Concepts

Key ideas

A few words come up everywhere in Distiller. This page explains them and how they fit together.

Recipe

A recipe is a short YAML file that describes how to install one game and run it well. It says:

• where the game comes from: the publisher's official installer (a download link, or the download page when there's no direct link), or files you already have, such as a game folder on your Mac;
• what it runs on: the kind of Wine build and the graphics layer;
• how the Windows side is set up: the Windows version, runtime components (fonts, .NET Framework, Visual C++ runtimes) installed with winetricks, registry settings and DLL overrides;
• how it starts: the program to launch, its arguments and environment variables (tuning options for the graphics layer, for example);
• adjustments for particular Macs (overlays), such as capping the frame rate on Macs with less than 16 GB of memory.

Recipes are data, not programs: they can't run commands on your Mac, and every path in them stays inside the game's bottle (see Safety and privacy). A game can have several recipes, for example one per graphics layer. Recipes from the community catalogue are ranked by how they ran on Macs like yours.

Bottle

A bottle is a Wine prefix: a folder holding a small Windows installation (a C: drive, a registry, settings) for one game. Each game you add gets its own bottle, so one game's settings and runtimes don't affect another. New bottles are instant copy-on-write clones of a template (APFS clones), so they cost almost no disk space until they change.

A bottle is not a sandbox: Windows programs in it run with your permissions and can read and change your files like any app. Install games you trust.

Components

Components are what Distiller runs games with. It downloads them from their publishers (or imports them from your own downloads) and keeps several versions side by side:

Component	What it is
Wine build	The software that runs Windows programs on macOS. Distiller installs Wine Staging (or Wine Devel) builds for macOS.
Graphics layer	Translates the game's Direct3D graphics for your Mac: D3DMetal (Apple's, Direct3D 9–12 on Metal, imported from your own Game Porting Toolkit download), DXMT (Direct3D 10 and 11 on Metal), DXVK (Direct3D 9–11 on Vulkan through MoltenVK), or WineD3D (Wine's own, through OpenGL; the most compatible and usually the slowest).
winetricks	The tool that installs Windows runtime components (fonts, .NET Framework, Visual C++ runtimes, DirectX extras) into a bottle.

Each component has one active version, which new games use. A game can follow updates or stay on a version you choose. See Components and updates.

How a game is installed

1. Distiller reads the recipe and works out the settings for your Mac (the recipe, plus any overlays that match your Mac, plus your own local changes).
2. It makes a new bottle with the active Wine build.
3. It sets the Windows version and registry, adds the graphics layer, and installs each winetricks component.
4. It runs the recipe's install steps: downloading the official installer (checking it), asking you for files it needs, and running the installer.
5. The game appears in My Library, ready to play.

Community catalogue

The community catalogue is the shared collection of recipes and reports at nullfx/distiller-recipes, shown on the website and in the app's Community tab. Anyone can browse and install without an account; sharing a recipe or a report uses your GitHub account.

Community check

Before a recipe is shared, the community check proves it works for other players: a fresh bottle, the publisher's official installer, the recipe's settings, and you confirming that the game reached its menu or login screen. See Sharing recipes.

Ratings

Reports rate how a game ran on a particular Mac:

Rating	Meaning
Platinum	Runs perfectly out of the box
Gold	Runs perfectly with the tweaks in the recipe
Silver	Playable, with minor issues
Bronze	Runs, with major issues
Borked	Doesn't run