A Guide to Lacre?

Fallen London
1

Conclusion For the Christmas of 2014 (please correct me if I made any mistake):

TLDR version for best use of snow:

Grind your SotC to 10. Buy Monocle. Wait for advent gift to give you first Lacre. Examine Twice. Wait for the end of advent gifts and Mr. Sacks stories. Go to Penstock Wicket, buy stuff, exit. Examine again if you Lacre fall below 6. Repeat until you have used all your snow.

1 You can get 8 pails of snow + 5 Lacre for free.

2 Some come from &quotnatural&quot snow fall, some come from Advent gift, some come from Mr. Sacks.

3 You can buy extra snow with about 150 E worth of items and Urchin connections. Or you can spend fate to get more Lacre.

4 The best way to get more Lacre is to examine it with Monocle and 10 Scholar of the Correspondence (Sotc) when your Lacre is less than 6.

5 To see your Lacre level, either check the description against wiki, or set it on your mantle and see your profile.

6 Unless you want to keep Noman alive to Feb (which is extremely hard and require months of preparation), the most expensive thing you need to buy cost 9 Lacre.

7 So, wait till you get your first Lacre from advent gift, then exaimine twice to get to 7, then wait for more gifts.

8 You should be able to get to 11 when Wicket opens (10 if you decide not to rob Mr. Sacks).

9 Buy the 9 Lacre lodging.

10 Examine the snow to get to Lacre 8, and buy whatever you need.

11 You can save Lacre for later use, but you’ll need to use all your snow before mid-Jan.

12 How to get Sotc? Do the expedition to get the first point, go to Carnival to get to 3, Spend time in University or Forgotten Quarter to get to 7, write symphony to get to 10. Or you could just spend fate in Labyrinth, breed some rare beast and use their card to get 10.

——

So I just acquired my first piece of Unusual Snow… I looked at the wiki for it, and now I’m totally confused.

The main use of Snow is to get PTPT: Lacre, right? Then you can use it to get some nice lodgings and items.

But all these &quotup to&quot stuff really confused me. It seems all the &quotnormal&quot actions with the Snow are capped really low, so how do I get to, say, Lacre 9? I’m not a correspondent and I do not have any Dreadful Surmise (how do you get it anyway?). Are there any other way to increase PTPT? Are there any guide to Lacre lying around? Thank you so much,
edited by zbr308 on 1/7/2015

2

You get to 6 with Semiotic Monocle. Surmise is the best option after that, but you won’t get one before the Feast of the Rose. Not sure what else works after six.
During Christmas there will be some options that can give you uncapped Taste too.

3

[quote=Fhoenix]You get to 6 with Semiotic Monocle. Surmise is the best option after that, but you won’t get one before the Feast of the Rose. Not sure what else works after six.
During Christmas there will be some options that can give you uncapped Taste too.[/quote]

I just got up to 8 with the monocle - it gives +3 to anything less than 6, and I had 5 PtPT left over from last year, so I would try and aim for 5 first. Scholar of correspondence at 10 should make that straightforward.

4

Aside from the Advent Calendar, how were the pails of “snow” acquired last year? I’ve looked through the wiki, but it’s a mess with all the retired pages for holiday events.

5

Some one-time story cards. Also urchins sold lacre on their connection card last year.

6

Pails of so-called snow could be bought from the urchins, or collected by clearing the path to one’s lodgings, and a few options in the Mr Sacks story also gave either pails or direct levels of taste of lacre, which is how I got well above 15. At first the urchins charged a Storm Threnody and five Aeolian Screams for a pail, but once Penstock’s Wicket opened up they increased the price to a Nightwhisper and five Storm Threnodies (or something like that). No telling if they’ll start out with their latest price this year. Last year the devils also began to offer to buy souls for that price on the Brass Embassy guest room card, presumably because upgrading that guest room required one to be soulless.

7

I think you will get “snowed in” when Time the Healer comes, you should be able to get lacre then.

8

does this lacre-level drops when time,the healer comes? should i wait to do something with the unsual snow or it doesn’t matter?

9

Time the Healer doesn’t touch your Taste of Lacre quality. Be kinda mean if it did.

10

So my best chance is Examine * 2 + Wait for Mr. Sacks?

11

How is “lacre” pronounced? Lacker? Lac-re? Lac with the re mostly silent?

12

I think it’s supposed to be pronounced like acre with an l in front it it.

13

I didn’t see an option to buy lacre on the Urchin connection card - or an option to clear snow after Time The Healer came up today. Not yet, at least.

14

Seeing it almost certainly has something to do with lacrima (latin for tears, we are probably more familiar with lacrimosa, latin for weeping), I’d guess it has a similar sound, &quotlakri&quot maybe.

edited by zbr308 on 12/9/2014

15

The options at my stats (80’s) don’t look very good…
I think most of this holiday is going to be well out of reach.
Is there anything simple that maybe I should aim for?

