PSA: Skeletons not needed for new content

Fallen London
21

Alright, so I did some math regarding the usefulness of skeleton-building for HS grinding (or money grinding, actually) and I’ve come to the conclusion that this is in fact among the best grinds available at the moment, if you can access Parabola, Ealing Gardens (and obviously the Bone Market) and have the Iron-Toothed Terror Bird from Whitsun.

I’d appreciate this if someone looked over it to see if I haven’t forgotten anything crucial:

Let’s say that we want to grind Hinterland Scrips in a mostly self-contained fashion. What follows is an estimation of actions you need for the individual parts:

Torso - Thorned Ribcage: from hunting the Terror-Bird; this is now trickier due to the outfit lockdown; at a minimum, it needs 6 actions; failing a few leads to a quite reasonable expectation of ~9 actions. Let’s be conservative and go with a Glasswork use attempt and overall 4 failures, or 10 actions.
Skull - Sabertoothed Skull: takes 1 action to make in Ealing Station and costs 4900 Bone Fragments and 125 Nodules of Warm Amber
Limbs - Ivory Humeruses: take 8 actions and 4400 Bone Fragments to make Orange-Apples in Parabola + another ~5 actions to convert into the Humeruses, if the Persuasive challenge is at 80%
Tail - Tomb-Lion’s Tail: takes 1 action, 200 Bone Fragments and 2 Nodules of Warm Amber to make in Ealing Station.
To this, you need to account for travel to Parabola and back and to Ealing and back, which would cost a total of 4 actions and 50-100 Drops of Honey. As a side benefit, going to Ealing should provide 1 Rumour of Upper River, unless your banditry is overly rampant.

Now, for the Bone Market part: you need 1 action at the beginning, 1 for each of skull, limbs and tails, 1 for declaring as a monkey and hopefully 1 for sale. The total action cost is then 9.
If you add the actions up, you get 10+1+8+5+1+4+9 = 38 actions to make a skeleton with value 19750 p., 1 amalgamy, 2 menace and 2 antiquity.

What you get depends on who you sell to; with the Gothic Writer, you obtain 400 Hinterland Scrips + 4 Carved Balls of Stygian Ivory (or 10E value). You can go for 400 Nightsoil + 2 Rubbery Pies (sell to the Rubbery Collector) or 395 Memories of Light + 4 Tailfeathers (totalĺing 207.5 E)

Importantly, you can also sell the skeleton for Bone Fragments (and, very occasionally, for Warm Amber) - which you need to obtain the bones.
For the same skeleton composition, you get 19755 Bone Fragments + 2 Unearthly Fossils. The kicker here is that if you do the resource grinding at the same time, you obviate a need to use another 4 actions for entering Ealing and Parabola in this cycle - the second skeleton will thus only cost 34 actions to make. Now, the need of Bone Fragments for each cycle is 4400+4900+200 = 9500, slightly less than a half of this skeleton value. I.e., you need to add ~17 actions, getting to 55 actions per 400 HS/207.5E
To be completely fair, you also need 127 Nodules of Warm Amber per cycle; you can sell the same skeleton for 2000 Warm Amber + 2 Knobs of Scintillack. You will need to do this quite rarely, in any given cycle, this translates into slightly over 2 actions. So again, conservative total estimate of actions will be 58 (55+3).

For these 58 actions, you will get 400 HS (~6.89 HS per action, much more than the 4 HSpA assumption which started this thread in the first place) + 10E worth of Stygian Ivory, or whatever payout you choose. In terms of selling for sheer echoes, you can get 207.5 E/ 58 actions or 3.58 EPA)

This is already quite solid, plus you also get 1 Unearthly Fossil per cycle. You pay 100 Honey to enter Parabola once every cycle (number of cycles), but you get 1 Rumour of Upper River from entering Ealing. Let’s say these effectively cancel each other out.

If you don’t fail quite so often and/or are more liberal with the rounding down, you might be looking at perhaps 55-56 actions in total. That would lead to 7.27 HSPA or 3.83 EPA - whopping numbers. This is even better than grinding Infernal Sharpshooter Rifles in your lab and selling them at Jericho, which according to the wiki takes 64 actions (63 for research, 1 for sale) and thus results in ~7.03 HSPA with maximum Train Luxury (450 HS per rifle).

The Parabola-Ealing-Bone Market grind is finnicky and requires a lot of setup, that is true. But for the endgame players going for Jericho and any future stations (even for Ealing Development after the Butcher’s shop), this represents a very good source of Hinterland Scrips or Echoes. (And Memories of Distant Shores for Jericho Canal grinding as well).

All in all, this seems very good, much better than not using the Bone Market. I’m curious to see if the rest of you guys can find any crucial mistake in my calculations and schemes, or if it really is this lucrative.

UPDATE:
Now that the Outfit lock has been lifted, we can probably shave about two actions from the total costs. That would get the whole carousel at ~53 actions, or 3.91 EPA / 7.54 HS (or other rewards including Bessemer Steel and Memories of Distant Shores) per action / 559 Bone Fragments per action.

