[DF] The Magical Moneymaking Machine?

[sjmdw45]

Originally Posted by Captain-Captain

The real money maker in DF may be the Mature spell when used in conjunction with alchemy. DF alchemy lets ingredients be more local. Local monster parts but local nevertheless. As Magic explicitly points out, Mature will work on elixirs. Preptime is reduced from weeks to hours. If there are no failures on the rolls, the Alchemist can produce 8 potions in 8 hours time. That kind of productivity pays. A 4 week potion's profits from an hour's labor.

The Artificer (from DF 4) has Alchemy and Quick Gadgeteering both, so cost, not time, is always the limiting factor anyway. A Resurrection potion (50 weeks) takes two and a half hours for a Quick Gadgeteer.

There's this confusing sentence in Magic that says that, for a Quick Gadgeteer, cost remains the same but to assume that whatever is to hand will do. I think it's trying to say that if a potion/amulet costs $25,000, you still have to spend $25,000 worth of ingredients on it but they're all pretty much fungible--it doesn't matter whether it's two $10,000 rubies and a $5000 dead hen's egg or twenty-five pints of $1000-a-pint troll's blood, you can make $25,000 worth of any potion from it.

-Max

[sjmdw45]

Originally Posted by Captain-Captain

The real money maker in DF may be the Mature spell when used in conjunction with alchemy. DF alchemy lets ingredients be more local. Local monster parts but local nevertheless. As Magic explicitly points out, Mature will work on elixirs. Preptime is reduced from weeks to hours. If there are no failures on the rolls, the Alchemist can produce 8 potions in 8 hours time. That kind of productivity pays. A 4 week potion's profits from an hour's labor.

The Artificer (from DF 4) has both Alchemy and Quick Gadgeteering, so cost, not time, is always the limiting factor anyway. A Resurrection potion (50 weeks) takes two and a half hours for a Quick Gadgeteer.

There's this confusing sentence in Magic that says that, for a Quick Gadgeteer, cost remains the same but to assume that whatever is to hand will do. I think it's trying to say that if a potion/amulet costs $25,000, you still have to spend $25,000 worth of ingredients on it but they're all pretty much fungible--it doesn't matter whether it's two $10,000 rubies and a $5000 dead hen's egg or twenty-five pints of $1000-a-pint troll's blood, you can make $25,000 worth of any potion from it.

-Max

[Captain-Captain]

Originally Posted by sjmdw45

The Artificer (from DF 4) has Alchemy and Quick Gadgeteering both, so cost, not time, is always the limiting factor anyway. A Resurrection potion (50 weeks) takes two and a half hours for a Quick Gadgeteer.

There's this confusing sentence in Magic that says that, for a Quick Gadgeteer, cost remains the same but to assume that whatever is to hand will do. I think it's trying to say that if a potion/amulet costs $25,000, you still have to spend $25,000 worth of ingredients on it but they're all pretty much fungible--it doesn't matter whether it's two $10,000 rubies and a $5000 dead hen's egg or twenty-five pints of $1000-a-pint troll's blood, you can make $25,000 worth of any potion from it.

-Max

Or one hour using the Mature spell. And cost can be defered by killing the right critters, or be in full effect and nullified by the acquisition of treasure to buy the ingredients. or be in full effect and be nullified by the profit from selling them. Alchemy prices have costs built in to account for the alchemist working on it for several weeks. Reduced to hours of labor, the profit is essentially more profitable. ;)

[martinl]

Originally Posted by Harald387

I really rather like this solution; bravo, kudos, and do you mind if I steal it?

Feel free, that's why I posted it. It was mostly a mutation of Kromm's gambling section - it seemed to me that DF encourages abstraction of these sorts of things, and from there it was easy to cut, paste, and mangle. (Note that any "elegance" is Kromm's - I'm just a hack. ;)

Balance may need tweaking, but I set it up to be less efficient than gambling in town, and more efficient than gambling between towns. Seems appropriate for encouraging adventure.