Farmers of the world, unite!

[jorb]

Correct me if i am wrong.

You are, of course, absolutely right.

[Dwarfu]

You are, of course, absolutely right.

Pic...I mean patch, or it didn't happen!

[Phalene]

I support more options for farmers as well. Metal working is interesting, but I'd much rather replant forests and bake. And maybe make clothes.

[niltrias]

How do you think farming prices would correspond to sausage prices?

[Trafalgar]

Anyways, what I was getting at was I wanted to try to figure out what the correct conversion rate and thus what prices should be for wrought iron coins and bars.

I (re)did the math last night.

At 5 industry: 40% chance of turning cast into wrought, 60% chance of destroying it. And it tends to resolve much more quickly.

If I theoretically give N cast iron bars to a 5 industry guy to convert to wrought iron, or if he is converting cast iron to wrought iron for payment for food products, I can expect to get 40% of them back as wrought iron then. So to convert cast iron to wrought iron, (wi = ci * 0.4).

I used Potjeh's 'fair price' column from his pricelist on page 2 as a base, multiplied times 16 to get a price for an entire basket (the basket itself is free), and the above conversion for wrought iron to calculate a pricelist for CI coins, WI coins, and CI bars and WI bars for an entire basket of all the goods included on Potjeh's pricelist (WI prices are CI prices multiplied by 0.4, bars prices are coins prices divided by 100):

For a whole straw basket in both cast iron coins and wrought iron coins, presuming the basket is free:

Code: Select all

item            ci coins     wi coins      ci bars      wi bars

grain            160 cic      64 wic      1.60 cib     0.64 wib
flour            400 cic     160 wic      4.00 cib     1.60 wib
bread            448 cic   179.2 wic      4.48 cib    1.792 wib
butter           400 cic     160 wic      4.00 cib     1.60 wib
apple pie        960 cic     384 wic      9.60 cib     3.84 wib
carrot cake     1280 cic     512 wic     12.80 cib     5.12 wib
honey bun        560 cic     224 wic      5.60 cib     2.24 wib
straw             48 cic    19.2 wic      0.48 cib    0.192 wib


I just noticed that the raisin butter-cake is missing from Potjeh's pricelist (and thus this one as well).

[sami1337]

I still don't understand how butter and wheat seeds costs almost as much as bread.

[Potjeh]

Well, let's see per basket costs. Grain itself is 160cic per basket, or 320cic for the amount required for making a basket of flour. At 400cic per basket for flour, this is 40cic for the work of milling it. Turning it into bread adds additional 48cic to flour's value, and seeing how much work it is to mill flour compared to making bread I'd say it's decent compensation for the work involved.

As for butter, you're correct, I overpriced it. To be honest, I haven't done all that much butter making, but today I made a chestload and it was much quicker than I expected. Granted, I won't always have a herd of cows so close, but on the average I expect it won't be that much work. So butter should be around 300cic per basket, and apple pie and carrot cakes costs be lowered accordingly to 860cic and 1180cic. Raisin cakes are somewhere between apple pies and carrot cakes as far as work needed is concerned, so I'd price them at 1020cic.

[Trafalgar]

How long it takes to make a needed amount of butter largely depends on how close a herd of cows is to a nearby road or to you. With a cart you can load up a ridiculous quantity of containers holding empty buckets and drive to the cows to get a ton of milk, but if the cows are far away this will take a long time. That said the milk will last some time. And by some time I mean "get used up rapidly because you're making several baskets of carrot cake."

Now I don't know about saying it's overpriced. I don't have any chests (I used to have 4 but server crashes ate all of them), and I took a cart with urns holding two buckets each for a total of 8 buckets (if I had a ton of straw baskets at the time I could have taken 16 buckets instead) to the nearest cows, which were some distance away over a grassland. It probably took around 15 minutes to get there, milk the cows, and drive back. (And I wasn't driving around looking for cows, I asked my fellow villagers if they had seen cows)

But let's consider straw baskets instead, as there's no reason to use urns if straw is available in sufficient quantity. A cart filled with straw baskets filled with buckets of milk, totaling 16 buckets, can give you 45 butter, which is enough butter to fill 2.81 straw baskets.

Now let's assume that half the time (I'm being generous) cows happen to be in your village, or on a road close to it, or right next to your home, so you only have, let's say 2 minutes work to get the milk instead of 15 minutes. So let's average those times and say, on average, it'll take 8.5 minutes to get enough milk to make 45 butter if you're using a cart with straw baskets full of buckets (using chests means you invested iron, which not everyone will be willing to do, specifically to speed up your butter production, and so I don't think it should be counted in the pricing).

You've also got to spend some time turning the milk into butter as you need it, and this involves a lot of inventory juggling because of the size of the buckets, but it doesn't take long if you unload your baskets of milk buckets near your butter churn.

Of course if you don't HAVE a cart, making butter is going to be much slower. I suppose a single chest is as good as a cart full of urns, but not as good as a cart full of straw baskets, and certainly fails in comparison to a cart full of chests! And you won't go any slower dragging the cart on the plains than you will carrying the chest.

Anyways, there's my experience with butter, do with it what you wish as far as recalculating goes.

P.S. I'm thinking maybe the .4 for the wrought iron conversion ought to be lowered a bit. The +industry people doing the conversion should probably get to keep a little of what they produce when converting currency from ci to wi, and we can work that into the pricing by reducing the conversion rate. If the conversion rate is .35, for instance, and you give 10 cast iron bars to a +5 industry fellow, and he turns them into 4 wrought iron bars (assuming he rolls his dice averagely well), and then turns each of those into 99 wrought iron coins totalling 396 wic, he'll only owe you 350 wic and will get to keep the other 46 wic for himself as a fee for his work.

Also, with raisin cakes, you have to wait an insanely long time for the grapes to dry into raisins, and my grapes are taking much much MUCH longer to ripen than my carrots. It seems like I can harvest my carrots 2 or 3 times (at either the white-shoots stage or the final fat-orange-top stage if I miss the white-shoots stage) in the time it takes my grapes to ripen.

(I'm not sure why wheat seeds are on the list when no other seeds are. Especially carrots and raisins, which are even edible.)

[RaptorJedi]

It's also harder when there are cows around, and people are killing them off. I just went to get milk, knowing there were cows nearby, and someone came through and killed both of the herds I knew were around, and then walked away again without skinning them or anything. I know people killing cows for the sake of killing cows isn't all that likely to happen everwhere, but dead cows can't be milked.

[Blaze]

Butter? If you've got a cart of containers, why not bring the churn to the milk instead of bringing the milk to the churn?