Hi frens,
I’ve spent today meticulously crafting a spreadsheet in order to best optimise my harvesting of alchemica. What I found is that there is virtually no incentive to upgrade any harvester past level one if the space on your land allows it. When I first saw the game plan released, I was envisioned myself slowly upgrading all of my installations until they finally were all maxed out. My maxed out land would be pumping so much alchemica and I would be greatly rewarded for my efforts.
However…when you look at the data I calculated today, it is abundantly clear that keeping everything at level one is the best way forward. So, space allowing, spam building lvl 1 harvesters is how you make the most from your land.
What does this mean?
• Spacious parcels have a severe advantage when it comes to harvesting as they have 128 spaces for 2x2 installations
• Humble parcels get rekt
• To build a single level 6 FUD harvester on a humble parcel nets a negative return (meaning it is impossible to extract enough FUD to cover the cost of installation) - this is at today’s market rates
• Players are encouraged to spam build the same installation over and over across their entire parcel. This leads to a boring world environment and also discourages anyone from building aesthetically cool lands at the expense of yield.
• There is no incentive to level a harvester beyond level 3/4 maximum on any sized parcels.
There are a few advantages to upgrading harvesters. The main one being the rate of extraction. But even still, it doesn’t serve any advantage to upgrade a single harvester to level two until your entire land is covered with level ones. Something tells me this isn’t the design intention.
Unless I am missing something entirely, I believe the best way to have handled these metrics would be to set a limit to the number of installations you can have on each land and then make their ROI increase with each level. So a level 9 would be badass and worth the investment. But as you can see with the current set up, a lvl 9 harvester only generates 0.25% ROI per day and takes 403 days to pay itself off. Bear in mind that quantity of alchemica doesn’t even exists in a humble parcel.
I realise what changing this entails, however we still do have time before things go live with installations.
I really want to play a game where level 9 is achievable and actually something people strive for.
Please discuss and hopefully I am missing some glaring detail that puts all this concern to rest.
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Wow, great work fren, would love to hear @coderdan input on this. Seems like the only advantage of building past level 4 for harvesters is the extra space.
Seems like either the limit on the amount of each harvester needs to be decreased OR the ROI of each level needs to be reworked to make level >4 harvesters worth it.
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The only fix I can see to this without completely re-working the Harvester numbers is to severely limit the number of Harvesters that can be built on Spacious parcels (possibly Reasonable as well, but I’ll need to look into that more). If we limit the max Harvesters per parcel to a dramatically lower number, this would limit the “spam level-1 harvester” mentality.
However, doing so leaves Spacious parcels extremely barren. We’re going to need more installations or Spacious parcels are going to look awfully empty.
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But what about the spill of harvesters during production?
I know that this is not in the GB, but if there is a spill, then there will be a motivation to upgrade the harvesters
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I spent a lot of time in calculations and took into account the spill of reservoirs and harvesters by analogy with the altar (5% less with each level and starting from 50% spill) - but still, upgrading above level 4-5 is not very profitable (assuming you can build 128 harvesters on a spacious land). But we can’t limit the number of harvesters in a spacious land to less than 128 because then the humble and reasonable lands will have unreasonable advantages (imo)
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Ahh yes. Looks like Reservoir Spillover was referenced in Chapter 2 of the GBB, but those rates/details were never shared. Even in the Recipe Book it doesn’t reference the spillover %. We will need that info before any additional changes should be considered.
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Reservoir Spillover was referenced in Chapter 2 – yes, but not about harvesters((
and because of this it seems that the upgrade is unprofitable
Yes, have been looking at the same numbers… the ROI drops off severely as you level up harvesters. The only circumstance I could justify upgrading harvesters in my simulations is if I’ve maxed out all realm parcels capacity with L1 harvesters first paired with a higher level reservoir(s)… as the incentive to upgrade reservoirs makes much more sense from an ROI perspective.
It seems to only be specific to Reservoirs and not Harvesters based on GBB Chapter 2. I’m assuming Harvesters don’t have spillover since they can’t store alchemica. But we still need to know the spillover rates of Reservoirs at the different levels.
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If I am not mistaken it was mentioned that harvesters do not have a spillover, they just quit adding to your reservoirs when they are full 
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Here is the reference in Chapter 2 of the Bible:
Question is, how to incentivize upgrading of Haarvesters…?
My idea for this:
you cannot combine a Haarvester with a Reservoir that is x (1,2,3…?) Levels higher.
example:
Let’s say the maximum “level-difference” would be 1:
a Level 3 reservoir can only receive Alchemica from a Level2 Haarvester, not from a Level 1 Haarvester.
…like: older tech is often not combinable with newer tech.
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What about making the upgrade costs lower, but the block time higher? That might both help the ROI of upgrading, while also helping GLTR and slowing down the economy overall.
