Butterflies

I'm on my second run through singing to butterflies to see how long they live, but the first run suggests that singing extends the life of a butterfly by 3 milks.

Keeping butterflies in your house is a pretty huge return on investment, though a slow one.  I'm going to stick with donation-based valuation because it leaves a lot of questions aside.  A butterfly egg is worth 400, so for 400 currants you get to make 3200 currants over the course of six and two-thirds real days.  It's 17.5 currants an hour for very minimal upkeep.

Nothing New Here

I have to admit I haven't gotten a lot of Glitch in this week, mostly thanks to the beta of a certain other game.

Longer-lived Butterflies.  I unwittingly did an experiment in letting my butterfly milker get full this week. It is reasonable to wonder whether a full milker continues to drain life from the butterflies or if the milk-taking event gets stopped short.  By not logging in for three days I probably got my answer as my butterfly is alive and well when it would have expired had I been emptying the milker.  Of course this is confounded by my singing experiment, but I should be able to separate the two issues and be sure that a full milker doesn't shorten a butterfly's life soon enough.

Diablo 3.  Now obviously Glitch and Diablo 3 have slightly different target audiences, so I'm not going to recommend all Glitch players jump on the Diablo 3 bandwagon, but wow is this game fun.  Right now it also has the distinction of probably being the only action game I've ever played that is actually easier than Glitch.  If you don't understand how that could be, my only answer is that I beat the final boss of the beta without touching my keyboard or mouse - in Glitch you will actually die if you wander away from the computer for long enough.  At any rate, I'm sure they will sort that out and I am looking forward to fighting the forces of evil at launch.

More Mining

When there is a fixed amount of a resource in the world, more people being after it means there is less for each person.  This is an obvious fact in reality, in Glitch, and in pretty much every other game.  In the particular case of mining in Glitch, more glitchen has a synergistic effect that speeds the mining of each glitch.  That means that what's there will be used up even faster, making it seem like there is even less to go around.

As I discussed in my previous, overlong post about mining, the primary source of extra chunks when people mine together is not the bonus chunks but the extra chunks that are generated because people get extra ticks after the rock has disappeared.