Distilling

Post your distilling tips here.

I really need some help with distilling. Anybody got any tips for me? So far, my best has been a good.

I've yet to get an incred, but I get excellent every time and I'm Legendary.

Keep moving the white balls as far left as you can. The idea is to make as many crystal clear rows as you can (all white balls).

I move as many as I can left, building rows as I go, when it is too hard to move left any longer without losing white balls to the furnace, I start moving them right to complete my crystal clear rows. Doing this I can get at least 5 cc rows every time, but usually 6 and sometimes 7. My best is an 8.

This is in my opinion a hard puzzle and it has taken me months to get to here. But with practice it gets easier.

Some things to remember :

If there are 2 or more black balls in the row it will go down the furnace, 0 or 1 will send the row up to the still. So as you are moving your white balls left to make your cc rows, keep an eye on your (discard ) columns that you want to go down the furnace, make sure they contain at least 2 blacks, so as they don't go up to the still and ruin your score before you start getting the cc rows to go up.

By this method, I can discard a bunch of rows before I send up at least 5 cc rows, then I start the process all over again, moving to the left for as long as I can to make another set of cc rows.

Two sets of 5 crystal clears rows will give you an excellent score and produce expert labour. As will a set containing 6 or better. Rows of 4 will give you excellent score producing skilled labour. Anything less than these will give you a good.

If you own a distillery, you need at least one staff member who can do expert labour to be able to produce rum.

As with all the crafting puzzles, you need to be renowned or better to produce expert labour.

Don't bother with the tutorials , I found them confusing, if anything find a video and watch it to get the idea. If someone can tell me how to make a video, I'll gladly make one for anyone who would like to see it.

good luck!

Thanks Peache. Really helped!

yay!

yw

Ergh. I tried what you did and the first time i did it, it worked fine. But after that, I kept getting the white pieces stuck in the top left corner and the brown ones in the bottm left, so i could only get 2 CCs. Any help?

Just practice.

If i start the puzzle and there are a lot of spice pieces near the start, I will quit and start again. If the balls aren't going my way , or I just don't like the look of it either...I'll quit and restart. The best thing about crafting puzzles, is we can pause them or quit them and not go down in rating. We don't get a score unless we complete it.

Don't worry about spice pieces either, they really aren't that important, you'll get a better score for more crystal clear rows than a row or two with spice bonus pieces.

I got my best yesterday of a cc 9...though still no incred. I guess I need probably 10 or better to get that elusive incred.

Well done on your first excellent last night sword!

Wee!

okies, I asked an ult...

You need 11 cc's for the incred trophy, and you need to do 11 cc's on average every time you do the puzzle to get ultimate..


waaa we have work to do!!!

I got no chance.

Don't know if anyone still reads this board or not >.>



Distill ish my game XD I'm 4th in ocean on cobalt.. I'm a little obsessed >.>



Peache has the right idea of moving the white pieces left. *hoewever*
to make sure i give myself enough room to move about...
did you know that you can create a row of browns as long as you leave ONE space empty (Black) and it will burn?
It's an easy way to get all those brown out the way whilst your moving your whites left.

I distill with two colours really. brown and white. it's easier to focus on the way in which two colours move as opposed to 3.
Try focusing upon how two of the colours work together and see how you can move them.

I know. I'm awful at explaining it lol.
I tried making a video of me distilling before.. but well.. it lagged me sooooo much i couldn't get my usual 12CC
However.. i'll try and upload it somewhere as it will give you an idea of how i do it.
There is one move where you crisscross through the board that you'll see me doing a lot. it's the most valuable move in distilling!

*goes to find somewhere to upload video.I'll leave a link in this thread once I upload it/

Hi, at the moment, Distilling is probably my favorite puzzle. I have managed to hold on to the #1 spot on Hunter for several weeks, and only time and patience is stopping me from regaining it again (I am currently #2).

How did I do it? (see bottom of post for links)

A long time ago, I realized that the only puzzle I was not good at was Distilling. Not only was I not good at it, I couldn't get far at all by just trying to play it. I couldn't accept this, so I did some research. I quickly stumbled upon Sonnyz's distilling tutorial and after one look I was absolutely impressed with him and the puzzle, and knew that I wanted to achieve that level of mastery.

I studied Sonnyz's techniques and tried to emulate them. This got me somewhat far, but in the end, I had to think outside the box, or at least outside of his tutorial in order to adapt my own mind to the puzzle enough to finally achieve a CC^12.

Sonnyz's tutorial covers almost everything there is to know about the Distilling puzzle. There are a few techniques he omits, but they are only useful for improvement after you are able to achieve 12s at least occasionally.

It is important that the techniques shown in Sonnyz's tutorial, and all techniques that can be described in the puzzle, are symmetrical (as a consequence of the symmetrical rules of the puzzle). For the most part, he demonstrates only one of version of a technique (for instance, his "race track" method). It is important to practice techniques in all varieties, bottom, top, left, and right.

Lastly, the puzzle is really just about practice. This is really what I like about the Distilling puzzle: you can examine the technique and gameplay in detail, viewing a demo or tutorial, and understand how it is done, but you still need to play the puzzle over and over in order to condition your mind to perform the techniques as second nature. Although true for most puzzles, I find the improvement curve to be really evident in Distilling, you can steadily and gradually feel yourself improving at the puzzle. I am #1, and I feel that I can still improve my performance. Right now, I can perform a CC^12 about half of the time, but I feel that I can increase the rate even more, and I can definitely work to become faster yet. (My recorded record is about 3:30 for a CC^12, but I have not spent much time trying to set speed records. Also, for trivia, I have done a CC^14 twice, but sadly I didn't manage to document it, because both times I think I didn't realize what I did until it was too late)

If you are interested in the puzzle, and have not already done so, do yourselves a big favor and examine the following:

Have fun distilling!

http://yppedia.puzzlepirates.com/Distilling - wiki page on Distilling
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=sonnyz&search=Search - Sonnyz's famous Distilling tutorials
http://forums.puzzlepirates.com/community/mvnforum/viewthread?thread=16632 - Piplicus's screen shot tutorial

And if you're curious about what I can do, here are some videos recorded shortly after I broke the CC^12 barrier:
https://www.youtube.com/profile?user=somnlaut - the Waste Minimization video shows a technique (which I have since nearly perfected and generally perform much, much faster than shown there), of moving groups of pieces vertically, that I really should illustrate in more detail later.