My happy gaming life.

Last night sometime, before going out for icecream (which ended up with getting Indian food instead because that's the nature of Argentina), I set up my little Euloran guy - Mircea Mircescu! - to craft with his little tiny hands on the rickety table available some Sharp Clumps of Slag.

The process is relatively simpleⁱ, you say

/bot craft 3000ⁱⁱ 5000ⁱⁱⁱ M^iv 1260000^v

and go on your merry way (to icecream, except Indian food etc).

These Sharp Clumps of Slag are reasonably valuable^vi and he's pretty skilled, so they come out quality 142^vii, which will be nice once I turn them into tools (Stone Adzes) which are used to dig up further resources from the unyielding soil of Eulora.

So I wake up this morning, and lo and behold he's amassed a pile of 299 Sharp Slags, processing almost 1`500 Slag. And he still has 6`300 to go! Which means he'll be there for a while, about two days or so, crafting away like a busy little bee^viii, which is not particularly surprising, seeing how in making the Slag he used about half a day (the oil I had already). Just think, to make 10k Slag you need 50`0000 Flotsam! Do you have any idea how heavy flotsam is ? And how long it takes to find that much ?

But this is the beauty of it - I recently started hiring noobs^ix which has produced oodles of cheap, low quality materials. That doesn't hurt me any, as I can turn them into higher quality tools (as seen here) and consumables (such as Coarse Frangible Thread - which I've been selling by the stack, and for a reasonable price^x, too!)

There's one step left in this process - turning the shaped slag into actual tools. This'll need some Solid Branches (which I have) and some Disgusting Goop (which I... also... have), and therefore I'm looking forward to about 2`000 Sharp Adzes, which will probably come out with a durability of 10k or so each. That's 20mn worth of tools, and they use up less than 200 per click, so we're looking at a 100k hits sort of mining run. Which will take me at least four hundred or so hours (!!!) to complete, using up at least five stacks of CFT (which I don't yet have) and a further five stacks of LBN (which I do have!) and yielding no less than 45-50 mn ECu^xi worth of goods that will need further processing!

Life is good. Of course, an eventual blueprint crisis looms, but then again what sort of economy would be that where impending doom weren't right around the corner.

I can honestly say I've never enjoyed playing a game this much in my entire life. I was never one for keyboard mashing ; always the consummate Power Player I can tell you the "slow paced", math heavy nature of Eulora tickles me deeply in that secret place.

Life is good without level caps, without inflation curves, without no derps left behind. Life is good, and I'm loving every minute of it!

1. Thanks to the wunderbar one-year-old Foxy bot! [↩]
2. How many it should try to make - though there's no downside to ordering too many, it just stops when out of materials anyway. [↩]
3. How often it should check state, in microseconds. 5 seconds is often enough here. [↩]
4. That it should use the best materials available - not that it makes a difference here as I only have one kind in my pockets. [↩]
5. How long to wait before forcibly resuming - if it gets stuck or somesuch. [↩]
6. According to Diana's lists they're worth 8`824 ECu, ie 0.00008824×596.33 = 5 cents and a quarter each, at the last price. [↩]
7. Which means - add another 142% on top of that 5.25 cents, yielding about seven cents and a half.

   This is all the better considering the materials I use to make this (5 plain Slag and 1 Improbable Oil) produce a bundle that's merely quality 103, which means out of every single item produced, 39 quality points are value-added, and so profit (not exactly pure profit, however, as they also burn a blueprint to make - but then again as I don't expect these to sell for base value, but at a premium, something around 200% which should account for this). Roughly speaking, the proposition that 39 % out of 200% out of 8`824 ECu is my value-add for being such a skilled little dooby is correct ; and from that it then follows a cash value of about 0.39×2×0.00008824×596.33 = 0.04 USD each. [↩]

8. He takes something like 100 seconds to make one. If they're each making me a profit of merely 4 cents as per the footnote above, then I'm clearing 24 * 60 * 60 / 100 * 0.04 = 34.56 USD each day, certainly sufficient to pay for the power. Consider :

   mircea_popescu ;;genrate 5600000
   gribble The expected generation output, at 5600000.0 Mhps, given difficulty of 2.25832872179e+11, is 0.00598589878931 BTC per day and 0.000249412449555 BTC per hour.

   That's almost exactly equal to my projected 24 * 60 * 60 / 100 * 0.39×2×0.00008824 = 0.059466701 BTC income, which is to say that in this application Mircea Mircescu is equivalent to a 5.6 Thash miner! [↩]

9. It's really a very generous offer - people get a bitcent just for registering their PGP key and starting up the game. [↩]
10. The commercial grade CFT I've been putting out, q 150 or thereabouts, goes for about 5 mn ECu a stack (9`999 items). That's about thirty bucks right there, as the million ECu is equal to the bitcent (0.01 BTC). [↩]
11. I'm figuring about 20mn from the tools, about 20mn from the CFT, plus whathever the LBN yields. [↩]