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.

Slower Mood Loss

I've updated my energy buying posts to reflect the fact that mood loss is slower with upgrades now.  It actually ends up making a really big different (especially coupled with larger stack sizes for transmuting).  Now I would say you are largely safe upgrading your energy to 4000-5000.  Exactly where the benefit drops off will depend on how you play.

Butterfly Milkers

First of all, Diablo 3 comes out tomorrow so I don't expect to be playing much Glitch for at least a few days, maybe even a few weeks.  As a result I probably won't have a lot to blog about, though I think I'll have to post something about the incredible cost of restoring objects in your street/house in the near future.

Until I get to that, though, here are some interesting things about butterfly milkers which probably apply to meat collectors as well.

Should you buy energy?

It turns out whether to buy maximum energy upgrades is a very complicated question.  I'd like to quickly go over some of the calculations that we can use to determine the value of maximum energy upgrades, and then talk about how to compare that to what we have to spend to get them.