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Re: CF: Alchemy Spoiler



On Fri, 23 Jul 1999, Preston.F.Crow@Dartmouth.EDU (Preston F. Crow) wrote:
> [Rick Tanner wrote:]
> >I am working on a Alchemy Spoiler section on a crossfire website.  I just
> >started it today, so it is pretty short.
> 
> Isn't there a command to tell the crossfire server to dump various tables,
> including the alchemy formulae?  I remember using that a while ago.

There are even two commands that will give you the full list of
formulae that you can use:
  crossfire -m7   will dump the alchemy table in a compact format
  crossfire -m9   will give you a more detailed list, comparing the
                  costs of the result with the cost of the ingredients.

I added that code some time ago, in order to check the usefulness of
the formulae and to see if some of them should be tuned.  For example,
getting the ingredients for the "balm of transparency" costs three
times the price of the balm itself, so that formula is useless.  On
the other hand, the "dust of repelling undead" can be sold for about
100 times the price of its ingredients.  For that formula, the output
of "crossfire -m9" tells you that the ingredients are too cheap.

> By the way, I never found alchemy to be very useful for creating things,
> but it is very useful for gaining mental experience.  There was one
> formula in particular that I used to use a lot for that reason (probably
> the one for Dust of Repelling Undead, based on the web page).  Now if only
> there was an easy way to repeat a sequence of commands so that you could have
> it do 100 alchemies in one shot.  (Or was that added since I drifted off to
> other distractions?)

The experience gain is also something that should be fixed.  I just
had a quick look at the code in server/alchemy.c and I see that the
experience is given by the square (!) of the number of objects in the
cauldron times the value of calc_skill_exp(), the latter being based
on the level of the object and your current level.

If I manage to find some spare time to work on CrossFire again (I
haven't been successful at that in the last two months), I will think
about including some numbers that could give you an idea of the
expected experience gain to the output of "crossfire -m9".  That could
also be helpful for tuning the alchemy stuff.

In the meantime, I think that it would be a good idea to multiply the
exp by the number of ingredients, and not by the square of this
number.  I understand that the original intent was to award more exp
for difficult formulae, but as we can see this is too much already.

I hope to be able to return to my CrossFire-hacking activities in a
not too distant future...

-Raphael

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