Nope! You can return - you just can’t sell it to anyone else.[li]
edited by Laluzi on 11/3/2013
And you don’t even have to open the way again yourself, which I was afraid of!
So what Watchful level is appropriate for the Cave of the Nadir? I’ve been grinding Curiosities and Secrets in the Fallen Quarter for a while now and with items my Watchful is at ~130 or so, but otherwise I’m not even a POSI (which, oddly enough, isn’t required for the Cave). Would it be worthwhile to attempt the cave or should I get my watchful higher, and how high?[li]
I’d recommend going for it. Prepare as best you can – take 100 Supplies and lots of Sudden Insights – and be prepared to make a huge initial outlay. The rewards are great and come in weekly, so the sooner you get it done the richer you shall be.
[li]
I went for it and got it, thanks! I’d been grinding skulls for a while just because Curios and Secrets is a relatively interesting grind for non-POSI’s, so I had everything I needed. Ended up beating it with a Watchful of around ~150. I went in with 100 supplies and came out with 33.
I have to wonder if there are that many other non-POSI’s who have managed to find the Cave.
[quote=Sebastian Flyte]… the sooner you get it done the richer you shall be.[/quote]Today I finally got around to it as well. I was merrily collecting Whispered Secrets at the University when these words spurred me into action. At first I thought I’d have plenty of time, but after reading a post where Spacemarine9 mentioned that the longest living story timer was 6 days and 8 hours, I thought it’d be a race against time, the healer, since I wanted to have plenty of irrigo to lose. But then it turned out that my initial estimate was more correct, and it took 6 days and 18 hours for time, the healer, to strike.
Now I’m going to take care of all the other living stories in my ‘weekly’ cycle, and then I’ll go back to turning third tier goods into Mysteries of the Elder Continent so that I can get enough Antique Mysteries to pay for a Room at the Royal Bethlehem Hotel before my next trip to the cave. More cards should help me quarantine the ones I want to avoid. Everything seems to work out nicely.
Except for my one regret: I can’t overlook the resources I foolishly spent on trying to hinder February instead of just dealing with her in the more decisive way. I only tried it once, because it looked like I might actually make it with that small an effort. But no. She got moving rather quickly after that, and now I have 9 x Presbyterate Passphrase instead of 50 x Mystery of the Elder Continent. Nine! So now I’ll need to get ten more to cover for the missing one I’ll need for 50 x Antique Mystery. A curse on the Calendar Council! (It also took two attempts at the chess game, but that turned out to be of less importance in the end.)
Yeah, getting my rooms at the Hotel Bethlehem is next for me too =). I have enough Memories of Light to buy the room (repeatedly ran the Search for the Deranged Aunt storylet while burning off nightmares as I ground Curios and Secrets) so it’s just a matter of converting them all around into Passphrases and then up to Antique Mysteries.
I’d like to go on this interesting expedition but I’m having no luck finding an eyeless skull. Is there anyone who would be willing to part with one?
EDIT: I’ve gotten one. If I ever get another, I’ll pass it on to anyone who needs it.
edited by Malgorath on 11/18/2013
Malgorath: Send me a request. Lady Ciel gave me one, and I’ll “pay it forwards”. Please do the same, someday!
How do you request skulls? Where does it appear as an option?
It is an option on Begin an Expedition in the Forgotten Quarter but you need Route to the Nadir 1, 60 expedition supplies. Archaeologist 5 and can’t have a skull. I guess that way you can’t get the five you might need later, but even if you have opened the Cave you can still ask for a Skull.
[li]
[quote=lady ciel ]It is an option on Begin an Expedition in the Forgotten Quarter but you need Route to the Nadir 1, 60 expedition supplies. Archaeologist 5 and can’t have a skull. I guess that way you can’t get the five you might need later, but even if you have opened the Cave you can still ask for a Skull.
[li][/quote][/li][li]
[/li]
[li]Ah. It’s the expedition supplies.[/li][li] Thanks.
