shift
  • A freeform hub behind the bar: serve the next order, work the room, take a breather, call it a night.
  • The night runs on energy sized off your fitness and shortened by a day already spent on your feet. Serving costs a little. Anything else costs a great deal more, so a night only ever holds one or two of those.
  • Pay is a shift wage scaled by your charm, your intellect and your mixology, plus whatever went in the jar. Clock off early and Sal notices.
  • The bar is mostly strangers, with the named regulars turning up as the exception, so no two nights are the same crowd.
• Behind the bar as a man
  • Serving a woman well is a conversation, not a transaction. Get the drink right and there is an opening.
  • Two drinks she liked and the right thing said at the right moment and one of the regulars will give you her number. Work through to close and she is still at the end of the bar with her coat over her arm, not quite leaving.
  • The strangers are strangers. They will drink, and flirt, and leave more than they meant to, and then they are gone.
  • Serve a man badly and he may push the glass back across the counter and tell you to taste it yourself. You can look at it properly first if you think you would know. Sometimes there is nothing in it at all and he just wants it made again.
  • Sometimes there is. Bruce in particular has ideas. The shift carries on afterwards, with a different bartender behind the bar and every regular who watched it happen still sitting there.
• Behind the bar as a woman
  • Bruce, Dredd and whoever else is in tonight, all of them on the far side of a counter you cannot leave for another four hours.
  • Give it back to them and the tips improve. Or keep pouring, which is also an answer.
  • Ruin a drink and you can talk them round, and mostly you can. When you cannot, the money stays on the counter and they suggest another way to settle it, and the Drum has rooms out the back that Sal never goes near.
• Settings and compatibility
  • A cocktail timer with Normal, Relaxed and Off. Off removes the clock entirely and judges a drink purely on the order, which also covers the real-time minigame accessibility setting.
  • A switch that keeps the job a job: ruined drinks cost you the tip and nothing else. Your Non-con setting is respected on top of it either way.
  • Nine achievements, two of them hidden.
  • LESBIANED supplies the strangers if you have it, and its own scenes take over from there. Without it they come from the base game's club pool.
  • BLACKED gives Dredd his ideas. Without it he still drinks, talks and flirts, and there is never anything in the glass.

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• Submitter
  AthenaWilliams
• Submitted
  09/01/26
• Category
  Gameplay Changes & Events
• Requirements