Game Balance

I wrote about different resources you can gather and how mining falls far short of the mark set by animal and tree harvesting.  Today I'm going to look at what effect this would have in a perfect market, why that is nothing like what really happens, and whether it might be better if mining weren't so far behind the other gathering options.

Gathering

There are lots of skills that let you combine things into other things, usually resulting in a gain in currant value and in imagination.  Within those skills there are many different things you can create and the gains for each vary.  When it comes to gathering the raw materials to make those things, however, there are three main tracks: Animals, Trees and Rocks.  So let's look at how we spend our gathering time and how profitable it is.

Street Imagination

Note: The information in those post is accurate as of the original date of the post, but things have changed.  I have made a page to keep up-to-date with changes to this, you can find it here.

With the help of some scientific alts I've compiled a list of how much imagination you earn from people doing things on your street.

Thing	Action	Img
Crop Garden	Harvesting	5
Herb Garden	Harvesting	5
Tree	Harvesting	8
Jellisac	Scooping	2
Barnacle	Scraping	3
Peat	Harvesting	6
Dullite	Mining the entire rock	15
Beryl	Mining the entire rock	20
Metal	Mining the entire rock	25
Sparkly	Mining the entire rock	30
Icon	Revering, Reflecting or Ruminating	10

A few things to note:

First, your daily cap is equal to five times your qurazy quoin value.  In addition to this, you earn your qurazy quoin value each day for free.  Thus, the maximum you can achieve each day is six times that value.  That means you have to be at least level 36 to get the top badge for your street stipend.

Second, rocks reward imagination when they are mined out.  A partially mined rock gives no imagination.

Third, only the actions above give imagination.  Petting and watering trees don't give anything.  Planting, weeding and watering gardens give nothing, as does tithing to icons.  I think the general rule is that we only get bonus imagination when our guest walks away with something for their troubles.

Fourth, animals and dirt piles currently give nothing.  According to stoot in the bug forums, this is an oversight and will be corrected.  I'll look to update the table at some point in the future.

Qurazy Quoin Value

Edit: I'm not changing this text for historical reasons, but all the values on the chart below are confirmed.

I've got Qurazy Quoin values for you for all but very low levels.

Purple Numbers

As Tribeca pointed out in my musing on purple, I should hardly make posts without at least some numbers, so I took a look at the post to see what I could quantify and I found it.

Suppose they did decide to implement a purple product that had the bizarre actions effect I described. What should you get when you use those actions?

Purple

Instead of numbers and things about the game today, I'm going to just use a post to talk about ideas I have.  I'm going to cross-post this on the ideas forum.  Somewhere in my heart I hope this makes you think, "No numbers?  I think I'll skip this post."  If it doesn't (shame on you!) then here is what I've been thinking about:

Earning Imagination from your Street

I've just begun my list of how much imagination you earn for everything that is done on your street.  It's not much of a list so far, all I know is that someone watering your garden plot gives you nothing while someone harvesting from one of your trees gives you eight.

My hypothesis, based on those two facts, is that you only earn imagination when someone gets something from your street.  If this is true then scooping, digging, mining, harvesting and picking herbs and crops should give you imagination, while watering, petting, and tending should not.  Fireflies will be a little harder to test and a little weirder.

Also I was out getting some metal last night and I ended up restoring some metal rocks on someone's street.  I've noted all of the relevant information about that so that I can compare the process with future restoration projects.  Mostly, what I want to know is:

• How does the game calculate the total value of a project (how does it know what percent done you are)?
• Does the total value of the project determine the imagination rewarded for it?
• Is restoring things really worth it now or should we still clear and replace?

Answer will follow in the coming weeks.

Another Mystery Solved

Thanks to various forum posters in a now somewhat ironically named thread, we have solved yet another numerical mystery.  If you want to know how much imagination you will earn per day from the rock simply by existing, it's equal to your qurazy quoin value.  Of course usually when you pick up a quoin you'll be getting a 20% bonus from full mood, so you'll have to divide that by 1.2.

According to information from the developers, we know that this is 20% of the maximum you can earn from people visiting your street., so you could earn up to five times the base amount in extra imagination (so up to six times you qurazy quoin value per day).

Also thanks to this discussion we know how to compute that value for levels 22 and up.  If you happen to have glitch with a street no one visits, you get the same amount of imagination from the rock every game day, and you are below level 22, please post your level and the amount you get.  Just a couple more data points and we'll probably be able to put together the entire chart.

Energy and Mood, Apart at Last!

Note: This post has been written to replace my previous post about mood for my guide to buying more maximum energy.  If you want to see the guide, look at the bar on the right under "Interesting Things" (I'd put a link here, but I want to plug my interesting things, you know).

The title of this post is misleading because your energy tank and mood tank are actually still the same size.  What has changed in recent days, though, is how the size of your mood tank affects the amount of mood you lose periodically.

The Spice (Beans) Must Flow

The other day I did a detailed analysis of Chicken Eggs vs. Fruit Beans, but there is another competitor on the field that is worth mentioning: Spice Beans.

Using the same kind of analysis we can determine the cost of making a spice bean is:
28.8 currants (36 energy)
58.5 currants (9 plain bubbles)
28 currants (4 general vapour)
28 currants (4 carrots from the vendor)
6 currants (1 bean)

For a total of 149.3 currants.  The return you get is only 172 imagination or 184 currants of value.  So your profit is only 34.7 currants.  This takes less time than the spice beans at only 3.75 seconds but that's still a very low return of 9.25 currants per second.

If you gather the materials yourself then you only have to pick up 14 tree ingredients but you still have to pay for the carrots, so that drops the cost to 56.8, increasing your profit to 115.2 and your time to 8.6 seconds.  So still only 12.4 currants per second.

There was a time I made spice beans because my intuition told me that using things with vendor purchased ingredients was going to be better than things without them.  Unfortunately that intuition did not carry from chicken eggs to spice beans, and fruit beans are better if you like beats.

Now you could reasonably ask why I'm not doing this analysis for every bean and egg, but there are pretty good intuitive reasons why we know it won't come out in their favor, and I'll talk about those after the break.

Eggs vs. Beans: Fight!

A recent forum thread asked whether it was better to make beans or eggs.  In particular, the analysis focused on whether it was better to make Fruit Beans or Chicken Eggs.  Some helpful comments on that thread explained the imagination gained for making and donating each and the energy required to make them.  What I'd like to do is convert everything into equivalent units and talk about which is most favorable for the time you spend making them.