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.
First of all, let's understand mood a bit. Every action in the game has a base imagination value. Nibbling a piggy with Animal Kinship 7 has a value of 10. Making a seasoned bean has a value of 50. Those might not look like the values you are used to seeing, but that's because having full mood actually provides a bonus. This is most obvious when you collect quoins. Imagination quoins are 20% larger than their currant and energy counterparts because full mood gives a 20% bonus.
From 90% to 100% mood you get a 20% bonus, from 80% to just less than 90% you get a 10% bonus, this drops to no bonus from 70% to 80%, then it goes to a 10% penalty and then it drops off from there. When you are at 80% mood or higher you lose 1.5% of your mood each minute. At 60% to 80% you lost 1% each minute. Below that you lose 0.5% each minute.
But we have a new cap on these losses. The most you can lose per minute is the amount you would lose with 2000 energy. So that's 30 per minute if you are at 80% mood or higher. We also have cards that reduce our mood loss by one sixth, one third and one half. With all three cards the most mood you can lose per minute is 15, regardless of your tank size. Also, you can only buy these cards if your energy tank is above a certain threshold. The first becomes available at 600 energy, the second at 1200 energy and the third at 2000 energy.
This makes the connection between mood and energy more complicated than it used to be in a mathematical sense, but much simpler than it used to be in a practical sense.
Buying Up to 600 Energy
Up to 600 energy the relationship between mood and energy is very simple. You lose 1.5% of your mood each minute. So if you go from 400 energy to 500 then you increase your mood lost per minute from 6 to 7.5.
What can you do to keep your mood up? By far the best thing to do is to drink coffee. Buy it from a grocery vendor for 6 currants a piece and get 12 mood back from each cup. The coffee takes 50 seconds to give you the full dose of 12 mood, but that more mood than you lose in 50 seconds so you'll easily be able to keep up. Alternatively you can just drink some butterfly milk, or even better yet, Slow Gin Fizz, when you are getting towards 90%. At any rate, you are looking at spending somewhere between 3 and 8 currants a minute to keep up with your mood loss at 400 energy and between 3.75 and 10 currants a minute at 500 energy. It's also worth noting that each time you refill your mood tank you essentially get 6 free minutes of mood.
But that's all assuming that nothing you do generates any mood. If you are mining that may be true, but other than mining you can generally generate a fair bit of mood from just doing things. With such a small tank I would assume that you are a relatively new glitch without high level skills. Even still, you can get 2 mood from massaging a butterfly with Animal Kinship rank 2. You can get mood from petting and watering trees with low level skills as well. With meditation rank 1 you can generate 12 to 15 mood a minute while crafting by meditating. It's not hard to keep mood up at such a low tank size.
Buying up to 2000 Energy
The moment you hit 600 energy you become eligible to reduce mood loss by a sixth. That doesn't mean you'll necessarily get the card right away, but since it is my firm opinion that these cards are all worth buying, I'm going to assume you are getting it in the long run. Since we are talking about the right amount to buy your energy tank to, if the answer was in fact between 600 and 1200 you would have that card. So going from 500 to 600 mood doesn't actually increase the amount you lose a minute. It stays at 7.5 mood. As you approach 1200 energy tank your mood loss per minute approaches 15 but when you actually get to 1200 you can buy the next upgrade and reduce it to 12. As you approach 2000 your mood loss per minute will approach 20 but when you get to 2000 you can reduce it 15.
Suppose you have 1700 energy right now. And also suppose you play about 2 hours a game day, teleport 4 times, use no-no and a get out of hell free about every three days to get a bunch of crafting done. For every 100 energy you buy you get about 55 available energy per day. You spend approximately 20% of your play time mining, and otherwise you easily generate enough mood through your actions or through meditation to cover the time-based decay. You have both upgrade cards that are available at 1700 energy.
If you buy another 100 energy tank then you'll get 55 more energy to spend each day, but 20% of the time you'll have to service the loss of an extra 1.5 energy per minute. If you are doing that with butterfly milk that would mean 2 currants per minute - excluding the first 10 minutes - 14 minutes a day, for 28 currants in total. So the 55 energy might not be worth it considering that you do have to pay for the upgrade as well.
But if you are look at buying 300 energy instead, you'll get 165 energy per game day but the cost of servicing your energy will also go down, rather than up. Instead of 17 lost per minute you will be able to get an upgrade and go to 15 lost per minute. So this is much more attractive.
