Mack's Hardcore booze guide
With a complete lack of booze skills, it's still easy enough to fill up your drunkeness for the day. Start by hitting up the barrels for a decent amount of booze, then try to pick up some ingredients for some other drinks. Whiskey and soda and wine spritzers are easy to get hold of, spiced rum/eggnog and the TPS base drinks are particularly good, and redrum isn't bad either.
Farming for the hippy suit is also a nice bonus for early runs, but you can get by without it. If you do decide to get hold of it, go for the flycatching quest while you're at it - it's worthwhile to get hold of an around the the world or 2 to use as nightcaps. Also, if you have crap luck farming the suit, you'll at least end up with a huge pile of slap and tickle-equivilant booze to drown your sorrows in.
Even after the barrel drinks and a few mixed drinks, you're probably going to still have a large chunk of drunkeness to fill. Imp Ales and Ice-cold beers help out here, but you'll mainly want to be drinking flower schnapps. Geting hold of 10 of these per day requires no farming whatsover, just 700 meat's worth of fermenting powder and 10 successful PvP hits per day. Each shot of flower schnapps also gives 3 turns of flower power (+20% to all stats). If you're having trouble with the castle, hole in the sky, or hedge maze, drink a load of just before starting on the tough areas. Combined with goofballs and other buffs from items (spiky hair, sugar rush etc.), this will help to reduce (or eliminate) the need for reagent potions at high levels. This tactic can be applied throughout the run, drinking a shot of flower schnapps before fighting bosses, or areas that you're having trouble surviving.
If your runs are 6 days or longer, farming a bartender-in-a-box is definitely a good idea.
The 3 DB drink rewards from the tavern are a great boost to the early game. There are 2 good tactical options for drinking these: - Drink them immediately to enable you to reach level 5 and reagent food on day 1, or to fill a stat gap between level 3 and 4 if you finish the rat quest early (although opening up your guild and starting on degrassi knoll is a better option). - Save them to use as nightcaps on the first 3 days, drinking up to 19 drunkeness then finishing the day with a DB drink for maximum adventure gain.
With Advanced cocktailcrafting:
This skill lets you create around 3 DB drinks per day - I recommend smashing up the barrels every day, and giving fernswarthy's tower a quick visit for fruit early on. Save any whiskey or wine you get for mixing with soda water and an umbrella, these are the easiest DB drinks to make. The hippy suit is kind of overkill in this situation - with all the fruit in the world, you'll still only be able to make 3 DB drinks per day, and the ingredients for these can be found with little effort during the course of regular adventuring.
With ode to booze.
This skill will give you around +15-20 adventures [i]per day[/i] once you can cast it, but at 50 MP, casting it can be tricky. It's worth getting hold of the goblin king's balls if the +14 myst is enough to cast ode a day earlier. Wisdom and Mojomuscular melody help out with getting the max MP to cast it, too. With this skill, Imp ales suddenly turn into a pretty decent drink, and ice-cold beers aren't bad either. Unless you have a bartender, try to avoid mixing too many flower schnapps - with ode, the adventure gain is better from Imp Ales and any other mixed drink.
With Advanced cocktailcrafting and Superhuman cocktailing.
If you're a moxie class, go nuts... the class is currently broken in terms of game balance. Go all-out to get as many superhuman cocktails as possible. Farm fernswarthy's tower, get the hippy suit, whatever it takes. SH drinks are a full 4 adventures better than DB drinks and worth farming for. I managed to get 660 adventures out of a 3-day hardcore run just by sticking to them. There's also no need to bother teetdropping. the average adventure count will be similar (even when under an opossum sign) to what it would be with stomach of steel.
If you're not a moxie sign, superhuman is still great for summoning 5 garnishes a day. This makes things much more flexible with regards to matching up your ingredients, hopefully cutting down on the amount of "not another 3 @#$%-ing coconut shells!" moments you run into. It also makes the hippy suit a better option, since you can actually use all the fruit you have access to on 5 drinks a day.
Other Notes
If you've got a lot of booze to choose between, it's worth giving some quick thought to how the drunkeness is going to add up. A few (kind of obvious) guidelines to stick to:
- Always work out a total that will bring you up to 19 drunkeness, then finish with a single DB drink
- Don't forget to factor in possible drunkeness from the pirates if you intend on doing them that day.
