Introduction
I went as usual. Installed my Morrowind, grabbed a bunch of mods, set up a new character. Then at some point(about 3 hours in) I realised I NEED an ability to make skooma to sell it left and right to satiate my greed. As it happens.
I found a mod that allows to do just that, but it was not fancy enough for me as I already got spoiled with all that MWSE stuff. The Art of Alchemy in particular.
So, an obvious decision have been made to make a mod myself. Of course, as it also happens, somewhere in the process I decided that I need some additional mechanics to justify using MWSE.
An now I present a fully functional* distillation apparatus complete with functional customisation and loosely vanilla alchemy-based custom(and probably too suffocating for most) distillation mechanics.
*Testing was less thorough then I'd like it to be, honestly.

How to get the device
One and only copy is placed in a cellar of skooma-producing orc plantation. If you avoid combat with owner and become the best of friends with him he will generously offer you to share his monopoly and offer you a similar device for a small fee of 10000 and a set of alchemical apparatus(for parts).
Mechanically:
- Find and pacify Gurak Gro-Bagrat in his plantation. Talk to him.
- Have "skooma" dialogue option known to you.
- Eventually have 100 relations with him. I mean, he basicly sells you his buiseness - less would be even more unreasonable than it is now.
- Have 10000 gold and a full (4 pieces) set of journeyman apparatus with you.
- You can buy additional distilleries for the same price.
- if you kill Gurak you are stuck with a single device placed in his cellar.
- Device's id is apparatus_skooma, if can no longer persist in the doomed world you have created. And have no principles. Of which I approve.
- I am not confident in creating a proper quest fitting the thing you recieve, so this is all the "challenge".

How to use the device
Place it in the world and activate. Have loads of base ingredients for local brews - moonsugar, saltrice, wickwheat, comberry, meadow rye. The base consumption of ingredients is 10 per bottle.

Easy part:
- Top left slot lets you choose the main ingredient. It is filtered to only offer those that have recipes - about 6 or so.
- Under it are basic details for the process.
- Lower there is a calculated chance of success. It scales off your alchemy, intelligance and luck without hard limit, but their value is diminished after each 100.
- You can cycle the "Once|All" button at the bottom to choose mode.
- "Once" will distill one batch.
- "All" will deposit all the ingredients you have and run continiously while there are enough.
- Use "Distill" button to start the process. You can SHIFT-CLICK it to force brewing a vanilla brew regardless of what else you have in your device. While not helpful here, it may be later.
- Wait the distillation to finish. While the process is running it silently takes samples of you stats and the result will be calculated with the lowest you had. So of you are going to buff yourself into aether be sure to have properly long duration. Or refresh it before expiry. Or catch the exact moments with your 1-second spells(I don't know how).
- You can SHIFT-Activate the device running in "All" mode to stop it after the current batch.
- After the device stops you can collect you products in case of success, or leftovers in case of failure.

Hard part:
- You have 8 upgrade slots in each distillery. Alchemical apparatus can be freely installed there in any configuration. They provide different benefits depending on type and scaling with quality.
- Mortars lower the difficulty by their quality
- Calcinators lower the consumption by their quality
- Alembics lower the distillation time by their quality
- Retorts provide independant chance of an additional output per batch scaling with both total and own quality
- Retorts also provide a buff to the brew's stats. That is when you may want to force vanilla brews, if you need them specifically.
- You can mix and match the upgrades however you want. They stay inside the distillery.
- You can SHIFT-CLICK the "Pick up" button to collect all the installed upgrades, but leave the device stay.

Suffocating part:
- Each installed apparatus provides a secondary ingredient slot linked to itself(mortar provides 2)
- Regardless of the order of installation apparatus work in strict order. First by type Mortar->Calcinator->Alembic->Retort. Then from left to right.
- Your chosen recipe provides the guaranteed effects to the produced custom brew and starts exactly as vanilla one.
- Mortars' ingredients behave like in alchemy - effects matching among the pair are added to the brew. Each mortar's pair of ingredients is isolated and does not ineract with anything else.
- Calcinator's ingredient adds 1 random effect for each 1 of quality of the calcinator, may repeat. Remaining fraction of quality adds to the brew's power.
- Alembic's ingredient adds all effects matching already present in the brew. Will respect the ones added by previuos apparatus.
- Retort's ingredient only provides its value to the brew - its effects are actually ignored.
- As a general rule - if added effect is new to the brew - it is just added. If it is already present - it instead contributes to whole brew's power multiplier.
- Brew's power multiplier is applied to both magnitude and duration of all the brew's effects.