Any advice about which one is the most efficient/remunerative way (storylets and cards in London) in which i can grind cellars of wine?[li]
Most of the ones i checked are 1 echo/actions, but i’m sure - somewhere - i can find some better way to accumulate booze.
Thanks!
I know that Cellars can be obtained via the Hound of Heaven story (I believe the Bishop gives them in return for Hounds) but I could be very mistaken. Even if I’m correct, it’s a bloody lot of work and even though I haven’t done the math, I doubt it adds up to something reasonable.
My method is through grinding Broken Giant via "Assist the Face" at the end of the Foreign Office story loop, however I believe this requires you to have access to the fate-locked "Mysteries of the Foreign Office" branch, and it may require you to side with the Face (double-checking as we speak). If you should happen to have these prerequisites or are able to obtain them, it’s definitely the fastest way of accumulating Broken Giant that I’ve found.
Give me a day and I can figure out the math.
[li]
EDIT: Yup, you need to side with the Face.
edited by Shadowhand on 1/14/2014
Thanks a lot! I have some spare nex, and the Office seem to be really cool. The main motivation for which i want the cellars is to use them to buy fourth city airag. I was - eventually - thinking to get it using a mixture of cellar grinding and expeditions in the forgotten quarter once i have enough spare cellars.
I haven’t access to the Foreign Office as I never wanted to be exiled from Court. For Cellars of Wine I usually used the Velocipede Squad to grind Broken Giant and then convert, but there’s also the option to grind Strangling Willow Absinthe from the Affair of the Box and then convert, pocketing the extra Correspondence Plaques (it’s a strategy suggested by Spacemarine9).
Ah, I forgot about the Velocipede Squad, which I sadly lost access to. It may be more profitable, but someone else will have to do the math there.
The Affair of the Box should still be available, though.
If you have access to Bundles of Oddities that give you 1-8 Compromising Documents, then you could convert the documents into Cellars of Wine:
55.56 Actions to get 250 Compromising Documents
5 Actions to convert them to 255 Memories of Light (+2.5 Echoes)
5 Actions to convert 250 Memories to 255 Zee-Ztories (+2.5 Echoes)
5 Actions to convert 250 Zee-Ztories to 255 Strangling Willow Absinthe (+2.5 Echoes and Making Waves +30 CP or so)
5 Actions to convert 250 Strangling Willow Absinthe to 50 Broken Giant (+2.5 Echoes, Connected: The Church -25 CP)
2 Actions to convert 50 Broken Giant to 10 Cellars of Wine (+2 Echoes, Connected: The Church -40 CP)
Total: 77.56 Actions for 125 + 12 = 137 Echoes (1.77 Echoes per Action)
Not included chances for rare successes to get 2 x Uncanny Incunabulum or Searing Enigma, but also not counting the drop in Church connections.
Nice idea! How can i have access to such bundles?
That’s an interesting method.
Any idea on how to reliably get such Bundles of Oddities?
Entertaining the topsy king, if your shadowy is within the range required to do so
In the second stage of the University you can get bundles with Compromising Documents from The student body during the first 8 Actions of a term. Then you have to settle for roughly 1 Echo per Action for 6 Actions, and then you can get 2.25 Echoes from the Duchess before you start a new term. Overall that’s about 1.77 Echoes per Action, so pretty good.
Better than the Topsy King, unless you switch equipment after getting into that storylet, so that your Shadowy goes up from 78 to 120. Then you eliminate the risk of failure, and if so, the Topsy King is the best grind in the game, as far as I’ve heard. Would require an awful lot of clicking though, to switch equipment between every bundle, plus the fact that the bundles themselves are their own storylets. At least at the University you can just click away. ;)
Ah, I see.
Alas, this means a Shadowy range too low for me.
