dov wrote:

Toran wrote:

Nightwhispers are easily acquired from the Fidgeting Writer storylet started in Tales of Terror! in your inventory. In theory, these should only result in about 1 Nightwhisper per 32 Tales of Terror, but thanks to the lacre-chiselling Urchins, I've recently found they seem to pop about 1 per 15(ish) Tales.

That's up to the all-mighty RNG to determine.
I've recently tried getting Night-Whispers using this method and got exactly a single one from my initial 39 ToT.

Fair enough. That also falls pretty close to the theoretical amount of 32 Tales of Terror per Nightwhisper. Still easier than doing expeditions and hoping you will get the Nightwhisper outcome.

I've felt for a couple months now that for a near-max (~180) Watchful character, the Corpsecage Island/Shrine of the Deep Blue Heaven loop was particularly lucrative, but the sheer number of possible rewards made it very difficult for me to pin down. I'll get into the math below, but the summary is that the loop appears to average >1.5 echoes/action.


The general loop goes something like this:
Zee voyage to Corpsecage Island, and on the island, select the following actions:
Digging up bones and rough justice
What's written here?
See what you can dig up
A message long cold
The shore near the jetty
Writing it all down
Tarry a little (because of the odds, I calculate this as yielding 15 prelapsarian archaeological notes on average)
Depart

That's a 22 action run, which if all successful (with the "tarry a little" caveat), will yield 418 cryptic clues, 264 prelapsarian archaeological notes, 40 map scraps, 125 proscribed material, and 1 zee story.

Loop on this and a zee voyage (my average action count: 23.5 actions and an average of about 1 echo worth of value from cards) as long as you can stand. If you just loop once and head back to London, it's the 45.5 actions needed to loop, plus the extra 23.5 to get back. The more loops you do without returning to London, the more the cost of that extra voyage drops. For these calculations, I leave it out, because theoretically you could do 100 loops and make that cost .235 actions per loop.

Once back, convert all of your prelapsarian archaeological notes into expedition supplies (1 action + 10 notes => 1 supply). Then complete the Shrine of the Deep Blue Heaven loop as quickly as you can. Based on techniques discussed elsewhere, you can reasonably easily get this as low as costing 18 supplies and 8 actions.

Based on 21 loops where I collected data, the average sale value of the treasure came out to 66.675 echoes (not including the one time I got an Eyeless Skull, which is excluded for hopefully obvious reasons). That ranges from the paltry return of 1 Storm Threnody and 200 Whispered Secrets (14.5 echoes, one time out of 21 tries) to the mega haul of two Night Whispers (125 echoes, six times out of 21), with the most common result being somewhere between 30 and 62.5 echoes.

This took me a bit of time with my LibreOffice spreadsheet and converting units. Start with the expedition treasure alone it comes to around 57 actions/expedition, which if just compared with the 66.675 average result is paltry. However, the Corpsecage Island loop and the zee voyages, if effectively normalized out for just the actions it takes to gather the supplies for one expedition, give you an additional 20 echoes. Add that in to your treasure haul and split it over the 57 actions, and my result is about 1.52 echoes per action, and a set of loops that at least gives you a bit of variety in your grinding.

I've done the Blue Heaven expedition three times and got the wooden mask every time. I thought rewards were randomised, so is this just a coincidence or am I doing something wrong?

BTW, the fate locked Uttermost Wind is not worth doing at all. The standard reward is at most an 12.5 E item.

I guess the Airag + Parabola-Linen result is pretty rare, then.

Nah, it's still there. I got it on April 30th.