Bottles and Storage

Bottles and storage

Bottles

Each game you add gets its own bottle: a folder with a small Windows installation (a C: drive, a registry and settings) for that game alone. One game's settings and runtimes don't affect another's. A bottle is not a sandbox, though: Windows programs in it run with your permissions (see Safety and privacy).

New bottles are instant APFS clones of a template made once per Wine build, so they take almost no space until the game is installed into them.

The Bottles section lists every bottle, with Show in Finder. Inside a bottle's folder:

Item	What it is
prefix/	The Windows installation. prefix/drive_c is the game's C: drive.
cache/	Installers and files the recipe downloaded, kept for reinstalls.
bottle.json	The bottle's details: the Wine build it last ran with, the graphics layer and winetricks it used, and versions it stays on.
recipe.yaml	For games you made: the recipe, to edit in your own editor (Open in Editor in the workshop).
restore/	A restore point, when there is one.

The recipe workshop's Bottle tab has the tools for one game's bottle: running installers and Wine tools, Show C: Drive in Finder, versions, restore points and rebuilding. Removing a game from the library moves its bottle to the Trash.

Games used in place from another drive

A game on another drive can be used where it is (see Installing games). Its folder is linked into the bottle, and the drive gets the next free Windows letter (D:, E:, …), so the game reads and updates its own files. If that drive isn't connected, the game says so and won't start until it is; Distiller never runs it against a missing drive.

Where Distiller keeps things

What	Where
The library, logs, settings, the recipe cache, icons, community pictures	Distiller's support folder, ~/Library/Application Support/Distiller. Always there, so Distiller can start and explain itself even when an external drive isn't connected.
Wine builds (and graphics layers and winetricks)	The support folder, or a location you choose.
Bottles (and their templates)	The support folder, or a location you choose. Bottles and templates stay together, because clones only work within one drive.

Settings ▸ Storage shows each location with its drive's format and free space, Change… to move it, and Show in Finder. A location must be on an APFS or Mac OS Extended drive that isn't case-sensitive. Change… moves everything in that location to the new place; quit your games first, since nothing may run from the old location while it moves. If a location is on a drive that isn't connected, Distiller says so and never creates the folder somewhere else in its place.

From a terminal: distiller storage show and distiller storage move (see Command-line reference).

Logs

Each launch writes a launch log (Wine's output from that session), and installs write logs too. A launch log keeps the first 20 MB and the last 4 MB of a session, so a game that repeats the same message can't fill your drive.

Settings ▸ Storage ▸ Logs shows how much they take now, and sets:

• Keep logs for: 3, 7, 14 (the default), 30 or 90 days, or until the size limit;
• Keep at most: from 250 MB to 5 GB (1 GB is the default), or no limit.

Distiller cleans up when it starts and once a day; Clean Up Now does it at once. Logs written in the last hour are never removed. Show Log on a game opens its latest launch log.

From a terminal: distiller logs, distiller logs clean, distiller logs set.