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I seeeee. The spillover only occurs when you claim the alchemica out of it. The harvesting & holding doesn’t have spillover. So you hit the TX to claim all the alchemica and THEN you have the spillover…I think?
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Although it isn’t described explicitly in the Bible,
that is how I imagine it as well.
Spillover “during haarvesting” seems too complex to implement.
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I thought this was readily obvious from the get go. You build out till you run out of space, then you level up. I am not sure what other interpretation could have been implied by the way the prices and times scale exponentially, but the yields do not.
There are use cases for the extremely high level installs, but they are not appropriate, in the first round or two. You wouldn’t want an L9 harvester, unless you have a parcel that’s been stacking alchemica inside for long enough where that’s the only way you are getting the money out.
We figured out on day one of bible 1, that the answer is “stop at level 4” or may 5, if you high rolled.
And yes, humbles have always been regarded as a terrible value proposition, that you only buy because you are broke, or more recently, a lot have moved because some people have 1k gotchis and need more land count to have enough altars for their gotchis.
The system is set up perfectly, for a long term view.
Look at the ROI on the gear… you are NOT going to speed build. If you do, you are going to pay hugely for it and lose. You need to finesse it, and think about moves long in advance, and even play the market a bit as well, judging when it’s better to upgrade, or to swing trade. Think of how oil companies work… they dont run full bore all the time. They’ll build 100 wells in a few square miles, to be more efficient, instead of building one monster one. Unless… its out in the gulf. Then they build a L9, because the platform is like a humble with a really high roll, that noone touched for a year.
To give an example, a lvl 9 maaker installation costs ~20k GHST at current prices. You could buy 5 spacious parcels and all the installations to optimally extract from them for less than that extra 1 craft/upgrade at a time. Will we ever see a lvl 9 maaker? Why? If not, why does it exist? Though the maaker is especially extreme, the same point can be made w/ most lvl 9 installations as we understand them.
The goal isn’t to make an obscure metagame of timing the market (though that will exist regardless), but to create an addictive and attractive upgrade path that makes people so salivate over those lvl 9s that they will wait months or spend 10 of thousands to get there faster.
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The level 9 lets you mine out a parcel that’s been left untouched. It’s late game stuff, like, so late that alch flows like water and those numbers don’t seem so ridiculous. You want it out of reach… that means we’re not experiencing extreme inflation.
The L9 harvesters in particular, are a safety valve, to burn shitloads of alch and slow inflation, while still giving that one person who left a spacious sit for 6 months, a way to power through that backlog. The part where you lose half if you sell it, is also a mechanism that keeps you from throwing down 9s and strip mining, and then moving to another parcel. There are good reasons to do any of the level 9’s, but they are specific and situational. For most, slowly layering out harvesters and reservoirs till the hit level 4, will be plenty. However… there WILL be parcels that just sit, because people dont have enough alch to go hard on all of them, so they just park the low roll and come back much later.
Another way to thjink of it is… the only way you can get all the “banked” alchemica from a neglected property, is to go to level 7+, and whats really happening there, is it’s a “use it or lose it” tax. You dont get to just stack up alch in the parcel, and cash it out later for the same amount as you would have if you just did 4’s from the beginning.
Unless I misunderstand the thing… It looks like going to 9s means you lose about half or more, to extract everything from a really backed up parcel
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Maybe I’m seeing some conflict between the 30-year pacing of the game and the way most people (who will likely not be here for 30 years) will play?
There is a characteristic feeling to upgrades in highly addictive games, where one feels he is constantly reaching for the next level, yet constantly incredibly powerful compared to just a couple sessions ago. “I could cash out now for X benefit which I was just drooling over yesterday, but waiting for Y is so attractive, that, okay, I gotta double down again for the reward of tomorrow!” I would like us to recreate that here.
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128 harvesters ser. That’s pretty reachy, isn’t it? It’s not one thing you are upgrading, and it’s one at a time.
I was going to do a level 1 or two maker, and then grind my way up, and I think it will take me over a month to get to level four, if not longer. Thats with pouring some money in up front. If you start with just one and your gotchi, and no alch… ohman. It would take a year to hit level 4.
Super interesting thread! I finally had a chance to run some calcs too today and it definitely looks like bulk L1 harvesters are the way to go. The only real advantage I can see of levelling them up is mining out your parcel quicker.
For an average spacious roll, if you built 128 harvesters and kept them at L1 it’d take 6 years to mine out your parcel. Is everyone else getting a similar figure to this?
The upfront cost of these harvesters is 435 GHST at current alchemica prices and building one of each reservoir to L5 that can support daily collections costs a further 1,057 GHST. So for 1,500 GHST you can get this setup right now and it’ll take 2 weeks to build.
The yield on this is crazy with current alch prices. I’m getting around 460% ROI if alch and spacious prices stayed as they are.
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