Making Lots of Potions

Update: The imagination upgrades have changed how many seeds we get, how many herbs we get, and how sure we are about both.  I've updated the post to fix the numbers.

There was a recent forum post from someone looking for tips on how to maximize their efforts towards the potion badges.  1033 potions is a lot of work, and while you can certainly spend some of your efforts towards this badge doing useful things, ultimately you are probably going to just grind out several hundred potions.

For those with limited time or limited interest in the analysis, the recommendation is this: Grow gandlevery while you are online and yellow crumb flower while you are sleeping, at work or at school.  Make Charades Potions and Tree Poison Antidotes, unless you really don't care about money, in which case make Rainbow Juice and Tree Poison Antidotes.  Vendor the Charades Potions and sell the antidotes at auction.

More Mood!

Under the level system, energy and mood were always the same, but we don't have a good reason to think they will be the same under the character-upgrade-by-imagination system.  The fact that they were the same could be seen as an accident until now, for a somewhat anachronistic but personally-beloved meaning of "accident."

More Energy!

Since we are going to have to be choosing whether or not to get more maximum energy soon, we should probably know whether we want more maximum energy or not.  If you'd like to cut to the chase, click here to jump to my simple calculation.  Otherwise, enjoy the ride.

Level 60s and Badges

Over 400 glitchen have reached level 60 to date, and there is probably another week to go before xp goes away.  I still have the high score, naturally.

1009 Tinctures.  I was a little surprised this one took as long as it did.  It seems like I made so many tinctures that did not go into potions that I would have hit this way in advance of hitting the potion badge, but I suppose it's easy to overestimate how many things you've actually made.

5000 Herbs.  This one surprised me in the other way.  I thought I was going to get the top potion badge first.

1033 Potions.  It can't be much longer before I get this.  I have a very large pile of charades potions that were made after the 457 badge.  Obviously the number I need to get from point A to point B can't be larger than 576, so I have to be getting close.  Speaking of which, if you'd like a charades potion, feel free to request one.

Icons and Vendors

Oh boy, icons again!  Vendor prices have changed and that should change our evaluation of the worth of icons.  This time instead of whether we should be carrying them around - a question made irrelevant by free access to homes - I'll talk about the value you can extract from your icons in terms of currants and whether there is a good reason to be acquiring icons at this point.

Vendor Prices!

The new vendor prices are a little more complicated than they used to be, but not very complicated.  Prices at vendors, with a few exceptions, are set by two variables.  The first is the their base price for purchasing things from you, the second is their spread.

The price vendors buy at (or the price you sell at) varied by vendor before these changes.  Tool Vendor bought at 80%, most vendors at 70%, toy vendors at 60% and gardening tools at 50%.  Vendors still have this number, though it is no longer the real price they will buy from you at.

Each type of vendor also now has a spread.  This spread is subtracted from the price they buy from you at and added to the price of everything they sell.

For instance, Produce vendors still have a base buy price of 70%, but currently have a spread of 11%.  As a result, they will only buy from you for 59% of the item's base value and everything they sell it marked up to 111% of the base value.

Because spreads are currently very strange numbers like 11%, 8% and such, I expect they will change over time.  Keep an eye on them.

But as of this post, here are the base buy values, spreads and consequent buy and sell values for each vendor type.

	Base Buy	Spread	Vendor Sells at	Vendor Buys at
Alchemical Tools Vendor	70%	7%	107%	63%
Animal Goods Vendor	70%	9%	109%	61%
Gardening Goods Vendor	70%	8%	108%	62%
Gardening Tools Vendor	55%	5%	105%	50%
Groceries Vendor	70%	13%	113%	57%
Hardware Vendor	70%	12%	112%	58%
Helga	60%	10%	110%	50%
Kitchen Tools Vendor	70%	10%	110%	60%
Meal Vendor	70%	5%	105%	65%
Produce Vendor	70%	11%	111%	59%
Tool Vendor	80%	5%	105%	75%
Toy Vendor	60%	10%	110%	50%
Uncle Friendly	70%	10%	110%	60%

Am I Back?

Is this blog still alive?  We'll soon see!

Hiatus.  Well obviously I disappeared for a few weeks there, partly thanks to the Diablo 3 beta (I will disappear again on May 15) and partly because of my disappointment with the early March housing release.  That's not to say that the housing release wasn't awesome in a way, but because it was just a test, there were limited furniture styles and everything was free there was nothing to work towards and not a lot of play to extract from it.  I thought early March was the big change to imagination.

Butterfly Milkers.  Having a large number of butterfly milkers means getting less milk per time.  I'm determining the actual formula.

"Nerf" to Vendors.  According to today's tweet there will be a bigger spread between vendor buy and sell prices.  This is going to have a huge economic impact and will probably be a sizable benefit to the wealthy at the expense of the less-wealthy.  I'll get into this more in a couple of days, first I have to see what the new prices are, plug some numbers into existing spreadsheets and built a new spreadsheet.  I like spreadsheets!