- If you have several DB drinks, give some thought to how many you want to use, and how many you want to save. It can be handy to save them for celebrating a stat day with lots of extra adventures.
- Try to avoid drinking any base drink that mixes with a cocktail garnish that you don't have. Better to save it and try to summon up the missing ingredient the next day.
With the recent doubling of DB drink stat gains, it's now more important to consider what drinks to save for stat days. It's mainly useful as a myst class, since the most common DB drinks you'll be mixing are horizontal tangos and roll in the hays. It's also lots of fun to drink a load of Imp ales on a muscle day (especially with ode to booze).
If you get some main-stat DB drinks, they can be handy for filling in gaps between levels. I can't cover every possible situation where this might be useful, but here's an example: If you're running very low in your main stat after completing the tavern quest, keep levelling up against the rats until you're a stat point or 2 away from hitting level 4, then drink the 3 DB drinks to hit level 4. If the quest gets finished at nearly the end of level 3/ level 4 then it's better to wait until you've got a gap in a level that you're not filling with quests - towards the end of level 5 is also a good time to drink them.
Basic bottle o' booze uses
Whiskey and Boxed Wine: The two most useful drinks to pick up, simply because they mix with soda water. Further mixing with a little paper umbrella gives horizontal tangos and roll in the hays. Both can be mixed with cherries for a good quality 3-drunkeness drink, and whiskey also mixes with dyspepsi cola and blatantly canadians for medium-quality filler drinks.
Rum: Can be mixed with spices for spiced rum then further mixed with a ghoul egg for eggnog. Also mixable with lime to make grog. These three drinks are all good quality, and worth making even if you're a moxie sign.
Tequila: The most uncomplicated drink- mixes with oranges and lemons for DB base drinks, and with limes for the high-quality tequila with training wheels.
Vodka: Mixes with the readily available orange and a coconut shell for a DB drink. If you've got a tomato and spices handy, it can be worth mixing up an extra-spicy bloody mary, and regular bloody maries and white canadians (vodka + goat's milk) are fine as filler drinks. Unfortunately, the only other things it mixes with are olives and jumbo olives, which are quite hard to get hold of.
Gin: Probably the most useless base drink. It only mixes with the incredibly elusive grapefruit, olive, papaya and jumbo olive.
Flower schnapps:As the only booze in hardcore that requires absolutely no farming, these deserve a special mention. Making 10 of these a day will fill up half your drunkeness with a low-quality drink (0-2 adventures when you count the turn spent cocktailcrafting). Flower schnapps become a lot more useful when you pick up ode to booze – Getting 1-3 adventures from each puts them on the same level as Infinitesimal IPA, but with a handy flower power buff (same effect as goofballs, minus withdrawal). And with both ode and a bartender in-a-box, they're nearly as good as DB drinks.
You'll need to win 10 hardcore PvP fights a day, though. Stick to searching and attacking people at least 2 levels below you, and you should be able to get 10 wins a day with ease. It helps to break your hippy stone straight after you ascend, and attack people with a very low rank. This helps keep your rank low so you're able to continue flower-picking from players at much lower levels than you.
I'll start off with a rough guide to where (and when) to adventure to pick up the best booze ingredients. I literally mean 'cruising' when you're farming booze, as you should be largely relying on ingredients that you run into during the course of normal adventuring – with a bit of care it's possible to get yourself drunk every day without needing the gnomish brewery or excessive farming in areas that are bad for stats.
It's intended to be a comprehensive guide to all booze-dropping areas, but if you're skim-reading the seriously useful areas are picked out in
Low levels
South of the Border: The place for tequila! If you somehow end up with an abundance of oranges and lemons, it might be a half-decent idea to give this place a (very brief) visit. There's a stupidly high amount of non-combat adventures here, but at least 3 of the 5 monsters in the area drop tequila.
The Lemon Party Slot: This place will give out a random fruit roughly half of the time, and chooses either a lemon, orange, jumbo olive, lime or cherry. It's too random for my liking... But I haven't done any spading to figure out if the place is worth it in hardcore, so I can't rule it out completely.