Basically, this is the first rate option to get pretty much anything the Bone Market can sell you.
edited by Aardvark on 8/11/2020

22

Sounds good, though i guess you missed a factor 10 for the warm amber you get (2000 instead of 200). And you might even consider to skip Ealing at all as you can buy the skull for 125 HS.

[quote=Aardvark]Alright, so I did some math regarding the usefulness of skeleton-building for HS grinding (or money grinding, actually) and I’ve come to the conclusion that this is in fact among the best grinds available at the moment, if you can access Parabola, Ealing Gardens (and obviously the Bone Market) and have the Iron-Toothed Terror Bird from Whitsun.
edited by Scona on 8/3/2020

23

[quote=Scona]Sounds good, though i guess you missed a factor 10 for the warm amber you get (2000 instead of 200). And you might even consider to skip Ealing at all as you can buy the skull for 125 HS.

[quote=Aardvark]Alright, so I did some math regarding the usefulness of skeleton-building for HS grinding (or money grinding, actually) and I’ve come to the conclusion that this is in fact among the best grinds available at the moment, if you can access Parabola, Ealing Gardens (and obviously the Bone Market) and have the Iron-Toothed Terror Bird from Whitsun.
edited by Scona on 8/3/2020[/quote]

True enough about the Skull. Although this way you also get the tail. Of course, you can go for an Ape and remove Ealing from the equation entirely, then you won’t need the Warm Amber at all and you’ll need only half as much Bone Fragments (4400 for the Ivory Humeri). Net result would be fewer actions for fewer HS and fewer Stygian Ivory Balls - I count 42 actions (34 for the main skeleton + 8 for obtaining Bone Fragments) for 275 (395-120 for the Skull), or 6.55 HSPA. Still good, but not as good as with Ealing.

24

You can improve the EPA a little by doing your work in Earling or Parabola for more than 1 skeleton at once. 4 Sabertoothed Skull for 6 actions sound a little better than 1 per 3 actions. Same goes for Parabola.

25

Right, I forgot to mention that. The larger your batches would be, the less effect the transition actions have on EPA/HSPA, obviously.

But the original point I wanted to make was that even if you’re less-than-ordinarily lucky and less than perfectly organized, the grind is still quite effective.

26

I really like that grind because it’s actually interesting. You’re doing different things, visiting london/ealing/parabola, stats and equipment matters for the hunts. It’s not just clicking “try again” and the same button a thousand times in a row.

27

With Ealing Gardens, you can also get Thorned Ribcages (sometimes) via geological surveys, which in my experience is faster than hunting, though Fate lab equipment definitely helps. Any human ribcages gained can be used as-is or converted to profitable mammoth torsos.

28

I think this is accurate for my experience. If all else fails spending big on Brass Skulls and some slivers is a quick way to jumpstart a skeleton while maintaining a fair chance at plausibility. One of the biggest hurdles to building skeletons for me was finding skulls in a hurry without squandering my Ambition-and-Cider Fund-exhausted echoes on Brass Echoes. Cue supporting the Paleontological Railway Gang on a spiteful whim at this stage of railway building-and hey presto! Useful, value-adding skulls galore! Suddenly combined with frequent tending to the Ealing/Jericho dig cards and I have everything I need to get everything I want from skeletons! Which is mainly scrip, pies, scrip, biscuits and more scrip. For those reasons I mainly build fairly basic skeletons from Thorned Ribcages since I can just set my Iron-Toothed Terror Bird running and pick them up after it.

I do think skeleton-building has become successively easier since it’s introduction and in tandem with your willingness to do two specific prolonged challenged research projects, though. Part of it is it being clearer what everyone actually WANTS and IS WILLING TO PAY RELATIVE TO THE ADDED MENACING/ANTIQUITY etc being neatly typed out under the options now. The true value of A Complete Account of Frogs, Toads And Other Croaking Beasts/A Comprehensive Study of Avian Anatomy, Oneiric and Otherwise didn’t make itself readily apparent to me until I realised declaring skeletons reptiles, amphibians and birds drastically upped their plausibility and/or appeal to buyers than just leaving them chimeras. In the end, I think skeleton-building takes a bit of an action and resource sink to make feasible between getting the good stuff in your pocket and picking out the best possible dais to sell from, but in the long run it does make it easier to churn out scrip without feeling like your finger belongs on an assembly line.

Except for Bessemer Steel Ingots, for which I am eternally grateful I can now just rob from Mr. Iron.

29

PSA: Thorned ribcage grind in Parabola has been made easier with the lifting of the outfit lockdown, so you can reasonably expect to finish the hunt in 8-9 actions. This makes the grind even more profitable than it already was.

I know. That’s the reason I’m quite fond of the grind myself, it really has a nice entrepreneurial/adventurous feel.

Personally, I prefer to get Bessemer Steel in Hinterlands now. Since I’m occasionally grinding Rumours of the Upper River by selling skeletons to the Sculptress, I have a lot of extra Surface Blooms which are perfect for converting to Bessemer Steel.

Oh and now you can also reliably convert resources into/grind Human Skeletons and Brass Skulls/Skulls in Coral at Jericho Canals if you’re Guild Doctore. That grind would not be self-contained so far and I won’t try to calculate any costs/yields, but it’s an option you have now.