[/li]
This makes me think about that scheme to send First City Coins to enable a character to buy a bottle of expensive cider: Wouldn’t it be quicker to send Eyeless Skulls? I think it would, but not as much quicker as I first thought:
Ask a friend for a skull: 1 Action
Sell him an Eyeless Skull: 1 Action (Connected: Revolutionaries -20 CP)
Meet some revolutionaries: 3 Actions (Connected: Revolutionaries +20 CP at the carnival sideshows)
That’s 62.50 Echoes in 5 Actions, for 12.50 Echoes per Action, which is more than the 7.50 Echoes per Action from receiving 30 x First City Coin. That doesn’t include buying the carnival tickets, but since one set of 10 x Carnival Ticket lasts for 50 Actions, I’d say that the "Amber in the well" card can easily cover for that, even with the Scandal from siding with the Rubbery Men every third time to keep the card available.
You can get 15cp Revolutionaries in one action by giving a Public Lecture in the Forgotten Quarter. You get some suspicion but you don’t need the actions for the Carnival option and Carnival Tickets. So I think that is a quicker way to get connected Revolutionaries and it isn’t capped at 10.
The only thing is having friends/alts with Skulls. They are not that common.
Also if you want to go the Carnival Route you can get 5 tickets and connected Rubbery on the Misfortune at the Carnival card.
edited by reveurciel on 11/18/2013
[quote=lady ciel ]You can get 15cp Revolutionaries in one action by giving a Public Lecture in the Forgotten Quarter. You get some suspicion but you don’t need the actions for the Carnival option and Carnival Tickets. So I think that is a quicker way to get connected Revolutionaries and it isn’t capped at 10.[/quote]Ah, I forgot about that one. No need for the carnival then. (I was aware of the 5 tickets from the Misfortune card, but they seemed a bit too expensive in Action cost, seeing as you only get half as many tickets as you do when buying them.) So it’d be more like 62.50 Echoes every 4 Actions then, when accounting for the Suspicion and the fact that +15 CP is not quite +20 CP.
[quote=lady ciel ]The only thing is having friends/alts with Skulls. They are not that common.[/quote]No, they are not. When I went looking for skulls by "Seeking Curios and Secrets in the Forgotten Quarter" I found one every ~200 Actions, though that included time spent away from the Forgotten Quarter while letting Nightmares simmer down with various opportunity cards, as well as playing a lot of opportunity cards in general. With high enough stats to avoid most Nightmares, and laudanum to deal with them when the cards don’t, I’m thinking that you could cut that time in half. That would mean ~25 characters supplying skulls to keep this going if everyone plays ~100 Actions every day. Keep it up for ~102 days and someone could become more immortal than the rest of us.
But meeting Revolutionaries at the Carnival costs 3 actions, so if you get 20cp that is around 7cp per action.
Yes, the Public Lecture is clearly better: 1.33 Actions to get +20 CP, and then another 0.25 Actions to lose a point of Suspicion through the social action (Ask a friend to cover for you: Suspicion -4 CP). So 1.58 Actions instead of 3 Actions to get +20 CP with everything accounted for. 3.58 Actions total for one Eyeless Skull. I just carelessly rounded that up to 4 Actions. So maybe ~91 days instead of ~102?
Assuming the Airs of the Forgotten Quarter change basically uniformly between 1-100 (a pretty large assumption), you’ll have an option that can even possibly give an Eyeless Skull 30% of the time. When you do, going off of this thread a rare success on those options happens about 3% of the time (has this been changed? it seemed much more common when I was looking for them)
So any single action has about a .3 * .03 = 0.9% chance of turning up a skull, and we should expect one skull in about every 111 actions. At this point I’m going to get lazy and say a very dedicated but not exceptionally lucky player should be able to get about 6 skulls a week, and justify rounding down by accounting for action inefficiency and dealing with nightmares.
Our receiver though has enough actions in a week to accept and sell about 195 skulls. So it would take ~33 dedicated players to keep that player fully occupied with receiving and selling them. If the network could be establish, though, they would be making just about 12k every week (How long did it take to get your Overgoat?), and could get the cider in about (excellent estimate Gillsing) 92 days.
If all 34 people involved took turns receiving skulls, though it would still take eight and a half years for the entire clique to become truly immortal.
According to the wiki, Airs of the Forgotten Quarter ranges from 0-127, so assuming uniform change, then the necessary options are present about 23.5% of the time.
I’ve never seen it higher than 100 grinding my own skulls, and according to the wiki there don’t seem to be any Seeking Curios options available at 101+ (the highest are all 80-100), so I went with a cap of 100.
I suppose it’s possible the distribution isn’t uniform and the 101+ range just has a very low weight, though.