The Final Four

On to the fourth post on factors that affect maximum energy.  When I wrote the first post I expected to say that these factors wouldn't have much of an impact, but since then I've had some in game experience that has shown at least one of them to be potentially a big deal.

Energy and Mood, Together at Last, Again

Update: New upgrades will reduce your mood loss by one third, meaning 0.75% loss per minute instead of 1.5%.  I've redone the numbers using the 0.75% figure because if you are worrying about how much energy to buy you probably have a lot of upgrades and ultimately we'll get there.  I realize that a lot of people are having trouble finding the third card because it's super rare, though.


Also now updated for changes to Rookswort.

When you increase your maximum energy you also increase your maximum mood.  I already wrote about maximum mood and how it was strictly a negative thing.  As it turns out, your maximum mood is still tied to your maximum energy, so mood can be thought of as a penalty you have to suffer through in order to get more energy.

Full Energy Refills

The previous part talked about the four most basic factors in determining the value of energy: full refills each day, decay over time, teleport costs, and wanting to have a large enough pool to achieve certain conveniences.

Today we move onto items 5 though 7 on my list, the three other ways of getting full energy refills.  As a reminder, they are

5. No-no crashes
6. Get out of hell free cards
6. Refills from buying energy tank upgrades
7. Making crabs happy

All of these things can restore you to maximum energy, so lets talk about how they do it.  After I'll compare the effects of these energy refills with the base energy values I used as examples in the previous post.

Maximum Energy Basics

Are energy tank increases right for you?  It turns out this is not necessarily and easy question to answer, but it's getting easier.  I'm going to write a series of posts here explaining what you need to know to make an informed decision about increasing your energy tank.  There are still a minority of glitchen for whom increasing energy tank is detrimental rather than advantageous, but for the most part energy upgrades are a good thing.  Still, there's lots of math to do to identify how good they are and to identify that limited segment of the population who they are bad for.

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.