Transmutation Revamp

Veldrin

I think I got plumbum in my natural underground room in my house

[Deleted User]

Antonius said:

I generally prefer not to send commands to the game unnecessarily, because while it takes a little bit more effort from me when writing the script it's better for the game overall.

It's not necessarily obvious that it would actually be better. Adding GMCP or CONFIG MINERALS means adding overhead to every single move and look action for every character in the entire game, as opposed to a few extra extract commands while extracting (which are effectively limited by celerity and by balance cost when you hit a room you can extract in).

I also think it's completely fair to have you populate the table yourself if you want to automate it the way you describe.

I'm definitely still leaning toward keeping it out of GMCP, at least for now.

Skye said:

@Ronwe Home owners are able to upgrade room environments to constructed and natural underground. I don't own any extractable locations in my subdivision home , but I'm wondering how the changes have affected such rooms. Is there a fixed mineral to be found in homes/cities?

Just like everywhere else, it should be fixed by area. So which mineral you get will depend on which area your house is in!

I think it should all be handled, but it's possible that some housing rooms with the right environment might not get minerals. If that happens, please BUG it or message me.

Skye

Just a bit of feedback from someone who is very lazy, I feel like since you can only get one kind of mineral in any given area, it would've been so much easier be able to extract with a general 'extract mineral' command instead of "extract <mineral type>' >_>

Minifie

Skye said:

Just a bit of feedback from someone who is very lazy, I feel like since you can only get one kind of mineral in any given area, it would've been so much easier be able to extract with a general 'extract mineral' command instead of "extract <mineral type>' >_>

just quoting for emphasis.

[Deleted User]

Skye said:

Just a bit of feedback from someone who is very lazy, I feel like since you can only get one kind of mineral in any given area, it would've been so much easier be able to extract with a general 'extract mineral' command instead of "extract <mineral type>' >_>

I considered doing that, but it's very possible that there will be more than one mineral in a location someday. No specific plans at present, and they'll likely still be very predictable and stable area-wide, but I wrote the system with that possibility in mind. Without that possibility, any time we wanted to add anything extractable in the future, we would have to add a large new underground area or retcon the minerals in an area, which we'd like to avoid.

And in general, I wanted to push back against blindly extracting as much as possible. That's one of the reasons why transmutation is expensive, why minerals are tied to areas, and why you need to know what you're extracting in order to extract it. This isn't designed to be a system where you just go around pressing your extract macro without worrying about what you're extracting, but rather where you learn where to go for specific minerals - and if you set out to an area for some magnesium, you know what to put in your extract command.

It does mean that you need an area-to-mineral script or an alias to swap your macro's mineral, but that should be pretty easy to create for people who want it.

Kyrra

I really love this so much.

Antonius

Ronwe said:

Antonius said:

I generally prefer not to send commands to the game unnecessarily, because while it takes a little bit more effort from me when writing the script it's better for the game overall.

It's not necessarily obvious that it would actually be better. Adding GMCP or CONFIG MINERALS means adding overhead to every single move and look action for every character in the entire game, as opposed to a few extra extract commands while extracting (which are effectively limited by celerity and by balance cost when you hit a room you can extract in).

I also think it's completely fair to have you populate the table yourself if you want to automate it the way you describe.

I'm definitely still leaning toward keeping it out of GMCP, at least for now.

Oh, those weren't directly connected thoughts. I wasn't suggesting that me sending one command, rather than roughly fifteen (or however many different minerals there are) commands, would outweigh the overhead of supporting new information in GMCP. I have no way of estimating the impact of either because I have no idea how things are actually implemented.

It was more a general comment - in response to a specific suggestion, which was prompted by the discussion we were having - that I prefer to send the minimum number of commands to the game to achieve what I need to do in all of my scripts, and that (all things being equal on the game's end) it's better for the game if everybody who writes scripts does that because it reduces the total number of commands you have to handle. Wundersys' handling of curing priorities is/was an extreme example, but one that's both recent enough for people to remember it and widespread enough that everybody would have experienced problems because of it.

Whether or not you add minerals to GMCP, I'm going to take the approach that means I send the one extract command I need rather than a ton of commands I don't. I can - and probably will - automate the process of populating that table. Though I also have Harvesting, and that still seems like the superior option to me, so I'm not likely to do much extracting at all anyway.

Khaibit

Okay, irritations so far that I will put here in the hope they are fixed

MINERALS much like PLANTS would be very helpful. Let it show primes too, for those people who also apparently still need to waste our lives collecting primes.

