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.