Pulling mushrooms by their wooly threads and other disastrous adventures

September 3rd, 2015

(This is a horrible 19th day in Foxy's Diary. The others are even worse.)

Last night I hunted for wooly mushrooms. Shrouded in darkness (since my clothes are just a bunch of rags) and with my trusty cruddy hoe in one hand, I moved and I plodded, I scratched and I prodded. And once in a while I caught a mushroom by its wooly wooly threads that gleamed white in the night. Oh, how it twisted and it tried to get away. And how I couldn't care less about it, as I just shoved it into my sack and I moved on to the next one.

By morning I had a good hundred mushrooms and a few to spare. And I also had a load of data, even more interesting than the shroomy creatures themselves. Here goes:

- A run of 4399 tries (gotta love the number, eh?). That's 822613 cruddy hoe “hit points” spent right there, or in other words, about 82 hoes (each try wears down 187 quality points out of a cruddy hoe). I start getting those old stories in which they were eating three stone breads and wearing down three stone sticks until they got where they wanted.

- Overall success rate is 53% (2344 successful grabbing of WM by their wooly beards, SM by their mossy hairs, a few AE by their shiny shells and all sorts of other stuff too). I'd say that's not bad at all for rare items such as these, but feel free to disagree. I'll enjoy it even, please do.

Update: to make it clear, the above are totals on a full-length file of mining logs. While they stand fine on their own, the WM run is shorter, namely made out of 2344 tries (approx 44 tools calculated as 2344*178/9352 since each tool had quality 9352 and it was worn-down by 178 points per try). Out of those 2344 tries, 2055 failed and 289 were a success for a much more horrible rate of success, of course. Those 289 successes were 21 small SM+23 small WM +3 tiny AE+136 tiny SM+106 tiny WM, just as previously noted below:

- Found 117 WM, 236SM, 3AE, all of them around 169 quality. If that's a quality really, not sure there.

- The above were extracted screaming, hissing and spitting from the following claims:

- 23 small WM and 106 tiny WM (small:tiny is approx 1:4)

- 21 Small SM and 136 small SM (small:tiny is approx 1:6)

- 3 tiny AE

- Quite as expected, small WM claims are small in gains rather than anything else, hence 27 WM were gotten out of 23 small claims. It could have been worse, of course, always, sure, no question about it. Wolves were hiding in the mountains, things were screaming in my mind. Still, small WM claims suck, there you are.

- The SM is slightly better behaved: 118 SM gotten out of 21 small claims. Curious though how I got a worse ratio small:tiny on SM. Probably those wolves howling or something. Scared any sense out of it all.

As for a bit of cost calculation, things are quite muddy given the mix of WM and SM. Still, considering values adjusted for quality, that would be 800k 440k coppers burnt (those zeroes will kill me one day) for 154k worth of WM , 38k worth of SM and 2k worth of AE. That's a wonderful loss, isn't it?

I'll leave it there. I did not even add the cost of thread or of the increasingly rare bits of nothing.

In similar ways, a different long run of 110 tools gave me 352EPS out of 47 small and 229 tiny claims, as well as some change in the form of 20WM and 42 TPT. At base value adjusted for quality, that's roughly 280k return on 1100k input.

Still wondering why do EPS cost 1k or more?