azrid wrote:water impacts food quality
food quality impacts stat gains
stat gains increase the speed and efficiency of your industry growth
Its no coincidence the exploiters group had the best stats
Don't downplay the importance of water quality.
Only stat relevant to the industry is str, all the other stat are required in such small numbers that getting them is trivial and shouldn't be considered relevant to the discussion.
Now, every competent group is able to keep up with str and mine on the latest mine level without the water bug abuse, that's the basic requirement of staying competitive, and there are breakpoints after which more str won't REALLY help you that much at the current level, especially once you can one tap every wall with a pickaxe, the only advantage is mining faster with a stone axe ONCE you find something good.
The first couple of levels are not a big deal to keep up with anyways, the issue starts around -8 and especially -9 where you need around 1-2k white str to mine comfortably with a stone axe. Let's consider what foods are ACTUALLY relevant around that level that require water, the main one that comes to mind are obviously the legendary orca meatpies that get quite a bit from the water quality, so in that regard yeah it helped them probably, but i don't think it actually helped them more than selling their industry in exchange for driftkelp and other rare ingredients like every other competitive faction does, like yeah 150 fep meatpie is great, but so are 200+ fep driftkelp pork bollock autumn steak and cupboards of mbc.
Now if they were actually a fighting village trollex having 1,1k combat stats would be quite a bit more relevant (Trollex defended brodgar with bugged stats nuke brodgar reeeee
![¦]](./images/smilies/troll.gif "Trollface")
), those are good stats but they aren't THAT high either (as in, kinda high but not haha bugged stats high, i can see how he got them), my group was approaching 700-800s like a month ago before we decided to quit and have not eaten a single piece of cheese during the whole world, if we just gained around 10 str/agi/con a day we would be at 1-1,1k by now, if we gained like 15 a day, we would be ahead of him. Those are plausible numbers of stats to gain daily ESPECIALLY if we consider cheese to be a factor.
Eat 5-7 mbcs (and maybe some bugged orca meatpies) a day, eat some oscypki + seal meat-in-jelly/crabcakes (slightly affected by water yes), eat some whale autumn steaks + sunlits (just examples, there is a lot of smaller foods you could grind and eat in combo to get stats). Honestly doesn't even seem that hard, especially if you were able to just bot the whole cheese making, and that doesn't even consider all the other foods they could be eating including rare ingredients such as pork bollocks, fairy mushrooms, driftkelp, truffles, pepper, etc. i just mentioned the big ones.