There is only 1 type of mineral in an area. There are not that many places on the main plane that are cave/mountain etc, and this limits what you can actually extract. You have to travel the entire world trying to find anything. This is very annoying and time consuming and honestly standing in a laboratory was less time consuming than this nonsense. Please add more minerals in main plane areas.

Moghedu only having bisemutum is the worse sodding idea in the sodding world. 

Being able to convert some minerals every day into other minerals is not a solution to the issue of lack of places that have minerals that are useful. It is a band aid fix on a brand new change at best, and that is not a good sign for how much thought was put into minerals, locations and amounts that are produced. 

Minerals are now, even less time and cost effective than plants. Prior to this their massive negative was time to produce, but their bonus was that it was fairly easy to get the base parts you needed. Now their massive negative is time to find, time to gather, time to hunt the whole world for the minerals you need most, hoping no one else has already extracted the 3 rooms that have them. And there is no bonus to them any more.  You have made the time needed for minerals even more, with no positives. 

Why only 1 mineral type per room? Most plants have several types per room, why are you making minerals, which are already in very limited locations, even more limited?

I am not loving this change. I sense that the people who are, are not people who spend a huge amount of time making minerals in the past. It seems like it has just been made to make things 'different' without any real need for the change to have happened. 
It is on my list along with the trade skill furniture now as 'fricking useless and worse than what was there before' so, there's that at least. 

Dupre

MINERALS is already a thing. And primes can't be extracted anymore

Ismay

After lots of exploration and making lists, I have to say that @Khaibit has a point with some of her complaints. When the change first went live, I was thrilled. I mean, minerals are now kinda like harvesting?! Yeah, nope.

Minerals are now much harder to find than they were to make, previously. Honestly, if I am going to be selling minerals to anyone else other than city mates, my prices are going to skyrocket. Sorry, @Dochitha !

Until this is fixed, if it ever gets fixed, Transmutation is going to mostly be another skill used to supply myself personally, rather than others.

Khaibit

Dupre said:

MINERALS is already a thing. And primes can't be extracted anymore

you are correct, my bad
we have to turn minerals into primes
so lets add that to the wtf' list shall we?

Rekhyr

You can buy reactants at 10gps per you are not limited to 200, that's just what you get for free.

Khaibit

Rekhyr said:

You can buy reactants at 10gps per you are not limited to 200, that's just what you get for free.

I am not sure why you think that 10gp to be able to convert a mineral to another mineral is a good thing. 

Dochitha

My first reaction was yay too. Then, huge disappointment, QoL got degraded...

But I am glad we have this thread to hear feedback, so I am giving mine:

The problem is in its availability. I rather we don't have transmutate but increase general availability to fix it, or reduce the cost of getting reactants. 2000g for 200 minerals is expensive . Back then minerals can go as low as 4g per in bulk. Now hard set it at 10g per... lowering this to 1g per should fix most complaints. Can't find what you want, pay nominally and get what you want. 

I don't prefer such commonly used basic resource to be gated behind tremendous effort and cost. It will ruin the fun we seek in playing games.

Skye

Ismay said:

Minerals are now much harder to find than they were to make, previously.

Other cities/players are probably way ahead of me, but a preliminary survey of about 76 distinct areas on mainland (and a few ferry islands) yielded the following:

Antimony - 5
Argentum - 4
Arsenic - 1
Aurum - 2
Azurite - 5
Bisemutum - 2
Calamine - 6
Calcite - 1
Cinnabar - 5
Cuprum - 3
Dolomite - 2
Ferrum - 4
Gypsum - 4
Magnesium - 4
Malachite - 4
Plumbum - 1
Potash - 9
Quartz - 3
Quicksilver - 4
Realgar - 3
Stannum - 6

Note that some of these areas basically consist of the one or two odd rooms that happen to be the right environment.

Mind you, I find the bolded troubling, for a variety of reasons:

• Very high demand even before the change and yet are not easily sourced from more immediate available locales.
• A key remedy ingredient for high use curatives like health
• Is already a pain in the ass to obtain in plant form.

I haven't even touched Meropis yet, but I think a key point to consider in mineral allocation is that a player shouldn't *have* to charter a ship just to find the mineral they want. Honestly, I don't think they should even have to go to Meropis at all because that locks out the midbies.

ETA: managed to boost the magnesium count by 2 areas, but they're not particularly big areas.

Atalkez

The bolder scares me. Serverside doesn’t allow intertwined curing, so if I can’t find magnesium then everything else becomes worthless to me as well.

Puxi

You'll be fine without magnesium!

Skye

I think you should be more worried about the aurum. People are already paying through the nose for kelp.