Mid-levels
The Hippy Camp: Easy fruit. But the hippy suit may take you a long time to get, and the lack of meat drops is quite crippling. I'd recommend it if you're going for convenience rather than speed, or if you're feeling really lucky.
Now that the wand, blue snowcones and ratsworth's monocle have been added to the game (and many people have all the item-drop skills) it may not be quite as horrible an option as it used to be.
One problem remains, however - even with all the fruit in the world, you can only make 3 DB drinks every day, and the base drinks for these three can be easily found in the barrels or through normal adventuring. Fruit schnapps would be handy as infinite booze, but flower schnapps are just as good and readily available. This makes the place of very limited use if you don't require reagent potions or chow meins in your runs.
The Orcish Frat House: Even worse than the hippy camp. To get 3-5 bottles of booze from this place, you have to: Spend lots of turns farming the frat boy ensemble, sewer for a clover, then spend an adventure using the clover. That's at least 3 turns spent with no stats, and a whole load of turns not spent in menagerie level 3 getting better stats and more booze.
High(er) Levels
Pirates: Rum and spices are good stuff. If you pick some up, hooray, but it's not worth farming this area after you've got the outfit and dictionary.
The Undefiled Cyrpt: Don't autosell those cranberries and ghuol eggs!
The Palindome: If for some reason you end up adventuring here, the gin, olives and papayas are useful.
Whitey's Grove: Yes, this place actually has a (somewhat limited) use! If you lack a fence after 5 shore trips, but have a wand the wine tasting adventure can appear while you're looking for a white picket fence. The adventure drops 2 very useful boxed wines, and if you're really desperate for booze, white lighting is OK as a filler drink. I still don't recommend this area much though, due to the high number of useless adventures and lack of any other decent item drops.
Whiskey+ lemon and coconut + soda water and umbrella
Tequila+ lemon and ice cubes + orange and umbrella
Vodka+ olive and ice cubes + orange and coconut
Gin+ grapefruit and ice cubes + olive and umbrella
Rum+ strawberry and ice cubes + grapefruit and coconut 
Boxed Wine+ soda water and umbrella + strawberry and coconut
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Lemon+ whiskey and coconut + tequila and ice cubes 
Orange+ tequila and umbrella + vodka and coconut 
Grapefruit+ gin and ice cubes + rum and coconut 
Stawberry+ rum and ice cubes + wine and coconut 
Soda Water+ wine and umbrella + whiskey and umbrella 
Olive+ vodka and ice cubes + gin and umbrella |
Coconut Shell+ whiskey and lemon + vodka and orange + wine and strawberry + rum and grapefruit
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Whiskey Sour + coconut Whiskey and Soda + umbrella Tequila Sunrise + umbrella Margarita + ice cubes Vodka Martini + ice cubes Screwdriver + coconut Salty Dog + ice cubes Martini + umbrella Strawberry Daquiri + ice cubes Monkey Wrench + coconut Wine Spritzer + umbrella Strawberry Wine + coconut
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Magical Ice Cubes
Little Paper Umbrella|
Lieutenant Freeman (rum) + kiwi and coconut + tangerine and ice cubes Jorge Sinsonte (tequila)+ kiwi and coconut + tangerine and ice cubes Calcutta Emerald (gin)+ tonic and umbrella + onion and coconut Definit (vodka)+ tonic and umbrella + onion and coconut Domesticated Turkey (whiskey)+ kumquat and umbrella + raspberry and ice cubes Boxed Champagne (wine)+ kumquat and umbrella + raspberry and ice cubes |
 Kiwi (lemon)+ Lieutenant Freeman and coconut + Jorge Sinsonte and coconut  Kumquat (orange)+ Domesticated Turkey and umbrella + boxed champagne and umbrella  Tangerine (grapefruit)+ Lieutenant Freeman and ice cubes + Jorge Sinsonte and ice cubes  Raspberry (strawberry)+ Domesticated Turkey and ice cubes + boxed champagne and ice cubes Tonic Water (soda)+ Calcutta Emerald and umbrella + Definit and umbrella  Cocktail Onion (olive)+ Calcutta Emerald and coconut + Definit and coconut
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Coconut Shell + Lieutenant Freeman and kiwi + Jorge Sinsonte and kiwi + Calcutta Emerald and onion + Definit and onion
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