Sally Noskills

While waiting for the housing change, I've spend a little time playing my alt, Sally Noskills, who has no skills.  Perpetually trapped in the early game, Sally provides an interesting perspective on what is fun and what is not fun.

Zoom!  Zoom has been incredible.  There has been so much to discover in the world when you can look outside the streets and see their entirety at once.

Second Butterfly Down.  This one gave exactly 400 milks.  Given my method of recording milks from the first, it's actually really hard for me to understand how I could have had an extra 38 on there, but I'm fairly sure I did.  At any rate, I'll be singing to this butterfly every day to see how much longer it lasts.

Eight Meat Collectors.  I have eight meat collectors in my house for my one piggy.  Unfortunately I am not noticing a uniform rate at which their are collecting meat.  With one it was definitely every 24 minutes just like the butterfly milker, but with eight I'm sometimes getting around the same and sometimes getting a lot less.  I makes me wonder if the way the "slowdown" works is that there is just a chance that a tick doesn't happen.  Of course I'm also worried that the piggy not being petted might complicated the issue. After I'm done with the butterfly experiment I might try timing with milkers since that prevents any petting-related problems.  Maybe I should get an alt house somewhere and start now.  I can't see this as being a violation of the community guidelines since I wouldn't actually be getting any in-game benefit, it's purely for science.

Icon Update

My Icon experiments have not stopped - nor are they likely to in the near future - and I have some

additional results to share.  Some of this might not be entirely coherent if you haven't read my previous post on Icons.

Icons Love Money

Icons Reward Tithing.  It turns out the first action you take with an icon after tithing to it is more rewarding than actions that follow.  The average revere immediately after tithing was 50% larger than the average of other reveres.  Of course this doesn't change anything about how you interact with your icons, except that maybe you'll be willing to revere them when you have more energy, knowing that you aren't going to get a 1700 energy revere if you didn't just tithe.

Exhausted Butterflies.  My butterfly gave 438 milks before returning to Humbaba, and another Mathemaglitchian's gave 400.  We are both doing another test.  I'm not sure at this point whether to suspect that the amount of milks given is random or whether to suspect that it is 400 and I made a mistake.  I'll double check my times against the number of milks produced to make sure it stayed at one every 24 minutes.

Badges.  In addition to getting the leaderboards high score in a facetious way, I also collected some big badges this weekend: Paul Bunions, Senior Mending Manager, Kitchen Division, and Chute Jockey.  I also picked up my 811st potion pour, though that pretty much comes free with bunions.  It had been 12 days since I earned a badge and then I got four just over 24 hours.  Unfortunately my lack of desire to play Game of Crowns will make me a perennial 20th+ place on the badge leaderboards (which, by the way, are the real leaderboards).

Winning

Meditation Experiments.  I tried out meditation a lot this week and posting my findings on the Glitch Wiki.  Most notable is that I previously thought Bubble Tea didn't work with Rank 3 meditation.  I assumed the two different +100% bonuses didn't stack.  It turns out it just doesn't work right with normal meditation at all regardless of rank, but it works fine with focused meditation and transcendental radiation.  This is now posted as a bug on the bugs forum.

Startling Fecundity.  I decided to start testing this stuff to see what it is worth.  Unfortunately, it seems that it is probably not worth using at all.  Nothing conclusive yet, but after a couple of throws on animal-packed streets I am pretty sure I am not getting my 300 currants a charge worth.  The problem is that there is a limit on the number of animals it will affect, and it will affects chickens which only give 10 currants worth of goods when affected.  I'm going to have to try this stuff at home with a controlled animal environment.

High Score!  I have finally earned the high score on the leaderboards.  If you don't know what I'm talking about, compare this with this.  Maybe I should have some kind of party?  I understand there are party organizers who help with this sort of thing.

Make Mine Mining

I really like mining math.  The reason I like it so much is that the math is super simple and the consequences of it are incredibly complex.  Here is a quick rundown of how mining works:

• When you mine you generate a random number of chunks
• To that number is added a bonus for each time someone used the "Help Mine" action
• The total number of chunks received is subtracted from the number of chunks remaining in the rock  if the rock is out of chunks it disappears

These simple rules give rise to so many unintended consequences.  For those of you who don't like reading through swaths examples and math, here is what you need to know about mining, in short:

• If you had your choice, you would better off being by yourself in the area you are mining; but
• Given that other glitchen are around, you are all better off helping each other mine

How Embarassing!

In a humbling example of why you should always double check you numbers before talking about things, I have discovered that my understanding teleportation costs for lower ranks of the skill were way off.  In fact, the actual cost of teleportation for ranks 1 through 4 is pretty much what I was suggesting they change the cost to in my maximum energy policy paper!

