Quality of items in Eulora is a big thing - it brings in more money for whoever can deliver it and it also gives one better dings. Or at least better chances at better dings¹, it would seem. Welcome to the murky shores of Eulora, this land open to all and totally opaque to most².

The most recent update³ was cheered for finally making it possible to actually do expensive stuff in a few minutes as opposed to a few months. After which there was silence and renewed confusion as to what is what and how much any darned thing is worth. Quite a lot of discussion ensued in the #eulora irc chan although mainly between me and Mircea Popescu as the rest of the veteran players⁴ seem to either have no clue or have no appetite for talking at this stage. Hopefully they'll find one if not both at some later point before totally sinking out of sight, unknown and unmissed for lack of actually being there, who knows.

While discussions in logs are all fine and good, they tend to be difficult to find and retrieve at a later time. So for my own future needs and potentially for others' use, I'd rather jot down here a few data points on all this. The most recent problem is that apparently *everything* works now as a quality sink: mining eats up crafted items of 4k quality to give back harvestables at 900q while crafting wants also to eat harvestables at 900q to possibly give something back at all (not even clear if >900q, at that; a reported craft that "almost works" brings down q from 90 to 84). After all sorts of experiments with my team of noob and not-so-noob helpers, I suggested that people might simply be approaching the issue here from the wrong end, a sort of trying to dig their way out of the hole instead of making a ladder to climb back up. I know that a big-enough dig can indeed get one out of any hole through the other side, but Eulora's rather short on shovels at this very moment⁵. So how about that ladder then? It starts with more experimenting and concrete data, such as this, collected over only a few crafting runs of Slag (base value 677):

All the runs had remarkably similar results (same quality always, same number of slag items always except where it appears in table as 4-5 i.e. sometimes 4, sometimes 5) so I simply recorded one result for each combination. The bundles there are all identical and made by the highest skilled crafter as she can pack most value into the bundle. Specifically, each bundle is made out of 17 Flotsam q192 and 11 Shiny Rock 187q. For one thing, this suggests that the highest crafter packs the ingredients for almost 4 slags into one single bundle. For the other, it means that any output < 190q is anyway a sink of quality, no matter how one looks at it. And looking at it, there is some support on both points: 4 slags are reliably obtained by highest skilled crafter with a blueprint of lowest quality possible, 1. They are however q32 meaning that quality was severely lost in the process. When quality is not lost by the highest skilled crafter, it is however totally transfered to numina it would seem: all output is numina and no slag at all.

Considering the results of the other two crafters, the most interesting part is that they can actually get Slag of higher quality than the inputs that went in: for the same ~q190 harvestables used as input, they get reliably outputs >q150, even close to q200 in one combination! So for one thing it's certainly NOT true that crafting is a sink of quality, quite on the contrary: it clearly creates quality of output - the only trouble is however to match the sort of output one wants (i.e. product not so much numina at the moment).

The even more interesting bit suggested by this teeny tiny amount of data is with respect to just how much of the actual value going in is then obtained back as Slag rather than numina. The input value is roughly 677*6.64 = 4495 ignoring the value of the blueprint (which is not much at 67*1.33 maximum in there). Highly skilled crafter gets precisely 0 in Slag out of this and all of it in numina unless they go for low quality when they get between 4*677*0.32=866 and 5*677*0.32=1083 so anyway about a quarter maximum. By contrast, middle level crafter gets 2*677*2.13=2884 or 3*677*1.51=3066 at lower quality so about 70% of the input value. And lower level crafter gets even more at their lower quality 4*677*1.41=3818 (or 2*677*1.98=2680 for their higher quality).

Before jumping to any conclusions, I'll add that I'm quite sure that the data captured there (i.e. Tinkering and Sortage skill ranks, blueprint quality, bundle quality, item) is quite unlikely to really capture ALL factors that influence the outcome. For one thing I can tell for instance from long experience with those characters involved that the highest skilled crafter tends to be rather unlucky in everything she does, while the middle skilled crafter tends to be quite the opposite - lucky and then some more.

With the above caveats in mind and other potential limitations quite obvious⁶, a conclusion is to be drawn and that is that at least on such low base value items beginner and middle level crafters are actually in a very good position to bump up quality and make a killing - if only they do buy the bundles of a highly skilled crafter! In turn, their output is likely to actually help highly skilled crafters as it gives them more quality as input for more valuable crafts presumably.

As for the highly skilled crafter, it would seem to me that she would really need to somehow pack in at least 4 times the value of Slag at her output quality of 401 in order to stand a chance of getting q401 Slag. That means she needs a bundle of 4*677*4.01=10859 so about 3 times more than what she made for this little experiment. Either she gets that from an even higher crafter (who can pack more of same q harvestables into one bundle) or she uses harvestables at quality at least 600 by the looks of it. Good luck with that my lovely, as q600 harvestables will come at a hefty premium at least from my wares - if they even come at all as it's not all that clear at this moment that such stocks can be replenished if used!

Other than that: isn't it marvelous how much one can get even from only a few numbers? If only they do bother to get those numbers in the first place, of course...

1. The term of art in Eulora is "pop" as in "1002mn pop, wow!" i.e. you put in 10mn and got 1002mn out of it, you lucky bastard. ↩

2. That post was written in 2015, yes. Not much changed since then in terms of players' understanding of Eulora's actual workings it would seem. Poor Eulora, so totally incomprehensible, so entirely misunderstood... ↩

3. 'Tis not even by far the only update Eulora went through so far. And all updates introduce changes that so far seem to mess up players' previous plans something fierce. ↩

4. Noobs have yet some other things to figure out before standing much chance with this really. ↩

5. And since I'm not that young anymore in Eulora either, I can tell you that I've subsidized this sort of approach at least once before and I don't want to do it again, ever. It was costly, very very costly. ↩

6. Very small sample is the most obvious but you really are better off thinking for yourself on this. ↩

Category: Eulora

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