What all this means is that you largely want to stay around 1200 until you decide you are ready to buy your way up to 2000. That doesn't mean you should save up and buy all those upgrades at once. It means that if you are working on lots of upgrades (you want to get all the 20% faster learning upgrades, you want to get your quoin multiplier to 20 or 30 or 100, you want to get your brain capacity to 30 or 40 or 60) then you might want to leave your energy at 1200 until you get through all those other things and then buy it up when you are ready to commit to a larger energy tank.
Of course that depends a lot on the specific values. If the same glitch instead teleported only twice a day and used the no-no/card combination every other day instead of every third day then that 100 energy tank upgrade would be worth 104 available energy per day instead of 55. Buying 104 energy for 28 currants worth of mood each day it a lot more attractive than 55.
Over 2000 Energy
When you are over 2000 energy getting more energy makes your mood easier to manage. You still lose the same 15 mood per minute but you get more "free" minutes and your mood becomes cheaper to restore thanks to Savory Smoothies.
At 15 mood per minute the least expensive way to keep mood up is coffee every 50 seconds which is 6 currants a minute. Of course you would still be losing 0.6 mood a minute, so you'd have to eat a bit into your free minutes, losing one free minute of mood for every 25 minutes you want to sustain your mood with coffee. To compensate for this we'd have to charge you and extra 0.3 currants per minute. But almost no one carries around stacks of coffee and drinks then every 50 seconds because it's just too much work.
So let's look at drinks that can easily be transported and consumed in stacks like butterfly milk. That would mean drinking 20 currants of milk a minute to pay for your 15 mood. It's a lot more expensive than coffee, but you aren't directly buying butterfly milk so it might be more reasonable to value that 20 currants at 15 currants - the amount of money you could actually get if you sold it.
There is a third alternative - Savory Smoothies. They are worth 96 currants each, but the market price had been going up so we should probably value them at 125 currants each.
A Savory Smoothie will get you to full mood from 90% regardless of how large your mood tank is and keep it there for 80 seconds. So if you have 2000 mood exactly and it takes 14 minutes for your mood to dip below 90%, you will have to drink a smoothie every 15 minutes and 20 seconds. If you have 3000 energy then it takes 20 minutes for your mood to drop to 90% so you'll have to drink a smoothie every 21 minutes and 20 seconds. At 5000 mood you only need to drink a smoothie every 35 minutes. At 10000 mood you drink about a smoothie an hour.
But also the first interval is free. If you play for 2 hours with 2000 energy then you'll have to drink just 9 smoothies. With 5000 energy that would be 3 smoothies. With 10000 it would be one. And that's only if you are mining basically the entire time. With 10000 energy you could mine for an hour and then go craft, meditating to replenish your mood and you'd never have to do anything to manage your mood at all.
So here is the cost of maintaining your mood, while mining for various energy levels:
Energy
|
|||||||||
Time
|
2000
|
3000
|
4000
|
5000
|
6000
|
7000
|
8000
|
9000
|
10000
|
20
minutes
|
125
|
0
|
0
|
0
|
0
|
0
|
0
|
0
|
0
|
30
minutes
|
125
|
125
|
125
|
0
|
0
|
0
|
0
|
0
|
0
|
45
minutes
|
250
|
250
|
125
|
125
|
125
|
0
|
0
|
0
|
0
|
1 hour
|
875
|
625
|
500
|
375
|
250
|
250
|
250
|
125
|
125
|
2
hours
|
1875
|
1375
|
1000
|
750
|
625
|
500
|
500
|
375
|
375
|
4
hours
|
3875
|
2750
|
2000
|
1625
|
1375
|
1125
|
1000
|
875
|
875
|
With 10,000 energy you could mine for 4 solid hours (beyond this you hit a new day, obviously) and spend less than 1000 currants maintaining your mood. That's only 3.6 currants per second, cheaper even than coffee.
Of course Savory Smoothies are going to get hit with the same stick rookswort did (they really will, it's just a matter of time), so this particular advantage of high energy could go by the wayside. Still, the free hour of no mood loss you get with 10000 energy is a real thing. It very likely means you'll never have to think about mood again. Even at 5000 you can mine for half an hour at a time without thinking about mood.
What about activities other than mining?
Basically everything other than mining you'll be fine. You need three piggy nibbles a minute to keep your mood up. If you are crafting you only need to squeeze 7.5 seconds of meditating in each minute to keep your mood up.
How much of a consideration is mood?
There is still a relationship between energy and mood, and one you may well notice if you start a new glitch and decide to pick up mining as your fist skill. In the long run, though, mood is not much of a factor in any late-game decision, and I don't think it's worth considering if you are deciding between 2000, 3000, 5000 and 10000 energy.
The next part goes over a list of the remaining things affected by maximum energy.
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