It seems that the duelist’s reward when cashing in POSI might be the best, if it’s so tedious to acquire cellars normally. [li]
[quote=empirimancer]It seems that the duelist’s reward when cashing in POSI might be the best, if it’s so tedious to acquire cellars normally.[/quote]That one-time thing from A Rainbow of Offerings? No. There are better things to get there. Anything you can make with regular goods is a lot easier to grind than any of the items you have to create in one of the shops (or grind by building up Dramatic Tension). Personal Recommendations and Whirring Contraptions for instance. That’s one benefit in getting thrown out of court. You can get five Personal Recommendations from your friends in court. Grinding just one Personal Recommendation looks like it would take about 20 Actions, so getting five of them is like getting 100 Actions. Significantly more than the 40ish Actions it might take to grind a batch of five Cellars of Wine. Whirring Contraptions are even worse, since they take 34 Actions each. But only one offering has any, and that’s just a single Whirring Contraption. But you don’t have to get thrown out of court or the university to get that offering, so that one was my choice.
Though if you have patience and like building up Making Waves I suppose that Personal Recommendations can be had virtually for free, as a side-effect of building up Talk of the Town at the party from A polite invitation. At first I thought it’d be another slow grind for PoSI items, but then I got Making Waves +20 CP at the end of the party, and that changed my mind. Making Waves +20 CP for 5-8 Actions is good enough to make the party worth it for that alone. Thus making Talk of the Town mere icing on the cake rather than the cake itself. :)
Unfortunately, my Shadowy is above the 80 cap, even with modifiers.
So, i am actually thinking about starting from Glim by educating lyme, converting it up to zee stories and go drinkig with His Amused Lordship.
It is not as greedy as the box of intrigue approach, given that for every 5000 glim (100 absinthe) i need to make 11 conversion action for a net gain of only 15 absinthe - but each conversion from zee stories to absinthe gives 5 cp of MW.
So, hoarding zee stories and converting them to absinthe in the same week, i may end up to net a couple points of notability.
(Does anyone knows a better source of glim / zee ztories?)[li]
edited by Mizr. Edlaine Saphburgh on 1/17/2014
[quote=Gillsing][quote=empirimancer]It seems that the duelist’s reward when cashing in POSI might be the best, if it’s so tedious to acquire cellars normally.[/quote]That one-time thing from A Rainbow of Offerings? No. There are better things to get there. Anything you can make with regular goods is a lot easier to grind than any of the items you have to create in one of the shops (or grind by building up Dramatic Tension). Personal Recommendations and Whirring Contraptions for instance. That’s one benefit in getting thrown out of court. You can get five Personal Recommendations from your friends in court. Grinding just one Personal Recommendation looks like it would take about 20 Actions, so getting five of them is like getting 100 Actions. Significantly more than the 40ish Actions it might take to grind a batch of five Cellars of Wine. Whirring Contraptions are even worse, since they take 34 Actions each. But only one offering has any, and that’s just a single Whirring Contraption. But you don’t have to get thrown out of court or the university to get that offering, so that one was my choice.
Though if you have patience and like building up Making Waves I suppose that Personal Recommendations can be had virtually for free, as a side-effect of building up Talk of the Town at the party from A polite invitation. At first I thought it’d be another slow grind for PoSI items, but then I got Making Waves +20 CP at the end of the party, and that changed my mind. Making Waves +20 CP for 5-8 Actions is good enough to make the party worth it for that alone. Thus making Talk of the Town mere icing on the cake rather than the cake itself. :)[/quote]
Agreed. Whirring contraptions are a huge pain to grind through Wilmot’s end. The cellar grind (unfinished business -> item conversions), however, costs Church connections too, so that’s something to consider.
[li]
To return to the topic, the Author’s reward includes a cellar, so if you don’t mind waiting a week each time, that’s free cellars!
The Whirring Contraption grind is annoying. I’m at 10 with another 20 to go for my Zub… I’ve ended up setting myself a target of one a day, in order that I get to do SOME other stuff.[li]
edited by A B Nile on 1/17/2014
You have my sympathies, A B Nile. The zub is a very jolly contraption, though, and the overseas content is well worth the effort of acquiring transportation.