16

[quote=zbr308]So my best chance is Examine * 2 + Wait for Mr. Sacks?[/quote]Last year one of the advent gifts was a level of Putting the Pieces Together: the Taste of Lacre, so if that one returns you might be able to add it to your calculation.

The second best thing to do with An Unusual Pail of So-Called Snow is to Dip a soul in it. Do that up to level 5, then get the rest of the points from the Mr Sacks story and it should be enough for at least one 5-card lodgings upgrade. Assuming that Mr Sacks is as generous with points as last year. I looked at my old screenshots, and I went from 15 to 20 by carefully studying the wiki before making my choices. Ain’t I a stinker? ;)

Another one of the advent gifts last year was a temporary return of the Smuggler’s Lamp code/story, which I played when I started out, as it was the Sunless Sea Kickstarter that brought me here. In that story you should be able to get a Dreadful Surmise, and then lose all your Hard-Earned Lessons (because failure is unacceptable) by trying to feed expensive pails of lacre to wild boars. Like I did to get to level 15. I didn’t know that getting that high level in Taste of Lacre was rather pointless, and that to maximise my points I should have kept those pails and examined them with my monocle after spending levels, and only fed a few to the boars to get to the necessary levels above 5-7.

And that’s why I only got two of the 5-card lodgings. And this year I’m not even sure if I want the third one, considering that I could perhaps get some Tears of the Bazaar instead. But what if there will be further upgrades that build on existing upgrades, but have stricter requirements that I might not be willing to fulfil for the two I have, but for the third I would? Better safe than sorry? Maybe…

EDIT: Turns out that upgrading to 5-card lodgings doesn’t just require Notability 3, but actually costs 3 levels of Notability. And my Notability is too high for me to throw away all those CPs of Making Waves just to be ‘safe’.

edited by Gillsing on 12/9/2014

17

Don’t invite a friend to taste the lacre. It loses the lacre, gives a ton of nightmares, and a slight stat boost. Next time I should check the wiki before doing that.

18

Thank you! I wonder how many pails of snow one can get without purchasing from urchins… looks expensive

[quote=Gillsing][quote=zbr308]So my best chance is Examine * 2 + Wait for Mr. Sacks?[/quote]Last year one of the advent gifts was a level of Putting the Pieces Together: the Taste of Lacre, so if that one returns you might be able to add it to your calculation.

The second best thing to do with An Unusual Pail of So-Called Snow is to Dip a soul in it. Do that up to level 5, then get the rest of the points from the Mr Sacks story and it should be enough for at least one 5-card lodgings upgrade. Assuming that Mr Sacks is as generous with points as last year. I looked at my old screenshots, and I went from 15 to 20 by carefully studying the wiki before making my choices. Ain’t I a stinker? ;)

Another one of the advent gifts last year was a temporary return of the Smuggler’s Lamp code/story, which I played when I started out, as it was the Sunless Sea Kickstarter that brought me here. In that story you should be able to get a Dreadful Surmise, and then lose all your Hard-Earned Lessons (because failure is unacceptable) by trying to feed expensive pails of lacre to wild boars. Like I did to get to level 15. I didn’t know that getting that high level in Taste of Lacre was rather pointless, and that to maximise my points I should have kept those pails and examined them with my monocle after spending levels, and only fed a few to the boars to get to the necessary levels above 5-7.

And that’s why I only got two of the 5-card lodgings. And this year I’m not even sure if I want the third one, considering that I could perhaps get some Tears of the Bazaar instead. But what if there will be further upgrades that build on existing upgrades, but have stricter requirements that I might not be willing to fulfil for the two I have, but for the third I would? Better safe than sorry? Maybe…

EDIT: Turns out that upgrading to 5-card lodgings doesn’t just require Notability 3, but actually costs 3 levels of Notability. And my Notability is too high for me to throw away all those CPs of Making Waves just to be ‘safe’.

edited by Gillsing on 12/9/2014[/quote]

19

[quote=zbr308]Seeing it almost certainly has something to do with lacrima (latin for tears, we are probably more familiar with lacrimosa, latin for weeping), I’d guess it has a similar sound, &quotlakri&quot maybe.

edited by zbr308 on 12/9/2014[/quote]

I went and dug up the tweet I recalled explaining how to pronounce it. It is acre with an l.

It stuck with me mostly because when lacre was first introduced I looked it up and discovered that it was Spanish for sealing wax, so I had been pronouncing it accordingly. I was pretty surprised by the clarification tweet. It being pronounced like lacrima would have been really neat, though.

edited by Sara Hysaro on 12/9/2014

20

Oops… well, hopefully my friend will forgive me for that…