(This could certainly be a whole category of troubles Foxy's bloody diary, if only there were categories to all the trouble.)
As a seasoned explorer of Eulora, maker of maps and of bots and of whatnots, Foxy knows where to search to find troublePetrified Bubbles, Dead Molluscs or other things of that sort. In a word, things that are worth 100+ times more than the basic stuff that can be found almost anywhere. For the naive explorer of words-other-than-Eulora, this might seem as the very opposite of trouble - the light, the profit, the happiness, the printing of money - in a word heaven without hell and earnings without losses or something of the sort. However, Eulora just doesn't work like that - it simply doesn't do all this "there shall be no trouble" thing and most probably it will never do it, not even when pigs1 fly all the way to the moon.
To illustrate this interesting2 lack of unbalanced happiness on Euloran soil let's consider for a second that you've got - as Foxy did - not only the rare knowledge of where Petrified Bubbles or Microgoats are, but also the concrete keys to corresponding claims3 for such resources. Such claims come in various sizes and increasing cost of building4:
Tiny claims take 1 Little Bit O' Nothing to build and so they cost 11 coppers.
Small Claims take anything between 1 and 7 Coarse Frangible Threads and so they cost between 180 and 1260 coppers.
Ordinary Claims take all sorts really, but adding them at base value reveals that they simply take about 15000 coppers, give or take some change. More precisely:
Ordinary claim of Petrified Bubble is 6*262+11*67+4*59+5*399+5*1963=14355.
Ordinary claim of Microgoat is 2*5439+2*1096+11*79+1484+73=15496
On the bright side, those two ordinary claims don't even require anything really rare - the PB claim takes some molluscs, but that's not a terrible issue. And the microgoat one takes one pacademia nut and otherwise plain and simple oil, almost as boring as it gets5. So then: what's the trouble?
The trouble is of course on the less-than-bright side, namely output and value and the likes. Out of the tiniest of claims (and thus for as little as 11 coppers), one will get at least one item. So one PB perhaps, meaning a whopping 43000 coppers and change. Or one microgoat with its rather macrovalue of about 86000 coppers. And that is only base value, as one can easily (sort of) get higher quality and therefore multiply those values by a factor of 2 or more. Small claims are especially good for this seeing how they easily allow overbuilding - the use of 7 threads instead of 1, thus pumping up the cost of building the claim but also the quality (hence, value) of output. For most resources *other* than those 2 discussed here, ordinary claims also quite imply overbuilding, since the 15000 coppers going in are certainly more than the 73 cost of one crumbly rock or even the more considerable 1963 cost of mollusc. However, for PB and Microgoats, ordinary claims are suddenly quite a pain to truly overbuild - at 86000 the microgoat and 15500 the ordinary bundle one needs 5.54 times the base value of the bundle (hence 554 quality points) to only match the smallest output at base value.
Sure, the above means that one is at least quite guaranteed a profit out of building an existing tiny/small/ordinary claim of PB or Microgoat. Assuming of course that there was no accumulated loss in *getting* such claim - quite a naive assumption. Nevertheless, the weirdness and trouble starts when one considers what quality of bundle should one make to build an ordinary PB or Microgoat. Should it be the lowest quality possible? That would mean apparently high profit as one PB is one PB and one Microgoat is really no smaller than another. However, a bundle of quality 1 will ALSO lower the quality (and therefore the value) of the output. Similarly, a high quality bundle will increase the quality of the output and given that each quality point of a PB is in fact worth 431 coppers and each quality point of Microgoat is worth 859 coppers, that's arguably not such a small matter. Adding to that the markup incurred on different ingredients required for the ordinary bundle, the whole thing suddenly becomes rather difficult to clearly decide on - and then one wonders simply why the ever loving fuck one got an ordinary instead of a plain old uncomplicated tiny or small - the result would STILL be 1 PB or 1 Microgoat, overbuilding the hell out of it would be waaaay simpler and more straightforward, underbuilding it would give no qualms and the trouble overall would be quite non-existent.
So then, can anyone come with any idea as to the actual usefulness of ordinary claims6 for high value items such as PB and Microgoat? Other than providing trouble, I mean. And perhaps the cuteness of an Ordinary Microgoat:
They are called Multifunctional Samovars in Eulora for some reason ↩
Some might call it painful, by another name. ↩
Basically they would be the equivalent of veins I suppose - they mark the place where you need to build something to extract the actual resource - in unknown quantities, mostly small quantities, sometimes large and at rare times huge. ↩
Will use base value throughout, to keep things simple at least for starters. ↩
Boring IS good on Eulora - you don't want the sort of excitement that happens there ↩
It's unclear - due to lack of data on the matter - whether the next size up for claims, namely Sizable would even do, but one can always hope it does and then go and dig. ↩
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