So, on one hand I was a total idiot.  On the other hand, apparently TS agrees with my instinct for what the cost of teleportation should be.  I've amended the policy paper and still suggest changing meditation to be maximum energy based, and reducing the extremely high value of quoins in the Ancestral Lands but also reducing their respawn time so that players can get the same effect from a visit but use up more of their maximum quoins per day to do so.

New Banner

I've put up a banner on the site that was gracefully provided by Muncey Mango.  I appreciate the theme and especially the small humbaba symbol.  My understanding is that more may be coming, and I hope to have updates from time to time.  Eventually I may look at some redesign away from the pre-packaged blogger theme, but I think it looks quite nice so I'm in no hurry.

Mining, how does it work?

I have a couple of projects on the go right now.

Butterfly singing.  We know that singing to butterflies makes the live longer, but we don't know how much longer.  Right now myself and another Mathemaglitch member each have one butterfly and one milker in our yards and are in the process of determining how many milks a butterfly gives before it dies.  Once we know how many milks a butterfly gives, and whether it is a random or a fixed number, we can try to figure out how much singing expands that number.  Results so far: Butterfly milkers tick once every 24 minutes, generating 10 milks per game day.

Rocks contain 50 chunks.  Well, about one in six or seven rocks contains 150 chunks.  I'll caveat this by saying it's speculation, but at this point it is pretty well supported speculation.  Even though rocks have 50 chunks, you usually get more than 50 chunks from a rock.  That's because the game always gives you the full amount of chunks from the mining action, even if the rock you are mining doesn't have enough.  So each action gives the same amount, regardless of the number of chunks remaining, but once the total mined adds to 50 the rock disappears.  I'll have more information about mining in the near future.

The value of everything.  I'm working on a giant spreadsheet that will let you calculate all kinds of useful things about crafting.  I'm just about to cut and paste all the information about every cooking recipe into it and then I can do some debugging.  After that I'll work on other recipes.  If anyone has any suggestions for how to assign values to elements I'd be very interested.

Icons at Home

Last week I talked about carrying icons around with you, but I didn't address leaving them at home.

Leaving icons at home is good because of Giant Love, but it somewhat restricts your ability to use them as energy sources since you have to be in a specific place to do so.  If you regularly visit your home and use them when you are there anyway this is a good deal.  For many Glitchen, however, using icons at home will mean teleporting home and teleporting back.  Since this couldn't possibly be viable without teleportation 5, I'll just assume that we have it.

Now with Group

I had decided to pace myself by making only one post a week, but it turns out I'm not good at not saying things.  So I'm going to permit myself two, but save the analysis for Fridays only.

Levitation Does Not Count as Meditation.  This week I took up the challenge of answering a question from DUG1138 in the General forum.  I made myself a little glitch friend, got him a lab coat, learned levitation, and levitated 345 times.  If you are curious about the number, levitation lasts 5 seconds and the smallest badge is 23 minutes, so 276 levitations should do the trick, but I was concerned there might be an off-by-one error, so I assumed levitation would only add 4 seconds to the count.  The result: no badge.

Orange Hair.  Last night, on the 7th of Candy, Li'll Missy suggested having a party for Innie to celebrate the fact that her human accidentally died her hair orange.  We all donned orange themed costumes and hair and decorated a party space with orange food and drinks.  You can see a forum post with a link to a picture here.  I sort of like the change, so I'm going to keep the orange hair for a little while.  The only downside is that it doesn't go with my octopus, so for a little while I'll be showing my antlers instead.

Mathemaglitch Group.  I decided to start an official group for Mathemaglitch.   I'd like to have a place where people can ask questions like "Does levitation count as meditation" or "Is tithing worth it?" and other people can find answers.  Obviously I'm using this blog as a vehicle for that, but I'd like to have a link back into the game.  Of course I am not one to do recruitment drives and that most groups fairly rapidly become defunct and silent, so I don't exactly have my hopes up.  If nothing else, though, I wanted to see how starting a group works.  For Science!

Icons!

I've spoken up in a couple of forum threads about whether it is worth it to tithe to icons.  Being level 60, I never use them for mood or xp, but for the last few weeks I have been carrying all eleven icons around in my bags to revere when I get low on energy.

Tithing to icons at high level is somewhat expensive so it seems a lot of people choose to stop tithing and, consequently, to stop revering.  I've posted a couple of estimates suggesting that it is indeed efficient to use tithe and revere, but without data I felt the need to be very conservative in my estimates.

I now have more than 300 icon uses to average, so I can be pretty confident that my estimates are reasonable.  I'm made more confident because in the last 100 uses the average has only changed by around 5.  It's not dead on, I'm sure, but it's not way off either.  In the end, I averaged 709 energy per revere and 4 reveres per tithe.  That's 0.49 currants per energy.  Tithing seems to be an efficient way to turn currants into energy.