Torinn

I think "paying through the nose" is subjective.  I couldn't be bothered harvesting the gold return was simply too poor for the time investment.  The increase in prices this will bring means that maybe it'll be worth spending time in again!  I agree it seems a bit too scarce on some of those, though unlike harvesting you can always extract even if someone has already been there, yes?

Skye

yes, the advantage to extraction is that it will always yield something even if it is just scraps.

Being a merchant, any opportunity for price hikes are entirely to my advantage, but as an older player, I just don't relish making newer players go through the age of 'we can totally grief people just by spamming X venom until they run out of cures and gold'.

12 gold per kelp is 'cheap' compared to the old herb shortage days, but people eat that shit like skittles.

ETA: In addition, I would highlight the fact that many of the newer or refurbished bashing areas are also now aff heavy. High consumption of curatives is no longer solely the purview of PVPers.

Cailin

I've been selling kelp for the same price as moss, and it sells out faster. I was hoping the transmutation change would fix that.

Torinn

Very true, but I would also argue that new players don't have problems gaining gold like they used to as well.  Anyways, sorry for derailing

Mindshell

You know, after trying the new alchemy metallurgy, it made me realise the whole sitting in labs forever could've just as easily been solved by making synthesis not take forever since we already had to go out into the world to extract. 2.5 seconds to generate 1000 primes/metals is way quicker than we had to deal with before. It certainly would've saved all the development hours put into this as well.

Rekhyr

Khaibit said:

Rekhyr said:

You can buy reactants at 10gps per you are not limited to 200, that's just what you get for free.

I am not sure why you think that 10gp to be able to convert a mineral to another mineral is a good thing. 

I was just stating you are not limited to that 'Being able to convert some minerals every day into other minerals'.
And it's seems fair to me, you either walk to finding places or you can pay 10per and keep rolling manara / moghedu. Both options are better than sitting 2 hours in a lab in chartoom mode in my opinion.

And yes, minerals are more expensive now, more in line with plants I guess? Why you think this is a bad thing?

Xaden

I've only found two aurum areas, also, but they're fairly large areas that yield about 600 each per day. I'm good with that.

Have a spot that does 1200 plumbum per day too, so that's fine. 

The worst offender thus far, that I can see, is magnesium. Anywhere that I've found it has been really quite small. I've no problem going through the wilderness to get somewhere to extract an important mineral but I fully expect that spot to be worthwhile going to and not just be 90 magnesium per hour.

Cooper

I think everyone needs to take a step back and give this a little bit more thought.

Each mineral previously took about 1.5-2 seconds to make when you considered extracting, transmutating to metal, then transmutating to mineral, ignoring any travel time.

Now the time per mineral is about .5 - ignoring travel time, and without the trait/arties.

Selling minerals before, ignoring arties/trait, net you about 15k an hour if you had a perfect script that used queuing for no down time. You can bump that to 60k an hour now (assuming you sell at 7 gold per).

Yes, you have to go out and find what minerals are where now, but that is a one time cost. And there are plenty of people (and cities) who have already invested the time and put together lists.

Even if you spend 30 minutes per hour walking from area to area to extract (hint: you won't), you will still make more gold than you did before.

If your concern is the 'extract' command being required to be mineral specific, you can make an alias that navigates that for you. If you can't code, you can ask someone to make it for you.

Xaden

To be honest, I've been whining a little on clan about the changes - but I've really enjoyed the exploration aspect of finding areas that produce the different minerals. On top of that, for the most part it does look like it may well be more profitable, all things considered.

I'd suggest that the people who have the biggest problem with it are the ones who bought their primes so they could sit mindlessly chatting in a lab all day.

Ismay

Oh, I loved that  it forced me to explore, an aspect of the game that I never really had an interest in pursuing. But that’s very quickly going to become frustrating. Who wants to make countless trips to Meropis, and to the areas far north, through all that wilderness? Not to mention sailing to whatever islands that may have them...

Torinn

People who do harvesting do it all the time.  Maybe it's time to get a different trade skill?

Keorin

Under this system, any mineral can be any other mineral for 10 gold each, which essentially price-caps things at 10 gold + however much profit the transmuter wants to make, since actually transmuting the things will take about a minute tops.  10 gold each is about double the price that minerals were at before, which seems to be the real problem. Setting that cap at 5-7 gold would move that cap far closer to the price minerals were at before.

Ideally, the system could reward transmuters who go out and hunt down their minerals, allowing them to obtain minerals more cheaply and in turn make a higher profit, while transmutating would keep prices from going too high and work for people who don't want to travel. Personally, I think that would be a neat system, the standardized price would just have to be lowered from where it is now.